Three Reviews and a Baby (Minus the Baby)
Yes, this was posted a day late, in reality, contrary to the day and time displayed. My apologies, I forgot to actually publish it, after I wrote it, so it sat around as a "Draft" until around 5:00 PM on Wednesday. But, here goes, nonetheless, three reviews of a moderate length, in lieu of five briefer ones. Thursday's reviews will consist of the same.
I was very eager to see this film, because I have a love of animation to a nigh perverse level, on top of being an independent film geek; so, put both together, with delicious rotoscoping effects, and I'm there, right quick. After trekking to the nearby independent movie theatre and sitting down to watch, wide-eyed like a schoolgirl in awe, quivering with joy and fear—fear, for you are never quite certain if such adventures in non-mainstream movies will be regretted or not—the film finished and I did not know what to think. The style of animation, rotoscoping, is something I think only I fervently adore amongst my friends, for when trailers were being ran for A Scanner Darkly, I was going, "Ooo!" and my friends were going, "Eeeh…"—I ultimately thought the film looked awesome, just so bloody neat, that I am far from retracting my opinion there.
The performances were pretty admirable; Keanu Reeves did what he does best, namely not having a clue what's really happening (unsure if it's acting or reality); Robert Downey Jr. was a brilliant conspiracy theorist; Woody Harrelson was the perfect drugged-out, surfer dude; Winona Ryder maybe gave the most bland performance, but there wasn't a lot to do with her character, I have a feeling. The bulk of this movie was a string of scenes centered on the daily lives of Bob Arctor (Reeves), Barris (Downey), and Luckman (Harrelson), in or around Arctor's house or in the car together, where they interacted with each other or with Donna (Ryder), Arctor's girl, and friend, Charles Freck, a minor part played quite beautifully by Rory Cochrane. A Scanner Darkly begins with Charles Freck, actually, following the course of his breakdown due to the drug, Substance D, which is highly addictive and induces serious brain damage; the final scene with Freck is quite hilarious, quite sad, much like the whole story of the movie.
Here's the jist: Fred is a police officer, a Sheriff, assigned to flush out Bob Arctor, a dealer in Substance D. Sheriffs wear a suit at all times which constantly mutates their outward appearance between hundreds of thousands of combinations of body parts from the government's records, in order to overcome the identity recognition technology located essentially everywhere in the country, so that the police force can operate with anonymity themselves. What you find out early on in the film is that Fred is Bob Arctor… something Fred slash Arctor doesn't seem to realise. Fred "takes on" the identity of Bob Arctor in order to do his job, and installs surveillance technology, scanners, all over his own home. Barris and Luckman are two druggies who live with Arctor, and, thus, the movie flips between scenes of the three men interacting with each other, and, then, Officer Fred later observing himself interacting with his two friends. Substance D splits the two hemispheres of the brain apart and causes them to conflict, to send criss-crossed messages to the nervous system, to, in essence, fight; therein you have the primary tool for the theme of duality within the movie: the self within the self that observes itself (O Existentialism, thou art so grandly overdone).
For the majority of the time, the film is a meandering observation of the schizophrenia of Arctor, Barris and Luckman, a "caustically comical" view of their paranoid delusions, their ridiculous conspiracy theories, their drugged-out lunacies—the funniest sequence in the movie is probably the one I refer to as "Come On In, the Door is Unlocked" (better watched than explained). That which I would fully understand as a reason to dislike A Scanner Darkly is that it does a lot of aimless wandering, takes no semblance of a direct route through the story, and leaves you wondering what the point may be. There is a backbone of a plot within the story tying everything together, but each scene, individually, is almost a short in and of themselves. No traditional, Hollywood moviemaking going on here, and I like that—maybe you don't, though, I don't know.
This is a drug movie, irrefutably. Did you like Requiem for a Dream? I did; this one is nowhere near as dark, though, much more of a dark comedy. Failure Rating: 10%.
Let's talk about Tom Waits, shall we? As a musician, he's been a creative force in the musical underground—the real one, not the one fueled by rebellious, snivelling teenagers and mindless trends—for decades. His music is a throwback to Blues, with a heavy influence of Jazz, plus a heavy dose of world music; his voice is an instrument of its own, a powerful, fear-inducing thing, bass and strong, hoarse and raspy, twisted and bewildering. The music of Tom Waits is bizarre and delightful, like a beatnik but good.
