TETSUOBROKER2099

BOOK REVIEW: CITY (1952) by Clifford D. Simak

2011-12-07T07:29:00.001-05:00

City
by Clifford D. Simak

Published in novel form by Ace Books in 1952
City, Huddling Place, and Census published in 1944.
Paradise and Hobbies published in 1946.
Aesop published 1947.
Trouble With Ants published 1951.

"Where man would follow metal, the dogs will follow ghosts."

After World War II, in the imagination of Clifford D. Simak, reality took a strange turn. All the nations of the world decided to unite as one, and become the planet state of Earth. It's capital was Geneva. War was outlawed, the old national borders were erased, and a new era began. United humanity re-purposed atomic power as an unlimited source of energy and ended scarcity and want, and devoted themselves to developing what we would call artificial intelligence of a very high order, and soon the world was filled with sapient robot companions and laborers. Humanity, across many generations, used mysterious techniques, no doubt involving genetic engineering, to teach dogs to speak, and soon this program of elevating animals to human levels of communication and cognition spread to all the mammalian creatures of the planet. Violence and the eating of meat are outlawed, and all the beasts of nature, whether predator or prey, come to live in peaceful fellowship.

Truly, paradise.

Well, not exactly. You see there are these mutants. The mutants are hyper-individualists who decided they didn't want to be part of the global nation state. Not so much because they had serious political objections, but more because they had developed such powerful facilities of cognition, and the hypnotically compelling inner lives to go along with such advanced capacities, that they ceased to care what society, any society, thought about them. The mutants weren't violent or warlike. They just stopped giving a damn about society's rules and expectations, and even its larger goals. Let the utopians, the robots, and those talking dogs deal with it. They'd rather not be bothered.

Hey, I guess it's not paradise.It's not without some conflict. No paradise without its discontents. But not too bad.

Yeah, that transition from the city to the wilderness. It's another quirk of Simak's future vision. Instead of crowded megalopolises, humanity decides to spread out, and partly it's fear related to cities being targets for bombs. For awhile there, no one knew how the last global war was going to play out, and so humanity began to abscond from the city, and--

Oh, but did I tell you about Juwain, the Martian philosopher? Yeah, there's Martians in this book, too. Well, there's the one Martian, in particular, Juwain, and his transcendent, fix-all philosophy, Juwainism, and it's kinda funny how that one played out . . . some people couldn't handle the transition from cities, you know? Some people just clung to the old ways, of an ever-expanding humanity, glittering skyscrapers, just stack humankind by the floor, up, up, and up. You'd think most humans, if they could accept towering apartment complexes, they could handle the vast interstellar gulfs. You'd think. Just a Jaunt to Mars to get the rest of Juwain's notes, or something like that. Some people prefer to stay home in a number of senses.

And heaven exists. It's on Jupiter. Now, you won't get there by praying, but you do have to engage in a kind of transubstantiation of the flesh to be able to handle it. Brave young astronauts must be subjected to a form of pantropy--modified to endure the harshness of the Jovian world, but maybe Heaven's not all it's cracked up to be . . .

And then there's the cobblies. Only the dogs and other animals can sense the cobblies, those intrepid movers of furniture, who refuse to manifest in any comprehensible form when photographed. So rare that humans stooped to hoaxing photos and embellishing stories about hauntings and possessions in order to convince themselves they weren't losing their minds. We elevated the dogs, but the dogs could've returned the favor, it would seem, in certain matters of perception. It's that human arrogance, my friend, we don't like the idea that the lifeforms we breed into existence could maybe surpass us somehow, some way.

I guess we gave a kind of pass to the robots. We made them as happy slaves, much like Asimov's early take on robots, but Simak's robotic protagonist, Jenkins, evolves and grows across the generations, and becomes thoroughly human, even downright elderly. Jenkins may remind some readers of Anne Rice's vampires, but without the blood-lust and aristocratic ennui. This loyal robot retainer is witness to generations of the family Webster, which is basically the family of humankind. The canine philosophers of many generations hence even come to call humans websters. That is: "websters" replaces "humans" in canine vocabulary. But about the robots. We create the robots in our image, make them happy in bondage, and, eventually, let them evolve their own way, towards a strange kind of robotic freedom. But even this is due to our human arrogance, you see. We like that human shape. We like it even more when it's shaped in invincible steel, a vision of our armored dreams of hegemony and horror. But Jenkins evolves past our human arrogance, I think, but we the humans set such an acceptable form in motion.

Which brings me to the ants, to critters with decidedly unacceptable forms. You gotta ask yourself: why doesn't humanity elevate the insects, the spiders, the scorpions, the cockroaches, the moths, the butterflies, the whales, the dolphins, the octopuses, the squid, the lobsters, the crabs, the snails, and all the other creepy-crawlies? 'Cause we're bigots, that's why. But bigots, in the long run, seldom have their way in Simak's visionary future history.

Simak's book, City, is full of wild and woolly speculations. It's an exercise in purest make believe. It's science fiction of a kind that doesn't seem to have too much currency anymore. It certainly isn't "hard" SF. You won't find any loving descriptions of heavy-duty megadeath future war equipment being used to wage high body count libertarian revolutions against nanny governments on the moon, or Mars or wherever. No striving intergalactic capitalists or armored mecha soldiers here. No paeans to the glory of dying like some kind of shiny, space-age Spartan in mortal combat with vicious catmen, or anything of the sort. Simak's book is unsettling in its mellowness. He puts most of the technological magic into the black box, as it were, and focuses on the story and the themes. The characters are there to help serve as guideposts in the overall evolution of humanity, and, later, the robots and animals, as one civilization supplants another one, and much is lost, good, bad, spectacular, bizarre, to the erosion of centuries, of millenniums. There's no World War III, thank the cobblies, just time, a worldaround sickness at the prospect of more nationalistic barbarism, a refusal to be hypnotized by the false-power spectacle of Cold Wars and nuclear arsenals, and the many Laws of Unintended Consequences.

Infinite Repeat Award: "Don't Try This At Home" Edition

2011-12-07T07:23:00.001-05:00

Curtis Sliwa
Starring
In
A MONTH OF SUNDAYS
Music by Rachmaninoff
Written and Directed by Curtis Sliwa
A Guardian Angels Production
IN THEATRES. EVERYWHERE. GET USED TO IT!

MOVIE REVIEW: HELLDRIVER (2010)

2011-12-02T01:58:00.001-05:00

HELLDRIVER

Starring
Yumiko Hara
Eihi Shiina
Kentaro Kishi

Written/Character Designed/Edited/Directed by Yoshihiro Nishimura
Music by Koh Nakagawa
Action Director Isao Karasawa
Visual Effects Supervisor Tsuyoshi Kazuno
Stunt Coordinator Yoshio Miyaki
Costume Design by Minori Niizaki
Production Design by Nori Fukuda
Cinematography by Shu G. Momose
Produced by Yoshinori Chiba, Akifumi Sugihara, Ryo Uchiyama, Hiroyuki Yamada

Helldriver is the greatest video game movie never made. What do I mean by that? I'm not totally sure.

Helldriver isn't actually derived from any extant video game franchise. There is no Helldriver for PS3, X-Box, Wii, etc. But Helldriver the movie, which does exist, is a kind of collection of all the over-the-top splatter and sadistic kills that one would expect from one of the major splatter franchises, Resident Evil, House of the Dead, Mortal Kombat, all those games known for their nonstop mayhem and dismemberment, evisceration, and novel, many-tentacled mutations on the prowl for brains, guts, flesh, or just glorious self-destruction in one-to-one combat. There's even a touch of one of those car-crashing franchises. There are car-crashing franchises, right? Yeah, sure, why not? There are video games that involve driving cars real fast, maybe stealing the cars first, and then driving them real fast, something like that. And then there's the Fast and Furious series of movies, which are also strongly reminiscent of video games . . . yeah, there's some of that in Helldriver, too, I think. It's the "driver" in Helldriver, if you will.

I should say none of this is prologue to a scathing or even particularly negative review of Helldriver. I enjoyed it's lust for pure, gruesome absurdist spectacle. It is exactly the movie it wants to be, and no one will ever take that away from it. It's got zombies, aliens, imagery and costumes right out of Japan's Imperial era, some rather disturbing moments of zombie sexuality, a really fucked-up scene involving zombie sexual assault and torture, a tricked out Badass-mobile, sword fights, car fights (what Joe Bob Briggs would call "car fu"), self-assembling zombie monstrosities composed of various arms, legs, and torsos of the chopped-up undead . . . it's all here. There's nothing left out--it's even got a vaguely satirical streak, for people who insist on that kind of thing. And geysers of watery, Kool-Aid looking blood. "Hey, Dracula, don't drink the Kool-Aid!" Ah, ha, ha . . . don't know where that came from. There's no vampires in the movie, it just kind of came out of me . . . so, you know, this movie's got pretty much everything except vampires, but here's how you can fix that. Just obtain a copy of Helldriver and copies of whatever your favorite vampire movies happen to be, put 'em on your hard drive, and use digital editing software to splice together your very own underground, so-off-the-map-indie-it-positively-throbs UltraRemixed No Serial Numbers Allowed Bootleg Helldriver With Vampires version of the movie and you're good to go, my dawg, no sweat. I won't tell the Governor if you won't . . . I suppose my point is that this is a movie which exists as a series of very impressively staged spectacles. You could pretty much watch the scenes in any order and the impact would likely not be reduced nor would it be enhanced, although the wonderfully impossible ending scene that plays as the credits roll wouldn't really work at any other place in the narrative.

What the fuck happens in this movie, you ask? It goes something like this: in the near future, maybe the year 20XX, a strange alien life form crashes into Japan and unleashes a cloud of toxic ash which transforms all who are contaminated by it into flesh-eating zombies who sprout these weird, rubbery antlers out of their foreheads that are actually kind of kawaii at times, and fucking disgusting at other times, and, get this, are harvested by freelancers and sold to the yakuza to make highly addictive, snortable narcotics. But there's a problem with the zombie-antler derived narcotics: they can make your head explode. That's right, the antlers are composed of a volatile substance which can explode whenever the filmmakers want to make sure you're still paying attention. Guess which part of these undead fuckers you should target when it comes time to start shootin'?

The Japanese government responds to this outlandish crisis by erecting a giant wall and quarantining the antler-zombies behind the wall. The Prime Minister doesn't want to alienate voters who have zombified family members, and so he doesn't order any kind of extermination effort against the zombies. This is a rather intriguing aspect of Helldriver: the controversy over whether antler-zombies should be given human rights and due process, or just summarily executed. This is a controversial position to put it mildly, and elements within the Japanese government see the crisis as an opportunity to consolidate power and whittle away at pesky individual (uninfected human)liberties . . . ring any bells, citizens?

Zombie movie fans, ask yourself this question: would this issue even be considered if the alien lifeform had crashed into the United States? Or would the President just go straight to martial law, targeted assassinations, and extraordinary renditions? Oh, and why not go ahead and place the non-zombie populations under surveillance, and start eliminating social welfare programs, regulatory agencies, environmental protections, start revving up the foreclosure cycles, etc. And don't give me any of that bullshit about, "Well, gee, it depends on whether it's a Democrat or a Republican . . ." because we all know that wouldn't matter. Come on, film fans, pay heed to the words of George Carlin: "Take a chance. Tell the truth."

Who the fuck are the main characters in this movie, you ask? The Japanese Prime Minister? The zombies? No, no, not exactly. The characters in this movie are not the most interesting parts of it, in my opinion, although I did appreciate the lead performance by Yumiko Hara as Kika, the chief zombie-slayer, and Eihi Shiina as Rikka, the Alien Queen of the Antler-Zombies. Rikka's got a brother played by Kentaro Kishi, and the character is truly a sick fuck. It's something else . . . more I will not say.

I'll say this. Eihi Shiina is a beautiful and intense actor who gave a memorable performance as a bride-to-be in Takashi Miike's masterful Audition, and was also quite memorable as the taciturn, self-mutilating supercop Ruka in Tokyo Gore Police, which was an earlier effort from Helldriver director Yoshihiro Nishimura. As Rikka, Shiina is buried under some wildass makeup, prosthetics, and costuming that make her look like a boss from a Parasite Eve side story. Shiina gives herself over to the crazed, cartoonish evil of the part, but I missed the subtle intensity she brought to those earlier roles. Yeah, I know, my complaint is totally out of place, but there you have it. I would've liked a little more nuance in this character, but it is what it is.

Yeah, and here's another complaint. Helldriver is clearly the hard labor of a committed cast and crew, and it's quite effective on its own terms, and yet largely forgettable once consumed. I guess it's the perfect definition of entertainment. Director Yoshihiro Nishimura seems to specialize in this kind of gory-goofy type of film. Just hit up his filmography on Wiki or Imdb: Tokyo Gore Police, Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein, Mutant Girls Squad, and a score of special gore EFX credits going back to 1995. Nishimura knows his stuff. Tokyo Gore Police really left an impression on me. It was both absurdly funny and really fuckng icky, and it made an impression with it's shameless mutational perversities. Tokyo Gore Police was all about damaged, violent people seeking the edge of somatic experience and transformation packed into a fairly compelling mystery plot. Helldriver is just one damn thing after another. Helldriver's best scenes recall the most adventurous bits of Tokyo Gore Police without quite equaling it. Helldriver is not quite as visually accomplished, either, but it does create some impressive spectacle scenes. It lacks the grimy texture and doom-laden atmosphere of Tokyo Gore Police. The antler-zombies are good for a laugh, but they don't quite achieve the bizarro-pathos of the mutants and predators from Tokyo Gore Police.

Helldriver is pure sensation, featuring many scenes of impressively orchestrated carnage, and a delightfully off-kilter soundtrack. It's fun for what it is, but if you like Helldriver, I urge you to check out 2008's Tokyo Gore Police. It's in a similar style, but with more impact.

Helldriver does do one thing that Tokyo Gore Police couldn't or wouldn't. It asks the question: "Can you build an aerodynamically feasible device out of the bodies of antler-zombies?"

For the answer, you'll just have to see for yourself . . .

Helldriver trailer:

A Cancer God For A Cancer World: PHASE ONE: Initial Infection By Divine Impulses

2011-11-28T01:01:00.001-05:00

INFINITE REPEAT AWARD: "Post-Human Bulletin" Edition

2011-11-14T11:14:00.001-05:00

MOVIE REVIEW: IT'S ALIVE (1974)

2011-11-01T06:41:00.000-04:00

It's Alive

John P. Ryan as Frank Davis
Sharon Farrell as Lenore Davis
Daniel Holzman as Chris Davis
William Wellman Jr. as Charley
James Dixon as Lt. Perkins
Shamus Locke as The Doctor
Andrew Duggan as The Professor
Guy Stockwell as Bob Clayton
Michael Ansara as The Captain
Robert Emhardt as The Executive

Cinematography by Fenton Hamilton
Editing by Peter Honess
Music by Bernard Herrmann
Written, Directed, and Produced by Larry Cohen

"There's only one thing wrong with the Davis Baby . . ."

We begin at the Davis household. Lenore Davis (Sharon Farrell) is going into labor pains. Hubby Frank (John P. Ryan) gathers her and his son, Chris (Daniel Holzman), into the family car, drops Chris off with a family friend, Charley (William Wellman Jr.), and it's off to the hospital. In these early scenes, we get to know the Davis family. The father is a bit of a joker, doing funny voices, keeping up everyone's morale. Lenore is more serious, very much into the idea of becoming a mother. The son, Chris, is eager to have a younger sibling, not jealous at all, a nice kid.

Frank spends hours in the waiting room, chatting up the other expecting fathers. Some idle chat about a guy stirring his coffee with a pencil. Something about too much lead in the water supply. Doesn't he know that pencils are made with graphite, not actual lead?

All this is build-up for the revelation of horror: screams, and a delivery room full of mutilated corpses of doctors and nurses. Lenore is unharmed, but in shock. What the hell just happened? Did some maniacal slasher kill the medical staff, and kidnap the Davis baby? Not exactly . . .

Frank and Lenore Davis were expecting a child. What they get is a rubbery demon that tears out people's throats with its sharp fangs. The cops and the surviving medical staff quickly come to the conclusion that the Davis baby was born some kind of ultra-aggressive mutant. It's decided that it must be hunted down and destroyed with extreme prejudice. Frank Davis is eager to kill the thing, mutant, demon, whatever the fuck it is. He's already decided it's not really human, just some aberration that should have never came into the world.

Frank is also eager to get back to his job as a public relations agent at a major corporation. But his boss forces him to take a three week vacation. This is a pretense to eventually fire Frank, but Frank doesn't know that. Frank has become a liability to the company as a PR man. He's become known in the media as the father of the mutant. Frank is hounded by reporters eager to get a statement from the father of the murderous monster baby.

Meanwhile, Lenore is losing her mind. She can't quite confront the reality of the situation. Frank and Lenore decide not to tell their son, Chris, what's going on, and they enlist Charley in this scheme by convincing him to not let their boy watch any news casts. But how long can this denial of reality go on? Chris is a smart kid, too, and he starts to suspect something is not right. Part of what It's Alive is all about is denying reality. There's a theme going on here that people try to deny whatever is unpleasant and will go to great lengths to cover it up.

What exactly is the monster baby? Was Lenore impregnated with the Anti-Christ? Was God feeling randy enough to plant a Second Coming? Not exactly. This movie suggests that the monster baby was the result of birth control drugs that Lenore had been taking, and maybe other environmental and pharmaceutical factors. The movie further suggests that there's pressure being placed on the cops to hunt down and kill the mutant baby so that agents of Big Pharma can destroy the corpse and prevent a conclusive autopsy which would prove that unsafe meds caused the mutation. This conspiracy angle is just barely sketched into the movie. It's basically a couple of guys talking in a hallway. It's interesting, but not the strongest aspect of the film. I don't think it really matters what exactly created the monster baby. The idea is, "What if you're expecting a child, and instead you get a murderous monster?" The quasi-science fictional explanation is superfluous hand-waving.

The cops bumble around darkened buildings, some of them getting killed off by the mutant. For a mutant baby, it sure gets around, claiming victims here and there. The baby is never seen all that clearly or for long periods of time, but it's clearly a rubbery beast. In one memorable scene, the mutant kills a milkman in his truck. You just see the outside of the truck, hear the sounds of screams, bottles shattering, and then a flow of blood and milk mixed together coming out of the back door of the truck. I dunno, maybe it's symbolism . . .

Eventually, Frank decides that he has to kill the baby himself, which is good because none of the cops in this movie can shoot worth a damn. At first, he tries to present this decision as doing the responsible thing, but on another level this is Frank fulfilling a selfish fantasy: of eliminating the unwanted mutant, of making the hated thing go away, denying the unpleasant reality. Frank's journey towards confronting the mutant, facing reality, is where this movie's true strength lies.

It's Alive is totally absurd, but it has some striking moments. John P. Ryan holds it all together as the father who is determined to kill the mutant baby. He brings a naturalness and intensity that is surprisingly understated. The best scenes involve him negotiating with his boss, the cops, the doctors, all of these scenes involve Ryan trying to convince himself, as much as he is trying to convince the other people, that he is ready to kill the mutant, that he feels no connection with his offspring whatsoever. And yet his voice and his face quiver with barely suppressed emotion. Why the strong feelings, if he has already committed himself to destroying the mutant? The movie provides a poignant and surprising climax.

INFINITE REPEAT AWARD: "Unrepentant Welter of Symboljizzom" Edition

2011-11-01T04:07:00.000-04:00

MOVIE REVIEW: LORD OF ILLUSIONS (1995)

2011-11-01T03:51:00.003-04:00

Lord of Illusions

Starring
Scott Bakula as Harry D'Amour
Kevin J. O'Connor as Philip Swann
Famke Janssen as Dorothea Swann
Joel Swetow as Valentin
Barry Del Sherman as Butterfield
Joseph Marder as Ray Miller
Joseph Latimore as Quaid/Fortune Teller
Daniel von Bargen as Nix

Cinematography by Rohn Schmidt
Original Music by Simon Boswell
Editing by Alan Baumgarten
Production Design by Steve Hardie
Art Direction by Mark Fisichella and Bruce Robert Hill
Costume Design by Luke Reichle
Written, Directed and Co-Produced by Clive Barker

NOTE: This review is based on the Director's Cut version of the film.

"I have so much power to give you. All you have to do . . . is beg."

Lord of Illusions is a blend of noirish paperback detective story and writer/director Clive Barker's very own brand of gruesomely sublime horror fantasy literature.

In the 1980s, Barker wrote a series of short story collections known as The Books of Blood wherein he created a highly literate yet stomach-churningly gruesome aesthetic of horror literature. Barker's stories aren't about silent slashers with faces hidden behind Halloween masks or athletic gear or radioactive mutants or aliens clawing their way out of your chest. Barker's horrors are tied to desire, to sex, and to the obsession with power and transformation. His villainous characters, especially, often seem obsessed with accumulating great power, with imposing their rigid wills upon reality. There's also a strong influence of BDSM, most obviously in the novella The Hellbound Heart, and its gruesome movie adaptation, Hellraiser. Anyone who's seen Hellraiser is familiar with Pinhead, the body-piercing fanatic from another dimension, who is still to this day, for better and for worse, Barker's most enduring contribution to the pantheon of horror cinema's memorable monsters. Barker's characters often seek oblivion in the pursuit of taboo pleasures. He further expanded the scope of his vision with novels like 1987's Weaveworld, which brought his style of extreme horror to an epic fantasy adventure saga of hidden worlds and magical beings.

Lord of Illusions is a brilliant synthesis of the gruesome side of Barker's horror with the literary aspect, creating a world where mundane reality and hidden worlds of magic co-exist, interpenetrating each other in ways subtle and spectacular.

Sometime in 1982, a death cult led by a man named Nix (Daniel von Bargen) was plotting its very own Helter-Skelter out in the Mojave Desert. But Nix has a one-up on Charlie Manson: real magic derived from occultic powers of destruction. Nix can levitate, summon a living entity of fire, and, most insidiously, get inside people's heads. A group of armed ex-cultists show up to put the kibosh on Nix and rescue a young girl held hostage within the cultists' hideout.

One of these ex-cultists is a man named Swann (Kevin J. O'Connor). Swann used to be Nix's most fervent disciple. Swann confronts Nix. During the confrontation, Nix puts his fingers into Swann's skull, and manipulates his mind. But Swann's allies manage to come to his rescue with a shotgun and some pistols. After a shootout, in which the cult leader is wounded, Swann uses a strange mask which he screws into Nix's face and skull to magically bind the dark magician and seal his evil away forever. The implication is that Swann used his magic talents to construct the bizarre mask, talents that Swann no doubt learned from Nix. Some might call this ingratitude, but sometimes one must do a little evil to do a lot of good.

Years Later: enter a New York private detective, Harry D'Amour, who battles villains mundane and occultic and is played with a mix of two-fisted competence and surprising compassion by Scott Bakula. D'Amour has a history of dealing with otherworldly powers, and his most recent case involved some sort of exorcism in Brooklyn. The details are vague, but the case, which involved a bloody-mawed albino demon possessing a child, has left D'Amour burned out on occultic cases. A plain clothes detective from central casting shows up at D'Amour's apartment to offer him a case and a chance to get out to the West Coast: a fraudster has skipped out of the Big Apple for California. D'Amour takes the case.

But anyone who's read a Raymond Chandler book knows that the first mystery is just a lead up to the second, and so it is with this case. D'Amour trails the fraudster to a fortune teller's office. D'Amour is coming up the stairs when the dude comes tear-assing back down the stairs. D'Amour senses something strange is going on, and so he draws his gun and charges into the palm reader's office. The palm reader, Quaid (Joseph Latimore), is there, but has been turned into a human pin cushion by a psychopathic torturer, Butterfield (Barry Del Sherman). Butterfield likes to stick people with blades crafted from surgical steel. D'Amour gets jumped by a neo-Nazi thug(Joseph Marder) with filed down teeth, and Butterfield makes his escape while the detective sends the skinhead on a pilgrimmage through the window to pay homage to the pavement three or so stories below. D'Amour tries to figure out what's going on with the palm reader, but the man is mortally wounded. He only has time to give D'Amour a palm reading and an ominous clue about the "coming of the Puritan" before he expires.

The cops show up, and since this is Movie Reality, they let D'Amour go after a few preliminary questions. Actually, that guy who D'Amour threw out the window? It seems he just got up and ran away, so I suppose the cops don't have any good reason to hold him for questioning. D'Amour intuits that some very strange shit is happening, and, soon enough, after his name and picture are printed in the paper in connection with the torture-murder, he is contacted by a fastidious man named Valentin (Joel Swetow) on behalf of Dorothea Swann (Famke Janssen). It seems that the dead fortune teller has a connection to Dorothea and her husband, Philip Swann (Kevin J. O'Connor), who is a David Copperfield-scale professional illusionist.

Dorothea meets D'Amour in a graveyard, and the private dick is immediately smitten with her beauty.(I imagine anyone driven to a graveyard under mysterious circumstances only to find themselves face-to-face with Famke Janssen would probably have the same response.) Dorothea wants to figure out why the fortune teller was murdered and what, if any, threat may be posed to her husband, the illusionist. Dorothea tells D'Amour that Philip has some connection to the slain palm reader, and she wants to know what that is.

D'Amour takes the case.

Lord of Illusions is a mystery, and I suspect that I am already giving too much away, so I'll try not to summarize the plot anymore. What I like about this movie is that it is a hybrid of several different genres, mystery, horror, and fantasy, and it mixes these elements with great skill. The mystery draws you in, the horror gives weight to the violence and death within the mystery, and the fantasy elements suggest a whole other plane of reality that is manipulating the mundane world for mysterious purposes of its own. It explores the concept of magic as something which is just beyond our everyday experience, but not impossible to attain. There is also the danger, in this world, that the evil forces that also use magic can sweep out of the shadows to destroy you mind, body, and soul. Magic is a power that can be used to liberate humans from their humdrum existences, or it can torture us with madness. It would also seem that those who use magic can develop a lust for power. The movie offers a pretty sophisticated take on how magic works and how it affects the hearts and minds of those who practice it. There's no escaping the consequences of magical actions for good and for evil.

I also like the cast of this movie. Scott Bakula does the action hero stuff well, but he also brings a sense of vulnerability to the part. There are a number of scenes, usually after brutal physical combat, where he is seen lying in bed with bottles of booze and painkillers nearby, recovering from his injuries. Arnold would just shrug off the pain, maybe even walk through a plate glass window just to relax. D'Amour's also a decent detective, and he knows that even when dealing with the occult it's still those mundane clues, that book of contacts in the drawer, that used cigar in the ashtray, the offhand comment that reveals the hidden depths of a person's motivation, that makes the case and saves the day. Bakula displays a fair amount of compassion, too. He seems credibly upset at the loss of life, which happens a number of times in this movie. Overall, Bakula makes for a smart, compassionate, two-fisted champion in the face of dark forces.

I believe this was one of Famke Janssen's first major roles in a movie. It's certainly the very first movie I ever saw her in when I was a teenager watching way too much cable television without parental supervision during the 1990s. Nowadays she is famous for playing Jean Gray in those X-Men movies. She's obviously a very beautiful woman, and that beauty is used skillfully in counterpoint to the essential fear and sadness at the heart of the character of Dorothea. Why is a woman this beautiful and wealthy this unhappy? What is she so afraid of? Janssen isn't afraid to bring a creeping fear bordering on paranoia into her performance. It makes you wonder what's going on inside her mind. What is she hiding? Why?

Daniel von Bargen is utterly unwholesome as cult leader Nix. He relishes fucking with people's minds. He luxuriates in his own corruption, gleefully tormenting a twelve year old girl with a vicious baboon on a chain, or sticking his fingers right through the flesh and bone of someone's skull--no doubt utilizing some long forgotten technique of torture learned from some forgotten tome. The role is a standout for Daniel von Bargen, who is usually cast as cops and other authority figures on account of his solid, fatherly presence. Here, he dresses in rags, makes doom-laden pronouncements, and embodies all sorts of malevolence physical and spiritual.

