Friday, August 27, 2010
The Brothers Pete
Time is a concept most abstract here in Gallowmere. From the sparseness of my posts lately and unfulfilled deadlines, it's pretty obvious. And to let you in on a secret, my books don't have timestamps, they are somewhere between anachronistic to just simply "achronistic". I avoid pop culture jokes, or commenting on events from present day in them. Though I may have elements which parallel certain things but take them to new ridiculous planes. But I often throw in objects and elements from time periods a little far back, and also make up technologies, cultural, and political customs which could be considered futuristic.
In my life, I am like Billy Pilgrim from Slaughterhouse Five; I'm unstuck in time. And right now I'm back somewhere in the mid-90s. A child approaching the double digits, a Canadian living in America, already weird, so feel like a space alien. I'm home from school, and what's this I see on TV? Two brothers with the same name planting landmines on people's lawns and disguising themselves as lawn inspectors to con people into getting them to remove the mines from their lawn so that the little brother could buy a jetpack. A superhero who might just be a madman who lives a a port-o-john, helping the boy out with a paper route and throwing the paper's so hard they almost go through people's chests. The same superhero later becoming a bowler using a ball that has a hamster in it that he communicates with telepathically. A crossing guard who can make people physically incapable of moving forward by holding up his sign. This is all in one episode The Adventures of Pete and Pete. It instantly becomes one of my favourite shows.
It's about two redheaded brothers named Pete Wrigley living in the fictional town of Wellsville in "The Sideburn State". Big Pete is a slightly dorky teenager who deals with sinister teachers such as a psychotic wood shop teacher who attaches different parts to his prosthetic hand (he lost the real one in an accident), and with the typical problems of growing up, figuring out if he wants to date his best friend Ellen, and dealing with his nemesis Endless Mike, a bully who has been in high school forever. Little Pete is who makes the show for me. He's a weirdo and a rebel who wears flannel hats, clothes too big for him, and has a different way of looking at things. He uses his own cuss words like "Blow hole" and constantly tells people to bite his neck hair. He often goes on surreal adventures, such as beating up the ocean, travelling back in time by crossing states during daylight savings hours, and befriending the elusive man who inspects underwear before packaging them.
Their father is pretty much Homer Simpson. He's fat, bald, mediocre at everything, and can be idiotic though well meaning. Their mother is a quirky character who has a steel plate in her head which is featured as a character on the show and is able to receive radio transmissions from around the world.
It has a very quirky and surreal sense of humour which I don't normally see in children's shows, hell, on TV altogether. Children's shows tend to be loud and silly, and deal with asshole kids who are unpopular but who would sell out their friends for any chance they could to be popular. The Adventures of Pete and Pete has a sense of humour sort of like what can be found in Get A Life (which I might review later) or The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, though maybe not as outrageous. What makes it work was that though it is so ridiculous, it's played straight. As outrageous as the things are that happen, and as bizarre as the characters are, nobody ever seems to be winking at the screen, or being outwardly jocular in tone. It also had a fairly decent production value. It has a feel which is organic, and kind of cinematic. That's to say, it doesn't seem like it was just shot on a sound stage like the children's shows which will show in the 2000s like Hannah Montana and iCarly. And it has some interesting stylistic choices, especially episodes like "Tool and Die", "Halloweenies", and "Pinned!" (an episode where people actually get murdered, and murdered in ridiculous ways).
While I personally have no heart, the show has some heart too it. Not at all saccharine, but its way of showing the close but sometimes wavering bond between the Petes who are year apart in age is very compelling. They're best friends, but Big Pete often has to deal with teenage bullshit and Little Pete has to deal with the oppression of being a kid. They also often give serious dimension to people you'd never expect, like the weird superhero, a crossing guard who never goes home, and the solitary Ice Cream truck driver whose head is a giant scoop of ice cream.
The musical choices are also pretty interesting. It doesn't go for music which was popular for the time, and it doesn't go for having the hippest playlist. The music mostly matches the quirkiness of the show. Such as the instrumentals of music from Stephen Merritt. The theme song "Hey Sandy" being played by grunge band Polaris on the Wrigley's lawn perfectly encapsulates the '90s. The show itself is the '90s; fuzzy, sophisticated but not high tech, slightly innocent but a lot of strange things under the surface.
Not too many people I know even know of this show. I don't think it ever came on in Canada, but season 1 and 2 are on DVD. Paramount put season 3 on hold, but I have ehrm... taped versions of that one.
