Monday, September 01, 2008
Thummer Thoughts
August comes to an end, and so does summer. I don't have anything significant to say other than that I plan on sending off a barrage of manuscripts to publishers in mid-October or early November. As well, I have also regained confidence in believing about 70% of people are shit. I won't bore anyone with a lengthy diatribe, I'll save that for a book. Don't mind me too much, I'm just a borderline schizoid and think people are too panicky, ignorant, inconsistent, presumptuous, shallow and irrational.
But again, not here for that. Instead I'll just ooze some of my thoughts into the thought depository. My brain pockets were getting a little too full. So I'll spill some of it here. A lot of trivial stuff.
I watched The Dark Knight which I deeply despised. After seeing the movie, I felt as if I'd soaked in somebody else's murky bathwater for over two hours. It was a very bland movie, full of no real substance, yet acted as if it had some. It had an overblown yet aimless plot. It was nothing but a lot of explosions, incongruous action sequences, stilted dialog filled with tawdry lines which serve to be cherry picked as quotes people can use on their web forum signatures. Instead of a soundtrack it had intense thumps interspersed with subtle sounds of other instruments forming picayune melodies! Batman doesn't even have a solid theme song anymore, just a stock action movie beat. With the Danny Elfman Batman theme in 1989 and 1992, you just had to hear 5 notes and you could know it was the Batman theme. With this theme song, it sounds like the silverware is spilling onto the pots and pans. The movie was dark, but had no charm to it at all, darkness without a cause. It was just bad things happening all the time, so there was never any pace. It was just pornography, exploitation. No one could ever accuse me of liking things light. I enjoy materials which disturb me and are unrelentingly dark. But this was just haphazardly directed. A pretentious mess.
I'll even go as far as to say that the Joker performance wasn't even that phenomenal. I preferred Jack Nicholson's a lot more. Heath Ledger was an up and coming actor whose movies (especially Brothers Grimm) I never cared for, but his performance was well executed. Speaking of performances, what was with Christian Bale's voice when he was Batman? It sounded like he was shitting gravel all the time. As a whole the movie as a product (and I stress the word product) was a well done effort. It was very manufactured, cold and gray. It made death look casual, but people say it packed an emotional punch. Maybe I'm missing something.
What bothers me the most about it is that I can't understand why Christopher Nolan, who by this time figures himself to be some sort of film auteur thinks the Batman movies should be hyper realistic. For fuck's sake, this is a movie about a guy parading around in a bat costume trying to thwart the plans of a goth philosopher/killer clown. Get real.
The movie was filled with so many far fetched elements and plot holes. If there was a city that chaotic, there has never been as chaotic as the ChicaGotham city in that movie. When Joker got caught, nobody could identify him. As if he's some sort of super natural entity? This guy didn't just start committing crimes out of nowhere. He would have to have a record. The police could have taken off his make up, and sent his picture around to different precincts and asylums and gotten the information. They probably could have found out that he was a homosexual cowboy. The movie rubs the viewer's face in shit for hours and then tries to show that humans are good because nobody on the boats blew each other up in Jokertes the philosopher's little sociological experiment? Then moments later squeaky clean district attorney Harvey "Half Burnt Face" Dent becomes a homicidal maniac and tries killing a kid just because his diseased looking girlfriend died. Batman who dodged running over Joker was able to kill Half Burnt Face with ease. And what was with the case they make for the Patriot Act? I could go on and on, but the movie should not be worth the energy. My opinion is in the minority. It will have zero impact on its massive box office revenue. And everybody and their mom will still jerk off over it, especially the comic geeks, even though it's nothing like the comic universe. Gotham city actually looks gothic, and not just like Chicago. And the Joker was an actual freak with white skin and green hair who had an arsenal of gag and toy themed lethal weapons, not a guy with "War paint". Comic fan boys can only say they like this movie because it's "adult" and not because it's faithful to the material. I will always prefer the two Tim Burton did, and his much maligned by comic book fan boys Batman Returns will always be at the top of my list. They were just funny and great to look at.
I know I'm pretty much alone on this one, and though my fan base is clocking in at about zero right now, professing my thoughts on this movie will probably push it in to the negatives. The only other person I've spoken to who shares a dislike for this movie is The Prince of Darkness. He quite appropriately calls it "The Dark Shite". His brother The Hell Spawn also didn't like it and rightly pointed out that the tag line "Why so serious?" should have been directed at Christopher Nolan and the crew.