Watching Big Time, a live performance of sorts by the man and his ensemble, helps solidify what it is that makes Tom Waits so interesting: Tom Waits is the music you would expect to hear in the corner of a bar in Hell; you find yourself in the Underworld, you make your way to some seedy, dim and smoky dive, on Queens Street of Pain perhaps, and there's Tom Waits and his band, in the corner, playing. Tom Waits is the Blues of Hell—it doesn't help that the man is some form of demon, easily seen when you watch him performing, as no man can make such frightening expressions and do such creepy dances unless he is secretly demonic. His voice is a channeling of dark forces, indeed, as well.
Could there have been any better music to have playing in the barroom scene of Fight Club? I say, "No," and the producers of the movie agreed. When you need someone to play the deranged doctor in Bram Stoker's Dracula, Renfield, is there any better man to fit the part? Again, "No," and it is agreed upon by the moviemakers. Want a random, desert wanderer in your movie to spout prophetic riddles at the protagonist, making her unsure if he is an apparition or mirage? Tom Waits is there, Mr. Tony Scott, to appear in your film, Domino.
Big Time seems to be a couple concerts by the madman, cut apart into several different sequences, and spliced back together in some kind of strange nightmare vision. In case the music of Tom Waits wasn't weird enough, now we have his idea of his own music video movie. It's all strangely perfect, however, the imagery and scenes matching his sound perfectly, and the man may be crazy, but he's a brilliant showman on stage. Each little vignette tells the tale of a grimy, run-down little theatre and the characters—all Tom Waits—associated, in the loge, in the ticket booth, in the bathroom. It's the story of every down-trodden American in the city ever told, set to the tune of Tom Waits.
The lyrics of Tom Wait feel as though they are one long story of barroom misery, of drunken failure, of love lost and heartbreak, of time wasted down the drain, of mistakes made and sins enacted, of unseen dramas in back alleys and deserted docks, the ringing sounds of an abandoned warehouse and the rats within. To listen to his modern-era albums is to listen to the dark side of the American dream, like a beautiful retelling of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman," or if William Faulkner wrote of the big cities and was put to song; Tom Waits is black comedy at its best, a dark look through a red lens set on life, love and everything inbetween.
Imagine all that, in a concert movie. It… is… so… fucking… awesome. Failure Rating: 0% (Big Time is no longer in distribution, can only be found on preowned VHS tapes, and has been put into DVD format and is freely distributed, legally, by very cool individuals only).
For several reasons, I have a special interest in this particular webcomic, "xkcd." For one thing, I know the writer and artist—not really that closely, mind you, but an acquaintance, nonetheless—who graduated from the same college I attend and is now living with my ex-roommate, locally. Being able to watch things develop firsthand, as it grows from a secondary LiveJournal for random doodles on occasion, to being updated thrice a week, to becoming a standalone website with powerful hosting, all at specific, timely stages, I find the whole experience intriguing and telling of things I always knew to be true, but only from secondhand sources. Seeing a webcomic's popularity deliberately engineered by virtually exploiting the big social networks on the Internet is a curious sight.
The comic itself is fun and great for gags. The art is usually neglible, for it's mostly stick figures or crudely drawn objects for the purposes of conveying textual jokes, so there's not much interesting to look at in most cases; once in awhile, the creator utilises a visual trick or sketches an animal, landscape or famous person, all of a very "margin doodling" style… The joke-writing is the real strength of xkcd, typically able to produce a good laugh—or a groan, due to the puns, because when he says a "webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language," the "language" part means horrible puns, the bastard. The "romance" part is of a variety of sappiness I can't get behind, as he definitely strikes very "emo" chords here and there: bemoaning lost love or complaining of a broken heart and the such. The "sarcasm" is my personal favourite part, and it can be very well timed and executed.