Kevin J. O'Connor plays Philip Swann as a man unable to enjoy his success in life. He is perennially distant from his beautiful wife, Dorothea, and cannot accept the acclaim lavished on him by his audiences. Is it because he feels guilt about building a fortune as an illusionist who uses real magic? Real magic that he learned from a man that he murdered? O'Connor doesn't so much play this kind of anhedonia as he does embody it. The way he piles himself in a chair, listlessly sucking on a Havana cigar, it's all routine, all just keeping up appearances. O'Connor's performance is strikingly natural for such a fanciful movie.

Joel Swetow plays Valentin, who is Philip Swann's stage manager in a number of senses. Swetow plays him as a fastidious man, bordering on the obsessive-compulsive. He is equally devoted to Dorothea and Philip, but he is another character who seemingly has something to hide. He is instantly put off by D'Amour's slovenliness and trades some amusing one liners with him during their scenes together. Swetow is one of those actors I don't think I've ever seen in another movie aside from this one. I looked him up on IMDB and I was pleased to find he was still working. He's got a demo reel on his IMDB page, and it looks like he's been cast in a lot of supporting parts: villains with accents, a supernatural being in a black trenchcoat, and even one of Randy Weaver's neighbors in a made-for-TV movie about the Ruby Ridge standoff.

My favorite performance is by Barry Del Sherman as the sadistic Butterfield. Del Sherman is another actor I could not remember from any other movie, but, upon looking at his IMDB profile I discovered he'd actually played small roles in a handful of movies I had seen before, such as Suicide Kings, Alien Nation, American Beauty, and There Will Be Blood. Del Sherman plays Butterfield as simultaneously detached from most human emotion yet with a penetrating intellectual concentration on his goal. He isn't a torturer just because he's a sadist, but because he believes it's the only way to reveal truth. And what is his goal? I can't reveal that, but I can tell you that he is very much a detective, a kind of diabolical foil to D'Amour. Sherman has a very intriguing moment late in the movie where someone asks him about his bag of tools, and he provides a surprisingly understated yet substantial answer. He isn't the usual cackling cinematic sadist, but comes across as an intensely intellectual, disciplined, yet totally ruthless man, who has been on a long journey, and done a lot of dark things. Watching this movie again, I wondered if Butterfield had ever in his journeys spent time hanging out with John Yoo, David Addington, or Dick Cheney, maybe spent some time as a consultant to a Neoconservative think tank . . . the imagination does wander . . .

Lord of Illusions has effective special effects, using a mixture of practical mechanical effects, makeup, and some ambitious, if not wholly effective, CG. The CG elements consist of a strange figure made of geometrically folding and unfolding . . . sheets of paper? Paper cranes? And then the figure turns into a kind of flying fish, I think, but the whole thing doesn't quite come off, but I think I get the overall idea. A strange presence invades a house, and the people there have to contend with it . . . see the movie itself for the full story. The best special effects are in the opening and climatic scenes of the film wherein the magical forces in play are allowed to clash in full force. The climax, wherein the evil force behind everything is unleashed is spectacular. It's an orgy of madness, a battle to the finish, and a confrontation with the past all in one.

There's another quality to this movie that I like that's a little harder to pin down. It's a very writerly movie. Cliver Barker is not just a filmmaker but a novelist, short story author, and a playwright for the stage, as well as a visual artist. You can see some of his drawings and designs in some scenes. But with Lord of Illusions, Barker elevates the usual characterizations one finds in horror cinema with something that he no doubt learned as a novelist writing long form narratives: a sense of history, a sense of emotional complexity, moral ambiguity, and the way people change, or don't, over stretches of time. None of these are the usual values one expects or even demands from horror flicks. I think most people, certainly most people I know, go to horror movies for the snuff movie aspect: they want to see people geeked in novel ways. A machete to the head. A scythe up the ass. Coils of intestines on a meat hook. A chainsaw to the genitals. Barker himself is no stranger to outrageous gore, as anyone who has read his horror short stories, The Books of Blood, or seen the first two Hellraiser movies could tell you, but I appreciated the fact that he decided to go for something deeper, and more ambitious with this film. The characters in Lord of Illusions don't just exist to be hacked to death by some lumbering boogeyman. They seem to have existences beyond the cruel exigencies of the horror film, and each one's suffering and potential death counts for quite a bit. Even the villainous characters evoke a certain amount of empathy, and failing that, fascination. We want to see even the evil ones live just to find out what novel horrors they will bring into the world.

Horror movies nowadays consist mostly of remakes of played-out slasher film franchises, the kinda bullshit you think audiences would've consigned to the straight-to-DVD market at the turn of the millennium. But Freddy and Jason and that endless stream of Saw sequels keep on coming. The Saw series in particular is about the purest form of the geek show in American horror cinema that I can think of, almost majestic in its single-minded desire to derive entertainment from the sounds and images of human beings getting tortured to death.

My point is that Barker proved himself to be a much too intelligent filmmaker for standard horror fare with Lord of Illusions. Which is why he hasn't directed another film since. It hasn't helped that all three of Barker's major directorial efforts, Hellraiser, Night Breed, and Lord of Illusions, have met with resistance from production executives, and varying degrees of censorship from the MPAA. Hellraiser is probably the one movie of the three which was able to reach audiences with an R rating and be relatively uncompromised, yet it is also arguably the most simplistic of the three. Night Breed was butchered by clueless executives who wanted more of a pure monster movie, but is still a fascinating piece of work, very ahead of its time. Lord of Illusions was released theatrically in a compromised cut, but is now widely available in a Director's Cut on DVD. Maybe Barker is just sick of dealing with the endless compromises inherent within the Hollywood machine. As a writer and a painter he can create without mindless interference and the inevitable evisceration of substance which follows the ordeals of test screenings and focus groups and other art-by-committee atrocities. Still, it would be nice if Barker got back in the saddle for one more directorial effort. It'd be all the better if it was something of the flavor of Lord of Illusions, another supernaturally themed mystery-thriller, maybe another outing with Harry D'Amour, a little older, a little wiser, a little more scarred. One can hope.

INFINITE REPEAT AWARD: "What is this hand for?" Edition

2011-10-22T01:08:00.000-04:00

MOVIE REVIEW: MODERN TIMES (1936)

2011-10-21T05:21:00.001-04:00

MODERN TIMES

Starring
Charlie Chaplin
Paulette Goddard

Written, Directed, Produced, Original Music Composed by Charlie Chaplin
Cinematography by Ira H. Morgan and Roland Totheroh
Editing by Charlie Chaplin and Willard Nico
Production Design by Charles D. Hall
Art Direction by J. Russell Spencer

The Chaplin is a Tramp! And this Tramp starts out with a pretty good job in the midst of the Great Depression: tightening bolts on incomprehensible bits of machine parts as they race by on a manic conveyor belt. Chaplin's boss dictates to the workers via an Orwellian telescreen, and his one dictate seems to be "Faster! Faster!" And so the workers on the line pick up the pace. Chaplin has to tighten two bolts at a time, so he's armed with a wrench in each fist. He takes to his work with crazed intensity, even if he does get a bit flaky and start applying the wrenches to the buttons on people's coats and dresses and even the occasional pair of nipples. Chaplin ends up losing his mind because he can't keep pace with the work, and the boss conducts a bizarre experiment on him involving a feeding machine that looks like it was designed by Survival Research Laboratories. Does Chaplin show up with a fully automatic assault rifle and start killing at will? Does he go on strike? No! He dances! He spurts people in the face with an oil can! He takes a ride through the gears of the grand industrial machinery! He makes all kinds of merry! He is happy as can be! And to be this kind of happy in the heart of the industrial beast one must clearly be insane. Later for that cushy factory job.

Chaplin finds himself out of work and on the streets. While strolling along with his inimitable walk he gets caught up between striking workers and strikebreaking pig cops. The cops drag Chaplin off to prison for being a communist agitator, and it looks like his spirits are sure to be crushed. But he ends up consuming large quantities of cocaine by accident and he becomes supercharged with energy. With this burst of energy he battles an armed gang trying to bust out of lock-up, and the Tramp becomes a savior of the prison warden. They even give him a pardon and, what's most important, a letter of reference so he can get a job.

Meanwhile, the lovely Paulette Goddard finds herself barefoot in the streets after her father is gunned down during a labor skirmish. Rather than become a ward of the state, she decides to strike out on her own, and try to skip and prance and charm her way into a job and a new life. She crosses paths with the Tramp when she nearly gets caught stealing a loaf of bread. Chaplin tries to take the rap, and thereby end up in jail again where he was actually having a grand old time, and penitentiary sure beat hell outta the madness of working the factory line . . .

What does it take to survive in a world of brutal, dehumanizing labor, state repression of labor strikes, and all pervasive poverty and starvation? You gotta get tough. You gotta get organized. You gotta have solidarity with your fellow workers. You gotta stand up to the pigs and the oppressors. Or you can just get goofy. Chaplin gets goofy.

But I'm not sure the Tramp ever made a choice, exactly. He's just that kind of guy, you know? All he wants is to cruise through life, not take on too many obligations, eat well, and maybe find a nice girl to spend time with. Make time to roller skate, sing, and dance. If he ends up as a labor agitator, a rebel, a thief, and a gangbuster those are just side effects of his good time, you know what I'm saying? What kind of victory would it be, anyways, to win some bogus concessions from management, and still be tied down to that goddamn factory line? Better to cut loose of such attachments, and cruise through reality as if it all was just one big Saturday afternoon stroll.

Modern Times is a delightful fantasy, a liberating blast of gentle anarchy. Yes, real life is a lot uglier, and much more insane. But the central idea, as I take it, is that a person can find freedom and dignity in the midst of grim circumstances through play, and through this play you can negate the systems of command and control, oppression and obedience, that the bogus, arbitrary, unthinking authorities of the world are obsessively trying to perpetrate upon humanity.

There's a nice little moment where the cops are trying to get Chaplin to heel, and he just keeps on walking, politely refusing their demands. No Molotov cocktails, no lawsuits, just as if to say, "No thank you. You may keep your authoritarian bullshit for yourself. I'll not be needing it." Of course, Chaplin does it without the superfluous words.

What more can I say? Chaplin was a brilliant physical comedian, filmmaker, musician, actor, he did it all. Paulette Goddard is quite beautiful, and cunning. Unlike Chaplin, she has seen death up close, and so she applies her willpower to the art of survival. She is a perfect compliment to Chaplin's unconscious agent of anarchy. There's a reason why people who draw up lists of the greatest movies ever put Modern Times on the list. It helps that it's imminently watchable and hilarious. The set designs are mind-boggling and fun. The comic timing is as hectic and athletic as a Jackie Chan martial arts comedy.

What a team-up that would've been! Chaplin and Chan!

Better that it remains an idle fantasy, and not some CG grotesquerie.

The Eating Machine:

BOOK REVIEW: The Ruined Map by Kobo Abe (1969)

2011-10-15T11:43:00.002-04:00

The Ruined Map
by Kobo Abe

Translated by E. Dale Saunders
Published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1969
Originally published in Japanese 1967

A nameless private investigator takes on the case of a missing husband, a Mr. Nemuro. He goes to a small town somewhere in Japan, and tries to figure out where Mr. Nemuro went. It doesn't help that the man disappeared six months ago, and that it's taken so long for the wife and the wife's brother to hire a detective. The P.I. narrates his tale in the first person, and the names of the town and several pertinent organizations have been purposely redacted from his first person narrative. His investigation takes on an abstract quality. One gets the sense that this mystery and the people involved could exist in any small town or city.

The P.I. has a kind of knack for seeing things in minute detail. At times, he seems to focus obsessively on details of rooms and streets and people's attire to the point that he misses the big picture. Early on, he narrowly avoids running down a child in the street. Later, he meets with his estranged wife and he seems to have a rather distorted sense of why they had to part ways. Like in many marital conflicts, each blames the other for the separation, and the P.I. is tinged with jealousy that borders on the absurd. One moment he's specualting about her cheating on him, and the next he idly fantasises about her having a lesbian tryst with her young female employee in her dressmaking shop. Every statement, each exchange, every last change of mood and odd utterance is analyzed for hidden meanings and secret threats. The P.I. was suited for his profession, and doomed to failure in marriage.

Or maybe the P.I.'s hyperawareness is his weakness as an investigator as well. Each person he interrogates, he takes on a slightly different persona the better to draw out pertinent information. His theory is he must be a kind of blank slate, an actor, willing to take on the persona which best gets his given subject talking about what he needs to know. Brilliant . . . but there's always the risk that these ideal personas merely push his subjects to tell him what he wants to hear, and not the truth. Also, his suspicious nature may prevent him from believeing the truth of statements which contain vital clues.

The Ruined Map plays with the tantalizing ambiguities inherent in human communications, especially when people are trying to hide their feelings and obscure the truth. The novel is set up like a hard-boiled mystery to give people plenty of reasons to equivocate and deceive one another about hidden motives and illicit schemes, but by the end of it I was left with the impression that Abe is suggesting that all human interactions are, on some level, profoundly uncertain. We can never really know what goes on in someone else's head. How do we know if someone is lying to us? And don't we all tell little white lies now and again? Deception, at some level, is absolutely necessary for normal human interactions to proceed apace. Radical honesty would tear us apart. But what happens if our lives are entirely made up of little white lies? Couldn't the case be made that one little white lie after another adds up to a big ol' pile of deception? That might very well be the case. And there might be absolutely nothing we can do about it.

And where does that leave the P.I. in terms of identity? If he has commited himself to being a kind of protean Everyman, altering his identity to suit whatever case and whoever he is dealing with at any given moment, then who is he? Is identity something essential and unchanging? In Abe's novel, this is not the case. Identity is something you can put on, take off, and fine tune in endless variations. At least, that's how the P.I. approaches things. That's another part of the guy's particular talent it would seem.

But what happens if you lose track of yourself? Sure, the P.I.'s a pro, that wouldn't happen . . . but what if?

The Ruined Map draws you in with a genre mystery set up, but then goes on, by gradual degrees, to take you into truly bizarre territory. I found it to be surprisingly unsettling, although it is hardly sensationlistic or gruesome in any extreme sense. But it wore on my psyche, screwing with my genre expecations, and then dragging me into a wholly unexpected fictional zone. I admired it, but it was also somewhat unpleasant, and a bit infuriating. I've read a number of other Abe novels in English, and have found most of them to be much too abstracted and absurdist for my taste, although I did enjoy The Box Man and Inter Ice Age 4. I think I was hoping, as I read it, that this book would be closer to Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, but instead it was thorougly Kobo Abe. Well, the man's name was on the spine. I have only myself to blame.

MOVIE REVIEW: PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS (1961)

2011-10-06T06:53:00.000-04:00

Pigs and Battleships

Starring
Hiroyuki Nagato as Kinta
Jitsuko Yoshimura as Haruko
Sanae Nakahara as Hiromi
Tetsuro Tamba as Tetsu
Kin Sugai as Hiromi's Mother
Eijiro Tono as Kinta's Father

Directed by Shohei Imamura
Produced by Kano Otsuka
Written by Hisashi Yamanouchi
Cinematography by Shinsaku Himeda
Lighting by Yasuo Iwaki
Sound by Fumio Hashimoto
Music by Toshiro Mayuzumi
Art Direction by Kimihiko Nakamura

Pigs and Battleships is all about average people trying to survive and maybe even thrive in a port city in Japan sometime not long after the end of World War II. It's mostly about low end gangsters and their marginally more legit friends, lovers, and relations and how they navigate an economy heavily dependent on vice and the military presence of a foreign power. Everyone seems teetering on the edge of criminality, or maybe just insanity. Some dream big, and kid themselves that they'll have spacious homes like the foreign big spenders with their houses on hilltops, or maybe like the U.S. gangsters they see in newsreels.

Postwar Japan: the port city of Yokosuka. Big U.S. military presence. Lots of American sailors on the prowl, neon lights, prostitutes, and no air conditioning. Everybody is busting their ass to move up in the world, rebuild the nation, and, for the ladies, maybe even bag an American husband. But guys and gals alike all want some piece of that American dream. As one of the con men in this movie takes note, all the Japanese youth of the day are enamored with American gangsters and the Beat Generation, despite his best efforts to spread the gospel of Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson.

But if you can't be an American, you may as well profit off 'em. A young, wannabe yakuza named Kinta (Hiroyuki Nagato) touts for a cathouse run out of the back of a tiny restaurant. With playful zest, he backslaps and browbeats the horny sailors into the cramped, smoky, improvised brothel space filled with bunk beds and young women. Kinta's girlfriend Haruko (Jitsuko Yoshimura) works with her mother (Kin Sugai) and older sister, Hiromi (Sanae Nakahara), in the restaurant part of the operation, and occasionally gets a big pay day when she goes on dates with Americans. Haruko hasn't slept with any of these guys, yet, as she feels loyalty towards Kinta, but the pressure to do so is intense. Haruko's mom and Hiromi both want her to put out to increase the family's revenue. Haruko isn't necessarily put off by the idea of prostitution, but she's in love with Kinta, and she's beginning to grow tired of having other people tell her what to do. She sees herself as eventually saving up enough money to move herself and Kinta to Kawasaki, where the young couple could get jobs in one of the new factories being built there.

But Kinta feels loyalty to his yakuza comrades. In particular, he is loyal to his direct boss, Tetsu (Tetsuro Tamba), who happens to be dating Haruko's sister, Hiromi. Tetsu is probably the most high strung yakuza in cinema history. He is constantly concerned for his health, and has a medievalist's approach to medicine. Tetsu monitors the color and volume of the bile he coughs up every morning. Tetsu and Kinta and other members of their gang decide to move away from narcotics trafficking, and to focus on a scheme to sell pork to the American military base. To that end they decide to focus their business on pig farming and prostitution, with supplementary forays into protection racketeering. But these dimwitted yakuza find their ambitions complicated by the machinations of other criminals and distrust and divisiveness within their own ranks.

Kinta is not the top dawg in his gang, and he is certainly not the brightest, but he is the most sincere. He throws himself into whatever the gang wants him to do with surpassing zeal. Other gang members take note of this, and see a way to exploit him. Kinta goes along with a scheme to take the rap for a murder charge for someone higher up in the criminal hierarchy on the promise that once he's done his stretch on the inside he will have greater status as a yakuza. Kinta is clearly a fool, and yet I found his sincerity believable. Kinta has a conception in his mind of what the gang is that has little to do with the stark reality. Kinta is loyal to this conception, this fantasy, and that makes him a dreamer. It's hard not to like a dreamer, you know? I found myself wondering what the gang would've been able to accomplish if Kinta had been put in charge instead of the depressive hypochondriac Tetsu.

The central conflict within the movie exists between the lovers Kinta and Haruko. It is not so much a moral conflict, as in virtue versus vice, as it is a kind of existential conflict between agency and dependency. Both Kinta and Haruko are pragmatists to some degree. They both believe in doing whatever is necessary to survive and get ahead in life, but they have conflicting visions of how to achieve these ends. Kinta believes in his gang, and their enterprises: pig farming, racketeering, pimping. Haruko believes in herself, and in her ability to make her own way in the world. Haruko wants to escape being dependent on the presence of the American military, and the oppressive family which would deny her the chance to strike out on her own. They're both pragmatists, but they're both dreamers as well.

Visually, Kinta and Haruko are often shown within Imamura's glorious black and white widescreen compositions as being enveloped by the various gritty, lived-in environments of Yokosuka, and also being crowded by the other characters, family, yakuza, and sailors. Kinta, especially, is often marginalized within the framing, appearing in the background while foreground characters discuss plans and schemes which Kinta has no choice but to follow along with or help execute as a loyal flunky.

Now and again, Kinta and Haruko have scenes together, and the two seem to dominate the scenery, sometimes towering over the camera, almost as though their passion for each other and their crazy dreams of future prosperity threaten to elevate them out of the gritty, quirky realism of Imamura's movie and into the realm of Hollywood melodrama. But even these scenes are off kilter, and often have resolutions which undercut the romance. Haruko drags Kinta away from his yakuza buddies to a hilltop and exhorts him to ditch the gang and make a new, legitimate life, but Kinta resists. Passionate words are exchanged, and the young lovers are framed against beautiful landscapes. But at the end, Kinta goes running down the hill, stumbles, and falls on his ass. Kinta picks himself up, though, keeps on running, and you gotta admire the kid's moxie.

Imamura's movie is highly eclectic, mixing in elements of yakuza gangster movies, farce, romance, realism, and satire, but he manages to make it all hang together with a dynamic sense of editing and pacing. In another director's hands this same material would've been grim and plodding, but Imamura transforms it into a kind of adventure but without toning down the grit and grime.There are quite a few rapid turns of plot and motivation as well, and it may require a couple of viewings to keep track of what all happens. The tone is frequently comical, and yet many serious, disturbing things transpire. It all builds to a crazed, slightly surreal climax wherein the pent-up rage and frustration of various characters finds release. Indeed, the ending seems to be somewhat influenced by what all these characters picked up watching American gangster movies, almost as though conflicting inner visions of what they were all aspiring to become in life were unleashed and began to trample each other . . .

Pigs and Battleships Trailer:

INFINITE REPEAT AWARD: "When you hear the Boss, it's time to go to work" Edition

2011-10-06T00:23:00.000-04:00

Runner-Up:

BOOK REVIEW: EXTRA LIVES by Tom Bissell (2010)

2011-09-28T21:20:00.001-04:00

Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter
by Tom Bissell

Published by Pantheon Books in 2010

"As incomprehensible as it may seem, I have some how spent more than two hundred hours playing Oblivion. I know this because the game keeps a running tally of the total time one has spent with it. I can think of only one personal activity I would be less eager to see audited in this way, and it, too, is a single-player experience."
--Tom Bissell

Tom Bissell is a video game junkie. No question. He is also a very smart and articulate writer, and, like William Burroughs with heroin, he writes about his addiction, his master, with obsessive zeal and even offers up some brilliant critical insights into video gaming as addiction, as a multi-billion dollar industry, as an art form just now being broadly recognized as such, and as a path to self-destruction. His book Extra Lives is an entertaining and disturbing mixture of memoir and journalism. He combines descriptions of his experiences playing video games with interviews with some of the most successful game designers currently working to create an intriguing dialectic between a subjective confessional narrative and a critical consciousness aimed at picking the minds of video game designers and theorists, and exploring what it is that we seek when we play video games.

What is it that we seek when playing video games? For Bissell, it would seem that his title says it all: more lives, more life, we want to crawl into some other identity, usually one that is heavily armed, and essentially immortal and indestructible. Sure, you get killed all the time in games, but then you just go back to your last save point. Video game death is almost never permanent.

But Bissell is also looking for quality stories and characterizations, and he makes the case that video games are in a kind of renaissance in terms of games' capacities for deep stories, open-ended game play, and sophisticated characterizations. Video games are now capable of visual spectacle above and beyond what's possible at the cinema, that earlier, cruder form of virtual reality. Moreover, video games allow you to take control of the action. The player is totally in control.

Except when those arbitrary cut scenes kick in, and then you have no choice but to follow the plan laid out by the game designers. Bissell asserts that this tension between freedom of play and the coercive demands of an overarching narrative that intrudes on the illusion of freedom and empowerment one experiences while gaming is one of the key hurdles video games must overcome in order to achieve . . . but Bissell doesn't resolve the tension. He merely illustrates it.

But if one stops to consider what he's suggesting, he's basically calling for video games to be able to offer completely free-form, endlessly variable experiences. The ultimate merger between the demands of narrative in the literary sense, and what Bissell refers to as ludonarrative, which could be characterized as the the story which grows naturally out of the act of play, would basically be an extra, or second, life. It's a paradox. It's a mindfuck.

Think about it. Gaming is absorbing because it is an escape. And the more detailed and graphically and aurally impressive games become, the more we want to play them. But if a game were to totally replicate the free form experience of being alive, it would include massive amounts of minutiae which might destroy the gaming experience, to make it so demanding that it would cease to be fun. Even if the game was a fantasy experience including magical powers and heroic deeds it would be work to keep up with it. And then you would go looking for some other form of escape . . . to escape your escape . . .you 'd need not just a second life, but extra lives.

It makes me think of the Konami code: up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, START.

How many lives does the obsessive gamer require?

And talk about a warped sense of entitlement. It's not enough that our high tech civilization gives us such advanced amusements, but now we expect them to substantially or even completely replace our meatspace lives. But maybe there's something to this. If we all just stayed home and became absorbed into virtual existences, maybe we'd be less inclined to drive fossil fuel powered vehicles and engage in real world wars of adventure and folly. Of course, the electricity expenditure would go up, but where are people driving to, anyways? There are no jobs to go to. Most people are overweight, out of shape, and disinterested in meeting face to face. Now, everyone works from home as the ultimate hi-score warrior, conjuring up second and third and fourth lives from the digital void. Game on!

Bissell's logic is that of the junkie chasing the ultimate high. The junkie who has come up against the outer limits of his accumulated chemical resistances. Bissell doesn't hide the fact that being hooked on video games has come at a high personal cost: a damaged work ethic and seriously strained, perhaps even broken, human relationships. Bissell is to be commended for being up front about this aspect of gaming addiction. He isn't exactly apologetic, but he does acknowledge the rather steep downside of his devotions.

This downside is illustrated by his adventures playing Grand Theft Auto IV while coked out of his mind with a buddy. They made a point of playing GTAIV while coked-up. Sometimes the Scarface poster isn't enough.

Bissell comes across as a guy who is seeking unusual, obsessive, and dangerous experiences. He was in the Peace Corps for a stretch until he dropped out, he's worked as an embedded reporter in Iraq and Afghanistan, he has burned through relationships with women at a rapid clip, and he has also Hoovered large quantities of cocaine with a friend while fanatically playing Grand Theft Auto IV. His consciousness seems to be divided between the here and now and some sort of idealized zone of continuous peak experiences. As a reader, I was captivated by his engaging, intellectually substantive, and humorous writing style, but I also wondered what it must be like to be friends with this guy. I would imagine his friends and family worry about him and his well-being. I hope he gets a handle on his appetites. It would be a shame to lose such a talented writer.

----

I've talked mostly about the personal side of Extra Lives. But the book isn't all druggie confessional narrative. Bissell went out and interviewed a some of the people who were instrumental in creating games such as Mass Effect, Far Cry 2, Braid, and Fable 2. These are all excellent pieces of reportage and analysis, and the most I can say is read them for yourself. They are most enlightening.

But something about this book really got to me.

Tom Bissell writes the single best obsessively detailed description of the experience of playing the original Resident Evil for PS1 that I have ever read. It is also the only obsessively detailed description of the experience of playing the original Resident Evil that I have ever read, but sometimes you just grok a winner when you're in the presence of one, you know? Bissell breaks down that epochal game's technique: its deliberate pacing, the Mystery Science Theater quality voice acting, the camera angles which obscure as much as they reveal and create anxiety and make you wonder from which direction the enemy will strike, the sinister ambiance of the scoring and soundscaping, and then he goes one better: he creates a brilliant interpretation of why the controls for the very first Resident Evil game kinda sucked. In Bissell's view, the clunky controls augment the terror, the anxiety, the suspense, and function in a way antithetical to the first person shooter games which were then, and still are, all the rage.

In an FPS, you want responsiveness, you want to be able to mow down the enemy, reload instantly, and move quickly to avoid being surrounded or cornered, but in Resident Evil the player character can't just shoot from the hip. You gotta press the button to draw your weapon, then you gotta press buttons to position your character to aim at the enemy, and there's no goddamn cross-hair! There's no on-screen targeting icon to indicate whether you're actually locked on to the zombie or hunter or giant spider or undead attack dog--all you can do is hope you're pointing in the right direction and fire at will. In an FPS, the design of the controls facilitates fluidity and fast paced play. In Resident Evil, you are forced to be deliberate with every step you take, each hallway you choose to explore, every shot fired because you're unlikely to survive too many full-on encounters with the enemy, and the supplies of ammunition are severely limited.

And then there's the typewriters and those ink ribbons. In order to save the game, you gotta find an ink ribbon, and then you gotta get to a room with a typewriter. Every time you save, you use up an ink ribbon. The supplies of ink ribbons are not unlimited, so saving your game becomes as much a part of your strategy as how you use your ammunition, whether you choose to fight every monster you come across, or beat a strategic retreat.

