Magickal

Good ol' fashioned fun and fantasy - I really enjoyed The Brothers Grimm. Sure it does weave odd tangles in a relatively simple plot, that is basically a mish mash of any and every faerie tayle, and not just Grimm ones - but it delivers satisfaction and well toned suspension of belief.

I first saw adds for this in Japan on late night countdown shows and thought it looked spectacular. It came out on DVD I think, the week before I left Hitachi. I was bit too busy with cleaning and packing and worrying to watch too many movies.

Brothers Grimm also manages to maintain the sort of moral ambiguity of traditional "happily ever after .... well maybe not" tales. We have a beloved father commiting infantcide to satisfy a n enchanted lover; trees eating people; a rather minced kitten; fraudsters masquerading as heroes; and noone really gets the girl in the end - leaving the resolution rather sexless in all.

It makes for good fantasy. It isn't supposed to make sense, be fair, its meant to be a fun ride - and if you learn a lesson all the better for it. And some very real lessons learned - don't trust vain corpses, sometimes parents can be monsters, shiny armour is still armour even if its not enchanted ...


Now I have to prepare myself not to be reduced to a shivering wreck while watching the Grudge. At least its daytime.

(Comic) Books vs Movies

No this is about X-men. It doesn't require to much intelligence to point out how much that sucked and disappointed.

I watched V for Vendetta the other day. And I have the privelage of having already read the book before the film. I don't think I'll be able to pull the same stunt with Aeon Flux by watching the original mini-series first.

I wasn't dissapointed, "V" is an excellent film with good cinematography, characterisation
(very hard to do with a masked dramatis persona) and a pretty good story - It's just not the same as the book. The books main creator, Alan Moore, was dissapointed with the film; co creator David Lloyd attributed this to Moore probably going to be unsatisfied with anything but a direct transposition of graphic novel to screen.

I think maybe its a bit like the difference between the XII comic vs the XIII video game. I can't be certain, I haven't read the comics. I once got in trouble for proposing a merge between those two articles, I thought if they both have a title and plot elements the same - they must essentially be the same - after seeing V I think I can understand more that it is simply not the case.

Both plots are flawed in their own way. In my copy of V, Moore himself acknowledges that he approached the ramifications of a global nuclear war rather naively - plus you simply get the fact that the comics were circa 1970s while the movie was moderned up. The calamity was upgraded to biological attack - which two I think in hindsight could be recognised as being treated rather naively. Both the development, and execution and remedy for the biological attacked had several flaws. You can't trust biological elements to be quite so controllable. Jurassic Park: Life will find a way.

I think another flaw in the film plotline is that England doesn't seem to bad off. everything remains sort of middle class - in fact, poor people seem to be just non-existant at all. Fascism can certainly accomplish that (idealistically anyway). The novel managed to highlight the typical hypocrisy inherent in puritan models of governance, while the upper crust maintained a sense of unity and prevalence (which itself was corrupted by the existence of beings such as the Father) - the down and out were still starving, with vice gambling, strip bars, drinking, brawling and prostitution not exactly rare or scandalous.

Also because of the middle-class environment the inhabitants of a post-2000 Norsefire England weren't so intimidated by the government. In the book I doubt the shooting of a pre-pubescent vandal really would've sparked the community outrage it did in the movie. It would be expected, probably served the snotty subversive right. England in the book was still plagued by the sort of anarchy that the movie's US seemed to be. Norsefire in the book was elected because people really wanted it, in the movie it was more they couldn't care less. Maybe apathy was considered a more relevant issue to face by the filmmakers.

The movie certainly feels more relevant to modern society than the book - with more focus on elements like social apathy, media bias, censorship, wars on terror and the morality of rebellion/terrorism. But that said the book's themes aren't exactly irrelevant either.

Snakes on a MutherFucken Plane!

[warning this mutafucken blog entry may use muthafucken course language]

Wow!

This was movie that would have to try supremely hard to fail to deliver what its title advertised -
and boy, does it deliever muthafucken snakes on a muthafucken plane!

Not only does it have muthafucken Samuel L Jackson, it has hardcore Aussie, Nathan Phillips, as the unlucky targets of some crazy Korean gangster's attempt to stay out of jail. If you pay attention it's actually a social dialogue on the fate of children in single-parent families - but you are generally too mutherfucken busy watching out for those muthafucken snakes on the muthafucken plane.

SoaP lives up to expectations as utterly ridiculous and unbelievable, is chock full of product placement (Sony muthafucken Playstation saves the day), stereotyped characters, one liners, and of course lots of snakes and lots of violence - actually it exceeded my expectations on the gore level - some of the worst muthafucken injuries are not caused by the snakes. You do have to practically wait the entire movie for the "muthafucken snakes on a muthafucken plane" line though. But it is worth it.

It's definitely better than muthafucken Anaconda.

One of the girls I went to see the movie with has to fly to muthafucken Bermuda today. Good muthafucken luck.

I'm
disappointed that this muthafucken news story about a SoaP prank, turned out to be a hoax.
But the truth, that a rattlesnake actually snuck into the theater all by itself, is actually scary and freaky enough as it is. If you found a snake in a SoaP theater, you'd freak out, but you'd expect it to be a muthafucken prank. That the snake just got in tehre by itself is muthafucken creepy.

Muthafucken.