What is the most interesting part of it all is how it got to where it is. This is not a webcomic made for the webcomics community, or really much a part of it, on the whole. The creator is only recently initiating himself with the world of webcomics (to probably try and figure a way to farther expand his readership). The fanbase of the strip was garnered almost entirely from the Blog community and the LiveJournal community, the two largest social networks on the Internet, via simple manufacturing of links and associations. The website is separate from any webcomic studio or network, nor is it syndicated through any major webcomic label; it is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 license, however, making it freely shareable (if that's a word). The trick was accessibility: xkcd has had, since nearly day one, an RSS feed and a LiveJournal for the RSS, plus the permanent links for both comic page address and image URL are explicitly displayed for each comic. So, when it got linked by big Blog sites like BoingBoing, the hosting guaranteed site stability despite huge traffic, the RSS made it easy to keep up with afterward for the visitors, and other, smaller Blog sites would put the links and comics up, too; all the while, it's trickling slowly through the LiveJournal community, thanks to the creator's efforts and a few associates who persistently linked it to friends, who, then, "friended" (a verb I do not endorse) the RSS LiveJournal. Thus, a moderately popular webcomic that has nothing to do with the webcomics community whatsoever.
My only notable problem with xkcd is the tendency to be a tad high-flown, mostly with the "math" part of its tagline. Some jokes boil down to little more than mentioning a complicated or highly advanced mathematics or physics (the field he got his degree in) concept, perhaps with pretense of being otherwise, but a lot of it can be "Ha, ha, look at this! Isn't this funny?" Other people see it, and say, "Oh! I know what that is! Ha, ha, that's awesome that he mentioned that thing I, too, know about! That is funny!" Very apt for the Blog community, really, which is fueled by such practices of large, psuedointellectual circle jerks. A lot of the times, xkcd is being quirky and clever, but, other times, it's straddling the fine line between pretentious and merely observational, reminiscent of the songs of Tom Lehrer. You can sometimes not quite be sure if he's making funny of others for doing this same thing, or if he's doing it himself—if you consider that clever or not is your choice, I choose not.
Mostly a "non-comic," in the vein of Far Side, with little to no continuity, small amounts of narrative, zero characters, xkcd is a mouthpiece for the author to crack wise about entirely random subjects, and I respect that. It, also, truly is simple as pie (or pi, AHAHAHAHAHA) to keep up with new updates; bonus points for consistent updating, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, always on time (especially considering he has automatic scripts for posting and a queue of comics for always about a month ahead). Failure Rating: 15%.
[TIA;TY]
A Scanner Darkly
I was very eager to see this film, because I have a love of animation to a nigh perverse level, on top of being an independent film geek; so, put both together, with delicious rotoscoping effects, and I'm there, right quick. After trekking to the nearby independent movie theatre and sitting down to watch, wide-eyed like a schoolgirl in awe, quivering with joy and fear—fear, for you are never quite certain if such adventures in non-mainstream movies will be regretted or not—the film finished and I did not know what to think. The style of animation, rotoscoping, is something I think only I fervently adore amongst my friends, for when trailers were being ran for A Scanner Darkly, I was going, "Ooo!" and my friends were going, "Eeeh…"—I ultimately thought the film looked awesome, just so bloody neat, that I am far from retracting my opinion there.
The performances were pretty admirable; Keanu Reeves did what he does best, namely not having a clue what's really happening (unsure if it's acting or reality); Robert Downey Jr. was a brilliant conspiracy theorist; Woody Harrelson was the perfect drugged-out, surfer dude; Winona Ryder maybe gave the most bland performance, but there wasn't a lot to do with her character, I have a feeling. The bulk of this movie was a string of scenes centered on the daily lives of Bob Arctor (Reeves), Barris (Downey), and Luckman (Harrelson), in or around Arctor's house or in the car together, where they interacted with each other or with Donna (Ryder), Arctor's girl, and friend, Charles Freck, a minor part played quite beautifully by Rory Cochrane. A Scanner Darkly begins with Charles Freck, actually, following the course of his breakdown due to the drug, Substance D, which is highly addictive and induces serious brain damage; the final scene with Freck is quite hilarious, quite sad, much like the whole story of the movie.