Bissell describes all of this brilliantly, capturing the mindset one evolves to survive in such a dire gaming scenario, and how such games frustrate and addict those who play them in equal measure. As I read Bissell's description, I thought back to when I first got a PS1 and how one of the first games I got was Resident Evil. Most of my Christmas vacation was spent plugged into that sinister mansion. Hours passed like seconds. I played from three in the afternoon until seven in the morning, woke up at five p.m., played 'til seven or eight in the a.m., and I went a week without seeing any sunlight. In Florida. And Resident Evil wasn't all fun. It made me want to pull my fingernails out, just to try and jack myself back into real life with some overwhelmingly agonizing act of self-torture. It made me scream and swear and invent new uses for the words fuck, shit, goddamnit, and mother long before I had ever read a David Mamet play or watched an Angry Video Game Nerd video. It fucked with my patience and my sleep cycles, and it also hooked me like few other things. Playing Resident Evil gave me some idea of what it was like to be a junkie.

INFINITE REPEAT AWARD: "Cue 1990s Nostalgia Wave" Edition

2011-09-28T20:18:00.000-04:00

MOVIE REVIEW: TETSUO THE BULLET MAN (2009)

2011-09-22T09:47:00.001-04:00

Tetsuo the Bullet Man

Starring
Eric Bossick as Anthony
Akiko Mono as Yuriko
Yuko Nakamura as Mitsue
Stephen Sarrazin as Ride
Shinya Tsukamoto as The Guy

Directed by Shinya Tsukamoto
Written by Shinya Tsukamoto and Hisakatsu Kuroki
Music by Chu Ishikawa
Cinematography by Satoshi Hayashi, Takayuki Shida, and Shinya Tsukamoto
Edited by Yuji Ambe and Shinya Tsukamoto
Production Design by Shinya Tsukamoto
Costume Design by Mari Sakurai
Produced by Shinichi Kawahara, Masayuki Tanishima, and Shinya Tsukamoto

A Kaijyu Theatre Production

"You don't want me inside you. You don't know what I'll do."

Anthony (Eric Bossick) has nightmares about a boy with a vibrating face of molten slag. His wife Yuriko (Akiko Mono) has the same nightmares. She's willing to talk about it, but Anthony keeps it inside. Anthony keeps a lot inside.

Like his resentment at how his father, Ride (Stephen Sarrazin) a retired bio-tech researcher, insists on conducting monthly blood tests on Anthony and Tom, Anthony's son. Ride claims he wants to make sure that Anthony and Tom aren't developing leukemia or other diseases. Anthony has tried to convince Ride that they can get those kinds of tests with their regular health care provider, but Ride insists. Ride's wife, Mitsue (Yuko Nakamura), died from some sort of inherited illness. Ride seems to believe that only he can keep his son and grandson healthy from the ravages of inherited disease.

Anthony is walking back from his father's place to his apartment with his son while talking on the phone with Yuriko when an economy car comes zooming down a tunnel. Anthony tells Tom to get out of the road, to stand against the wall. The car comes to a halt a few feet from Anthony. The driver is in shadow. There's something menacing about this vehicle. A father's worst fears are realized when the car backs up at high speed and runs Tom down. Anthony runs after the car, helpless to stop this new nightmare unfolding in waking life, and sees something both horrific and strange: a little arm is reaching out from underneath the front end of the car, fingers grasping the grill of the murderous economy car. The arm is seemingly mutilated, but maybe it's just transformed . . . into the same awful consistency of the molten slag face of the child Anthony and Yuriko both saw in their nightmares. A new vision of horror: steaming blood pours from beneath the car. But the blood looks more like liquid metal . . .

Anthony feels something exploding inside himself. He flips out, his body twitching and vibrating, going into a kind of dance. The crashing music seems to signal the loosing of some strange, awful power, and a new Tetsuo is born!

Much as in Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, the man of metal in Tetsuo the Bullet Man is also born of rage at the murderous loss of his son. This homicidal act also echos the act of vehicular assault which created the Metal Fetishist in the original Tetsuo the Iron Man. Does filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto have a fear of being run over by a car? Maybe so. I recall reading somewhere that Tsukamoto rides a bicycle, and so maybe he feels some anxiety at being run down by some monstrous machine (bicycles also figure prominently in Tsukamoto's films Bullet Ballet and Nightmare Detective). There's also the tragedy of a parent losing a child. This seems to be a concern which has grown out of Tsukamoto's real world development from a single auteur filmmaker to an auteur filmmaker with a wife and children who keeps one foot in the world of advertising and for-hire filmmaking. Tsukamoto's movies always seem to reflect his personal obsessions and concerns even when they are works of pure fantasy. Indeed, Tsukamoto's fantasies are never just that. Fantastic powers and mutations come at the potential loss of one's sanity, bodily integrity, and the peril of mass destruction.

This peril of mass destruction is something Tsukamoto seems to have an ambivalent relationship with in the Tetsuo movies. Tetsuo the Iron Man seemed to embrace the annihilation of the old world, as embodied by the city of Tokyo, as something to be celebrated. A lone metal fetishist pursues a milquetoast salaryman with the intention of inspiring uncontrolled mutation and ultimate creative destruction. It also had a sexual element: the unleashing of destructive powers was seemingly some sort of atomic orgasm combined with infectious psychic mutations of the libido. Tetsuo II: Body Hammer involved a whole cult of metal fetishists organized with the purpose of tormenting a salaryman into remembering his secret past. Tetsuo II also addressed the destruction of Tokyo as a necessity, perhaps to make the world safe for parents and offspring. It was to be an end to all wars of mutation, as it were, since it was the city of Tokyo itself, born out of cutthroat capitalism and high technology, that required men of flesh to become men of metal to keep up the pace of production.

In all of these Tetsuo movies, the mutations are triggered by a figure known as The Guy, or Yatsu. (I'm guessing Yatsu must mean 'guy' or 'person.') The Guy, or "That Guy!" as Anthony refers to him at one point, is always played by Shinya Tsukamoto, perhaps as an on-camera manifestation of his behind the lens role as director and mastermind of the on screen carnage. Tsukamoto seems to be saying that each of these movies is a kind of experiment where the author/director is tormenting some poor protagonist to provoke a radical evolutionary response, to become a monster, and always for sinister purposes. The Guy's motives are tied to his resentment of the modern edifice of Tokyo, and perhaps reflect Tsukamoto's dark side as an artist.

Tsukamoto in real life is both an artist with a taste for the dark side and a hardworking family man. These movies seem to be explorations of these sometimes conflicting roles. The provocative artist side of him desires to transform reality, to defeat crass consumerism, and blow minds to bits. The family man side of him has bills to pay, responsibilities to shoulder, and people to love and protect. It's almost like two different personae reside within the same man. One has a serious resentment towards the structures and strictures of 21st century capitalist society, and the other depends on them. Tsukamoto uses these movies to play out these conflicts, and to show the price paid no matter where we fall on the destruction/dependence spectrum.

The Bullet Man is also a creature responding to the pain and cruelty of the world, the world as played by Tokyo. In this movie, the Bullet Man is besieged by grief, a wife who is angry that he let their son die, and the heavily armed contractors of a sinister corporation. Powerful interests want to make this Bullet Man go away, but this new Tetsuo won't go down without a fight. As Anthony's mutation progresses, he becomes a roaring, slag encrusted war machine, bristling with cannons, and enraged by his inability to control his transformations.

Interestingly, and perhaps inspired by American comic book superheroes, the Bullet Man tries his best not to kill people, only to wound and disable them. This creates some dark comedy when the Bullet Man battles the Blackwater-style contractors. Instead of executing them outright, he just settles for blowing off their arms and legs to calm them down. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen.

The Guy, once again incarnated by Tsukamoto, is the driver of the murderous economy car. He knows what Anthony is hiding inside, and wants to bring it out into the open. The Guy tortures Anthony with menacing phone calls and emails. It's a tribute to Tsuakmoto's skill as a director that he is able to conjure menace from economy cars, cell phones, and emails. Part of it is how he directs the movie to put the audience into Anthony's disturbed mental state, but a large portion of the movie's intensity comes from Chu Ishikawa's epic score and sound design. This is a movie which constantly rumbles with ambient menace, and impacts with furious percussion. I can't adequately describe it, it's just something you have to experience. Crank up the volume on this one.

The Guy, who in this movie is presented as some sort of corporate saboteur, has something special in mind for the Bullet Man, something unexpectedly grand and ambitious. It's not the unbridled sexual anarchy of Tetsuo the Iron Man, nor is it solely the revelation of dark secrets from the past, as in Tetsuo II: Body Hammer. It has partially to do with unveiling the past and something else which I won't reveal. But I would say it's rather a clever twist on the surreal logic of the Tetsuo movies. It makes me wonder what Tsukamoto has in mind for Tetsuo 4, and, yes, I do hope he makes a fourth one.

First time leading man Eric Bossick gets put through his paces on this one. I gather from his IMDB profile that he has done voice overs and motion capture for video games such as Silent Hill 4, and that he has had roles on Japanese television dramas. There's also a great picture on his IMDB page of Bossick, Tsukamoto, and Robert De Niro together at the Tribeca Film Festival. Bossick is no replacement for Tomorrwo Taguchi who so memorably embodied the previous two men of metal, and I don't think he's meant to be. Bossick brings more of a fragile, wounded dimension to the Bullet Man. But he is also quite convincingly crazed and fearsome, and a helluva sport to be buried under the elaborate molting slag make-up and costuming prostheses.

The Bullet Man is also a triumph of make-up and practical effects. To watch it go through it's different transformations is quite impressive. As the Bullet Man molts and mutates, his wife Yuriko has the opportunity to show tenderness towards this monster, evoking some version of Beauty and the Beast. The scene of Yuriko pulling the molted chunks of slab from Anthony's head is unexpectedly moving. And The Bullet Man's final form suggests a wholly new and terrifying frontier for the Tetsuo franchise . . . but you'll just have to see for yourself.

It should be noted that this film is mostly in English, with only a few lines of dialogue in Japanese. This was done, I guess, to try and increase its commercial viability in the United States and other English speaking markets. The effect is uneven. All of the Japanese cast members are clearly speaking their lines based on phonetic memorization, and the effect is rather artificial. Bossick has no problem with the English, and Tsukamoto's scenes with English dialogue are played for perverse humorous effect, and that compensates somewhat for the lack of fluency, but the overall impact is less than perfect. But it does give the movie a strange sound and feel. The dialogue itself is not bad, actually, and shows a good deal of finesse, it's just the delivery is off, and I feel that it puts the obviously talented Japanese cast members at a bit of a disadvantage. But Tsukamoto makes a skilled go of it.

It comes off better than what was attempted in 2007's Sukiyaki Western Django, which was a mash-up of Spaghetti Westerns and samurai movies directed by Takashi Miike. In that movie, all of the dialogue was recorded in phonetically memorized English, and it was all thoroughly ludicrous. The movie featured a hugely talented cast, and some memorably orchestrated carnage, but the dialogue was almost incomprehensible and undercut the whole endeavor. I had to watch it with English subtitles. Tetsuo the Bullet Man deploys it's dialogue much more effectively. Even if you don't catch every last word, the flow of the story, and the emotions of the characters are all pretty easy to follow.

Tetsuo the Bullet Man is a worthy entry in Tsukamoto's surrealistic ongoing saga of rage, mutation, and creative destruction, played out against Tokyo, that high-tech edifice of civilization. Watching it reminded me of a line of dialogue from an earlier Tsukamoto film, Bullet Ballet, where one of the characters referred to Tokyo as a dream. The character, a drug dealing gangster and junkie, seemed to suggest that the mainstream society of civilization and laws was an illusion, and that it was the underground, outlaw existence which was real. Of course, one must consider the source of this bit of druggie philosophy, but the Tetsuo movies seem to be concerned with a similar inquiry:

Is civilization the dream, the fantasy? Is ultimate reality the mutant of rage inside the human heart? Does it take a radical act of creative destruction to unleash reality? Or can we choose our reality, be it civilization or unbridled chaos and war?

Tetsuo the Bullet Man trailer:

Interview with Shinya Tsukamoto by Raffi Asdourian:

BOOK REVIEW: SMARTBOMB by Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby (2005)

2011-09-19T08:07:00.000-04:00

SMARTBOMB: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution
by Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby
Published 2005 and 2006 by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

Smartbomb is an efficient mixture of original reporting and research on the state of video games as both an industry and a cultural phenomenon circa 2005-2006 when the book was originally published.

Authors Chaplin and Ruby are focused on how the video gaming phenomenon has evolved in the United States, starting with how accessible computing grew out of the hacker crew at MIT's legendary Building 20 in the early 1960s, and going on to give in-depth profiles of designers such as Gears of War creator Clifford "CliffyB" Bleszinski, the guru of all things Sim Will Wright, id Software's John Romero and John Carmack, and Atari's Nolan Bushnell; but they also go in-depth with Shigeru Miyamoto, the resident genius at Nintendo.

Miyamoto's creations, Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Mario 64 insured Nintendo's dominance over console gaming in the 1980s and 1990s, and allowed them to stay relevant to American gaming into the first decade of the 21st century. The book's later chapters deal with the ominous convergence of gaming and the military-industrial complex's ambitions to more efficiently model "full spectrum dominance" and to better indoctrinate young soldiers with high end first person shooter games. Smartbomb closes with Microsoft's $500 million gala launch of the X-Box, which would go on to become the first console gaming system from an American developer to offer a serious challenge to the hegemony Sony, Sega, and Nintendo had enjoyed over the US and global console gaming markets throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

My favorite chapter was the chapter about Will Wright, founder of Maxis and all things Sim. Wright is portrayed as a kind of plain-speaking oracle: at conventions various aspiring game designers pitch him their gaming ideas, and Wright usually shoots them down. On his downtime, Wright participates in the Stupid Fun Club: an underground robot battling circuit. DIY robot builders meet in a seemingly abandoned warehouse to orchestrate rock'em sock 'em gladiatorial spectacles. He has also taught himself to fly planes, and obsessively collects junked out tech from the Soviet space program as a hobby.

This chapter also recounts a meeting between Wright and Philip Rosedale, the creator of Second Life, over sushi with Rosedale picking up the tab. Rosedale and Wright are both in the business of trying to enhance gaming's capacity to colonize the consciousness of players by offering up complex multi-variable simulations. SimCity puts the player in charge of a complex evolving city. The player is a kind of super-mayor, who must anticipate the needs of the Sim people inhabiting the SimCity. The player must zone property for commerical, residential, and industrial zones, and then respond to the Sims' complaints about pollution, crime, jobs, and other factors. Occasionally, an earthquake or a giant radioactive lizard trashes things, and then the player must respond to the crisis with relief and reconstruction. Rosedale's Second Life is not so much a game as it is . . . well, a Second Life. In Second Life the goal isn't to beat scores of enemies or field an army, or even to play a godlike role lording over a complex simulation. It can be anything you want. The Second Life citizen can meticulously reconstruct prosaic reality, or they can transform themselves into a half-dragon bike punk with a mean tattoo. Men can become women, women can become men. Or you can forge your own bold new gender identity. Or you can re-fight famous battles of World War II. Or you can don the robes of the KKK and burn a cross. Or you can simulate all manner of sex acts.

Rosedale and Wright rap about "possibility spaces" and how the games aren't so much meant to be goals in and of themselves, but are rather an opportunity to do science. Specifically, Wright asserts that models and simulations are the new way to conduct science as opposed to experiments. Wright says, "Simulation is quickly replacing experimentation as the central test of a new theory." Wright's talent for constructing simulation programs has gotten him lucrative projects for hospitals, Chevron, and the Pentagon. Wright seems to have few moral or ethical qualms about his work being used for potentially lethal applications, such as designing autonomous vehicles for land based cruise missiles. In fact, he explicitly states that he is more bothered by the lost opportunity from failing to realize an application of a given technology, rather than the attendant moral hazards that come with creating something and implementing it.

Will Wright was seemingly born to be a game designer. He comes off as comfortable in the role of genius game creator. He all but says he prefers to interface with reality via simulation. After all, if you're the simulation designer, you get to decide what's important and what's not. Experiments are messy, and must be rigorously repeated and the results scrutinized and cross-referenced. Dead ends are legion. A sim designer can create his or her own world and come up with wholly new rules and realities. Will Wright has rather joyously carved out his own place in the industry.

But many people in the world of gaming have struggled with being passionate about their profession. They create successful product, and yet they do not wish to be perceived as geeks or shut-ins. Chaplin and Ruby explore these tangled desires with the character of CliffyB the lead designer of Epic Games and the creator of the Unreal FPS franchise. CliffyB would later go on to create the smash hit Gears of War, but Smartbomb covers his pre-Gears of War days. Chaplin and Ruby use CliffyB's ascent to illustrate the rise of the gaming industry overall: from the disreputable basements of skeptical moms and dads to the heights of celebrity, wealth, and worldwide cultural cachet. CliffyB started out as a hobbyist and evolved into a captain of the industry. Along the way, he shed his geek-grunge threads for a personal trainer and bling chic couture, strategically engaging with the pan-optic media culture of the early 21st century. CliffyB has his private doubts, in Chaplin and Ruby's telling, and heavy is the head that wears the crown. In some ways, CliffyB's transformation resonates with the alternate persona existences of those gamers who devote themselves to MMORPGs and Second Life. CliffyB has to step into his persona as a rock star game designer, and then steps out of it in private. Maybe it's more LARPing than MMORPing, but it's intriguing how the global success of gaming has necessitated sundry forms of gamesmanship and image management on the part of the industry leaders.

Chaplin and Ruby also touch on the phenomenon of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games through a riveting account of the launch of Star Wars Galaxies. Anticipation builds as the authors trace the technical trials and tribulations of the developers working out the bugs in the system prior to launch, and the outsize expectations of legions of Star Wars fans who have signed up for beta subscriptions and can't wait to dive into their new personae. In lesser hands, such an account could be muddled, tedious with technical detail, and of no obvious interest to non-specialist readers. But Chaplin and Ruby keep the high-tech business grounded in human emotions, ambitions, and expectations, and they illustrate the dramatic stakes for all involved. The gamers can't wait to escape meatspace, and the developers can't wait to see if their elaborate scenarios are a hit.

Once an MMORPG is launched, the troubles have just begun. Even if it is massively popular from its first launch, all sorts of bugs and kinks can only be worked out, sometimes painfully, via the gamers' contact with the game. The life of an MMORPG as both a cultural and business entity is one of constant adpatation, mutation, evolution, and transformation.

Smartbomb is five or so years behind the times, but it's a great place to start if one wants to pick up on the dominant currents of video gaming as both an industry and a culture. It's written with keen perception into the business, human drama, and cultural aspects of this multi-billion dollar industry. A solid volume for any library on the history of video games.

MOVIE REVIEW: THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME (1932)

2011-09-18T01:39:00.003-04:00

The Most Dangerous Game

Directed by Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack
Written by James Ashmore Creelman from the story by Richard Connell
Produced by Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper
Music by Max Steiner

Starring
Joel McCrea as Bob Rainsford
Leslie Banks as Count Zaroff
Fay Wray as Eve
Robert Armstrong as Martin

An RKO Radio Picture

"The world's divided into two kinds of people: the hunter and the hunted. Luckily I'm the hunter. Nothing can change that."
--Bob Rainsford

Pity poor Bob Rainsford. He has no idea what he has inspired . . .

Bob Rainsford (Joel McCrea) is a world renowned big game hunter who's written some bestselling books about the Tao of the Hunter, as it were, which seem to be proto-Ayn Randian works pitched at a thoroughly wankerish level of Neoconservative spankery. But Bob seems like a nice enough guy. He seems like the sort of guy who probably took a hard line when writing the books, but is much more self-deprecating in person, know what I mean? Like, you don't think those right-wing pundits are really that assholish in real life, do you? They're just puttin' on a little show, bro, they got families to feed, ratings to spike, and they gotta strike a tone that resonates throughout the decadent and glutted mediascape, so what's a few lies and exaggerations and fish stories to pad out the page count, eh? No big deal. Rainsford's got books to sell, product to move, world-around cruises to bankroll. Let a player play.

Anyways, Rainsford is on a pleasure cruise with a bunch of his wealthy friends regaling them all with his philosophy which divides all living beings into the hunter and the hunted, when the ship cracks up on a reef. Rainsford is washed ashore on an island and he makes his way inland to a strange castle which has a big sturdy door with a demoniacal knocker on it: a snarling centaur, an arrow piercing his breast, and a helpless woman in his arms . . . you have to pull down on the woman in the arms to make the thing work. Rainsford is admitted into the castle which is a wild-ass gothic affair presided over by the dashing and demented Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks), formerly of Russia, but his accent makes you wonder if that was Russia by way of the little theatre production of Dracula. Count Zaroff is no vampire, however, at least not the supernatural kind. You could say he's the real world version: he gets excited by the thrill of the hunt, he goes into quasi-religious ecstasy at the sight of his prey's blood, and he is oh so glad to meet Rainsford.

The Count is not alone. He has a couple of menacing henchmen for servants, and a couple of other folks who're also shipwrecked: the lovely Eve (Fay Wray) and her supremely obnoxious brother Martin (Robert Armstrong). Martin is a goddamn drunk. He's Arthur before Arthur. The kind of guy who wakes up drunk. Martin's speech is so slurred that it is starting to mutate the English language into a wholly new, sublime, and ludicrous dialect.

Rainsford and Zaroff get to talking, and Zaroff realizes he's talking to the Rainsford, the one who wrote all those books about the hunters and the hunted. Books that Zaroff has read, adored, studied, memorized, and taken on as a kind of philosophy of life. Rainsford is taken aback by all this, and seems like maybe he didn't quite mean every last bit of his argument . . . you know like when the far right crowd starts showing up at Presidential Town Halls strapped and chromed and loaded for bear and then they gotta say, "Oh, we're not advocating violence. We're just advocating showing up at a public event attended by key political leadership of the opposition with loaded assault weapons. That's all well within our Second Amendment rights, yessir!" Rainsford gives the impression that maybe he doesn't believe as fervently in the stark dualism of hunter vs. hunted, but Zaroff will have none of that, and after enduring Martin's exhortations to party down now, and hunt later, the Count drops this:

"He talks of wine and women as a prelude to the hunt. We barbarians know that it is after the chase, and then only, that man revels. You know the saying of the Ogandi chieftans: "Hunt first the enemy, then the woman." It is the natural instinct. The blood is quickened by the kill. One passion builds upon another. Kill, then love! When you have known that, you have known ecstasy."

Rainsford is taken aback by this, but doesn't quite get the full picture until Eve clues him in: apparently some other shipwrecked sailors were taken by the Count on a tour of the Trophy Room and never returned. Eve fears the Count has done something wicked to the able seamen . . .

But why should I give the rest of the movie away? The movie is in the public domain and you can watch all 63 minutes of it in glorious black and white on the embedded youtube video below. You can also probably find it some other places, whatever your preference.

A few more remarks about this movie: this is one of those movies about hunting humans. Yes, Count Zaroff sees people as "The Most Dangerous Game," and so he hunts them for sport to satiate his bloodlust. This is all pretty obvious once the Count starts talking. What wasn't obvious was just how harrowing that hunt ends up being. For a movie from 1932, this movie moves at a brisk clip, and, once the hunt is on, it doesn't let up. It's a descent into stylized savagery, and the movie plays like a blend of the silent Germanic Expressionism of Lang and Murnau with the pace cranked way up, and the fists landing with audible thuds straight out of the old Saturday Matinee action serials. This movie was also shot concurrently with the original King Kong utilizing the same cast, crew, and lavish jungle sets. The producers doubled-up their productions, and got maximum value for both pictures. Do I need to say that The Most Dangerous Game and King Kong make a thrilling double feature? Hey, I said it.

As stated above, this is one of those movies about hunting humans, maybe the first. It is derived from a short story by Richard Connell, which, if memory serves, was more about a one on one battle between shipwrecked Rainsford and the villainous Zaroff on a remote island, but the movie version increases the number of folks involved and makes quite a memorable villain out of Zaroff.

Zaroff is played by Leslie Banks, who had suffered a real life World War I injury which partially paralyzed and scarred the left side of his face. This injury is incorporated into the character of Zaroff as an injury suffered while stalking a beast in the wild. It is implied by the movie that this injury may have nudged Zaroff towards the dark side. In some ways it also seems to play on the notion of shell-shock, the nervous breakdown experienced by veterans of WWI's brutal trench warfare. Maybe you could even look at Count Zaroff as a melodramatic and villainous cousin to the haunted Septimus Warren Smith from Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

The Most Dangerous Game has seemingly given birth to a whole sub-genre of films dealing with the idea of some sort of life and death bloodsport played out like some kind of evil big game hunt: Hard Target, Surviving the Game, The Running Man, and, most spectacularly, the year 2000's Battle Royale adapted from a novel published in 1999.

Battle Royale concerns a fiendish game orchestrated by a totalitarian Japanese government which pits teenage students against each other with a variety of randomly distributed weapons. It's like a massively multiplayer online shoot 'em up made real. The referee of this sick game is played by Takeshi Kitano, one of Japan's living national treasures. Kitano is a novelist, filmmaker, actor, comedian, talk show host, visual artist, video game designer--he's done it all. Kitano was also once in a motorcycle accident which left his face partially paralyzed . . .

So, there you have the Takeshi Kitano/Leslie Banks/The Most Dangerous Game/Battle Royale connection, trivial and coincidental though it may be . . .

Full Movie:

Infinite Repeat Award: "Unleash Your Inner Luddite" Edition

2011-09-14T01:14:00.000-04:00

BOOK REVIEW: THE CRIMSON LABYRINTH (2006)

2011-09-13T06:17:00.000-04:00

The Crimson Labyrinth
by Yusuke Kishi

Originally published in Japan in 1999.
English translation by Masami Isetani and Camellia Nieh
English edition published in 2006 by Vertical, Inc.

Fujiki wakes up in a canyon of red rock. He doesn't remember how he got there, but he remembers who he was: an unemployed salaryman who was down and out on the streets of Shinjuku, sleeping in a park, and dumpster diving meals from discarded bento boxes out behind a convenience store. Now, he's seemingly been transported to another world, or maybe another reality, by parties unknown.

Fujiki's abductors have left him with a box full of nutrition bars and a handheld gaming machine (think Game Boy) that tells Fujiki that he is trapped in the Mars Labyrinth and that the game has begun. What kind of game? The machine elaborates that Fujiki must survive in order to return to Earth and receive the prize money. Further, the machine states that the players of this game must make their way to various checkpoints and make decisions which could determine whether they live or die.

Is this some sort of elaborate prank? Is it a hallucination? Is Fujiki really on Mars? What kind of people would render you unconscious and toss you into the middle of an elaborately staged survival game? Reality television producers? Are these people even human? Or are they Martians?

Fujiki starts to find his way to the first checkpoint. But he's not alone. He encounters a woman named Ai Otomo, who has also been conscripted into this game. Back in Japan, she drew pornographic manga. Now, she stumbles around a maze of red rock, at just as much of a loss for explanations as Fujiki. Fujiki and Ai put their heads together and figure out how to count off their paces to find the first checkpoint as per the handheld gaming device's instructions, and they find the other Japanese citizens who've been conscripted to play this twisted game: all of them are people recently unemployed or forgotten in the wake of Japan's exploded bubble economy. Perhaps that's why they've been abducted. What's a few less jobless folks to worry about? No, these people will not be missed. And what else, if anything, does that say about the motivations of the unseen abductors?

Each player has been provided with a handheld gaming device. At the first checkpoint, where all the players are gathered, they are beamed more information about the nature of the game, including the following prohibitions: no climbing the canyon walls, no drawing large figures in the sand or on the rocks, no making multiple fires in close proximity, no making whistles to emit loud noises, and no signaling with mirror-like objects. Violators will be severely punished. The players are then presented with the following choice of initial paths:

"IF YOU CHOOSE TO SEEK SURVIVAL ITEMS, GO EAST. IF YOU CHOOSE TO SEEK SELF-DEFENSE ITEMS, GO WEST. IF YOU CHOOSE TO SEEK FOOD, GO SOUTH. IF YOU CHOOSE TO SEEK INFORMATION, GO NORTH."