I give this show '95/'90s
See everyone in hell!
posted at 12:59 PM | Permanent Link
Thursday, August 05, 2010
Love Exposure
Sion Sono is quickly becoming one of my favourite directors. His movies blend the subtle sickness and sad undertones of Todd Solondz's Happiness, and the over-the-top violence, sexual kinkiness, surrealism, and barmy horror of Takashi Miike's films of the late 90s and early noughts, you know, before he decided to become a jobber. The first movie of his I saw, Suicide Circle, got under my skin before I could realize it. And when I watched Strange Circus, I had to get back to it a year after watching the first 10 minutes of it because it had already gotten under my skin. Though of course, when I did watch it, it went in a completely different direction than I had imagined... then a million different more after that. That was the film where I started to feel the love. I've gone on to watch as many movies of his as I can find.
Two weeks ago, I sat down to watch one of his latest releases, Love Exposure, and my mind's still smoking and wobbling around like hot rubber. This movie is a four hour long romance/black comedy/action/coming-of-age/religious satire, not particularly in that order, though at times, all of these things at once.
Love Exposure is novelistic in scale with its wide and wild plot which really allows the story to breathe. Its protagonist Yu Tsunoda is a young man whose mother dies only after telling him that the girl he should fall in love with should have the traits of virgin Mary. After becoming a widower, his father Tetsu, a devout catholic, becomes a priest. He is dedicated to his job, and adheres to his duties until a troubled woman literally barges into his life. They have a love affair in a house they rent far away from the church. The relationship goes to shit quicker than relationships usually do, and it sends Tetsu off the rails. His sermons become harsh and accusatory, and he squeezes confessions out of his son. Yu eventually commits transgressions which become increasingly more sinful to win his father's attention. This eventually leads him to getting caught up with a band of troublemakers who get into fights and shoplift. From there, it leads to him getting upskirt photos of girls, flipping and rolling around like a ninja and taking snapshots of their panties.
His father reacts extremely negatively to this, causing Yu to take even more pictures. His pastime eventually leads to him making a bet with one of his friends to see who can take the best upskirt photo. He loses, and has to dress up as a woman and kiss a girl while speaking in an effeminate voice. So dressed up as a woman named Ms. Scorpion, he sees a girl about to be attacked by a gang of thugs. He intervenes, kisses her, sees traits of Virgin Mary in her, and gets his first erection. The girl is Yoko, and it later turns out that this girl is the step daughter of Koike, the woman who had an affair with his father. To complicate things, his father falls back in love with Koike after she chases him down and knocks his car into a lake. Yoko is in love with the woman Yu was dressed up as, but has no interest in Yu himself. Complicating things even further is a creepy girl named Saori who has a profoundly fucked up past. She has been keeping a close eye on Yu, and eventually wedges herself into the relationship, saying that she is actually Ms. Scorpion. This is only the first hour and a half of the movie, and from this point on, it only gets weirder...
Having spoiled enough, I will just say that it leads to a genre hopping journey which involves a sinister cult, shady porn dealers, sex, seppuku, blood baths, and a whole lot more.
I thoroughly enjoyed this movie, and it has easily done for me what Taxidermia, Ex-Drummer, and Synecdoche, New York did for me last year in being the most wild and refreshing movies which pulled my intestines out of my navel and smacked me with them. The plot is weird, original, sprawling and unpredictable. The acting is over-the-top. The humour is absurd beyond belief, yet it has real heart (and various other body parts) to it. It had a decent soundtrack. I will always hear the second movement of Beethoven's seventh symphony anytime I think of this movie. The J-Pop wasn't too bad either. I think a couple songs did annoy me.
As for the cinematography, it was decently shot. There weren't any awe-inspiring shots, however, and I'm not too wild about it being shot digitally, and everything does look a little bright and colourful, but it doesn't really contradict the movie's tone. Also, a part involving a penis amputation sort of had its impact dampened by the fact that the penis was blurred out. I understand it's a legal issue as to why genitals both male and female can't be shown in their films, but it's a little disconcerting. And I find the law stupid.
If it's necessary for the theme, or subject matter, parts shouldn't be blurred out for the sake of a stupid law. Not that I personally need or desire to see full frontal nudity in every movie I see. Heaven knows I felt pretty sick after seeing Shortbus, but that might have to do with the movie being total trash.