The only other movie I cared to go see this summer was Tropic Thunder which was a hilarious Hollywood satire. It starred Ben Stiller as a Tom Cruise type, Jack Black as a mix between Chris Farley and Eddie Murphy, Robert Downey Jr. in blackface, and Tom Cruise in one of his funniest roles ever as a corporate asshole. I enjoyed it a whole lot. It reminded me of Hot Fuzz with its mix of action, comedy, and parody (though not Epic Movie style, thank god). I also gained a lot of respect for Robert Downey Jr., star of Iron Man (a super hero movie I enjoyed because it didn't take itself seriously at all) after catching an interview where he also had the balls to say that The Dark Knight was dark shite.
Other things to come out this summer were a few downloadable games I purchased. There was American McGee's Grimm. I played the first episode and boy... what a let down. The game offers no challenge at all. It's basically running around and "darkening" things which are within your radius. A blind two year old could do it. And it wasn't funny. The Brothers Grimm fairy tales were riotous as they were with their innocently relaying the grim details of the story. They had to fuck it up with adding a wink-wink nudge-nudge jokey tone to the thing. I played the first episode and demanded my money back from GameTap.
Next, there was Braid on Xbox Live Arcade which was a quick experience but a very refreshing and entertaining one. It's basically a platform game which superficially plays like the NES Super Mario. But as you go along you realize you can control time. First you realize it can help you get out of death, but then you find out you have to use the abilities to solve all sorts of brainwracking puzzles which involve reversing time (while other objects remain unaffected), slowing down objects within a certain circumference, and a level where your forward movements propel time forward and backward movements reverse time.It also has little notes you can read before entering levels and at the end of the game which provide profound introspective insight.
Then there was Bionic Commando:Rearmed which I had been waiting for for quite a while. It's a remake of a game I used to play on the Nintendo that came out 20 years ago. You're a soldier who can't jump, and who has to use an extending bionic arm to grapple onto walls and floors to swing across the levels. Simple and fun concept beefed up with new graphics and extra features such as 2 player co-op, death matches, bonus levels, hidden items, more weapons, and challenge rooms. They also revamped the soundtrack, and changed a few things up. My favourite feature of the original NES version was the shocking end where you find out the last boss is Adolf Hitler. The original Japanese version did indeed have you fighting a futuristic faction of the Nazis, but Nintendo in America was against featuring Nazis in games at the time, so they were renamed "The Badds" and Adolf Hitler's name was changed to "Master-D". The surprise appearance and ridiculous name made it that much funnier. Then to top it off, he calls you a "damn fool" which was pretty taboo for the time, and when you kill him, there's a graphic frame by frame animation of his head exploding. Good times.
I recommend the game to anyone who can get it. It's on Xbox Live Arcade, PSN, and PC for download on things like Steam. I'm also now looking forward to their retail game sequel of it which will be in full 3D and feature state of the art graphics. I was skeptical about it before, because the producer guy behind it at first seemed like an out of touch corporate tool, but I've learned that he actually knows what he's doing and he actually gives a damn. And not that it's a selling point, but Bionic Commando will be voiced by Mike Patton. The man is a madman musical genius.
No books I'd want to read came out this summer, not too many books come out in the year that I'd want to read. The only book coming out this year I want to read is Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago. It comes out in October. Still, it doesn't mean I didn't do any summer reading. I read Boomsday by Christopher Buckley - funny, satirical, Libertarian. I read Satan Burger by Carlton Mellick III - bizarre, trashy, entertaining. I read The Trial by Franz Kafka - surreal. I tried reading The Crying of Lot 49 but discovered I don't like Thomas Pynchon and threw it in the incinerator.
The latest book I started reading is Geek Love by Katherine Dunn. I took a break but I have to get back to and finish off. So far it's the best book I've read all summer. Contrary to what the title may convey, it has nothing to two with two geeks falling in love at a techie convention and having a Star Wars wedding. It's actually about a man who owns a freak show and his wife who's a geek - a circus freak who bites off chicken heads. They decide to breed a family of freaks so each time she gets pregnant, the husband concocts cocktails of drugs, radioisotopes and arsenic for her. The result is a family of children including a boy with flippers for hands and feet, a pair of Siamese twins, an albino hunchback dwarf, and a baby psychic. Page by page it has starkly dark and twisted material, more secrets are revealed, more bizarre things happen. I'm enjoying the book profoundly. I was just taking time off to focus on editing mine. I'm going to take time off of doing that again though, so I'll finish off the book before school starts next week. It reminds me a lot of the last book to really blow my mind, The Wasp Factory. Both books are "weirdly imaginative". They're both about strange families with dark secrets and sinister experimentation. And both are bizarre while being mostly grounded in reality. There are a few mildly super natural things in Geek Love, at least what I've read so far, and The Wasp Factory had supernatural elements, but they weren't actually there, and it was done to comment on people believing in superstitions. I'll finish it soon and deliver the verdict.
Sheesh, that was a long one. I should start blogging again more frequently so I can have shorter single subject posts. Would be a good idea, wouldn't it?
But until then...
See everyone in hell!