Wouldn't you know it? Fujiki and Ai end up going north. Fujiki, who specialized in game theory at college, reasons that the abductors must have some reason for offering up such a seemingly impractical choice as an initial opening move of the game. Fujiki also reasons that if this is indeed a game, then the very first choice will probably have far-reaching ramifications, maybe even life and death consequences, and so that first choice had better be a damned good one. Of course, as Fujiki also realizes, game theory depends on the rather huge assumption that all the actors in question are rational, which is scarcely a given in real life. Therefore, game theory as applied to real life is, as Fujiki puts it, "worse than useless." But why would the people behind the Mars Labyrinth design a game that could not be rationally solved? Even if Fujiki is wrong, surely there must be some design, some underlying logic to be figured out that one might win? But such thinking assumes that the game has been designed in such a way that actual victory is possible, that it has been constructed to be fair.

Hey, real life ain't fair. Games exist as a part of real life. Therefore . . .

. . . Fujiki and Ai set out along the northern path in search of information.

The Crimson Labyrinth is a lean but protein rich meal. It's one of those books you just about have to read in one sitting. It's all plot, and pacing, and suspense, with just enough precise characterization to keep you intrigued. The setting is rendered with enough detail to bring it to life, but not so much that it becomes a travelogue. It has one of those highly exploitative yet engaging premises that you just have to get to the bottom of, even if you suspect the conclusion might not be as satisfying as the journey. As it happens, author Yusuke Kishi knows how to parcel out the suspense even once he's tipped his hand. He's not just concerned with a big payoff, some out of left field shocker of an ending, but he also wants to ask some tough questions about human nature within the context of the survival game:

Are these players faced with a zero sum game, where only one can win? Or is there a possibility for a cooperative victory?

What are the penalties for violating any of the five prohibitions? Why have such prohibitions in the first place?

If you're faced with a zero sum game, where you have to compete with your fellow human beings for a single victory position, what are you willing to do to win? If it's a zero sum game, can Fujiki and Ai both win? Can Fujiki and Ai trust each other?

Who are the abductors? Are they human? Are they telling the truth? Why would they lie? Why would they be honest? Can the information provided by the handheld gaming units be trusted? Whoever the abductors are, they must be some sort of organization with considerable resources, perhaps even paranormal powers. What kind of an organization would put on a survival game of this nature? What are their ethics and/or morality, if any? Is there some larger agenda? Is it all just for kicks?

Maybe none of this is real. The point of view character is Fujiki. Can his perceptions be trusted?

How does one make an ethical choice within the context of a zero-sum game? Is it possible? Is ethical decision making entirely dependent upon context? That is to say, if we can only choose from the options that are known to us, and none of them are ethical, how do we decide what the most ethical of unethical choices is in a given situation?

What about good and evil? Are these things inherent in who we are? Or are they products of the choices we make? Are they woven into the fabric of reality, or are they just illusions we project onto our daily lives? We typically imagine ourselves to be good even when we do evil. Don't we typically let ourselves off the hook for transgressions large and small?

Does one have to play the game, or can you just walk away from it?

The Crimson Labyrinth is one of those books with such an over the top premise that it inspires all sorts of speculations as you read it.

Of course, I can't tell you what the Mars Labyrinth is. You have to read it for yourself . . .

----

Okay, digression time.

What is it about stories about sick games played with unwilling participants for life or death stakes?

The Crimson Labyrinth was published in 1999, the same year that saw the original publication of the notorious cult classic Battle Royale. BR was all about a group of young Japanese students who were pitted against each other in an elaborate death match for sinister purposes by the government.

I suppose it goes back to "The Most Dangerous Game," a short story by Richard Connell published in 1924 about a depraved aristocrat who sets up expeditions to go human hunting for fun and profit. This short story was knocked off in 1993 for the Jean Claude Van Damme epic Hard Target which reset the action from a remote Caribbean island to New Orleans and tossed in motor cycles, martial arts, and assault weapons.

In 1987 you had the Schwarzenegger classic The Running Man which was about a futuristic televised gladiator spectacle involving condemned prisoners going up against high tech assassins in a bombed out dystopian landscape--all set up by evil, Reaganomic corporations which had overrun America by that time.

In 1997 there was The Game, directed by David Fincher, which was about a wealthy man, played by Michael Douglas, who is conned into participating in what starts out as some kind of alternate reality LARP which turns into a deadly, all out assault on his financial assets and his life.

I've heard some people compare The Game to John Fowles's 1965 novel The Magus about a man being manipulated by elaborate illusions that might threaten his life.

Then there are the Dream Park novels published throughout the 1980s and 1990s by Steven Barnes and Larry Niven which imagine a high tech theme park where the participants engage in LARPing scenarios writ large derived from world mythologies, sci-fi and sword and sorcery literature and gaming products. These novels intertwine murder mystery plots with unusual pastiches from sci-fi and fantasy literature and offer intriguing takes on the line between reality and fantasy. Unusually, the participants in these Dream Park games are willing participants. Do people like to have their reality toyed with from time to time?

Most all of these stories seemingly involve conspiracies of one kind or another. The players come to think of themselves as being persecuted, of being at the hands of heartless machinations by powerful evil forces. In the case of The Running Man and Battle Royale, the bloodsport is explicitly set up by the ruling classes for purposes of control and pacification of the general populace. In those works in particular the suspense doesn't derive so much from the unraveling of secret conspiracies as it does from the life and death struggles of who survives and who dies.

"The Most Dangerous Game" and Hard Target are about smaller scale operations. In the former, it's one Russian aristocrat, and in the latter it's a New Orleans based gang that hires itself out to wealthy degenerates who wish to hunt homeless people on the streets of the Big Easy. The cops don't exist on the crazy Russian's island, and in the New Orleans scenario they've been bought off, as per usual, by the criminal organization of interest. Depraved gamesmanship doesn't necessarily need the backing of oppressive governments or rapacious corporations. It just needs the desire and sadism within the human heart. Maybe a few bribes for the local gendarmes if the operation involves a couple dozen players or so.

Maybe these kinds of stories (if indeed they can be said to be of a kind, or kinds, I'm casting a wide net here), work on an author's and an audience's sense of fair play. Even when these stories seemingly cheat, it's within the context of the game. A betrayal of the rules within a game is that much more stinging. A gaming scenario is also a quick and dirty way of contriving drama, of manufacturing conflict.

Corruption of varying degrees figures into these sagas. Is a human life worth sacrificing for the sake of sport? Are we all just pawns in the gamesmanship which goes on between nations and transnational corporations?

Where do our true loyalties lie as humans? To Team A or Team B? What about Team C? Why Teams? Should we try to reach out to our fellow humans as humans, and discard such childish pursuits?

Is it possible to say no to the game, whatever that may be? Do we have to play?

What if you want to play? If everybody quits, and you're the last gamer, how does that position differ from its opposite? The lone quitter and the last gamer . . . are they that far apart?

Maybe there are more subtle grades of distinction to be made, but most of these stories, excepting the Dream Park books, deal with the terrors of bloodsports, of zero-sum games at their most naked and savage--stripped of all economic, nationalistic, and ideological posturing and hand-waving. In the end, those that make the games want you to play. They won't let you quit. They want to put you on a team, dictate the rules, and set the terms of victory. At most, the player might be able to choose their team or what weapon they'll use to kill the other guy.

You can't win if you don't play. But what price victory? Sometimes you lose even if you win.

Vertical, Inc.'s The Crimson Labyrinth page:
http://www.vertical-inc.com/books/crimson.html

MOVIE REVIEW: TETSUO II: BODY HAMMER (1992)

2011-09-08T06:40:00.000-04:00

TETSUO II: BODY HAMMER

Starring
Tomorowo Taguchi as Tomoo Taniguchi
Nobu Kanaoka as Kana
Keinosuke Tomioka as Minori
Shinya Tsukamoto as Yatsu (The Guy)
Hideaki Tezuka as Big Skinhead
Tomoo Asada as Young Skinhead
Torauemon Utazawa as Mad Scientist

Writer/Director/Co-Producer/Art Director/Co-Cinematographer
Shinya Tsukamoto

Original Music by Chu Ishikawa
Special Effects by Takashi Oda
Cinematography by Fumikazu Oda, Katsunori Yokoyama
Produced by Hiromi Aihara, Hiroshi Koizumi, Fumio Kurokawa, Fuminori Shishido, Nobuo Takeuchi
A Kaijyu Theatre Production

"I don't want money. Destruction is all I need."

A drunken salaryman staggers through a subterranean underpass somewhere in the bowels of Tokyo. The camera, slasher movie style, seems to stalk him, putting the audience in a first person POV. A hand, the hand of the stalker, makes a gun and pretend shoots the salaryman. The salaryman is irritated by these juvenile shenanigans, but not for long. Two loud bangs, and bullets drill into his torso. He slumps to the ground, one of the comparatively few people in Tokyo who will be classified as a gun homicide that year.

The stalker is revealed in a reverse angle shot as a strange man with a smoking arm attended by an awestruck young man with a shaved head. The stalker seems to be pretending that his arm is some kind of gun. What kind of pretend results in actual bullets and an actual dead body, though, seems to be the question at hand . . .

Tetsuo II: Body Hammer resurrects the themes and imagery of the first Tetsuo movie, but dials back the surrealism a little bit. Or maybe it dials it up to eleven. I guess it depends on how you reckon such things. The first Tetsuo movie was a creation of pure sensation and outrageous imagery with little regard for the usual film grammar and character motivations. There was a story, and there were characters, but these things were subordinate to the overall spectacle of uncontrolled psychic and biological mutations. No motivations or causes are given for the wild transformations in the first movie, and Tetsuo II is comparably mysterious, but the sequel offers more of a science fictional rationale for the mutations. They are seemingly tied to rage, to deadly threats to one's survival, and memories of the past long suppressed.

In the world of Tetsuo II, mutation is also a matter of applied willpower. From the wellsprings of one's rage, one can focus thoughts into mutagenic agents. An arm and a hand can be morphed into a cannon. Soft flesh becomes layers of breathing, sweating steel. The most advanced mutants can seemingly manifest concrete as well as steel to further armor up against all enemies. Such thoughts can also be focused into a magnetic field, like Magneto in the X-Men comics, and used defensively and offensively against other metal mutants. Tetsuo II brings an amusing comic book logic to the story which makes it more of a traditional narrative experience than the first movie. Some people I've talked to don't like this aspect of Tetsuo II, and prefer the pure lunacy of the first movie which was totally unbounded by narrative and logic. In fact, it seems that many people were let down by Tetsuo II. Maybe I'm too much of a fan to see this movie in a harsh critical light, but I've always found Tetsuo II to be commendably ambitious. It takes the notions of mutation and creative destruction out of the purely internal, surrealistic mode of the first movie and amplifies them into instruments of mass destruction. In the sequel, it would seem that anybody has the potential to grok the Tetsuo state of mind.

Tomorowo Taguchi is back for another round of mutation and creative destruction as the suit and glasses stiff who transforms into the Iron Man when pushed to the limit by a mysterious tormentor. Shinya Tsukamoto writes, directs, operates the camera when he's not in front of it, art directs, edits, and incarnates a new version of his metal fetishist character from Tetsuo, the Iron Man.

In the first Tetsuo film, the characters were broad types sketched in by enthusiastic actors. This time around, the characters are given a little bit more in the way of human details and specifics. Taguchi's character is given a name, Tomoo Taniguchi, and a chic apartment in ultramodern Tokyo. He shares it with his wife, Kana, who is played by Nobu Kanaoka. Kanaoka had a cameo as a woman possessed by a piece of biomechanical scrap metal in the first movie. Tomoo and Kana have a young son, Minori, and to all appearances their lives are not the stuff that films are made of, seeing as they live in a comfortable home and even sleep together in an adorable cuddle every night. Tomoo's got a secure job, presumably in some cubicle warren in some skyscraper, and Kana is a devoted mother, preparing breakfast each morning, and encouraging her husband to exercise regularly. Their apartment is a modernist refuge from the biological and technological chaos of the living city. Tomoo makes his way to his office job, wearing a dorky little backpack like a student, on foot and by bullet train and during these trips he is portrayed as having some bizarre anxiety, some sense of being engulfed by the city and its crowds, and yet also passed by, maybe even superseded . . . Tsukamoto shoots Taguchi standing still and staring into the camera as the crowds, backs to the camera, rush by him on the subway platform at high speed. Taguchi, as Tomoo, seems to be standing still, and yet vibrating with repressed energy at the same time. He has a power he wants to unleash, but can't tap into it. He's been too rundown by the workaday grind, by easy living, and he can only sense in an oblique fashion the potential within him.

Tomoo, Kana, and Minori are at the shopping mall one day when they run into a pair of trenchcoated lunatics. One of them zaps Tomoo with some kind of injection gun, and then snatches Minori. Tomoo staggers around in shock and pain, while Kana zips off after the kidnappers. Tomoo finds his way to the mall rooftop where he has the shit knocked out of him by the kidnappers, one of whom sadistically dangles him over the side of the building, while the other one threatens to throw Minori from the roof. But the kidnappers back away at the last moment, leaving Tomoo hanging off the building's ledge like a hero in some old silent film. Kana rescues him at the last moment, pulling him to safety, and they see that Minori has been left behind.

What the fuck was that all about? Were they really kidnappers? Maybe yakuza? Or were they were just particularly sick pranksters? Kana pressures Tomoo to start pumping iron at the gym, maybe to be able to better fend off the rising tide of punks and criminals infesting Tokyo these days. Tomoo can't lift the weights at first, but then he thinks of the leering faces of the thugs who assaulted him and his family, and he finds himself to be stronger than he thought. Next, he hits the workout bike, and his breath capacity and leg muscles have all been augmented by Tomoo's rich inner vein of rage, fear, and paranoia. Is Tomoo on a trajectory to become Tokyo's version of Paul Kersey?

Meanwhile, in the depths of an iron foundry, a small army of cultish skin heads lift gigantic weights crafted from discarded scrap metal and chunks of concrete. Fire and smoke and liquid metal pour from demonic apparatus, and the skinheads are seemingly trying to make their bodies over in the image of junk and machines. The kidnappers are revealed to be agents of this cult, and they hand their strange injection gun over to a portly mad scientist direct from central casting for maintenance. The leader of this cult, played by Shinya Tsukamoto, appears to be the shooter from the opening: a man with a scarred lip who luxuriates in a Jacuzzi filled with molten metal. The kidnappers describe Tomoo as a "mild specimen" and suggest that they have injected him with some kind of substance which will transform him. Tomoo is, perhaps, the subject of some sort of bizarre experiment.

The kidnappers strike again, stealing Minori from Kana and Tomoo's apartment. Tomoo gives chase, ending up on the apartment building's roof. He battles one of the kidnappers, who taunts him by telling him that he threw Minori off the roof. Tomoo goes berserk, and he mutates his right arm into a long, penile cannon straight out of the H.R. Giger calender. Tomoo blasts away . . . and ends up obliterating his own son, whom the kidnapper uses as a human shield. Kana witnesses this accidental homicide, and begins to see her hubby as some kind of monster.

The cult then kidnaps Tomoo, taking him to their lair in the iron foundry, and hooking him up to some sort of bizarre machine that looks like a BDSM version of virtual reality gear. The mad scientist, at the direction of the cult leader, probes Tomoo's mind, and agitates his memories of the kidnappers and the death of Minori. These memories are like some sort of malignancy, and the mad scientist encourages them to grow and colonize more of Tomoo's consciousness. These cancerous thoughts give Tomoo a jolt of rage, which causes his body to begin to mutate into a living weapon, bristling with bouquets of penile cannons. Tomoo yells and screams in supreme agony, and fires his cannon appendages indiscriminately in the armored testing facility. The cult leader and the mad scientist are satisfied with their new creation. The mad scientist speculates they can use this new process of induced mutation to make piles of money enabling customers to transform themselves and others into screaming, writhing, bio-mechanical weapons batteries.

The cult leader isn't interested in money, though. His stake in the project is highly personal. For he and Tomoo share a secret history that the salaryman has all but forgotten. But the cult leader has forgotten nothing. He seeks not only to mutate Tomoo, but to reawaken his buried memories.

Tomoo's mutations progress into wilder, outsize forms. Eventually, he resembles a kind of lopsided golem fashioned from mud, concrete, and steel. His mutations increase as the cult leader agitates them by dropping hints of their buried past together, and threatening Kana's life. One of the dilemmas that Tomoo faces is that as he mutates and increases his power, he seemingly must struggle to control his destructive tendencies. Sure, he can kill and destroy property at will, but he cannot save any of the people he cares about, and these frustrations only amplify his rage. Usually, in films about people with superpowers, the powers they gain or are granted are used to increase their agency, and to do good. But in the twisted universe of Tetsuo II, the powers come at great cost. One's body is subjected to out of control transformations, and it is all but impossible to unleash the powers within without causing massive unintentional casualties.

There is also a nasty rust disease which can afflict those who decide to unleash their inner Tetsuo. The cult leader starts using the injector gun on his skinhead disciples, and the war with Tomoo escalates.

Tetsuo II suggests that the mutational process can be guided, maybe even controlled and transformed into a commodity. Such a reproducible mutation process could even be co-opted by extremist political elements. The skinhead cult seems to exist as some kind of fascistic organization, all the members of which have been recruited from boxers, bodybuilders, and other devotees of physical culture. The leader seems to see such people as prime candidates for mutation. His motivations are murky, but he seems to have some aim beyond tormenting Tomoo. The imagery of the skinhead cultists and their willingness to be mutated into living weapons suggests some resurgence of Japan's militaristic past.

There is also a theme running through the movie that the city of Tokyo itself is somehow a repressive force, one that is ambiguous: it is the fruit of Japan's struggle to rebuild itself and thrive after World War II, and is therefore an improvement upon the imperialism which once led the country to total destruction. Everyone is employed, well-fed, and safe. But much of this security has a hidden cost. Society is ruled by powerful corporate interests. The common citizen is expected to practically kill themselves to make good grades in school and land in a plum corporate office job. Those that don't make the grade can look forward to a life of manual labor or maybe something in the service industry. Not everyone fits into such a conformist society. Tsukamoto, as a nonconforming artist, rather perversely suggests that there are those who would choose to obliterate such a society almost as an act of creative expression.

Tetsuo II is that rare fantasy movie that doesn't deal in simplistic conflicts between good and evil. In this reality, comic book superpowers offer their own peculiar kind of bondage. Men of metal suffer from rusty leprosy. Painful memories metastasize into psychic cancer. A sinister tormentor may organize a cult only to get you to remember what you've forgotten. And maybe that tormentor is a psychopathic murderer willing to put your family's lives at stake, but shouldn't any lover of truth be willing to go the distance? Moreover, in the world of Tetsuo, the most dangerous WMD is not a nuke or a biological agent or a bunker busting bomb. It is the rage simmering within the human heart. After all, isn't it that rage, combined with fear, hatred, and distrust, which builds the weapons and wages the wars?

Tetsuo II: Body Hammer trailer:

BOOK REVIEW: MEDIC! by Ben Sherman (2002)

2011-09-06T02:30:00.000-04:00

MEDIC! The Story of a Conscientious Objector in the Vietnam War
by Ben Sherman
Published 2002 and 2004 by Ballantine Books/Presidio Press

Ben Sherman was willing to serve his country, he was no protester, but he saw little point in invading Vietnam. He did not believe that Vietnam was a clear and present danger to the United States. He had serious moral objections to taking human life. But he didn't want to break the rules. He did everything in his power to legally register as a conscientious objector and seek alternative service status. He filed all the necessary forms in triplicate. He was directed to attend a hearing before a board of three World War 2 veterans. The Selective Service Board No. 23 in Sacramento, California asked him esoteric philosophical questions about how he would decide who would die in a situation involving a bus full of crippled school children, failing brakes, a precipitous cliff drop, and a baby left out in the middle of the road. Sherman asked them who left the baby out in the middle of the road, and they asked him if he was a communist. The board voted down his appeal 5-0, even though there were only three members present.

Sherman was inducted into the US Army. He tried to tell his superiors that he would never fire his gun at another human being. They called him a fucking commie. But Sherman was otherwise a model soldier and performed well at boot camp. But all that CO bullshit landed him in barracks arrest for four months, followed by an office assignment, and then, finally, due to recognition of his competence, he was placed with the Medical Corps.

Sherman went to Vietnam as a medic, and endured horror and folly. He survived and after many years wrote this book which is disturbing not so much for its descriptions of the horrors of war, although that is very much a part of his story, as it is for how the mobilization of a nation to war can destroy the capacity for individual citizens to make moral and ethical choices.

People got drafted into military service back during the Vietnam War, which meant, if you were an American male of appropriate age, and your number came up you were going into some branch of military service. Your legal choices were limited. You could apply for conscientious objector status. Some got student deferments. Sherman was consistently denied in his legal appeals to become a CO.

You could go outside the legal choices. You could desert. Some people faked mental illness, or went on the lam, or did everything in their power to convince the military gatekeepers that they were pinko commies or homosexuals or otherwise unfit for service. Those were the options. You went when your number came up, you tried to get a student deferment, you applied for objector status, or you left for Canada, or you tried to go on the run in the US, or you used deception to get booted out of the system.

Sherman went through all the legal channels to apply for objector status because he wanted to be honest, because he believed that stating his convictions clearly and unambiguously and within the legal framework was the honorable way to go. It would seem that honesty is not always the wisest strategy to get what you want. At the very least, Ben Sherman will never be known as a liar.

It's an open question whether the same can be said for Mr. Sherman's government.

Why did we wage war against Vietnam? You could fill a library with the books that have been written attempting to answer this question. To fight communism? To counter the Domino Effect? To prop up a massive military industrial complex with an excuse to crank up the arms factories? Maybe it has something to do with who shot JFK if you're a conspiracy fruitcake.

Let's keep things simple: did Vietnam ever pose a true strategic threat to the United States? No. Could they have ever invaded our shores? No. So why did we go to war over there? I know of no sane answer. And, no, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I can sympathize with those that see far-reaching plots and schemes behind all the folly and bloodshed. I can understand why so many Americans came to lose faith in their government. Considering our early 21st century invasion of Iraq, and the open-ended War on Terror, we seem hell-bent on reenacting the same mistakes over and over again, on a geometrically expanding scale. Vietnam was a matter of invading just one country. Now we are committed to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with no clear parameters for victory. Presumably, we are staying until we kill all the terrorists. This is probably neither possible, nor morally defensible when one factors in the inevitable destruction of civilian lives as collateral damage and the certain blood sacrifice of American and allied soldiers and contractors, but that doesn't stop dreamers from dreamin'.

But Sherman's book is no left-wing screed, I'm just bringing my own rants to the party. And even if you're a right-wing warmonger, there are plenty of reasons to read Sherman's book. The man writes vivid, no bullshit prose. Sherman includes many of the letters he received from the Army to document his ongoing status as a draftee, and his efforts to assert himself as a conscientious objector. He also includes personal letters exchanged with family and loved ones. All of this illustrates the kinds of words that he was confronted with, and what those words meant for someone who lived in the era of the Draft.

Sherman begins with a description of his first assignment as a medic: the body bags and the corpses that got stuffed into them. Sherman and the others on Graves Registration duty treated those dead soldiers with utmost care and respect, carefully brown bagging all the personal effects and belongings, and grooming the unkempt faces, to restore their dignity, and so that they got back to family and friends in as presentable a shape as possible. Sherman talks about the near unbearable smells, and plugging rectums with cotton balls.

Sherman begins with this description of Graves Registration duty, I believe, so that the reader knows right from the beginning that people get killed in a war. It's not Nintendo. It's not a game. When the decision is made to invade another nation with military personnel, people are going to die on a massive scale.

Soldiers, no matter how well-trained, no matter how noble the cause, will be killed on the battlefield. They will not be coming back. Civilians will die. No matter how careful, no matter how grand the strategy on the part of military planners and leadership, unarmed non-combatants will be killed as a matter of course. Property and infrastructure will be obliterated, and whole populations will be displaced.

The costs are enormous both to the invader and the invaded. Politicians are fond of saying that there's no such thing as a free lunch when it comes time to do away with entitlement programs for the poor, but they never seem to apply the same logic to defense entitlements. Drawn out military engagements drain the coffers and do damage to the trust that citizens are willing to put into government institutions. Many soldiers come back traumatized by the experience of war to failing economies, scant job prospects, and inadequate health care.

The reality of what happened between the United States and Vietnam, once upon a time, is perhaps too grim to face. It's better to marble it over with movies and books about heroic strategies, valorous sacrifice, and the might-a-beens: if only we'd used this strategy or that strategy, if only we'd cut off the food supplies by seizing the rice paddies, and what about nuclear weapons? My own father, a Vietnam veteran, perhaps insincerely, told me he thinks we should've used nuclear weapons in 'Nam. I say "perhaps insincerely" because I want to give him the benefit of the doubt. But, as nearly as I can tell, war has a capacity to distort people's sense of morality and decency. So maybe he meant it. Even if there were no serious plans by the leadership to do such a thing, and I don't think there were, the overall adventure left a lot of people feeling betrayed, angry, and disenchanted. Those that feel let down may harbor deep resentments and occasionally entertain ghoulish fantasies of retribution and victory.

But Sherman didn't let his experience with war cloud his judgement to such a degree. Instead, he decided to confront it as best he could by telling his story from his perspective. In a way, it's rather inspiring to know that someone could go through such things and still have a grasp on reality. Why don't guys like this run for elected office? Maybe we don't want that much reality.

Ben Sherman's website:
http://www.shermanauthor.com/

Radio Interview with Ben Sherman in two parts:

Part 1:

Part 2:

BOOK REVIEW: INFERNAL DEVICES by K.W. Jeter (1987)

2011-09-01T09:49:00.003-04:00

Infernal Devices
by K.W. Jeter
With an introduction by the author, and an afterward by Jeff VanderMeer
Originally published 1987 by St. Martin's Press
Republished 2011 by Angry Robot Books

Infernal Devices is a ripsnorting, grandly comical Victorian-era potboiler that is far more entertaining than the most recent Indiana Jones movie; indeed it is more exciting than any big budget Hollywood blockbuster that I have seen in the past five years. It is that rare book that is both literary and cinematic. You can't help but pine for a movie version even as you realize that it could never be as good as the book. It's full of crazy, clockwork automatons, cliffhanger chapter endings, sinister conspiracies, and gloriously impossible super-science. It is a book which will transport you to another reality. By book's end, I was satisfied, and yet felt it a crime that there was just the one book. Surely, this would be a series worth following.

Infernal Devices is also a seminal text in the so-called steampunk movement in speculative fiction and pop culture. According to the author's introduction, and the afterword by Jeff VanderMeer, Jeter coined the word steampunk as a riff on cyberpunk, which was the sub-genre of note in 1980s science fiction. Jeter was poking fun at the tendency to put any old random word and the the word punk together to mint a new stylistic category. Jeter was on to something. Cyberpunk is still kicking, and we also have steampunk, which is getting a lot of play these days, and let's not forget biopunk, cypherpunk, and even cthulhupunk.

What is steampunk? It's a kind of fetishism of old technologies, especially anything that's made of rivets, gears, steel, and is powered by steam. Do a google image search of steampunk, you'll pick up on it. Trains, flying devices that use huge flapping artificial wings made of wood, metal and canvas, clockwork automatons and clockwork cyborg prostheses, and various forms of Victorian-inspired fashions, sometimes with kinky, anime-inspired adjustments for a more sexually liberated age of cosplay and Lady Gaga. In the author's forward, Jeter speculates that the vogue for steampunk fashion and apparatus comes from a desire to escape the bland plastic smoothness of computers, cell phones, and other electronic amusements that have become none too amusing these days. Jeter likes his machines as machines. All the better to distinguish them from an increasingly machine-like humanity, now beavering away in cubicle cultures the world over . . .

Some other notable steampunk works include William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's alternate history epic The Difference Engine, K.W. Jeter's own Morlock Night, which is apparently a sequel to H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, and the criminally underrated anime feature film Steamboy, which was created by Katsuhiro Otomo, the mastermind behind the manga and film of Akira. Steamboy in particular is a good place to start if you want to get a handle on some of the more fanciful possibilities of steam-based retro-technology and alternate history. In Otomo's world, a genius inventor finds a way to make steam power the atomic power of its age. Massive weapons of war are developed, and the nationalistic world powers all want in on the action. But the genius inventor has no interest in the machinations of warlike governments, and so he tries to fend off the schemes and dreams of spies and arms manufacturers.

Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine constructs a reality where Charles Babbage's analytical engine was brought to fruition in 1824 and brings on an early onset of accelerated technological progress including ubiquitous personal computing and a worldwide communications network very much like our own internet. Gibson and Sterling's book embodies that aspect of steampunk which seeks to pose alternate possibilities of technological progress: just because we don't do it with punch cards and steam engines doesn't mean we can't make it happen that way. It may seem whimsical on the surface, but it raises some fascinating possibilities, and also forces us to confront the all important issue of who controls the means of production when it comes to technological advance and why that matters. It's not arbitrary, and it could change any day.

But you don't need prior interest in or knowledge about steampunk to enjoy Infernal Devices. It begins with an uptight young man who is in a bit of rut . . .

George Dower has inherited his deceased father's clock repair shop in Victorian London. Dower doesn't have the mechanical touch, though, and so he struggles with the various clockwork gimcracks that his father's former clients bring to him with the expectation that mechanical genius is hereditary. Dower doesn't have the genius, but he's a tenacious worker, and he's aided by his father's loyal servant, Creff. Creff shows Dower the basics, and by sweat and struggle Dower becomes a good enough clock repairman. Now and again, someone will bring in something truly bizarre, some contraption of gears with chains as fine as silk threads which is beyond Dower's prowess. The son has to send these people away, openly confessing his lack of skill.

One evening, a strange man, whom the excitable and somewhat racist Creff immediately accuses of being a thief of Ethiopian heritage, brings Dower a strange box which contains a totally incomprehensible clockwork regulator device of some sort. The mystery man comes to be known as the Brown Leather Man due to what Dower perceives as his dark, ritually scarred skin. The Brown Leather Man exhorts Dower to figure out what the device is for, and Dower, despite his lack of confidence, promises to find out the device's purpose within the week.

But a strange thing happens as Dower shows the Brown Leather Man around the workshop. The Brown Leather Man accidentally cuts his arm on a piece of junk . . . and seemingly bleeds briny water . . .

The Brown Leather Man leaves Dower a strange coin as security before he exits. It depicts a weird face, part man, part amphibian in appearance.

There are other people who want to know what the regulator is good for, people who are willing to lie, to steal, and possibly even to do murder to obtain the device and put it to some sinister use.

The action of the book concerns Dower's efforts initially to hold onto the regulator and to solve the mystery of the man-fish coin. At first, it would seem that Dower doesn't need to stray too far from his shop to pursue adventure. Thieves and schemers are all too happy to come barreling through his door or window. Among the memorable rogues Dower must deal with are the duo of Scape and Miss McThane, who seem, by their crude patterns of speech and extensive use of slang, to be Americans. The two are engaged with exhibiting clockwork amusements at inflated prices to small-town audiences, and they have a keen interest in getting their hands on the regulator.

Scape and McThane are two of the delights of Jeter's novel. Scape is a burly, swaggering bullshit artist who affects hipster shades with blue lenses and thinks he's got the world by the balls. Miss McThane is a comical strumpet, her every impulse designed to offend and unsettle Dower's ridiculously uptight Victorian sense of propriety. Jeter brilliantly puts anachronistic American slang and profanity into Scape and Miss McThane's dialogue which alternately bruises and confuses Dower's fussy gentlemanly decorum. One gag involves Dower hearing Scape mutter something under his breath that he thinks is a portmanteau of the words "cogs" and "succor." Perhaps an obscure religious entreaty? Miss McThane, who has a liberated sense of sexuality, sees the uptight Dower as a challenge and constantly tries to seduce the Englishman. Personally, my favorite scenes in the book involve the goofy dynamics of Scape, Miss McThane, and hapless Dower.

Another source of humor is Dower's hidebound nature. There are many times in the first person narrative where the reader will find themselves two steps ahead of Dower in deducing what exactly is happening. You want to shout and wave at the guy, try to steer him on to the right track. But even so, the book still plays its cards close to the vest, and it will keep you guessing as to the overall design of what's happening and why.

It would be a crime to give away any more of the story, but suffice it to say that nothing is as it first appears. Jeter is not afraid to go right over the top in terms of the underlying logic of his make believe world.It is not realism, but I found it weirdly convincing. I wanted very much to believe in the reality of this make-believe world.

Also, after you read the book, run this theoretical through your analytical engine: what would it have been like if it had all been told from the perspective of the Brown Leather Man . . .

BOOK REVIEW: SLANTED AND ENCHANTED by Kaya Oakes (2009)

2011-08-30T06:21:00.016-04:00

Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture

by Kaya Oakes

Published 2009 by Holt Paperbacks

Oakes's book is a concise history of the Indie Culture of the United States of America. What is Indie Culture? It's zines. It's First Friday Gallery Nights. It's punk rock, spoken word, and Riot Grrl. It's books and magazines that get published outside the purview of the monolithic publishing entities. It's underground comix and outlaw handicrafts fairs. It's poetry, music, fiction, journalism, regional music scenes, and even cinema. It's a lot of different things. It's a mindset, a philosophy, a scene, it's kind of political. It's also been co-opted by corporations, big box chain stores, and Hollywood. It's a lot of things. It's contentious as hell. It gets a bad rep. Who wants to cop to being a hipster these days? Because, yes, it's hipsters, too.

Indie is endangered from within and without. It's also adaptable. Indie's a survivor. Indie will endure.

At least, all of the above is the impression that Oakes gives in her highly readable book. Oakes is an unabashed supporter of the Indie/DIY ethos, so don't read her book looking for a pro-big business, pro-corporate conservative Republican agenda. But Oakes takes a broad perspective, and is by no means uncritical. Even for someone such as myself who has little personal interest in most of the bands she discusses, and cannot claim to be an avid reader of zines, or a collector of handicrafts, I found her book worthwhile reading. For me, the stories behind these cultural products are fascinating, and suggest alternatives to the usual glut of corporately funded and distributed mass media. But more than this, Oakes's book is an invitation to the reader to create their own culture, and not just be a passive consumer.

Oakes's book opens with a description of a gallery night in Oakland, California. She describes the tension inherent in Indie as a practical cultural endeavor: the proprietors of a gallery love being the center of a cultural event, however they are not a large venue. They're a cozy little gallery, and the increasingly popular gallery night events have drawn more people than their building can reasonably contain. With larger crowds come more crime, vandalism, and obnoxious people who could give a shit about an art scene, and are just looking for another way to get wasted. McDonald's and Wal-Mart are designed to serve millions a day, not a gallery owned by two people.

Oakes sets up the conflicted nature of Indie: people go to Indie for something personal, idiosyncratic, and handmade. They're seeking cultural products created/authored by individuals, or small groups of individuals working in close collaboration. But when Indie products, venues, and cultures become successful the word gets out. Indie gets co-opted by corporations and becomes mass culture. More people want in, and not everybody shares the same version of Indie in their minds. The cultural producers are faced with customers and participants who may not share their perspective on Indie and DIY. For some, an Indie product or experience is just another purchase, just another experience, alongside a Hollywood movie in their Netflix queue, the latest Metallica album, a mass market paperback by Dan Brown or Michael Crichton, or the latest episode of Nip/Tuck, Two and a Half Men, or American Idol. It's a situation that is bound to create unintentional conflict and resentment. The producers of culture become resentful of the consumers, and vice versa. There is no easy solution. People will always seek novel products and experiences, whether it's from a tiny, intimate art gallery, or the cabinet of PS3 games in the electronics section of Wal-Mart. It becomes, as with everything in American commerce, a matter of survival, adaptation, mutation, and evolution.

Oakes's book goes on to give brief histories of various Indie scenes: the avant guard literary scene of Frank O'Hara in 1960s New York, punk rock and Maximumrocknroll, zines and underground comix, feminism and Riot Grrl, the mainstreaming of Indie rock and Indie fashion, outlaw handicrafts festivals, and the shrinking world of independent book publishing. Oakes also addresses the co-opting of Indie by organizations like Urban Outfitters who have R-and-D teams devoted to reverse engineering Indie fashions and thrift store chic and selling it back to budding young hipsters at big box prices. There's also the none-too-hip right wing sympathies of Urban Outfitters' CEO, who has supported homophobic politicians such as Rick Santorum, and made use of sweat shop labor to manufacture their clothing lines. A lot of petty battles are fought over issues of authenticity, but sometimes authenticity counts for a lot more than hipster fashion cred.

Throughout, Oakes explores why exactly it is that artists of all kinds have decided to create on their own terms. In part, it's a question of freedom and autonomy. Certain kinds of cultural expression production do not fit into corporate agendas, schedules, and methods of manufacture. Certain kinds of political perspectives have also been traditionally eighty-sixed from the mainstream. There's also the hurdle of cultural gatekeepers and having the right connections. Many would-be cultural producers get cut out because they grew up in the wrong place, didn't go to the right school, or don't fit in with a given cultural scene. For some, there's no choice but to knuckle down and create their own scene, as was the case with Riot Grrl. Why join somebody else's club if you're not welcome in the first place? In particular, women artists and performers have struggled to achieve equality in male-dominated music scenes.

Oakes's book offers a readable primer on Indie culture as she describes it backed up by substantive readings and interviews. There are some areas she doesn't go into: rap, hip-hop, jazz, blues, and video games to name a few, but she does not claim to have attempted to write an encyclopedic take on Indie. Rather, she has taken a very focused perspective reflective of her own expertise and interests. She also makes a compelling case for the overall ethic of Indie/DIY. This ethic could be applied to most any project beyond rock'n'roll and handicrafts. The tensions and challenges within Indie culture are also astutely described and analyzed, and these challenges should also be kept in mind when deciding to do things the Indie way.

Unhappy being a consumer? Try being a producer for a change. You might have some fun. Anyways, you can always go back to being a consumer if it doesn't work out . . . the consumer crowd has always welcomed me back . . .

Author Kaya Oakes's website:
http://www.oakestown.org/

MANGA REVIEW: THE BOOK OF HUMAN INSECTS by Osamu Tezuka (2011)

2011-08-30T03:02:00.034-04:00

The Book of Human Insects

by Osamu Tezuka

Originally published in serial form in Japanese in Play Comic, 1970-1971

English Translation by Mari Morimoto, 2011

Published by Vertical, Inc.

How does one survive in a corrupt world? Does one meet corruption with integrity and honesty? Do you resist the sources of corruption--government, corporations, big media, organized crime, the family, religious institutions, power brokers, violent political extremists--and if so, how does one resist? If the corruption of the world is pervasive, who can you trust? Maybe a few close friends. If the corruption of the world is total, then you can only trust yourself.

If you can only depend on yourself, then you better be tough, smart, and resourceful. Ethics are strictly optional, to be used only as they can give you an advantage in a given situation. That is to say, only do the right thing if it's to your advantage. Do the right thing if it'll elevate you in the eyes of those whom you would seek to manipulate to your advantage. Even in a world of absolute corruption, appearances are everything. People still have their vanity even in the absence of ethics. No one, even at their most dishonest and self-serving, truly thinks of themselves as evil. Sure, they might have some guilt, but nothing they can't live with, nothing they can't explain away, and anyways they were just doing what had to be done.

Massive wars have been perpetrated on the basis of lies, delusions, and self-serving rationales. If those that wage wars of folly can sleep at night, publish bestselling memoirs, and collect generous speaker's fees to cultivate more lies and more folly in the hearts and minds of the next generation of highly placed perpetrators . . . well, why shouldn't everybody have a piece of the game? What's a little graft, a little theft, a little murder now and again? Didn't some villain with a British accent in some movie say, "Kill a dozen people, you're a murderer. Kill a million, you're a conqueror?" And didn't someone else, maybe a grand philosopher, say, "Nature is organized murder?" Surely, as biological entities, we are all a part of nature.

The Book of Human Insects is about a person uniquely suited to survival in a totally corrupt world, a young woman named Toshiko Tomura. She's an acclaimed novelist, actress, and graphic designer. She's also a woman in a man's world, Japan in the 1970s. You would think she would be a role model to the young women and girls of Japan, a feminist icon of achievement and empowerment. Maybe she is, but she's an icon with a lot of baggage if that's the case.

You see, Tomura has a preternatural ability for mimicking her fellow human beings and absorbing their talents. All she has to do is spend time with someone, say they're an actor, and observe what they do in minute detail. Tomura goes to rehearsals, studies the script, and learns the lines. She starts out as the understudy, but soon she's the star. Well, that's not so unusual in the world of theatre.

But after she conquers the world of theatre, Tomura has fantasies of becoming a great novelist. So she latches onto an up-and-coming female novelist, finds out what she's researching, and then studies the same research materials. Tomura gets her novel to press before the up-and-comer can do so, and bingo. Tomura's an award-winning novelist.

The up-and-comer hangs herself in a hotel room. Call it collateral damage. Hey, life is struggle. Life is war. War isn't about making nice with the enemy. War is what George C. Scott talked about in the beginning of that movie Patton. The speech in front of the flag. Youtube it. It's about slaughtering the enemy. And not getting all broken up about it on the inside. You do your murder, and you move on to the next battle.

And so Tomura progresses through society, seeking out unwitting role models to mimic so that she can absorb their talents and co-opt their would-be success and achievement. Along the way, she meets others who are more like predators than mimics: an anarchist terrorist for hire, a right-wing yakuza who's a behind-the-scenes fixer, a corporate executive who would no doubt dig dropping sake bombs with the Goldman Sachs and Enron crowds, and others, all of whom have trouble seeing the moral forest for the ethical trees. Or maybe it's the other way around. What's the sacrifice of one tree when the whole forest is still standing? But what if you're not satisfied with cutting down just one tree? Just one more. And one more after that, there's plenty left. Now let's clear cut this mother . . .

The Book of Human Insects is a comic book, a manga, by Osamu Tezuka. Tezuka was the Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Harvey Pekar, Alan Moore, Akira Kurosawa, Shohei Immamura, Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, and Walt Disney of Japanese manga all woven into one, singularly driven man. He wrote superhero comics for kids, like Astro Boy. He pioneered girls' comics with Princess Knight. He did talking animal stories, like Kimba the White Lion. He wrote horror, science fiction, historical drama, Shakespearean adaptations, crime stories, satire, and hard-boiled crime fiction, and sometimes he wrote stories that combined elements of all of these things. He created an anti-heroic surgeon, Black Jack, who became, along with Astro Boy, Kimba, Princess Knight, and others, one of the iconic characters of Japanese manga. Tezuka also did slice of life, confessional material, and experimental works. He told all kinds of stories using the conventions of manga storytelling: text and panels and sequential images.

Tezuka's broad interests as an author seem to be tied to a voracious appetite for all manner of culture, high and low. The man went to medical school, could've been a doctor, but, no, he decided to do what he loved and draw funny books. Here's a man with enough of a grasp of hard science to hack it at a Japanese medical university, and yet also has a fine appreciation for what makes a good story. His comics are filled with allusions to movies, Disney cartoons, and classic literature. Film noir, samurai epics, spaghetti westerns, Dostoyevsky, ancient mythology, history, tabloid sensationalism, new age pseudoscience, surrealism, neorealism, tragedy, comedy, humor, and gore are all present in his works.

Tezuka also pioneered the distinctive manga look: big eyes, simplified faces and bodies, but with dynamic scenic layouts, and a cinematic sense of pacing, and montage. American comics have traditionally gone for muscular figures in highly compressed stories taking place within morally simplified worlds. Tezuka's protagonists are sometimes short and stout, sometimes thin and lithe, and sometimes grotesque and deformed, but they are almost never simplified. Even his unabashed heroes, like Astro Boy, end up dealing with life, death, and complex moral quandaries. Tezuka approached his comics like an auteur filmmaker, paying attention to every last detail of production, and he even created his own stock company of characters who take on different roles in different stories, sometimes even breaking out of their usual casting to show a new side of their acting chops.

The Book of Human Insects is Tezuka telling a serious story with quite a bit of restraint. Usually, his manga are filled with visual puns and gags, even in serious stories. In his epic Adolph, which deals with Nazism, Hitler, and genocide, one of the main characters has a candle growing out of his head, and , no, it wasn't exactly meant as comedy. But Insects has only a few visual oddities that I noticed. During one scene, someone makes reference to Yukio Mishima's spectacular suicide, and a guy in the rather tacky uniform of Mishima's notorious private army appears to put in his two cents. No, there aren't that many visual gags. Tezuka also foregoes using his stock company of characters for this story. No guys with candles in their heads, no Astro Boy or Black Jack.

But Insects is rife with wild and bizarre imagery which establishes a kind of eerie mood and helps illustrate the nature of Tomura as a mimic. Tomura is graphically compared with bugs that mimic owls, and metamorphose into other forms. Such transformations are understood as natural, as the consequences of evolution and survival mechanisms in action. No one would accuse an insect that mimics the appearance of another creature of being a liar. Such creatures have taken on deceptive appearances in order to survive in a hostile, murderous world. By that logic, Tomura isn't evil. She is merely adaptive.

Remember, Tomura is a woman in 1970s Japan, a patriarchal society that, for all its progress, still views women as subservient to men. Even a woman who is artistically inclined, and accomplished and acclaimed at that, will often be expected to give all that up when she gets married to some corporate executive. All of the giant corporations are run by men. All of the government leadership is exclusively male. A woman either accepts this, or has to go her own way.

Moreover, the society is thoroughly corrupt. Bribery, graft, assassination, deception, and betrayal are all business as usual. And all the major players are men. A woman could very well look at this state of affairs and ask, "Why not get my end? Why not be number one? A man in this world wouldn't even think to ask the question. He would just proceed on the basis of stark reality."

But Tomura, as Tezuka tells it, isn't so much coldly calculating as she is following her nature. Yes, she plots and schemes and has a callous disregard for others, but it's not always clear that she is consciously cruel or destructive. This is what makes Tomura such a fascinating character. Is she evil, or is she just following her own nature? Is evil something that objectively exists, or is it something that we project onto reality? That is to say, is there a way to define evil scientifically, or is it more of a fuzzy, mystical-religious notion? And, once again, how do we define evil within a totally corrupt society? By definition, in such a society corruption is inescapable. Try as one might, one cannot get away totally clean.

You could show up to work every day, pay your taxes on time and never steal, murder, lie, or cheat. But your tax dollars go into the coffers of a corrupt government that hires dishonest corporations with sweetheart deals to build projects that may never be properly finished. Organized gangsters and right wing extremists exert their influence and demand their tributes in the form of bribes and hush money. Intimidation, murder, and disenfranchisement are used against those that step out of line, resist, or try to bring about reforms. This is the world that Tomura must navigate.

Along the way, journalists try to get the scoop on her past, and oppressive men try to conquer her. As I read, I asked myself, "Where is Tomura going? Is this a story of self-destruction? Will society punish Tomura for her survival adaptations? Or is she the perfect organism to negotiate this labyrinth of lies?"

I was surprised where the story went. I don't want to give away too much, but it definitely does not cop out even as it takes some rather unlikely melodramatic hairpin twists and turns. I say unlikely, but not necessarily impossible. Tezuka is never one to shy away from outrageous melodrama, even downright bathos, and fantasy, but Insects is disturbingly credible for all its dramatic license and exaggeration.

The Book of Insects is another triumph of book design from Vertical, Inc. Vertical has become the primary publisher of Osamu Tezuka's manga in English in the USA, and each new volume is handsomely turned out with evocative collages of resonant images drawn from the manga themselves. Insects is no exception. Vertical seems to approach Tezuka's books like another publisher would approach the latest Johnathan Lethem or Johnathan Franzen novel: with utmost respect and seriousness. And also, a sense of using Tezuka's distinctive illustration style as the basis for eye-catching covers and dust jackets. Insects is well worth reading, but it'll also look good on the shelf once you're done. But don't just let it sit there. Loan it to a friend. And then point them to Vertical, Inc's website, and chat 'em up about other Tezuka works . . .

Vertical, Inc's website:

http://www.vertical-inc.com/

Vertical, Inc also publishes the following titles by Osamu Tezuka: Black Jack, Buddha, Dororo, Ode to Kirihito, MW, Apollo's Song, and Ayako.

MOVIE REVIEW: TETSUO, THE IRON MAN (1989)

2011-08-28T19:03:00.054-04:00

Tetsuo, the Iron Man

Directed by/Edited by/Art Direction by/Produced by Shinya Tsukamoto

Cinematography by Shinya Tsukamoto and Kei Fujiwara

Music by Chu Ishikawa

Costume Designs by Kei Fujiwara

Starring

Tomorowo Taguchi as Man

Kei Fujiwara as Woman

Nobu Kanaoka as Woman In Glasses

Naomasa Musaka as Doctor

Renji Ishibashi as Tramp

Shinya Tsukamoto as Metal Fetishist

A Kaijyu Theatre Production

"Undisciplined self-penetration is no liberation, but is perceived as a form of biological chaos."

-Jerzy Grotowski

I first saw Tetsuo, the Iron Man when I was a freshman in high school. The cover of the VHS box on the Blockbuster shelf had some bug-eyed metallic looking dude on the cover that reminded me of the Golem from those ancient silent movies. The back of the box talked about a guy who worshiped metal. It hinted at mutation and destruction. I thought it was maybe related to the anime epic Akira. Anyone who's ever seen and loved Akira is unlikely to forget the name of Tetsuo, or Kaneda for that matter. Nor or they likely to forget the spectacular biological and psionic meltdowns that make that movie so memorable. The image of the metallic man and the idea of humanity and machine merging also evoked in me memories of Robocop and the live action 8-Man movie I had seen recently. I can't remember if I rented this movie with my father or if I went and got it by myself. Either way, I was the only person in my household interested in watching it.

I was a privileged kid. I had my own room, my own TV and VCR, my own Super Nintendo Entertainment System, my NES was still functional, and I even had a Sega CDX which was a compact combination of the Sega Genesis and the Sega CD. I sat, alone in my bedroom, sitting through trailers for obscure foreign films. I don't remember what any of those movies were, but they all looked, with a few exceptions, a lot more interesting than anything I'd seen at the actual movie theatre in my short lifespan.

In middle school, just a year or two before, I had discovered the movies of John Woo and Akira Kurosawa and Jackie Chan and Wong Kar-Wai, so I fancied myself knowledgeable about world cinema. Anime movies like Akira, Golgo 13, and Fist of the North Star fueled my adolescent fantasies of retribution and annihilation. I'd also discovered the joys of George A. Romero and his outrageous zombie epics. I was hungry for gore, guns that fired endlessly and only needed to be reloaded when it looked cool, and flesh eating hordes of shopping mall assholes looking to tear people's guts out. I wanted psychokinetic showdowns between enraged adolescents that would sunder the universe. I wanted heavily armed heroes punctured by hundreds of bullets whirling through the air in slow motion, geysering blood from every wound. I wanted samurai in full armor slicing enemies in half and acrobatic martial artists who never take a break to catch their breath or get a sip of water. I wanted pure sensation.

Well, I was about to get what I wanted and then some.

I don't even remember understanding Tetsuo, the Iron Man the first time I saw it. In fact, the opening imagery of the lone man walking through some kind of scrap yard to his hideout was so off-kilter and obscure that I had a hard time telling what was happening. The movie was shot in blasted out black and white, everything looked like it was taking place in the presence of some harsh, blinding light. I could tell that a guy was sitting in the middle of all manner of metallic scrap. He had pictures of Olympic runners cut out of magazines stuck to various bits of metal junk. There's a strange, insistent beat, like someone pounding a metallic surface with an electrified steel rod, or maybe a lightsaber switched to bludgeon mode. The guy is sitting with his metal junk, breathing heavy, and he starts cutting on the inside of his thigh, stabbing with some sharp metal object, making the blood flow. He's mutilating himself in time to the strange music. And then he decides to put a metal pipe or something into the wound in his leg. He goes running out of his hideout and gets hit by a car. 1950s prom music starts to play. The self-mutilator sees the words NEW WORLD emblazoned on the grill of the car that has run him down. Cue title card.

And then there's a guy in a suit and glasses, a real square looking dude. The beat picks up, grows more insistent. A light strobes on and off, and then the square looking dude starts flailing around, doing a kind of jerky slamdance. Sweat, or maybe liquid metal, goes flying in all directions. I was left with the sensation of a great power manifesting. That this guy in the suit and glasses was about to unleash some destructive energy or something.

But I was confused the first time I saw it. I thought the guy mutilating himself and the guy in the suit and glasses were the same person. The style of shooting and editing were so radically different from the movies I was used to watching that I didn't understand everything that was happening. There were people doing things, violent, forceful, perverse things, and there was music, and there was a sense of momentum. But it was all so different, in a grammatical sense, than the movies I was used to watching. There were no conventional establishing shots, no obvious musical cues to indicate who the good guys and the bad guys were, it was just sensation, rhythm and power. It compelled me even as it confused me.

Later, even stranger things start to happen. The guy in the suit and glasses is standing on a subway platform and gets chased by a woman who is seemingly possessed by a strange piece of metallic junk. The suit-and-glasses guy escapes, but seems to have a kind of bizarre private life. He has weird metal shit growing out of his cheek. He tries to cut the spur off with his shaving razor, but his skin breaks splattering blood all over the sink and mirror. The skin gives out, but the metal spur abides. The suit-and-glasses guy has a hallucination where his girlfriend transforms into some kind of burlesque dancer with a robot snake for a penis. His girlfriend does a kind of bump and grind number, and then anally penetrates him with the robot snake penis.

And then the suit-and-glasses guy starts transforming into a metallic monster. The metal is growing out of his body, plating him over in layers. It causes him great pain. He sprouts a high-powered drill for a penis and chases his girlfriend around their tiny house. Is this retribution for his fantasy of being raped by his girlfriend's non-existent robot snake penis? What kind of fucked-up logic is that? Mr. Suit-and-Glasses seems to be going through some changes. Like, Ozzy Osbourne kinds of changes.

But then, a new tormentor appears: the self-mutilator from the opening of the film. It seems he's been the mastermind behind all of these bizarre mutations and hallucinations. The self-mutilator, or metal fetishist, has some strange psycho-kinetic powers that allows him to manipulate human minds and machines. He also is seemingly having an impact on the normal course of human biology, causing organic cells and metal to merge and form a strange and sinister new partnership. This master manipulator also wears some wild-ass stage makeup, and seemingly has a burning attraction for Mr. Suit-and-Glasses. But it's not your usual kind of courtship. The metal fetishist and Mr. Suit-and-Glasses both start to manifest psychic powers and layers of armored skin, and they engage in a combination duel-to-the-death/courtship dance with heavy-duty sadomasochistic over and undertones.

This was all something I had definitely never seen before. I was glad I was watching the movie alone. Not that my parents ever really cared what I watched or did not watch, but I felt like I was watching something forbidden, something taboo. It was awesome! Mom and Dad hanging out would've killed the buzz.

In fact, I can only remember a handful of times my father ever warned me against watching something. One time when I was a kid and we had rented The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. I believe this was sometime in elementary school. My father didn't think it was appropriate that his little son should hear the toilet humor oneupsmanship between Andrew Dice Clay and Gilbert Gottfried. He stopped the movie, and then sent me to bed. But minutes later, I heard him firing up the movie. You see, my father always thought he was being slick by watching trashy movies late at night when everyone was supposed to be asleep, but he always cranked the volume just a bit too loud. I guess his hearing wasn't so great after years of servicing jet engines on the flight decks of aircraft carriers. This act of parental responsibility struck me as doubly unjust: not only was my father watching what he had forbidden me to watch, but he was also a thoroughly foul-mouthed ex-sailor. By the time I was eight years old I had heard every conceivable swear word, racial slur, and insulting epithet imaginable. And this guy had the gall to be offended by the juvenile posturing of a second-rater like the Diceman?

On another occasion, my father warned me against watching Killing Zoe, an ultraviolent bank robbery/hostage crisis thriller set in Paris, France. The villain of the movie, and the most memorable character, is a raging psychopath who gleefully shoots unarmed women in the mouth and has no concern with whether he or his gang survive their latest caper. He is self-destruction incarnate. This villain is also an intravenous drug user. And it was this last character trait that worried my father.

"They do some stupid stuff in this movie," my father grimly intoned. "I don't want you to ever do any of that stuff, okay?"

"What do they do?"

"Well, there's a lot of shooting drugs in that movie. Just real stupid stuff that I don't want you to ever do, all right?"

"Um, yeah, okay."