Here's the jist: Fred is a police officer, a Sheriff, assigned to flush out Bob Arctor, a dealer in Substance D. Sheriffs wear a suit at all times which constantly mutates their outward appearance between hundreds of thousands of combinations of body parts from the government's records, in order to overcome the identity recognition technology located essentially everywhere in the country, so that the police force can operate with anonymity themselves. What you find out early on in the film is that Fred is Bob Arctor… something Fred slash Arctor doesn't seem to realise. Fred "takes on" the identity of Bob Arctor in order to do his job, and installs surveillance technology, scanners, all over his own home. Barris and Luckman are two druggies who live with Arctor, and, thus, the movie flips between scenes of the three men interacting with each other, and, then, Officer Fred later observing himself interacting with his two friends. Substance D splits the two hemispheres of the brain apart and causes them to conflict, to send criss-crossed messages to the nervous system, to, in essence, fight; therein you have the primary tool for the theme of duality within the movie: the self within the self that observes itself (O Existentialism, thou art so grandly overdone).
For the majority of the time, the film is a meandering observation of the schizophrenia of Arctor, Barris and Luckman, a "caustically comical" view of their paranoid delusions, their ridiculous conspiracy theories, their drugged-out lunacies—the funniest sequence in the movie is probably the one I refer to as "Come On In, the Door is Unlocked" (better watched than explained). That which I would fully understand as a reason to dislike A Scanner Darkly is that it does a lot of aimless wandering, takes no semblance of a direct route through the story, and leaves you wondering what the point may be. There is a backbone of a plot within the story tying everything together, but each scene, individually, is almost a short in and of themselves. No traditional, Hollywood moviemaking going on here, and I like that—maybe you don't, though, I don't know.
This is a drug movie, irrefutably. Did you like Requiem for a Dream? I did; this one is nowhere near as dark, though, much more of a dark comedy. Failure Rating: 10%.
Tom Waits' Big Time
Let's talk about Tom Waits, shall we? As a musician, he's been a creative force in the musical underground—the real one, not the one fueled by rebellious, snivelling teenagers and mindless trends—for decades. His music is a throwback to Blues, with a heavy influence of Jazz, plus a heavy dose of world music; his voice is an instrument of its own, a powerful, fear-inducing thing, bass and strong, hoarse and raspy, twisted and bewildering. The music of Tom Waits is bizarre and delightful, like a beatnik but good.
Watching Big Time, a live performance of sorts by the man and his ensemble, helps solidify what it is that makes Tom Waits so interesting: Tom Waits is the music you would expect to hear in the corner of a bar in Hell; you find yourself in the Underworld, you make your way to some seedy, dim and smoky dive, on Queens Street of Pain perhaps, and there's Tom Waits and his band, in the corner, playing. Tom Waits is the Blues of Hell—it doesn't help that the man is some form of demon, easily seen when you watch him performing, as no man can make such frightening expressions and do such creepy dances unless he is secretly demonic. His voice is a channeling of dark forces, indeed, as well.
Could there have been any better music to have playing in the barroom scene of Fight Club? I say, "No," and the producers of the movie agreed. When you need someone to play the deranged doctor in Bram Stoker's Dracula, Renfield, is there any better man to fit the part? Again, "No," and it is agreed upon by the moviemakers. Want a random, desert wanderer in your movie to spout prophetic riddles at the protagonist, making her unsure if he is an apparition or mirage? Tom Waits is there, Mr. Tony Scott, to appear in your film, Domino.
Big Time seems to be a couple concerts by the madman, cut apart into several different sequences, and spliced back together in some kind of strange nightmare vision. In case the music of Tom Waits wasn't weird enough, now we have his idea of his own music video movie. It's all strangely perfect, however, the imagery and scenes matching his sound perfectly, and the man may be crazy, but he's a brilliant showman on stage. Each little vignette tells the tale of a grimy, run-down little theatre and the characters—all Tom Waits—associated, in the loge, in the ticket booth, in the bathroom. It's the story of every down-trodden American in the city ever told, set to the tune of Tom Waits.
The lyrics of Tom Wait feel as though they are one long story of barroom misery, of drunken failure, of love lost and heartbreak, of time wasted down the drain, of mistakes made and sins enacted, of unseen dramas in back alleys and deserted docks, the ringing sounds of an abandoned warehouse and the rats within. To listen to his modern-era albums is to listen to the dark side of the American dream, like a beautiful retelling of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman," or if William Faulkner wrote of the big cities and was put to song; Tom Waits is black comedy at its best, a dark look through a red lens set on life, love and everything inbetween.