I'm doing it... I'm going off topic big time. But anyway, Love Exposure: Brilliant movie. I like movies which are a little messy and loose, and as long as they're not too much so. That's what this movie was, and that's why I found it to be perfect.
10/10
See everyone in hell!
posted at 11:08 PM | Permanent Link
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Life During War Time
Any time that I watch Todd Solondz's Happiness, after sewing up my split sides, I have a knot of anger and contempt for humanity in the back of my mind which I can never easily shake. I like that knot, and I love the movie. The sequel Life During Wartime has left me even angrier than Happiness, but I can't say it's a good anger. It's anger from annoyance.
I have a problem with sequels. The only sequels that I can think of that I really enjoyed and thought were just as good or better than their predecessors are Toy Story 2 & 3, Batman Returns, Terminator 2, and Evil Dead 2. Most sequels tend to take what was good about the first film and run them into the ground. Then there are the ones which take what was terrible about their precursors and make them even worse, like The Dark Knight (there goes my credibility with the people who masturbate to comic books). Life During Wartime falls into the category of turning gold into manure. Maybe manure is too strong of a word, it turned gold into white bread. Nothing happens in it. It is totally inconsequential.
Life During Wartime was filmed and most likely takes place eleven years after Happiness. It follows the three sisters from its precursor as well as the men in their lives. But for some reason, Todd Solondz recast everybody with different actors. I have no idea why. Part of what made Happiness so memorable besides the shocking content and ink black humour was its performances. Philip Seymour Hoffman as Allen, a pervert who gets off by making obscene phone calls, Dylan Baker as Bill, a pedophile father, Lara Flynn Boyle as Helen, an emotionally stunted author who longs for real suffering (reminds me of somebody), Cynthia Stevenson as Bill's naive housewife Trish, and Jane Adams as Joy, an aimless and hopeless idealist in her early 30s.
Following their lives a decade later, everybody is burnt out. Set mostly in sunny Florida, everything is bleak for the characters. They are all dealing with or asking for forgiveness for the terrible things the men did in the first film. Bill (Ciaran Hinds) has been released from prison, but has nothing to live for. Allen (Michael K. Williams) is married to Joy (Shirley Henderson) and is trying to curb his vice. Trish who was once worry-free and upbeat has become wary and burnt-out, on a countless amount of meds, and is trying to date again. Joy, while dealing with the discovery that Allen hasn't changed, is haunted by Pee Wee Herman who plays her boyfriend who had committed suicide in Happiness. And Helen (Ally Sheedy doing a grating impression of Lara Flynn Boyle's portrayal) does fuck all.
The movie worked in that it was definitely bleak and depressing. Visually it all has a murky tone despite being set in sunny Florida and the conversations are filled with awkwardness and gloomy dialogue. However, the movie is ultimately a failure. I don't know what Solondz's intention was for having an entirely new cast, but it's completely jarring. I'm not against this direction being taken in a movie, it worked in his previous film Palindromes where the main character, a 13 year old girl constantly changed size, age, and race in different scenes. However, that was a standalone movie, and the constant changes helped in telling the story and work in that contained universe. It makes the movie to me seem more like a fantasy sequence than a sequel.
Missing from this movie are the disturbing shocks, the painful humour, and sheer cynicism splattered against a Norman Rockwell backdrop. This has all been supplanted with remorse. And indeed, the way characters in that hack Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins constantly "philosophized" about "fear", characters in Life During Wartime features characters constantly musing over "forgiving and forgetting". Also missing is a story. Nothing seems to happen for an hour and a half. They also injected a lot of Judaism into the film which I don't remember Happiness having at all. I don't remember the sisters being Jewish, but in this one they dwell on it a lot. Trish wears a Hebrew Chai symbol on her necklace, makes a big deal that her boyfriend is Jewish, constantly refers to Israel and her son is preparing for his Bar Mitzvah. I'm not against Judaism anymore than I am against any other Abrahamic religion. To be fair, it's a lot more innocuous than Christianity, and more pleasant than Islam than Islam. My problem is that I don't recall any sign of Judaism in happiness, and this one hits you over the head with it. It's what made A Serious Man so abstruse for me.
A lot of people who see Todd Solondz movies say that they would never want to watch them again because they are so depressing. I can more than handle depressing material, but I don't think I will ever watch Life During Wartime ever again because it was so disappointing.