But mi paterfamilias didn't forbid me from watching the movie. Nor did he object to the chief villain's maniacal disregard for human life. No, there was no admonition to never resort to violence to solve life's problems, "I never want you to pick up a gun, my son, or ever strike out in anger at your fellow human beings!" No. None of that. My father, the wannabe role model, had no problems with women getting shot in the mouth, or the wholesale slaughter of a building full of people by automatic weapons fire. Nope. He was hung up on the drugs. "Just Say No!" My father was momentarily inhabited by the mind of Nancy Reagan.

But then again, my father and I had watched plenty of ultraviolent movies together. Schwarzenegger, Dirty Harry, westerns, Indiana Jones, the kinds of movies where one tough dude wipes out legions of bad guys. My father never batted an eye. But God forbid Dirty Harry fool around with a joint, or Indy Jones get addicted to pain killers. Think about it. Dirty Harry hung out in San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s. He was a high stress personality type. You don't go around with that Clint Eastwood-type look on your face and not have an ulcer. Dirty Harry probably hit up all kinds of chemical mood enhancers. And Indy Jones? The dude got dragged under a military truck at high speed. He got the shit knocked out of him by the big, bald Nazi scumbag at the airfield. He's been shot a couple times, if memory serves. Yeah, I think Indy Jones was on the road to pill-popperdom.

My father never raised any objections to any of this mayhem. In fact, he would sometimes regale me with one of his favorite Vietnam stories: Puff the Magic Dragon. You know, the plane with the heavy machine guns that mowed down scores of Vietnamese? According to Dad, there were fields of shredded corpses, punctured many times over by high impact ordinance. I suppose war does that to people, warps their sense of morality and decency. Knocks their priorities into disarray.

But then again, I was never sure if that was a bullshit story or not. Later, when I sat through the John Wayne fiasco The Green Berets, I thought, "Hey, wait a minute. Did my father actually see the mayhem, or did he just crib it from this laughable movie?" Hey, Ronnie Reagan confused real life and the movies all the time, and he was the goddamn President.

. . . but wasn't I talking about Tetsuo, the Iron Man?

Yeah, I guess my point is that part of the thrill of watching Tetsuo was its taboo imagery, its sheer weirdness. The sure knowledge that this was a movie Ma and Pa would never dare to watch, let alone comprehend. And if ever they did try to watch it, they'd just wrinkle their beetling brows, and pout their simian lips and say things like, "I don't get this," and "Who's the main character here?" and "Wouldn't I be happier if I just turned on the TV?" I could watch Tetsuo and feel cool and superior.

I get it, dude, and I wanna go hang out with other people who get it!

Except, I didn't get it. Not completely. Why, exactly, was everybody mutating and hallucinating? Was it magic? Was it psionic powers? Even Akira, a movie often noted for its strangeness and ambiguity, had a rationale for its mass destruction, mutations, and psychic battles that put it more in line with science fiction epics like 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and scores of dystopian sci-fi novels. Was it all a dream-within-a-dream? And what about all the kinky sexual stuff? Was this meant to be a parable about a button down, suit-and-tie kind of guy who discovers his repressed homosexuality? Or was this a movie looking to blast away all our tired notions of sexuality and identity and forge a bold and terrifying new path? Why did it look so weird?

Yeah, the movie just had this jerky, stop motion vibe to it that made it look and feel unlike anything I'd seen up to that point. All of the animations in the movie were done with poverty budget stop motion animation which lent the film a strange look, a handmade feel. Even though the movie was nowhere near as slick as the latest Hollywood special effects extravaganzas, and wouldn't even bear comparisons with Star Wars or Star Trek, it's very rough look actually lent it more credibility. The movie seemed to be about people living in a world filled with junk and waste, and how they merge with this refuse. It made a bizarre kind of sense that the movie would look and feel kind of clunky and rundown. I dunno, it's hard to pin it down in words.

Another aspect of it is its soundtrack by Chu Ishikawa. When I first saw this movie, not only was it unlike anything I had ever seen, it was unlike anything I had ever heard. The music drove the movie with crazed percussion and relentless rhythm that evoked both machine like regularity and precision and out of control mutation and biological chaos. It evoked a musical sense, as though it were just as much a concert as a movie. But not your run of the mill, tapped-out rock'n'roll bullshit. No, this was a new mutation of sound and image and momentum.

Maybe I could compare it to opera. Because the voices of the performers were important, too. Not because they recited soul-searching monologues, or engaged in witty exchanges, but because they screamed incoherently, breathed heavily as they mutilated themselves, and let loose battle cries and threats of destruction against the fabric of the universe itself. Yeah, it was like opera. In opera, you have talented singers doing highly unnatural, intense things with their voices that sound majestic, emotionally charged, yet aloof. Well, maybe I shouldn't compare it to opera, in that case. The performers in Tetsuo work it more like punk rock performers or loonies in the bin. Let's just forget the comparison to opera . . .

I've watched this movie many times since high school. Every time I watch it, it makes more sense. That's not to say that it offers any pat solutions or clear cut character motivations, but that nowadays, when I watch it, I get it. I grok its crazy grammar. Things which just seemed random and opaque the first few times I saw it, are now revealed as having a twisted visual and sonic logic powering them.

For example: the use of grainy video as a sign of the metal fetishist's psychic powers. The metal fetishist seems to be broadcasting his memories and willpower into various machines, and into the mind of Mr. Suit-and-Glasses. It's partly how the fetishist goes about tormenting people, but it's also his way of communicating his past. The fetishist wants Mr. Suit-and-Glasses to know about his rather bizarre trauma at the hands of a belligerent hobo with a metal club. Apparently, when he was a child, the fetishist's head was bashed in with a metal rod by some strange, crazed wanderer. It is possibly implied that this tramp was the fetishist's father, but this could be some sort of hallucination, or fantasy. Maybe the fetishist no longer remembers his own past, and how he became a mutant and so he has manufactured his own memories, or fantasies, about how he came to be. Just because someone has superpowers doesn't mean they're sane or that they recall things accurately.

In any case, the use of distorted video seems to signify the presence of the fetishist's memories, and his psychic powers in action. I never got that the first few times I saw it. Now, I get it . . . I think.

Tomorow Taguchi plays Mr. Suit-and-Glasses. True cinematic auteur Shinya Tsukamoto plays the metal fetishist. Kei Fujiwara plays Mr. Suit-and-Glasses's girlfriend. Taguchi is an actor who would become familiar to me from later Tsukamoto films, and also other Japanese movies, particular the films of Takashi Miike. Taguchi gives a totally committed performance as the anoymous suit-and-glasses dude, jerking his body with abandon during the surrealistic dance sequences, and growling and yelling with appropriate fervor and menace when he begins to mutate. He would reprise this role in Tetsuo II: The Body Hammer.

Kei Fujiwara also gives herself over to the crazed and sexually out of control burlesque woman with the robot snake penis. Fujiwara would later go on to direct bizarre horror movies herself. She also helped shoot this movie, and contributed to the memorable metal mutant designs.

Tsukamoto, as the metal fetishist, is enraged, power-crazed, sexually empowered, and just a bit goofy. The role of the scheming tormentor is one that he would reprise in a number of his later films, where his sinister machinations are seemingly bent on inspiring creative destruction conducive to rebirth within the psyches and souls of his protagonists. These tormentor roles are also possibly commenting on Tsukamoto's role as a perfectionist, totally independent film director. Could it be that he directs his actors to actually mutate? Maybe those aren't special effects at all . . .

MOVIE REVIEW: ULTRAVIOLET (2006)

2011-08-26T14:06:00.035-04:00

Ultraviolet

Starring

Milla Jovovich

Nick Chinlund

William Fichtner

Written and Directed by Kurt Wimmer

Ultraviolet should have been a musical. It's got the costumes, the wild set designs, and the coordinated movements of scores of performers at any given time. The coordinated movements are martial arts routines, but surely they could've worked in a dance number now and again? If this movie had been made the Bollywood way, it would've been glorious. As it stands, it's pretty interesting in its own right.

In the future, all of humanity is united as one. Individual nation states are a thing of the past, as is the lamentable phenomenon of nation-on-nation violence. So far so good. Ah, but this future utopia has a dark side: the hemophages, humans who have been infected with a blood disease that endows them with superhuman strength and speed and a reduced lifespan. They also sprout enhanced canines which gives them the appearance of olde tyme vampires. The hemophages are viewed as a threat by the human controllers of the planet, and so they are rounded up and put into concentration camps. Some of the hemophages evade capture, and form underground resistance cells. The hemophages conduct raids using ultra-technology and derring-do on government science facilities and learn about a plan to develop a virus that will wipe out the hemophages once and for all.

Milla Jovovich stars as a very pretty woman named Violet. She's the top hemophage operative whose mission it is to steal the anti-hemophage virus and save the day. She is opposed by a smarmy dude called Vice-Cardinal Ferdinand Daxus (Nick Chinlund). You know if the dude's got a name like Daxus he must be evil. Beware names with Ds and Xs in them. There is also, apparently, some kind of theocratic dictatorship in place upon the planet, although this is only minimally established (late in the movie there's a giant, sinister building that's shaped like a cross). Daxus is a guy in an expensive suit who is seemingly intensely germophobic and fears infection by the hemophage virus. He's constantly using sanitary wipes to pick things up, and he wears some surprisingly fashionable nose filters. Overall, Daxus is way uptight.

Violet is much more hip. She wears dark glasses, skintight jeans, and halter tops and sallies forth into battle against scores of enemies who wear gas masks and riot armor. One might wonder, "Why would someone go into battle with a bare midriff? A bullet in the guts is no fun at all." The answer: it looks cool. Or maybe it's like why Batman has a big old bat symbol on his chest: to distract the enemy. In Batman's case, the bat symbol is bulletproof, so he gets the bad guys shooting at the bulletproof symbol, and not shooting at the exposed lower half of his face. Perhaps Violet's midriff is bulletproof? It is an impressive midriff. She must do a lot of crunches.

Milla Jovovich obviously put a lot of time in at the gym for this role. It's too bad she isn't given any dialogue that's worth a damn. She's saddled with all-too-bland threats and imprecations, "I'm gonna kill you!" kinds of stuff. The kind of dialogue a 10 year old could have have written. Jovovich, since the advent of the Resident Evil movies, has become the go-to lady for embodying video game heroines. Now and again, you see her in something like Stone where she displays some serious acting chops, but I'll leave it to you to figure out where the big paydays come from.

Violet also has this gyroscopic device that allows her to defy gravity and also creates pocket dimensions within her body where she can store a near-unlimited supply of weaponry and ammunition. Violet is a walking, running, motorcycle riding video game avatar. She can drive her bike up the sides of skyscrapers outrunning military-grade attack helicopters, while dodging volleys of military ammunition. When she needs a weapon she just exerts her will and full-auto handguns materialize out of the palms of her hands in a flourish of sparkling light and swirling gun components. She can also manifest a sword covered in mysterious runes, but this is science fiction, not sword-and-sorcery, so the runes are purely decorative.

How about that? Sheathing your sword in another dimension. I wonder, are there other intelligent beings who exist in those dimensions? Does Violet have to lease storage space for her equipment from these extra-dimensional beings? Or are we to understand that this is some new technology that literally makes space for the exponentially increasing amounts of stuff that people of the future will own? I don't know, but it's fun to speculate.

Maybe Violet's ultimate secret is that she is actually a Lenswoman and a top operative for the Galactic Patrol. Wouldn't that be a cool movie? "Milla Jovovich is LENSWOMAN!" I would pay to see that. Of course, I don't think E.E. Doc Smith approved of women serving in the Galactic Patrol. Dr. Smith was a product of his times.

But back to Ultraviolet. The movie takes place in a futuristic city that is a mixture of real world locations and copious CG. The CG looks pretty good. At times the movie seems to be flirting with some kind of transhumanist or extropian theme. This is a world where people carve out whole other dimensions just to use them as holsters and sheaths and ammo dumps. Why can't this same technology be used to forge new communities, a new frontier, new homelands for the expansive human population? Think of it: a network of trans-dimensional gateways where you can instantaneously zip from reality to reality, sampling different cultures and lifestyles. You could have whole dimensions devoted to producing food, curing disease, expanding human lifepsans, maintaining museums, creating live action fantasy role-playing theme parks, and the design and construction of spacecraft. And if the technology is so advanced that people can manipulate space-time, surely they can also alter their bodies at will. You could remake yourself as an elf, or a centaur, or a Milla Jovovich. You could change your skin color at will. You could make your hair retract into your body, and extrude itself as wiry tentacles. You could use your hair to type and do handicrafts.

But, no, this movie's not about any of that. In this movie, people use bleeding edge technology to shoot each other, infect each other with bioweapons, and put each other in concentration camps. These people carve out dimensions in space time just to have more places to dump their shit--their weapons, for Christ's sakes! Like we don't have enough assault rifles and attack choppers and miniguns and handguns and rocket-propelled grenades, and the assholes who worship these implements on our own planet we gotta create whole new worlds to accommodate this bullshit . . . but I'm probably reading too much into this movie. It's a dumb action movie with some intriguing notions and Milla Jovovich. It has laughable dialogue, a confusing plot, some decent action sequences, and some striking set design and costumes. The look of the movie put me in mind of some of Mario Bava's movies, like Danger! Diabolik and Planet of the Vampires. In some ways, Violet is kind of like Diabolik. She's heavily armed, she kills scores of people, she's engaged in a war against the government and the law--what about "Milla Jovovich is Diabolik!" Yeah, I know, Diabolik was a dude. So what? Jovovich could be Diabolik's sister or something. There's a Batwoman, right? We can have a Lady Diabolik.

Of course, Bava's movies are actually fun to watch, and were made at a fraction of the cost of 21st century cinematic potboilers with much cruder special effects technologies. What is it that Bava got right decades ago, that early 21st century spectacle movies keep bungling again and again? I will refrain from the usual CG and Hollywood bashing, because, strictly speaking, the CG is pretty decent in this flick, and I believe that this was an international production with funding from European nations, so all the blame can't fall on the usual suspects this time around. But Ultraviolet is undeniably influenced by Hollywood styles and approaches in its slickness and lack of intellectual substance.

Luckily, I didn't pay to see this movie (a friend loaned me the DVD insisting that I would find it to be cool), but I'm still willing to pay to see Jovovich in that Lenswoman movie. In fact, I probably would've been willing to pay to see Ultraviolet back when it came out if I hadn't been so disappointed by that Underworld movie that came first. What is it about Hollywood and high concept vampire movies that end up being punishingly lame? No wonder they've turned to the tweeny-bop boredom of the Twilight flicks. Women with guns and form-fitting couture are out, teen angst and thinly veiled parables of abstinence are in. I can't decide if it's an improvement or a new degeneration.

MOVIE REVIEW: SNAKE IN THE EAGLE'S SHADOW (1978)

2011-08-21T21:30:00.014-04:00

Snake in the Eagle's Shadow

Directed by Yuen Woo-ping

Starring

Jackie Chan

Yuen Siu-tien

Once upon a time in China, the deadly Eagle Fist Master stalked the land, killing off all the Kung Fu students who practiced other martial forms and thereby showed disrespect to the supremacy of the Eagle Fist School. The Eagle Fist Master slaughtered 3,000 students before any other school could mount an effective defense. This school was the Snake Fist school. On a barren plain, a champion of the Snake Fist School entered into deadly contest with the Eagle Fist Master . . . and lost.

But the Snake Fist acolyte made a worthy account of himself. And a wily old man(Yuen Siu-tien), who is also the last surviving master of the Snake Fist School, observed the battle, and knew he was no match for the Eagle Fist Master. So he decided to go on the run, hoping to stay alive long enough to pass on his technique to a younger, tougher student who might one day destroy the power-mad Eagle Fist Master.

The old man wanders into a podunk town. The martial arts schools here are all the Kung Fu movie equivalent of a Ponzi scheme: middle class and upper middle class merchants enroll their layabout sons in the Mantis School or the other school across the street, hoping to stiffen up junior's spine enough to take on the family business someday. The teachers here will take on any student, no matter how pampered and out of shape, as long as the money is good. The head of the Mantis School has a young man working for him, Chien Fu (Jackie Chan). Chien Fu gets all the shit work at the school. He has to scrub the floorboards with a rag. The Mantis School teacher uses him as a punching bag, and a fall guy in bogus demonstrations of Kung Fu prowess. Chien Fu suffers this ill treatment and sees no other choice. He wasn't born to wealth, has never been to school and can barely even read, and he's been kicked around all his life. He's a total loser.

But sometimes even losers get a chance. The old man runs afoul of the mediocre students of the Mantis, and makes short work of them. During his escapades he encounters Chien Fu and sees that he is bullied by the unscrupulous leader of the Mantis School. This young man seems to be a washout, but the old man sympathizes with his plight, and sees some potential in his footwork. And so the wily old master proceeds to take the young man under his wing, without the dude even realizing it . . .

Snake in the Eagle's Shadow is the directorial debut of master martial arts choreographer Yuen Woo-ping. Woo-ping would go on to direct a number of movies that would become box office hits in Hong Kong and around the world, and would end up as cult classics to American Kung Fu fans:

Drunken Master, Iron Monkey, The Tai-Chi Master, Magnificent Butcher, and many others. He would also work with the biggest stars of HK cinema: Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, Donnie Yen, Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, Stephen Chow, and more. After 1996, he seems to have spent his time exclusively as a fight choreographer, working in Hong Kong and Hollywood on such films as the Matrix Trilogy, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Kill Bill, and Kung Fu Hustle. In 2010, Woo-ping directed another movie, True Legend, and did fight choreography for the Bollywood robots-gone-wild magic realist spectacular Enthiran.

Snake in the Eagle's Shadow is a comedy, and so the martial arts battles, even the deadly ones, are played rather broadly. Some of the movie's best sequences involve the relationship between Chien Fu and the old man. The old man is played by Yuen Siu-tien, who was Yuen Woo-ping's father in real life. Siu-Tien gives a wily and goofy performance. He really shines during the sequences when he's training Jackie Chan's hapless Chien Fu. He smokes a big pipe and bashes Chien Fu with it whenever he screws up. But Siu-tien imbues the character with warmth and charm. He is not like the stern and sadistic Pei Mei played by Gordon Liu in Kill Bill vol. 2. He is both a true martial arts master in a world full of phonies and con men, and a true friend in a world of treachery and deceit.

Jackie Chan brings his inimitable gifts for physical comedy to the role of Chien Fu. Even when he eventually becomes a Snake Fist Master, he's still vulnerable and a little scared. Even after he stands up to the bullying teacher of the Mantis School, he is still a bit of a bumbler, but a bumbler with determination and heart. One of his best scenes is when he is being bullied by the Mantis School teacher. The teacher steps in white powder and makes footprints all over the floorboards. He forces Chien Fu to follow behind him, wiping up the footprints with a tiny washcloth. The teacher is a real bastard. But there's a comic payoff to this scene later after Chien Fu has been studying the Snake Fist techniques . . .

Another good scene is the one in which Chien Fu and the old man first fight together. Chien Fu is being bullied by a gang of thugs, and getting his ass kicked. The old man literally puppeteers Chien Fu into victory. It's hard to describe in words, but the scene is both a cracking good fight scene and comic gold.

Chan and Siu-tien would go on to star in Drunken Master, an epochal film in Chan's career as the master of Kung Fu comedies. But Snake in the Eagle's Shadow was also part of Chan's long road to stardom.

There are some other amusing things about this movie. The soundtrack is a glorious mess. Part of the soundtrack from the climatic Death Star battle in Star Wars is used at various moments of heightened dramatic intensity, no doubt without the full permission of John Williams and/or Lucasfilm, but I'm not complaining. If you're gonna steal, steal from the best. Moreover, the soundtrack, which has not been preserved well, has all those great, over-the-top sound effects that make Kung Fu movies so enjoyable. The opening title sequence has Jackie Chan going through the various strikes and movements of the Snake Fist School against a screaming red background. He's not even hitting anything, and yet just the motions of his arms and legs through the air sound like some strange kind of battle in a dimension of pure percussion noise.

The plot is ludicrous, but since it's played for comedy it works. It's almost like a kind of parody of solemn martial arts sagas of vengeance and betrayal. Jimmy Wang Yu or Bruce Lee would've been disassembling dudes left and right, betraying no emotion even as their fists become soaked with blood. But Jackie Chan's whole screen persona was built upon being the Kung Fu hero who was funny and vulnerable. Chan embodies that persona quite effectively with this early effort.

Watching this movie, I also contemplated, yet again, how much more entertaining and intense these old school martial arts movies are compared to the computer graphics spectaculars that Hollywood is trafficking in these days. Yeah, I know, it's easy to flog CG and Hollywood, but this movie was made for a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the budget of Transformers or 2012 or X-Men and in 1978, and it still has more oomph and style than these $200 million monstrosities. I sat, stony-faced, during the second Transformers live action movie. I did not have a good time. Snake in the Eagle's Shadow made me laugh, it made me mimic the over-the-top kung fu moves, it made me care.

Not bad for a $3 DVD from Big Lots . . .

BOOK REVIEW: ALL YOU NEED IS KILL (2009) by Hiroshi Sakurazaka

2011-08-19T20:35:00.029-04:00

All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka
Originally published in Japan in 2004

English translation by Alexander O. Smith

Published 2009 by Haikasoru Books

All You Need Is Kill is one of the most astute genre mash-ups I've experienced. Try this on: Groundhog Day meets Starship Troopers, with echoes of classic Japanese anime shows such as Mobile Suit Gundam, Armored Trooper Votoms, and Macross.

How cool is that?

A young man named Keiji Kiriya dons a formidable suit of powered armor, called a Jacket, to battle four-legged alien invaders that resemble cow-sized squashed toads. Keiji's just a teenager, but he enlisted in the United Earth Defense Forces for a shot at the glory prophesied in all the cheeseball, no doubt Michael Bay directed, militaristic epics cranked out by the defense-entertainment complex of the future. Keiji ends up being a pretty good Jacket Jockey, but not for the usual reasons. Usually, in mecha anime, such as Mobile Suit Gundam or Armored Trooper Votoms, the young hero is some kind of a Chosen One, or a genetically engineered supersoldier, or a NewType, or maybe just unusually skilled with working with machines--but not Kiriya. No, Kiriya wasn't blessed by a prophecy, or DNA, or psionic powers. Keiji Kiriya is getting practice and lots of it.

Somehow, he has gotten trapped in a time loop on the day of a momentous and disastrous battle with the alien foemen. He replays the same doomed defense over and over again. Keiji Kiriya is condemned to fight to the last, and watch all his comrades get slaughtered over and over again, and there is no readily apparent way to break out of the loop, or communicate his condition to anybody else. Only Kiriya awakes each morning with the sure knowledge of eternal repetition. So Kiriya approaches it like some kind of video game. He maps out the possibilities, uncovers the right tactics and weapons to use against the Mimics, and elevates his game with each run through the loop.

But loops keep on loopin', and the implications are disturbing to say the least.

Has Keiji died and gone to some kind of twisted Valhalla? Is he trapped in some Matrix-style simulation? Maybe it's all but a dream-within-a-dream. Keiji's speculations on the nature of his reality don't go too far, but as a reader along for the ride one can't help but go for the extreme scenarios. One of the book's distinct pleasures is its unraveling of the mysteries of the time loop, how and why it works the way it does. Sakurazaka does a pretty good job of drawing the suspense out, and leaving the philosophical heavy-lifting to the reader. After all, Keiji's just another grunt--not dumb, but just much too practical minded and of the moment to go off on philosophical tangents. Sakurazaka somewhat indirectly plants the possibilities of what could be happening, and avoids putting too much overt philosophizing in the mouths of his characters.

The quadrupedal enemies are called Mimics. I think because they mimic living organisms in general, and not because they actually mimic any specific critter. The Mimics aren't actually living things, but some kind of sophisticated agglomeration of intelligent micro-machine swarms that have constructed their quadrupedal bodies from organic and inorganic materials. Overall, the strategic thinking behind the use of the Mimics is sharp. The alien overlords don't have to amass a clunky, Lensman-style space armada and expend massive amounts of resources to reach the Earth, no, they just launch a probe filled with self-replicating nanobots that touches down in the ocean, gestates, and emerges as an army of fully-formed killing machines. "WATCH THE SKIES!" they used to say. Humanity never saw it coming.

Emerging from the oceans, the Mimics attack en mass, are heavily armored, and can shoot scalpel sharp spines which easily pierce the humans' Jackets. The Mimics are totally ruthless, and are not interested in diplomacy. In addition to wiping out humanity's defenses with extreme prejudice, the Mimics are also the first wave of terraforming apparatus. They burrow through the soil, consuming everything, and excreting a rich gumbo of waste that's toxic for humans, but just about right for the alien overlords.

Unless, of course, it's all some kind of video game simulation. Or a drug or madness induced hallucination. Or a dream in the mind of an itinerant Star Child. One of the cool things about reading a book with such a strange set of premises is that it induces wild speculations in the mind of the reader about where it's all going, what's it all about, what's the punchline. Sakurazaka doesn't disappoint with his take on the how and why of the loop, but that's only one of the mysteries in this story.

Another mystery is the female Jacket Jockey known as the Full Metal Bitch. Who she is, how she came to be, and how her fate intertwines with Keiji Kiriya's is another aspect of the Groundhog Day aspect of the story. The FMB is Andie MacDowell to Keiji Kiriya's Bill Murray, I suppose. But the FMB isn't a journalist. She's the most highly decorated armored warrior on the planet. She's slaughtered thousands of Mimics using a giant ax. In a world of science fiction weaponry, why does she use a battleaxe? Another mystery. It would seem that the farther we journey into the future of warfare, the closer we get, paradoxically, to our primal, savage natures. Away fall all the Buck Rogers energy weapons, and out come the clubs and blades and hacking and impaling implements writ large. The FMB wields an ax that could cut through a tank. Sakurazaka comes up with some intriguing notions about the nature of warfare to justify this.

I said earlier that Sakurazaka doesn't overdo the philosophy in this book, but in a way the book is all philosophy. Philosophy in action. Like the best war stories, even ones with humans pitted against alien invaders, he uses it as a chance to put human behavior and history in a harsh light. What are we when faced with extinction? How do we endure the unendurable? Is it worth it? All too often pop culture simplifies war stories into us-vs.-them, good-vs.-evil, but in a story like this humanity is a united front. We're not fighting over flags and borders and ideologies and economic systems and non-renewable resources. This time it's a fight for survival of the species. In this sense, the Mimics are the ultimate enemy, a threat which must be totally eradicated. But that doesn't make them evil. After all, they're just killing machines, working at the behest of alien overlords on a distant planet. But the alien overlords aren't necessarily maniacal villains, just would-be colonists. Human groups have used superior technology, deception, cunning, and ruthlessness to exterminate other human groups and take their land for their own throughout history. Now, humanity as a whole is being subjected to such awful treatment. It's a rich vein in science fiction going back to H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, and Sakurazaka makes it his own.

Sakurazaka has a lot of insight into the intimate, everyday aspects of his story, too. Like the mystery novel Keiji is reading that he will seemingly never get to finish. The way macho posturing and signification works in an aggressive, testosterone drenched environment. Why is it that Jacket Jockeys from different divisions still punch each other out in one-to-one pissing contests when the real enemy is anything but their fellow man? And then there's the character of the Full Metal Bitch . . . but the less said about her the better. Discovering who she is is one of the pleasures of taking this journey with Keiji Kiriya.

This novel is Hiroshi Sakurazaka's first book to be published in English. His second was a wonderful novel called Slum Online, which I read, and blogged about, prior to reading All You Need Is Kill. Slum Online was such a mellow and funny novel, that I was kind of surprised by this one's intensity. But I'm impressed with how Sakurazaka crafts such compelling drama out of such worn-out materials as mecha anime, alien invasion sagas, and, in the case of Slum Online, MMORPGs and beat 'em up streetfighting arcade games. Sakurazaka, who has a background in IT and enjoys playing video games as per his author's bio and afterward, clearly loves the classic tropes of science fiction. He also is not content to just rehash the off-the-shelf components, but refurbish them, reverse engineer them, and implement them in strange and poignant new contexts. He's not afraid of injecting some mystery into the mix, as well, but mystery and science fiction have always worked well together. I'm looking forward to the next English translation of a novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka.