Imagine all that, in a concert movie. It… is… so… fucking… awesome. Failure Rating: 0% (Big Time is no longer in distribution, can only be found on preowned VHS tapes, and has been put into DVD format and is freely distributed, legally, by very cool individuals only).
xkcd
For several reasons, I have a special interest in this particular webcomic, "xkcd." For one thing, I know the writer and artist—not really that closely, mind you, but an acquaintance, nonetheless—who graduated from the same college I attend and is now living with my ex-roommate, locally. Being able to watch things develop firsthand, as it grows from a secondary LiveJournal for random doodles on occasion, to being updated thrice a week, to becoming a standalone website with powerful hosting, all at specific, timely stages, I find the whole experience intriguing and telling of things I always knew to be true, but only from secondhand sources. Seeing a webcomic's popularity deliberately engineered by virtually exploiting the big social networks on the Internet is a curious sight.
The comic itself is fun and great for gags. The art is usually neglible, for it's mostly stick figures or crudely drawn objects for the purposes of conveying textual jokes, so there's not much interesting to look at in most cases; once in awhile, the creator utilises a visual trick or sketches an animal, landscape or famous person, all of a very "margin doodling" style… The joke-writing is the real strength of xkcd, typically able to produce a good laugh—or a groan, due to the puns, because when he says a "webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language," the "language" part means horrible puns, the bastard. The "romance" part is of a variety of sappiness I can't get behind, as he definitely strikes very "emo" chords here and there: bemoaning lost love or complaining of a broken heart and the such. The "sarcasm" is my personal favourite part, and it can be very well timed and executed.
What is the most interesting part of it all is how it got to where it is. This is not a webcomic made for the webcomics community, or really much a part of it, on the whole. The creator is only recently initiating himself with the world of webcomics (to probably try and figure a way to farther expand his readership). The fanbase of the strip was garnered almost entirely from the Blog community and the LiveJournal community, the two largest social networks on the Internet, via simple manufacturing of links and associations. The website is separate from any webcomic studio or network, nor is it syndicated through any major webcomic label; it is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 license, however, making it freely shareable (if that's a word). The trick was accessibility: xkcd has had, since nearly day one, an RSS feed and a LiveJournal for the RSS, plus the permanent links for both comic page address and image URL are explicitly displayed for each comic. So, when it got linked by big Blog sites like BoingBoing, the hosting guaranteed site stability despite huge traffic, the RSS made it easy to keep up with afterward for the visitors, and other, smaller Blog sites would put the links and comics up, too; all the while, it's trickling slowly through the LiveJournal community, thanks to the creator's efforts and a few associates who persistently linked it to friends, who, then, "friended" (a verb I do not endorse) the RSS LiveJournal. Thus, a moderately popular webcomic that has nothing to do with the webcomics community whatsoever.
My only notable problem with xkcd is the tendency to be a tad high-flown, mostly with the "math" part of its tagline. Some jokes boil down to little more than mentioning a complicated or highly advanced mathematics or physics (the field he got his degree in) concept, perhaps with pretense of being otherwise, but a lot of it can be "Ha, ha, look at this! Isn't this funny?" Other people see it, and say, "Oh! I know what that is! Ha, ha, that's awesome that he mentioned that thing I, too, know about! That is funny!" Very apt for the Blog community, really, which is fueled by such practices of large, psuedointellectual circle jerks. A lot of the times, xkcd is being quirky and clever, but, other times, it's straddling the fine line between pretentious and merely observational, reminiscent of the songs of Tom Lehrer. You can sometimes not quite be sure if he's making funny of others for doing this same thing, or if he's doing it himself—if you consider that clever or not is your choice, I choose not.
Mostly a "non-comic," in the vein of Far Side, with little to no continuity, small amounts of narrative, zero characters, xkcd is a mouthpiece for the author to crack wise about entirely random subjects, and I respect that. It, also, truly is simple as pie (or pi, AHAHAHAHAHA) to keep up with new updates; bonus points for consistent updating, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, always on time (especially considering he has automatic scripts for posting and a queue of comics for always about a month ahead). Failure Rating: 15%.
[TIA;TY]
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