5/10
posted at 1:50 PM | Permanent Link
Friday, June 25, 2010
Where am I?
I don't know where I am. If somebody can find me, please rescue me. There will be a cash reward.
Oh wait, here I am! Alive and well. I'll go through a few updates as I dust off the dirt and branches I'd been buried in.
1) I moved into my own private padded cell. In this cell, nobody can hear my screams, and better yet, the screams of my victims.
2) I got accepted into that Multimedia program at [Miskatonic University]. I'll be taking courses in graphic design, digital video, and animation. There are other courses later on that I would like to take like Digital Rhetoric, and the course on videogames taught by [Dr. Macintosh], who I've had before. My degree will be a combined Honours in Multimedia and English. I am well aware that a bachelor's degree is less useful than tissue paper, which is why I am not getting that one alone. But my hopes are that the program will help me be a better writer, and more analytical reader. Though I am wary of the fact that getting too analytical can suck the fun right out of any medium. I fall somewhere in between, I guess.
3) I've been sneaking in as much as I can for [The Noxious Novel]. I haven't gotten much done because my schedule had been hectic over the last month, but the realm of Gallowmere is slowly coming back into order. Or whatever order this world can be in.
So there's that. Soon, once I get my workstation in my cell set up, I will recommence doing my daily doodles. Until then...
See everyone in hell!
posted at 10:40 AM | Permanent Link
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
EfFacebook
My friend [Spaghetti Western] used to post blogs online of his misadventures in the funerary world, mishaps at [Bric-a-Brac University] or hilarious tirades about everything else on planet earth. Eventually he stopped. I asked him why one day, itching for some vitriol to tickle my funny bone. He said he still did sometimes, but had been posting them on Facebook. I heard that name floating around quite often. And so I said, "Alright... You got me... I'll join this Facebook everyone speaks of." Later that day I did. What started as reading rants (which he eventually gave up on doing), ended up as me thinking up names of people I'd known in the past, and snooping to see what they were up to. There were groups like "Charles Bronson Fan Club", "Atheist Libertarians", "The Toxic Waste Guy in Robocop is awesome!" I could join which I started collecting for the sake of collecting. All was fine and dandy for a while.
Eventually, I started noticing how overwhelming it started becoming to me, and how annoying its prevalence had become. Wherever you see someone doing inconsequential texting, beside them you'll see somebody else on Facebook, updating their status with mundane details. Facebook started adding applications. Application, after application, after application. People passing them around like STDs in the early 80s.
I started feeling uneasy about how much people were putting out there, and how often they were. I alluded to my reservations of cellphones and texting, and I admit, I'm a bit of a Luddite. I like technological advancement, but I know that in most cases, if it's an advancement made for mass use, it becomes trivialized. This is why I project the 21st century predicted in the science fiction of the late 20th century will never come to be. Anything significant will not be in demand or get funding, and shiny objects which cater to the mundane needs of the hoi polloi will totally get abused and commodified.
Besides being a Luddite-Lite, a LudLite, I like privacy, a lot. I haven't reached the point where I burn my paper trail, file my fingerprints off, obscure my face in public, and go to live in a log cabin in the woods... yet. But I don't like to put myself out there. I'd rather not even let most people know the last time I sneezed let alone any other personal detail. My life isn't anything worth writing about... so why speak about it? And so for status updates, I usually had random statements or quotes.
For a couple years now, I've had my account set to "deactivated". I've snuck on a few brief instances, maybe once per quarter year if that, to see or read certain things posted by people who tell me to. Or sometimes I go into creepbook mode and "vet" certain people. Not something I can say I'm proud of, but we all have our dark secrets, most of them just seem to be posted on your Facebook accounts.
I had mostly been sitting with a sleeping account because I could never find how to delete it. But then the face of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg said something which creeped me out. He said:
"People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time."
What the Zuck? Count me out. That was a while ago, but the news only hit me recently. That was enough for me to finally go on Google (a company which ironically has its wacky ideas on how to treat privacy) and find out how to close it down for good. I found this link.
That was over a week ago, and now I have to wait another week for it to finally be gone. I still have to wonder how gone it will really be, but I'll just have to keep my eyes open. I don't count this as a victory against Big Brother. Obviously there's so much out there about me and of me that they could make a digital clone of me, and nobody would know any different. But this is a small step into the caves. Until then...
See everyone in hell, and not on Facebook!
posted at 10:23 PM | Permanent Link
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