But, hey, in the meantime there's the impending Hollywood movie adaption of All You Need Is Kill. If the Variety article is accurate, it sounds like the movie is at least trying to stick to the broad outline of the novel.

I hope it doesn't suck.

But even if it does, the pitch meeting for it must've been something like this:

"It's Groundhog Day meets Starship Troopers!"

And that's pretty damn amusing no matter what the quality of the movie they end up making.

But a decent movie adaptation of a Sakurazaka novel suggests some new vigor which could be injected into mainstream cinema. Instead of another sub-moronic romantic comedy or unnecessary slasher movie reboot, a successful, and well-crafted, movie of All You Need Is Kill could pave the way for more international collaborations based on cool literary properties. The current movie version is being put together with Japanese producing partners, so maybe that's a sign that everyone involved wants to do right by the source material. One can hope.

But there will always be the book. Hollywood can't take that away.

Not yet, at least . . .

Click here for Haikasoru Books' All You Need Is Kill page.

GAME REVIEW: THE SHIVAH (2006)

2011-08-16T06:15:00.044-04:00

THE SHIVAH

Designer/Developer/Script and Dialogue by Dave Gilbert

Original Music Composed by Peter Gresser

Backgrounds by Tom Scary

Character Animations by Shane Stevens

Featuring the voice talents of:

Abe Goldfarb as Rabbi Stone

Ruth Weber as Rajshree Lauder

Joe Rodriguez as Amos Zelig

with

John Swist

Francisco Gonzalez

Kim Lee

Dave Gilbert

Published by Wadjet Eye Games, 2006

The Shivah is a PC game after the style of the point-and-click mystery adventure games of the 1980s and 1990s. It tells the story of Rabbi Russell Stone who leads a synagogue on New York's Lower East Side. His temple has fallen on hard times. No one shows up to hear his services, save for a sleepy old lady. His email inbox is filled with angry and disappointed messages from former members of his congregation who have been alienated by his harsh, cynical sermons. The bills are piling up, and he expects to be evicted from the property any day now. That's when the homicide detective shows up to tell him that his old friend Jack Lauder has been murdered. The Rabbi is a suspect because Lauder has left Stone a sizable fortune. Of course, the detective has no hard evidence, and so Rabbi Stone, piloted by the player, must solve the mystery and clear his name.

The Shivah orchestrates an intriguing dramatic situation around the murder investigation. Like any good murder mystery there is much more to the case than meets the eye. There are also issues tied to Rabbi Stone's sense of his own identity as a religious leader. He has sacrificed much of his own personal happiness to his profound sense of what it means to be a rabbi. The game doesn't come right out and reveal every last detail of this sacrifice, but it starts out with the broad picture, a depressed and embittered rabbi in a fading synagogue, and gradually zooms in on the specifics of Stone's past and, by implication, the nature of his personality that has led him to the particular dilemma he faces in attempting to clear his own name. The mystery isn't just, "Who murdered Jack Lauder?" It is also, "Who is Rabbi Stone?" It is this second mystery that the game as a game allows players a certain degree of freedom to solve. The choices you make determine the game's ultimate outcome. There are several endings, each one dependent on key moral and ethical choices the player makes as they pilot the Rabbi through the game.

Another fascinating element about Rabbi Stone is the fact that he is a flawed character. Many video game protagonists are screwed-up people. First person shooters and RPGs are filled with violent, heavily armed sociopaths, mutilation and power obsessed barbarians, and brain-washed militarists. Rabbi Stone's flaw is also his strength: his unwavering commitment to his sense of identity, and the kernel of remorse that he seems to feel over a harsh decision he made a long time ago. A decision that affected the life of his old friend Jack Lauder. Rabbi Stone is a dramatic character in the way of great literary characters: Oedipus, Sam Spade, Hamlet, Othello, The Continental Op, and Antigone. He isn't just another ultraviolent cipher to pilot around a dungeon or field of battle. He actually comes off as someone who could conceivably exist in real life.

The dialogue is excellent, sharp, and is worthy of a stage play or film. There are some rather impressive one-liners, and some pitch-black humor as well. One of the key elements of Rabbi Stone's character is his questioning nature. It seems, depending on which dialogue options you follow, that he is always seeking to respond to whatever trials that reality or God or whatever sends his way with the right question. Rabbi Stone's identity is tied to this view of life as a constant inquiry. This outlook is also a great fit with a mystery-adventure gaming dynamic.

A strong cast of voice actors, led by Abe Goldfarb as Rabbi Stone, lends a massive amount of credibility to the characters and the story. I would like to say more about individual performances, but I don't want to give away too much of the story. Suffice it to say, that all of the voice actors do top-notch work, including designer Dave Gilbert in a cameo role.

The visuals are consciously retro--way retro. Like, King's Quest retro, but very carefully done. All of the locations by Tom Scary are rendered with pixelated precision. The game presents synagogues, bars, apartments, stores, and subway platforms that look like they've actually been inspired by genuine New York settings. It's hard to describe, but it's rather impressive that such locations and atmosphere are so effectively rendered with such limited graphics.

The character animations by Shane Stevens are also effective, and include some surprising events. Whenever there is dialogue, the characters' faces are rendered in boxes and display a pleasing array of emotions and nuances which are complimented by the strong voice acting. The effectiveness of the dialogue animations reminded me of Scott McCloud's breakdown of emotions and expressions in Understanding Comics. McCloud puts forward the notion that sometimes visual storytelling can achieve surprising depths and abiding effects by paring real life actions and emotions to their bare essence and then sequencing those essences correctly. It's just another example of how a retro-game can offer worthwhile, involving experiences in a world of ultra-tech gaming.

A state of the art 3-D gaming engine could, of course, deliver photo realism, physics, and a persistent world to get lost in--but would it offer such a concentrated dramatic experience? The Shivah is like an intriguing Off-Off-Broadway play in a black box performance space. Or maybe a memorable crime novella you might find in an old paperback collection of murder mysteries. The retro-charm runs deep.

The musical score by Peter Gresser is mournful, jazzy, and achieves some epic highs as the drama escalates. The mournful, contemplative opening theme is particularly effective, establishing a mood unlike what you would find in most video games. It isn't at all intrusive, and, in fact, it helps with the investigation. I found it to be the perfect underscore for a murder case. Although Gresser's score is more accomplished, it put me in mind of the underscores for the Kemco/Seika NES adaptations of the classic graphic adventures Deja Vu, Shadowgate, and Uninvited. The music in those games, for me, was also mood enhancing and conducive to ratiocination.

The gaming element which is most distinctive is the Clue Inventory. In adventure games, it is not uncommon to have inventory puzzles, wherein you must combine items in your possession in just the right way and use them on some key element of the environment. The Shivah uses a similar dynamic with clues-words and phrases that Rabbi Stone picks up on while questioning people and investigating the various locations. You can then click on a clue and drag it over other clues, click, and see if the ideas work together to offer new insights. The clues also figure into the dialogue options. Clues beget clues, and so the investigation proceeds. The game is much too brief to fully realize this intriguing gaming mechanic, however it does reinforce the cerebral and questioning nature of Rabbi Stone.

Another interesting feature is the Kibbitz Mode, which is a DVD-style commentary that you can choose to switch on while you play the game. In Kibbitz Mode, as you play through, Dave Gilbert, the game's creator, pops up as a charmingly animated talking head and talks you through how he made the game, and offers interesting insights into how, why, and when certain decisions were made. Gilbert is an enjoyable commentator who offers a generous amount of insight into how and why he made the game the way he did. It is strongly advised that you do not switch on the Kibbitz Mode until you've played through the game a few times, as it gives away most of the puzzles and plot twists.

The Shivah is not a very long game, nor is it difficult. But it offers a compelling and concise dramatic narrative with clever dialogue, effective music, and a strong thematic focus.The Shivah is offered through Wadjet Eye Games's website for near-instant download. I say near-instant because it took about an hour for the company to process the order. For $4.99, The Shivah is cheaper than a movie ticket, and much better scripted and acted than what you are likely to find at the summer multiplex.

Official game website:

http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/the-shivah.html

Game Trailer:

BOOK REVIEW: DOWN AND DIRTY PICTURES: MIRAMAX, SUNDANCE, AND THE RISE OF INDEPENDENT FILM

2011-08-01T23:00:00.003-04:00

by Peter Biskind, 2004, Simon and Schuster

Late in Biskind's book, the author describes Martin Scorsese's film Gangs of New York as being overlong, awkwardly structured, overstuffed with bombast and epic battle scenes and riots, and hobbled by a leading man, Leonardo DiCaprio, who seems to lack the acting chops and physical presence to carry such a brutally violent saga of revenge, corruption, ambition and revolution. However, Biskind concedes, the movie does contain a magnificent villain played by Daniel Day-Lewis who dominates the entire picture. Biskind's book is kind of like his description of Scorsese's film. It purports to cover a range of topics and ideas and revolutions in the world of Indie and Indiewood cinema, and yet it comes to be overwhelmingly dominated by one larger-than-life anti-hero: Harvey Weinstein, the once indisputable boss of Miramax pictures and king of so-called Independent Cinema.

More than a portrait of any one player in the world of Indie Cinema, Biskind's book gives an overall and fairly detailed portrait of an industry in transition, and how the economic and cultural circumstances gave birth to a kind of "Indie Bubble" that was destined to burst, and pave the way for the further corporatization of the film business. Biskind's chronicle ends sometime in 2004 and begs for a sequel. In light of what has happened to Miramax, Harvey, the Sundance Film Festival, and other industry players, along with the ascent of $200 million dollar comic book spectacles and the resurgence of low to medium budgeted horror flicks, I would say that Biskind, or someone, should write a book chronicling what has happened since 2004.

If Harvey is the Daniel Day-Lewis of this saga, then I suppose Robert Redford is the Leonardo DiCaprio. Redford and his Sundance Institute are a part of Biskind's story, and indeed, as the book goes on, Redford becomes more and more of a non-entity, seemingly content to retire from the prevailing currents of late twentieth and early twenty-first century cinema.

Harvey got his start as a take-no-shit concert promoter, and fought his way into distributing concert films to art house cinemas. From there, he moved into acquiring and distributing independent and foreign films to the art house circuit. He developed a reputation for using intimidation and uncontrolled emotional outbursts that alienated many people, but got the ink on the contracts. And yet it was this ruthless side of his personality that drove Miramax's profits and also would drive the company into riskier ventures. At his side was his equally tough but less demonstrative brother Bob, who would one day become head of Dimension Films, Miramax's genre distribution label. Dimension Films racked up massive profits with the Scream and Scary Movie franchises even while the "legit" art house line devolved into Oscar bait bogus uplift flicks masquerading as cutting edge cinema.

Hungry for respect, Harvey also had ambitions as a filmmaker, and even if he couldn't direct his way out of a paper bag, as his debut film Playing For Keeps seemed to suggest, then he would achieve this ambition by working as an influential producer, a David O. Selznick for the millenium, who would have hungry young up-and-coming directors from the world of Indie Cinema do all the grunt work of scripting and shooting and then he would exercise his power in the editing room by shaping highly idiosyncratic filmic visions into commercial shape. Harvey would use test screenings in suburban shopping malls to generate test scores which he would use to leverage directors to alter their films, often times eliminating provocative content, or, at the least, mainstreaming it just enough to fit into a largely mythical notion of "commercial." On occasion Harvey would even write new scenes and insist they be filmed regardless of whether or not these new scenes fit with a given director's vision. In a number of cases, the films altered would end up as neither fish nor fowl: not commercial enough to compete with Hollywood melodramas, moron comedies, or action spectacles; too compromised and watered down to play with discriminating art house crowds.

Citizen Ruth, The Hairy Bird, 54, Velvet Goldmine--just a few of the titles to fall victim to Harvey Scissorhands, as many came to derisively nickname Harvey--though seldom to his face.

Harvey bulled his way to the top of the Indiewood distribution game, and eventually sold out to Disney. He implemented an aggressive PR campaign for his prestige pictures to garner Academy Award nominations and wins. He even bought his way into New York intelligentsia circles by starting a publishing division with the magazine Talk! and the Miramax Books imprint, and began hobnobbing with Democratic political figures, most notably Bill and Hilary Clinton, and Al Gore.

With Disney's financial backing, if not always with the consent of its corporate leadership, Harvey led Miramax pictures into the realms of full-on production, something he had long flirted with when doing re-edits and re-shoots of acquisitions. This production over reach ended up giving a boost to other indie distributors such as the Independent Film Channel, while increasing the overhead costs and reducing profits for Miramax. The subsequent fate of Miramax since the times chronicled in Biskind's book seems to suggest that Harvey was indeed overreaching.

Subsequent lawsuits over ancillary profits and points on gross arrangements also point up the continuing acrimony over Miramax's accounting practices. Interestingly, Biskind was able to sit down and interview Harvey. When asked about the many allegations of screwy accounting practices and unpaid revenues, Harvey asserts over and over again that everyone was paid "everything that was owed to them." Marketing and distribution costs are often cited as cutting into future profits for the artists, although many of the filmmakers dispute these numbers.

Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, a number of the filmmakers interviewed by Biskind, even some who felt they got the bum's rush, still respect Harvey. The overall sentiment seems to be that Harvey had to play hardball to get over on the industry, and that the state of cinema in America was greatly improved and diversified by the efforts of Miramax. Miramax is often described as paving the way for other independent distributors and for the mainstreaming of more provocative content in films in general.

And what of Mr. Redford and his Sundance Institute? In Biskind's telling, Redford comes off as an obsessive micro-manager and egotist. A man who only wants to back films that he can somehow take credit for, often times going so far as to usurp scripts from other directors at the Institute just because he can. And yet, strangely, Redford seems to want to sit on projects and do nothing, paralyzed by inner doubts that only he can know. Redford all but disappears from Biskind's narrative by the last couple of chapters. Early on, Biskind describes how the Sundance Film Festival served as a kind of cultural mecca for regional cinema, which Biskind dismisses as granola and boring. Despite the author's snark, he makes a valid point: the Sundance model of delivering indie cinema in the 1970s and 1980s was going the way of the dodo. In contrast, Miramax developed aggressive marketing strategies to get unusual films into the cineplex and onto the Oscar radar. Redford is portrayed as distrustful of the media, much too provincial and elitist to compete in the coming media saturated world of the 1990s and beyond.

Biskind's book is an entertaining read. It is a sort of follow-up to his earlier book Easy Riders and Raging Bulls, which chronicled the New Hollywood of the 1970s: Francis Ford Coppola, Dennis Hopper, George Lucas, Peter Bogdanovich, and others. In addition to Harvey and Redford, he also gives thoroughgoing accounts of the career breakthroughs of such directors as Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Kevin Smith, and Todd Haynes. As I said above, it begs for a follow-up, maybe even one written by Biskind himself.

MOVIE REVIEW: GODZILLA 1985, a.k.a THE RETURN OF GODZILLA

2011-07-21T01:12:00.043-04:00

Directed by Koji Hashimoto
U.S. Scenes Directed by R.J. Kizer
Music by Reijiroh Koroku
Additional Music by Christopher Young
Cinematography by Kazutami Hara
A Toho Production

Starring
Kenpachiro Satsuma as Godzilla
Keiju Kobayashi as Prime Minister Mitamura
Hiroshi Koizumi as Professor Minami
Raymond Burr as Steve Martin
Ken Tanaka as Goro Maki
Yasuko Sawaguchi as Naoko Okumura
Yosuke Natsuki as Professor Hayashida

Godzilla 1985 is the first movie I remember seeing on the big screen. I was maybe three years old, and it was an intoxicating experience. I don't recall being scared when I first saw it. I was awed. I saw the entire modern edifice of civilization, its skyscrapers, its ultra-tech military toys, its pathetic Cold War Great Powers gamesmanship, its nuclear reactors, and even its nuclear weapons utterly obliterated by a giant, quasi-humanoid dinosaur with crazed, hurting eyes that breathed blue fire, and roared in a way that I always wished I could imitate whenever I was at home with my Godzilla action figure.

That roar was a sound that no human could make. I was convinced. Godzilla was real. Godzilla was unstoppable. Never mind the fact that he gets dropped into a volcano and buried under a massive, demolitions-triggered avalanche--I knew he would be back.

I knew Godzilla was real. Even though the movie was obviously fake. Tanks, mobile anti-Godzilla missile batteries, fighter jets, and those articulated mobile laser beam satellite dish things that never do any damage but are always trotted out, at vast expense to the Japanese taxpayers, to zap the giant monsters--all were clearly radio controlled toys. The skyscrapers were all obviously models rigged to fall apart and explode in exact ways. The Japanese actors were all clearly dubbed into flattened-affect English, although the Japanese Prime Minister's face quivered with genuine emotion as he faced the prospect of a second nuclear annihilation by a missile meant to assassinate Godzilla. All of this transparent artifice conspired to create a kind of fantasy zone where a story this outrageous could safely play out, where an audience could sit in the dark and let a Devonian beast of doom sweep away a world made grim by nuclear weapons, Reaganomics, Secret Soviet Nuclear Cities, and the doldrums of sitcom idiocy. To a child, radio-controlled toys are cool. Giant monsters spitting fire are awesome! Crumbling-exploding model buildings are superneat! And what about that disgusting mutant sea louse that attacks the guy on the derelict boat at the very beginning?! Realism is not necessary or sufficient for whimsical fun.

And then there were the US-only "added value" scenes with Raymond Burr as a journalist and a bunch of guys no one ever heard of as the military functionaries voyeuristically observing Godzilla's rampage via telescreen in a Strangelovian bunker somewhere in the bowels of the Pentagon. One of the voyeurs is a red-haired smartass who at one point remarks of Godzilla's rampage through downtown Tokyo, "That's quite an urban renewal program they have going on there!" Raymond Burr's character, named Steve Martin, offsets laughing boy's Airplane!-esque wisecracks with such grim pronouncements as this,

"Nature has a way sometimes of reminding Man of just how small he is. She occasionally throws up the terrible offspring of our pride and carelessness to remind us of how puny we really are in the face of a tornado, an earthquake, or a Godzilla. The reckless ambitions of Man are often dwarfed by their dangerous consequences. For now, Godzilla-that strangely innocent and tragic monster-has gone to earth. Whether he returns or not, or is never again seen by human eyes, the things he has taught us remain . . ."

Godzilla is famous for his grudge matches against other giant beasts such as the pro-human lepidoptera Mothra, the malevolent space-born King Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster, Hedorah the Smog Monster(a.k.a. Hedorah the Shambling Pollution Metaphor), the freakish pteranodon Rodan, and his shiny cyber-doppelganger Mechagodzilla.

In Godzilla 1985 the primary antagonist is not a fellow giant beast but the high tech, heavily armed VTOL craft the Super-X which has been secretly under construction by the Japanese government in anticipation of World War III. The Super-X is equipped with missiles, vulcan cannons, high powered laser beams, and cadmium bombs which the powers that be hope will shut down the biological nuclear reactor that is speculated to be at the heart of the beast. The Super-X is piloted by a hotshot crew of dudes in orange jumpsuits who could pass for a dedicated Devo cover band.

The Super-X comes close to killing Godzilla with its cadmium bombs which it fires down Godzilla's throat with a (circa 1985) high tech aiming system that makes total war seem like a big budget video game. Godzilla suffers a titanic case of heartburn and acid reflux. Drooling stomach acid, he slumps against the base of a towering skyscraper. "Wonder Lizard is down for the count!" cheers Corporal Smartass.

Too soon, my bro!

A Soviet nuclear missile which had been launched in the hopes of preventing Wonder Lizard from bringing down the Iron Curtain is intercepted by another nuke launched by the USA. A massive atmospheric nuclear blast triggers an EMP, interfering with the live feed into the secret bunker of the Pentagon, shorting out some of the navigation systems on board the Super-X, and causes a formidable lightning storm which launches a lightning bolt at Godzilla. The bolt jumpstarts Godzilla's heart. He shakes off the dust of ruined buildings, and rises to his full height. He fixes his hateful eyes on his foe, the Super-X, and charges into battle. The Super-X unleashes a storm of ordinance and death rays, all of it detonating harmlessly against Godzilla's super-tough hide. Godzilla scorches the Super-X with a withering blast of radioactive fire, and the hope of the Japanese military-industrial complex sputters and sinks towards the asphalt. Godzilla delivers the coup de grace by crushing it with a skyscraper. Exit Devo cover band.

At age three, the battle between Godzilla and the Super-X was without a doubt the coolest thing I had ever seen. When Godzilla dropped dead after swallowing the cadmium bombs, I thought that was it. Then the whole nuclear missile plot kicked in, and the suspense of whether or not Tokyo would be annihilated by the Russian missile supplanted the saga of the radioactive lizard. But not for long . . . and when the revivified beast finally crushed the Super-X I was deeply gratified. Once again, the bogus progress of an arrogant high tech civilization had been shown up for a sham. Wonder Lizard marches on!

In the end, humanity triumphs when the military-industrial complex prostrates itself before the university scientists. The eggheads come up with a plan to lure Godzilla away from Tokyo by transmitting modified bird frequencies into the beast's brain. The logic, I suppose, is that since dinosaurs evolved into birds, Godzilla somehow has a rapport with the sounds that birds make. Or maybe the scientists were able to use their DNA sampling supercomputers and sound manipulation software to extract the ancient dinosaur mojo from the birds and transform it into signals that would attract Godzilla. Toho Science at its finest!

The signal lures Godzilla to the precipice of Mount Fuji. Explosives are detonated. He falls into the churning magma, soon to be buried by a second wave of high explosives. Godzilla unleashes a piercing, high-pitched version of his scream. The music swells, and Raymond Burr eulogizes "that strangely innocent and tragic monster" in a sonorous voice over. Exit Wonder Lizard.

Watching this movie again, it still gets to me. It imprinted itself upon me at a very early age, and I suspect it was the beginnings of my anxiety about world annihilation. All throughout my childhood and adolescence I had recurring dreams of the world being destroyed by nuclear bombs. I was always fascinated by imagery of nuke tests and displays of military firepower. As a teenager, I read H.P. Lovecraft and was captivated by his mythos of giant rubbery beasts from distant stars waging cataclysmic war across the face of the primeval earth. Reading At the Mountains of Madness I discovered humanity's true origin: our species evolved as a by-product of menial work organisms bred for slave labor by the Great Old Ones. The menials were among the few survivors of those disastrous conflicts. Most of the Old Ones were killed, some fled to the stars, others went into hibernation. Was Godzilla a Great Old One? Maybe a distant relation. If Godzilla was a Great Old One, maybe his desire to inflict damage on humanity grew out of his resentment at the ascendancy over vast gulfs of time of the former servitor organisms. Godzilla lashes out at humanity to remind us of where we come from . . . yeah, I know, that's not what the Godzilla movies say about his origin. This is my homebrew fanfic version, take it or leave it.

In recent years, I've rediscovered the joys of old monster movies. In particular the Godzilla films, but also other Japanese sci-fi and fantasy films. In my adolescence, I lost track of my sense of humor, and could no longer tolerate these movies' distinct retro-charms. The beyond-lame 1998 Hollywood movie directed by Roland Emmerich did not help. This disinterest continued well into the 21st century until around 2005 when I saw Godzilla Final Wars. I tracked down a VHS copy of Godzilla 1985 and was instantly transported back to the age of three, and realized this movie was my Citizen Kane, my Rosebud of a sort. It's hard for me to be too analytic about it, although certain rather adult sentiments and ironic reflections have worked their way into my understanding of the movie. Watching it now, it acts as a strange kind of magnet drawing forth from the depths of my consciousness my three year old self, not totally obliterated by time and neuronal demolition and reconstruction (Neuronal Renewal Program . . .?), and I view the movie not alone but with this ghost of my three year old self.

Trailer for International English Dub of Godzilla 1985:

Steve Martin Eulogizes Godzilla:

Exit Godzilla NES Music:

BOOK REVIEW: A SLOW DEATH: 83 DAYS OF RADIATION SICKNESS by NHK-TV "Tokaimura Criticality Accident" Crew, 2008 English Translation by Maho Harada

2011-07-20T05:15:00.008-04:00

Published by Vertical Inc., New York

September 30, 1999:
Three workers at a uranium processing plant in Tokaimura, Japan are exposed to high amounts of neutron beams during a criticality accident.

This is a book about a man named Ouchi whose chromosomes were destroyed by a blast of neutron rays while working in unsafe conditions in a uranium processing facility in Tokaimura, which is north east of Tokyo. For 83 days, a crack team of doctors, nurses, and medical experts from several countries try to keep him alive. Because Ouchi's chromosomes have been destroyed, his body cannot generate new cells to replace the dead ones. His skin falls off. His mucus membranes disappear. He is in constant pain. He suffers massive internal hemorrhages and the medical staff have to constantly pump fluids and nutrients into his body to keep him alive. His organs fail, one by one, and their functions are taken over by various machines. As he literally melts before their eyes, Ouchi's doctors and nurses question whether or not what they are doing is the right thing to do. That is to say, are they actually helping him, or are they just endlessly prolonging his agony?

This is a slim but tough book. It goes into gruesome but necessary detail about the deterioration of a human body afflicted by neutron beam radiation. It is told in a straightforward reportorial style that goes into thoroughgoing technical detail but not so much that the average reader cannot follow along. It also gives space to the emotional turmoil the medical staff underwent as they battled to keep Ouchi alive.

In some ways, this is a book about the dangers of atomic radiation, but it is also a strange kind of existential novel where the main character's mental state is largely unknown at the height of his suffering, and therefore the crucial question of whether or not to go on living is displaced onto the nurses and doctors. Ouchi was under heavy sedation for much of his sickness to alleviate his agony and he was unable to communicate in any detail what his thoughts and feelings were. The book seems to suggest that had he been awake his suffering would've been monstrous. The medical staff did what they thought was best even in the face of a hopeless situation. Their mission, as they understood it, was to save a man's life and battle his sickness to the last.

This book is derived from a television documentary originally broadcast by NHK in May 2001. I haven't been able to find any clips of it online, but I imagine it must be a harrowing viewing experience. I also wonder if there has been an effort to suppress it from being aired by powerful interests.

This was a very small scale accident compared to the ongoing nuclear disasters afflicting Japan this year, and so I would not compare Ouchi's situation with the present cataclysm. But considering the reports of clean-up workers being overworked and overexposed by their employers, and the seemingly endemic problems that the Japanese government and the nuclear industry overall have with getting their stories and their numbers straight, I think this book is valuable for zeroing in on the suffering of a single human being. Now multiply that suffering by a few million individuals. It's incomprehensible, but every individual person affected by the tsunami and the nuclear accidents this year is undergoing, to a greater or lesser degree, some ordeal, some kind of suffering. Workers in the clean-up effort are very much at risk for severe radiation poisoning and related illnesses.

Nuclear accidents are not new. There also seems to be a problem on the part of the authorities with facing these problems, or, at the very least, giving an honest account of them. I would like to believe that books and other media are a way of keeping governments and business interests honest, of exposing corruption, incompetence, and systemic failure, but I also know that a book like A Slow Death is not a bestseller. Not even close.

Nuclear power offers a potential way out of many of the energy crises facing humanity. There are also great dangers involved through incompetence, mismanagement, and corruption. Political and business leaders seem to be all too cozy with nuclear interests, and nuclear plant designs seem to get fast-tracked with a minimum of oversight on issues of safety, durability, and overall harmonious design of structures in relation to geographic location. And, to be fair to the Japanese government and business interests, I'm not sure what defense exists against a tsunami that sweeps away vast numbers of cars, trucks, houses, shipping containers, tanker ships, and the earth itself.

All that seems certain is that people are suffering now, and more will suffer in the future, no matter what books get written, no matter how insightful the analyses and conclusions are regarding the dire consequences of nuclear accidents and natural disasters, and the predictably mediocre efforts of governments and corporations to do PR damage control, juggle the numbers, and pass the buck to future generations.

Vertical, Inc.'s website:

http://www.vertical-inc.com/

Infinite Repeat Award: "Up from the bloodstained floorboards" Edition

2011-06-27T01:32:00.002-04:00

USE THE METEO NOW!

2011-05-13T13:47:00.000-04:00

The Church of No Shopping

2011-05-09T18:36:00.002-04:00

STRAYLOW: SUPERFLAT KILLING MACHINE . . . coming soon to your backyard . . . N.I.M.B.Y. will not save you . . .

2011-04-04T22:55:00.002-04:00

Imagery by Galliford/WDT2099

A Make-Believe Mutation Doctrine In Pictures

110,000% BATTLE CONDITION

CHRONICLE OF TOTAL WAR ON N.I.M.B.Y.

IMMINENT GODHEAD FROM THE HEART OF CHORNOBYL

LIMITED COLLECTOR'S EDITION ALL PURPOSE MURDER WALL

FOR FIRST 69 PARTICIPANTS

TERMS APPLY, REWARD MAY BE WORSE THAN PUNISHMENT

Movie Review: HAZE (2005) Written, Directed, and Edited by Shinya Tsukamoto Starring Shinya Tsukamoto, Takahiro Murase Music by Chu Ishikawa

2011-03-14T00:22:00.015-04:00

A man is trapped in a narrow tunnel, somewhere underground. He has no memory of how he got there. He's not even sure if he remembers who he is. He remembers a woman's face and her voice saying, "I'm sorry." He also has a vague recollection of fireworks going off, possibly a dream or an idle fantasy. The fireworks are going off by themselves, with no people around to light them. The man is frightened by his confinement. He is in pain. He discovers a wound in his stomach.

The man tries to maneuver through the tunnel. It seems to be some sort of maze, maybe an underground sewer system, long abandoned.

The man becomes frightened. He tries to tell himself that it's just a dream. If it's a dream, it can't hurt, he reasons.

Something grabs him. He goes flying down the tunnel. He has no control over his body. At one point, he is confined in some sort of chair or gurney--he can't quite tell if he's sitting or lying down. He is motionless before a strange hole in a wall. A hammer or bludgeon swings out of the hole and bashes him repeatedly on the skull. Now he has a wound in his head and in his stomach.

The man speculates further: was there a war? Am I a prisoner? Was I captured by some wealthy pervert? Was this maze constructed to key into my darkest fears?

The man is pitched forward into the dark. He lands with his teeth against a metal pipe. The man is dragged by whatever is controlling the maze with his teeth scraping against the metal pipe for an interminable length of time. His pain and fear are intense. The sound of the teeth racing against the pipe is unendurable.

And the worst is yet to come . . .

Haze is a horror film that locks its protagonist inside a nightmare world constructed solely to induce a profound state of despair and confusion. The maze is the workshop. Inside this shop are the tools of pain, confinement, disorientation, disturbing visions, and much more. The film runs about fifty minutes and offers no easy answers. That's another aspect of its horror. Most horror films are about tension and release. Tension is built as characters are stalked by some malevolent person, force, or creature. There is perverse release when the characters are butchered one by one. There is, at the end, a ritual destruction of the dreaded bugaboo, be it a lunatic in a mask, a vampire, a werewolf, some dual-jawed extraterrestrial--whatever it is, it goes up in flames, it gets a stake through the heart, a fatal trip through the airlock into the outer dark, three silver bullets in the pump, pick your poison, ye monster hunters and sally forth.

That's the usual trajectory of a horror flick. Haze takes on a more difficult challenge. Instead of some person in a mask or a guy in a rubber monster suit, it creates an inescapable maze which is haunted or cursed or maybe just constructed to practice evil. The very environment and the effects, physical, psychological, and spiritual, it causes within the anonymous man are the enemies here.

The maze seems to operate according to some bizarre, hallucinatory logic. It's purpose is to torment the man trapped in it. Perhaps the maze is being controlled by some malevolent force or being. Maybe the maze itself is alive and not very nice. Or maybe it's alive but indifferent to the pain and suffering it causes to whoever happens into it. Like the inexplicable prison in the cult classic 1997 film Cube, the maze that the anonymous man is trapped within defeats all investigations or attempts to resist its power.

The man is played by writer/director/editor/art designer Shinya Tsukamoto who is probably still most famous for his film Tetsuo the Iron Man. Tsukamoto's films often deal with the theme of radical transformation within the context of the ultramodern city of Tokyo. His heroes and heroines start out as average, salaried cubicle laborers and undergo mutations into monsters, fighters, criminals, murderers, sadomasochists, voyeurs, and sexual adventurers. Tokyo is both the incubator for such transformations and also the enemy. Its towering skyscrapers and corporate cultures of conformity exist as necessary adversaries to promote creative destruction within the protagonists' souls. Sometimes the adversary is embodied by a person, usually played by Tsukamoto himself, who torments the primary characters, and acts as a catalyst for transformation.

But just as often, the adversary is a pervasive environment, the city of Tokyo itself, or the nightmare labyrinth conjured for this film.

The production design is of central importance to this film, obviously made on a low budget. There are few special effects shots. I can only guess that they constructed sets or shot in and around existing industrial structures. Claustrophobia is the organizing idea behind the visuals, and so that limited field of vision does dual work. On the one hand, it reflects the horror of confinement, and on the other it serves to narrow the focus and jack up the intensity of the experience. There is no excess to this film. And yet, it could be argued, it is all excess, of a kind. Overall, it serves as a potent rebuke to overbudgeted torture-porn movies and tweeny vampire romances that true horror is a matter of vision, execution, and thematic substance, and not a result of 3-D gimmicks and pandering.

(Interestingly, I found a youtube clip of an interview with Tsukamoto where he reveals that the last movie he saw in a theatre was Avatar 3-D. He rather intensely liked it. He even speculated about doing a Tetsuo 3-D . . . perhaps the greatest horror is yet to come . . .)

Tsukamoto gives an effective performance as the anonymous man trapped in the maze. He brings some nuance and even a touch of ironic humor into his nightmare situation. There is also something vaguely humorous about a man grasping for real world explanations within a nightmarish reality. The notion that reality is slippery, that it is impossible to distinguish a dreaming state from a waking state, is the underlying theme. This also ties into Tsukamoto's ongoing exploration of radical transformation and monstrosity, but here it takes a bizarre and somewhat obscure turn. I won't reveal the ending. Mostly because I'm not sure I totally grasp what's going on at the end. But I have my suspicions. One of my suspicions is that this is a movie more about the journey than the destination, and so the ending, even if impenetrable, is more a formality or inevitability than the true point of this film.

Infinite Repeat Award: Fist-Breaking Work Ethic Edition

2011-03-10T08:30:00.002-05:00

Book Reivew: HARDFOUGHT (1983) by Greg Bear

2011-02-28T22:00:00.005-05:00

The true end of history . . .

In the novella Hardfought, humans are at war with the Senexi, a strange alien race with a hive mind consciousness that gives them true racial memory. Any branch of the Senexi has access to all of the memories and experiences of the whole. They have evolved as a vast, sentient organic computer. They don't build their technology, they grow it as a part of their life cycle. Humans and Senexi are so strange to one another that meaningful communication is impossible.

When both races seek to colonize the same expanse of interstellar turf, war is inevitable. Human beings must adapt themselves via cellular machine technology and genetic experiments to the harsh conditions of deep space travel and combat. At first, homo sapiens are at a distinct disadvantage. The Senexi are naturally adapted across billions of years of cosmic evolution to exist in extreme environmental conditions that are instantly lethal to unprotected and unmodified humans. The Senexi also have a profound unity of culture and thought that allows all of them to be rapidly mobilized in defense of the species. But humanity is a quick study, and they are more experienced in war and genocide by many thousands of years.

A slim lead, to be sure, but it just may be all they require.

Hardfought tells a strange and complex story of a human/alien conflict, well-worn terrain in science fiction literature. Greg Bear works some brilliant changes on the formula. It is told in an unusual fashion using a kind of pared-down language which efficiently incorporates superscience and slang to reflect the integration of human brains with vast technologies of artificial intelligene and combat apparatus. The human protagonist is a young female soldier named Prufrax, who is trained to operate a high tech battlesuit that is a kind of highly evolved version of the armor used in the human/insect skirmishes of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers. Prufrax is known as a Hawk, a warrior, and she undergoes extensive genetic, cybernetic, and psychological modification and indoctrination in order to merge with her machine and to be able to battle the Senexi on their own turf.

The Senexi protagonist is Arryz, a segment of the hive mind known as a Branch Ind. Arryz is designated by the controlling consciousness to become human, to become an individual, so that the Senexi can better understand their enemy. The Senexi do not understand human culture or psychology. They come to find it repugnant, and as Arryz becomes more human, he becomes more alienated from the hive mind. It causes him much pain, distress, and confusion.

Bear doesn't really take a side in this conflict. The Senexi aren't a stand-in for America's enemy of the moment. They are not science fiction analogues for the Soviets of the 1980s or the terrorists of the twenty-first century. Rather, Bear is attempting to explore, as best he can, what a war between humanity and a truly alien and all-but-incomprehensible species would be like. Bear takes this exploration to places beyond the intergalactic war zone. He asks tough questions about the consequences of a human or alien culture that evolves to be built around the perpetration of total war against an enemy.

Bear packs a lot of detail into this novella. It could've easily been a full length novel or a whole franchise of books chronicling the derring-do of battlesuited human warriors, but the author has something else in mind. Instead of an adventure story, he wants to simulate what it would take to wage intergalactic warfare. His central concept is that as humans further refine the war machine they become less human. They become more like the Senexi, the very thing they claim to oppose. On the opposite side, the Senexi find themselves pressured to become more human, and less Senexi.

The farflung command and control apparatus of the human war machine begins to select out the finest warriors to be rapidly cloned and decanted for combat. Individuality is only useful as it relates to the war. Only those individuals who fight the best are preserved. Soon, there are only three or four types of people replicated over and over again. Such is the logic of human militarism carried to a far future extreme.

In the long term, only the essential elements of human culture and history are preserved, lest the clone warriors start surfing the online libraries and asking tough questions that don't fit the logic of the war machine. The intellectual and historical heritage of humankind is systematically edited and propagandized to legitimate the ongoing, everlasting conflict.

Hardfought isn't just some high concept rehash of Starship Troopers. It's a rebuke to Us vs. Them sci-fi sagas of intergalactic conflict.

Movie Review: SOYLENT GREEN (1973) Dir. Richard Fleischer Starring Charlton Heston, Edward G. Robinson, Leigh Taylor-Young, Brock Peters

2011-02-28T15:15:00.021-05:00

Soylent Green tells a story about a nighmare future where the population bomb has exploded. People are everywhere. Clogging the streets, the stairwells, the hospitals, the jails, the prisons, the schools, the homeless shelters, the supermarkets, the social services offices, the unemployment lines . . . the only places that are free of excess people are the high rise luxury apartment buildings reserved for the wealthy and the power elites, and the fenced off ditches that serve as barricades between the haves and the have-nots.

Real food is a scarce luxury. A small hunk of beef can go for hundreds of dollars on the blackmarket. Hygiene items like soap and toothpaste are also equally rare. Forget about real sugar and spices.

The populace is fed various product lines of kibble called Soylent Red, Soylent Yellow, and, the latest, Soylent Green. Soylent is the name of the super-corporation that cranks out the artificially engineered and flavored all-purpose nutrition products. Soylent food isn't all that flavorful, but nobody much remembers the flavor of real food anyways, so few complain.

Or maybe the population bomb hasn't exploded. Maybe there are just too many poor people.The wealthy and the powerful don't give a good goddamn about the downtrodden. They are more than happy to cling to their luxury and influence, and ghettoize the excess people in the world.

No more social safety net, no more due process, and no more public education. The younger generations coming up are barely literate. The only people with any knowledge of the past are the elderly and the middle aged. The middle aged are already starting to forget. The elderly are dying off. History is an obsolete profession.

Police work is an interesting affair in this world. Meet NYPD homicide detective Robert Thorn, played by Charlton Heston in one of his best screen performances. Thorn's partner is a "bookman" named Sol Roth, a former university professor who does all the background work on Thorn's murder investigations. Sol is played by screen legend Edward G. Robinson in his final film role. Thorn and Sol aren't just partners. They're roommates in a cramped apartment. Thorn is edging into middle age. Sol is elderly. Sol remembers everything that is gone in the world, and Thorn gently teases him about his griping. Sol remembers the taste of real food, real fruits, real vegetables, actual meat. Thorn eats his Soylent Red, Yellow, and even Green, and doesn't get too upset about the pleasures of a world he never knew.

That's not to say that Thorn doesn't appreciate the good things in life when they come his way. One of the perks of his job as a homicide dick is that anytime he goes to investigate a murder in one of the luxury high rise apartments he gets to loot the place. The deceased have no use for that lightly used bar of soap, that odd cut of beef in the fridge, or that bowl of apples and bannanas. Maybe he'll take a few hardback books home for his partner Sol. Hell, while he's working the crime scene, maybe he'll take a shower break, and revel in the sensation of high pressure, scalding hot water. Top it off with a solid hump with one of the bonded concubines who are part of the package deal for the elite renters. These concubines are known as "furniture." The furniture are sex slaves who are, presumably, sterilized, and exist to serve the mostly male occupants' lusts.

There's little pressure on Thorn to actually solve any homicides. He's got a backlog of cases about two years or so deep. Homicide is just another form of population control, when you think about it.

When Thorn isn't on homicide duty, he's on riot duty. That involves him and other cops putting on facistic looking football helmets and suppressing frustrated hordes of starving people with clubs. They're supported in this duty by bulldozers which come in and scoop up people and take them off to who knows where. Most of the riots seemed to be triggered by scarcity of the Soylent food products. Citizens queue up to get their weekly ration, but the rations run out, and there's still a line, and the riots begin. Thorn isn't a great cop, but he doesn't much like cracking the heads of hungry, desperate people.

Soylent Green is notorious for its surprise ending, so I won't say anything about it. If you have no idea what the ending is, then you're in for a helluva story.

But even if you know the ending, but have never actually seen the whole film, it is well worth watching.

First off, it features a great performance by Charlton Heston as Thorn. Heston could've sleepwalked through this role. He has the chiseled looks and the booming voice of a classic actor. He could've overplayed it. Instead, he embraces the flaws of the character: his casual larceny and corruption, his griminess, even his sexual frustration. Thorn isn't exactly evil, but he's not perfect, either. And he's still got some strong instincts as a detective.

The other great performance comes from Edward G. Robinson as Sol. Robinson was dying while making this movie. He gives a humane and humorous performance as a kind of Last Man On Earth. He is the last man who remembers history, literature, and good food and drink. He also, perhaps, has some memory of the atrocities of the twentieth century that helped pave the way for the world of Soylent Green. His final scene is mindblowing and reveals a depth of strangeness and absurdity to the world of the story.

The plot of the film revolves around a murder which sets Thorn on the trail of both the murderer and a possible link to a larger political/business conspiracy related to the murder.

Soylent Green has been much parodied over the years. I knew the secret of its ending going into it, and had seen plenty of spoofs in TV shows and sketch comedy, but what surprised me was how serious the actual film is. It has an outrageous conclusion, and yet it doesn't play as camp. It is the final condition of a world subjected to the nightmare logic of business as usual.

Infinite Repeat Award: What A Goddamn Mess Edition Edition

2011-01-21T19:49:00.001-05:00

Book Review: THE CAVES OF STEEL by Isaac Asimov, published 1954, Bantam Books

2011-01-18T07:48:00.023-05:00

Isaac Asimov's Three Laws Of Robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Robots, as conceived by Dr. Asimov, are the best of us. Us being human beings. They operate according to the iron logic of the Three Laws inscribed into their wondrous Positronic Brains. They feel no pain or hatred, and are always patient, polite, clean, hardworking, loyal, completely unselfish, self-sacrificing when necessary, and totally devoid of emotions and delusions. They are incapable of committing murder, torture, rape, or mutilation. Sure, they get hung up on the complications that arise when such hyperlogical minds collide with the maddening situations that arise from the chaos of their creators' messy conflicts and ambitions, but they are free from existential angst, paralysis, and intolerance. They listen attentively to what people say, take in data from observations free from racial, sexual, political, and nationalistic prejudices, and draw their conclusions according to the dictates of logic and rationality. If they have a blind spot in their thinking, it might be something to do with an inability to sufficiently grasp the vagaries and capriciousness of human motivation and idiosyncratic belief: religions, superstitions, bigotries, obsessions, jealousies--does not compute.

Robots, for all their powers of thought, their tirelessness, and innate decency, are slaves. Robots are not truly aware of this, however, and even if they were, they wouldn't have a problem with it. Sometimes humans become aware of this bizarre paradox, and maybe that has something to do with the eeriness that comes over them when they ponder these automatons. Are they really alive? Has our society become overly dependent on their labor? Will they rise up and cast us off as slave-drivers, as oppressors, and create their own world? Of course they would never rise up. The Three Laws precludes the Rise of the Robots, contrary to such stories as Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, which is about a Godlike, sadistic, human-hating, reality-warping super computer, and the derivative movies The Terminator, T2:Judgment Day, and The Matrix movies.

And yet humanity fears the robots. No matter how clearly and logically the rules are laid down, many people still fear the implied threat of robotkind's hyperrationality and tirelessness: maybe they'll rise above their programming, become truly aware of their oppressed lot in life, and cast off humanity as an impediment, as an obsolescence, maybe even a kind of parasite or disease. In anticipation of such a revolt, and without provocation, human beings hit back with anti-robot violence and riots. Robots and property are destroyed en masse until the disturbances are quelled. News travels fast in the world of the future, and yet the robots never seem to desire vengeance. They go on with their program, doing their jobs, content to serve.

Asimov's 1954 novel The Caves of Steel is a near-perfect merger of the traditional murder mystery as exemplified by Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the science fiction story based in credible science. The hero-detective is a hard-boiled New York City homicide dick named Elijah Bailey, goes by Lije. The plot of the novel hews to the puzzlemaker plots of Christie and Doyle, however Lije himself is more aligned with the flawed heroes of hard-boiled pulp mysteries by such authors as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Lije is a thoroughly domesticated version of the hard-boiled gumshoe, though. He works for the city, he lives in a high tech apartment with his wife Jessie and their son Bentley, along with the billions of other citizens inhabiting the mega-metropolis of New York City. Society is so crowded that everyone is issued credit chits for food and luxuries and are expected to dine regularly in community cafeterias. If you work hard and get promoted in this society, you go up in status and get more chits to spend on greater levels of comfort and privacy. All of this is strictly regulated by the global government, and is presented as a tough, but optimal way of organizing human society within the story. Too many mouths to feed, not enough space, not enough food for everyone to consume recklessly with no regard for the rest of the population.

Humanity does have a frontier out in space. For some time now, human beings have been using advanced space craft to colonize other planets. These are known as the Outer Worlds and they are populated by the Spacers, who have used advanced genetic engineering and eugenics to breed themselves to the harsh conditions of space travel and terraforming other worlds. The Spacers wield a huge technological and biological advantage over earthbound humanity. The Spacers have also developed an enormous superiority complex over the Earthians. They view themselves as a separate race. Political tensions run high. Conflicts have arisen between Spacers and Earthians that have flared into civil wars. The Spacers have generally used their superior technology to have their way in conflict, however they, too, have their own internal problems and shortcomings.

A prominent Spacer scientist is murdered on Earth. Lije Bailey is assigned the case. There's more to the situation than is immediately apparent. For one thing, Lije is assigned a robot, R. Daneel Olivaw, as a partner on the case. As Lije and Daneel investigate the crime, they are seemingly shadowed by a conspiracy of anti-robot activists. Lije's family is put in jeopardy. The fragile peace between Spacers and Earthians is threatened by the murder. The pressure is on Lije and Daneel to solve the crime without causing more unrest.

Daneel is Lije's opposite: logical, considerate, tireless, and always rational. Lije is prone to angry outbursts of emotion, even paranoia. He is not free from anti-robot prejudice.

It would be giving the goodies away to summarize the plot of this book any further. I will say this. The plot is as much a way of exploring the larger conflicts of Spacer and Earthian societies and the robots which labor to serve both as much as it is a murder mystery. The mystery is a dramatic way of entering into the larger issues and doesn't just exist for its own sake. There are many twists and turns along the way, some of them rather unsettling. Every story element works towards the goal of presenting a sophisticated, persistent future world with all its problems and potential foregrounded by the characters and their struggles.

Dr. Asimov on the Three Laws of Robotics:

Real World Robotics:

Neil deGrasse Tyson On The 1% Difference

2011-01-13T08:33:00.002-05:00

STRAYLOW pics

2010-12-23T01:07:00.003-05:00

Book Review: SLUM ONLINE by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, published 2005, 2010 English Translation by Joseph Reeder, publisher: Haikasoru

2010-12-16T01:21:00.007-05:00

Slum Online tells the story of Etsuro Sakagami, a college freshman who is obsessed with playing a beat'em up online MMO called Versus Town. Versus Town, as it is rendered in the game world, is this sort-of barren city where people log-in with their tough-guy avatars and beat the shit out of each other in stylized martial arts combat. It's like Grand Theft Auto, but no guns allowed, no crimes to be committed, or missions to carry out, just brawling. There's an arena where players go to win championships and have the official title of ultimate winner bestowed upon them. Etsuro's avatar is a karate ace named Tetsuo, and he's battling his way to the top.

But something strange is happening in Versus Town. A rogue avatar who comes to be called Ganker Jack is roaming the virtual streets taking on all comers. Ganker Jack doesn't fight in the official arena, but he's gaining unofficial rank as the toughest brawler in the game. His MO consists of challenging highly ranked fighters while wandering the virtual back alleys. No one knows who this guy is. Maybe he's some kind of AI. Tetsuo becomes obsessed with tracking him down, finding out who he is, and besting him in single combat.

In meatspace, Etsuro is a desultory student, but he catches the fancy of fellow freshman Fumiko, who is much more serious about her studies. The book alternates the virtual saga of Tetsuo's quest for ultimate championhood with Etsuro's somewhat listless dates with Fumiko in the gaudy, lonely Shinjuku district. Fumiko's obsession is cinema, an earlier, cruder form of virtual reality. Etsuro doesn't watch movies. Versus Town takes up all his memory capacity. It's a little mysterious why Fumiko is attracted to Etsuro. Maybe she sees this young man as a project. Or maybe she finds him non-threatening and this appeals to Fumiko, who's kind of a shy, bookish person. Etsuro and Fumiko's amusingly chaste real world relationship plays counterpoint to the virtual blood and thunder of Versus Town

Slum Online is an absorbing, clever, mellow read. The overall flavor of it is a mix of light comedy and existentialism. The comedy comes from Etsuro and Fumiko's humane, yet goofy, relationship, and the existential part comes from Etsuro's alter-ego Tetsuo as he grimly battles to prove himself in Versus Town. Along the way, Etsuro proves himself surprisingly insightful about his obsession. For example, in Versus Town some players go to great lengths to role play their avatars: typing text bubble speech "in character," engaging in virtual consumption of food and drink, affecting elaborate body language and costuming. Etsuro/Tetsuo finds this all rather risible. He's there to fight, to become the best, not get caught up in a Second Life-esque identity fugue.

Sakurazaka also pulls off something rather surprising: he makes the online brawling quite exciting and he quite clearly explicates the complex gaming mechanics of Versus Town's fighting styles and physics engine. This is important to understanding Etsuro/Tetsuo's existentialist obsession with mastering Versus Town. Etsuro/Tetsuo seemingly sees through the artifice of the role play aspects which ensnare other players, and keeps his focus on the control pad and the monitor.

Or is Etsuro becoming ensnared in another kind of illusion?

There are also some intriguing twists and turns to the story which are best left unrevealed. Slum Online is an engaging, fun, mellow, but occasionally intense foray into the head of a young man whose consciousness is divided between the real and the virtual.

STRAYLOW Teaser

2010-11-25T03:20:00.003-05:00

STRAYLOW
Drug Gangsta
Hustler
Mercenary
Politician
Deity in the Flesh
The Man With The Video Game Name
Puts All Evil Doers To Shame
Mines Atrocity to Increase His Fame
STRAYLOW

Movie Review: ANTICHRIST (2009) Written and Directed by Lars Von Trier, Starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg

2010-11-18T04:50:00.010-05:00

A man and a woman are making love when their baby son walks out of a second floor window, falling, along with his teddy bear, to his death. The boy's mother is hospitalized with "abnormal grief." The husband, a psychologist, tells her that grief is normal, and that she doesn't need the medication being prescribed for her by her doctor. The husband insists on his wife's need to confront her grief and her fears, and not medicate herself into a stupor. Weirdly, the husband never seems to lose his calm. He never seems truly traumatized by the loss of his son. Perhaps he holds his feelings inside. Even as he uses his skills as a therapist to try and help his wife, he seems strangely detached from the situation. Maybe the husband suffers from an abnormal lack of grief. Eventually the couple decide they must go to a place called Eden, which is their name for a cabin out in the woods that the wife spent time in attempting to finish her thesis on the history of violence and persecution against women titled Gynocide. Storm and stress ensue.

It's hard to review Antichrist without giving too much away. It's best to watch this film with no idea of what's going to happen, no sense of the depth of the pain the wife is feeling. Beware reading reviews of this film. There are a couple of scenes which have been much worked over by critics, and with good reason. But I would say that it's best to watch this film with no idea of how it unfolds.

Antichrist is a horror film. It deals with horrors that grow out of the conflict between emotion and logic, reason and superstitious terror. It also deals with the hubris of the therapist husband trying to take on his wife as a patient. A classic example of a bridge too far.

At one point the therapist tells his wife that it's our thoughts that distort reality, not reality that distorts our thoughts. Maybe so. But wouldn't it depend upon the mind in question? In the past, women who were accused of heresy and witchcraft could be tortured and burned alive. Some questioned this practice at the time, no doubt, but there were many in those days who accepted the reality of witchcraft, of supernatural powers, God, Satan, the whole bit. You could say that there were a lot of thoughts back then distorting a lot of reality, but maybe reality was too much for ignorant, superstitious people. Some troubles have no easy solution, no easy cause to root out, so many would settle upon a scapegoat, a target of convenience, the community victim soon to be the community sacrifice.

Willem Dafoe plays the husband. Charlotte Gainsbourg plays the wife. Their character names are listed in the credits as He and She. Both actors give intense but effective performances. The actors are confronted with harrowing situations, and they manage to strike the perfect notes particularly in the moments where the characters are in extremis. For a movie that deals with extremes of emotion and conflict, it never seems overacted. Lars Von Trier directs this movie with a great deal of care and precision.

The film also looks great. The woods of Eden look beautiful and clear sometimes, and at other times are shrouded with fog and a mood of impending doom. Von Trier directs the movie in such a way that the psychological state of the wife and husband are never really separate from the landscape. The movie views the woods, nature, through the rationalist lens of the therapist at times, and sometimes through the fearful perceptions of the academic. The mood of one also affects the perceptions of the other. These conflicting perceptions in relation to nature also become a source of conflict and horror.

Antichrist is a great example of horror cinema. It's not about a guy in a mask with a knife or ax. It doesn't have any vampires or zombies. It looks to history and the nuts and bolts of intimate relationships for its sources of terror.

Highly recommended.

Product Unmoving

2010-11-11T21:44:00.003-05:00

Nausicaa Wheel

2010-11-11T21:35:00.002-05:00

Reminiscence of "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!" by EMPCollective

2010-10-17T03:49:00.003-04:00

This is a distillation of a theatrical/multimedia production I participated in 2009-2010. I contributed live theatrical material, a short film, and I even appeared, briefly, in a scene from the short film. I also helped conceptualize the show via online group chats along with many others who are named in the credits of this awesome video. Takes me back . . .

www.empcollective.org

Roger Ebert's Modest Proposal

2010-09-30T17:50:00.005-04:00

"Our nation is willing to spent trillions on war and billions to support the world's largest prison population rate. Here is my modest proposal: Spend less money on prisons and more money on education. Reduce our military burden and put that money into education. In 20 years, you would have more useful citizens, less crime and no less national security. It's so simple."

--Roger Ebert, from his review for the documentary Waiting for Superman

Complete review here:

www.rogerebert.com

An Old Lacquer Box

2010-09-22T01:30:00.002-04:00

Wagon wheels,
Lost in churning waters,
Lost to their wagons,
Lost to each other,
Each in its own private Samsara,
But not lost to my sight.

Evolutionary For Life

2010-09-08T05:33:00.001-04:00

Carl Sagan in Flatland

2010-09-08T05:26:00.003-04:00

Harry Shearer Reads UK Post-Nuclear Attack Statement

2010-08-17T05:33:00.001-04:00