Category: Media

This is a container category for media reviews and related drivel.

  • Metropolis (Anime)

    Once again Cinema 21 comes through with an anime showing here in Portland. This time around it’s Metropolis, Osamu Tezuka’s take on a visual style based on some still images from the Fritz Lang film of the same name.

    Before I say anything else, I must say this: Metropolis is beautiful. Jaw-droppingly beautiful. Visually stunning. Hypnotic. Lovingly detailed. If you’re an animation fan, you’re going to love this movie. If you’re not, then at the very least you won’t find this movie to be cheap-looking in any way. This film is gorgeous.

    I can almost hear you asking, “So what you’re saying, Karel, is that it’s pretty to look at. I get it. What about the rest of the movie?” To answer that question I’m going to try to name some of the influences that seem to have gone into Metropolis:

    • Astroboy
    • Akira
    • The biblical story of the Tower of Babel
    • Titanic (yes, that Titanic)
    • Blade Runner
    • Fritz Lang’s Metropolis

    And I’m pretty sure that the above list is incomplete. You see, Metropolis is an art film, pure and simple. There is a story, and it’s not even a complex story, but the point of the film is to experiment with imagery, to dazzle the viewer with talent and technology. Plot elements are there purely as an excuse to move the viewer from one jaw-dropping visual sequence to another, or as an excuse to try something different and unique.

    For the most part, Metropolis is a boy-meets-robot love story, complete with a rogue henchman who wants to destroy the robot, a devious figure who wants the robot to help him rule the world, some revolutionaries, a robot cop, the boy’s amusing and clever uncle, and random broken-down robots who inhabit the lower levels of the city. Because the movie is presented subtitled, we get to enjoy the vocal talents of the original cast, who are all well-chosen and perform admirably.

    I should also point out that the use of music is fairly interesting. From Ray Charles to Dixieland jazz, each of the main sequences in the film is backed by music that is sometimes appropriate and sometimes deliberately strange. One musical moment in the film, which I won’t spoil, cost it a score point on my scale… you’ve been warned.

    The film only loses a couple of points, one each for a pair of “what the?” moments near the end that leave you bewildered and laughing for the wrong reasons. Otherwise Metropolis is a delightful movie experience. See it if and when you can.

  • Firestarter: Rekindled

    Please note that I’ve only seen the first installment of the miniseries, but since I’m not terribly interested in seeing the rest I suppose now’s as good a time as any to post my review.

    I’m not what you would call a huge Steven King fan. I admire his abilities, and I like some of his stories, but that’s about as far as it goes.

    The above statement has almost nothing to do with Firestarter: Rekindled, largely because King doesn’t appear to have been involved with the project. Good for him, I say. One his stories I do like is the original Firestarter novel; this miniseries appears to be an attempt to tell the rest of the story, as if the novel was somehow incomplete.

    Who is Charlie McGee, circa 2000-something? Apparently she’s an indecisive, absentminded loner who likes to go out and dance, get hot-and-heavy with strange men and then leave them hanging (as it were) before she burns them to a crisp. You’d think she would learn after a while, but oh well. She must have animal instincts or some nonsense.

    The erstwhile hero of the tale is a feeble loser who only clues in fairly late in the first installment that he works for EvilCorp. *sigh*

    Oh yes, and Malcolm McDowell seems to enjoy his role as the dastardly John Rainbird. It’s a little like having Dennis Hopper as the Raving Lunatic in any given movie… it’s not like we’re going to expect anything new and interesting, are we?

    I forgot, Hopper’s in this miniseries too, but he didn’t show up the first night so I can’t comment on his role. Sorry.

    I think I’ll stop picking nits here, and just say it flat-out: I’m not impressed. The characters are either underplayed to the point of flaccidity or overplayed to the point of absurdity. Things happen that don’t make sense logically or motivationally. Just about the only interesting parts are some of the flashback sequences, which is kind of sad when you sit around and think about it.

    Firestarter: Rekindled earns a couple of points for neat pyrotechnic effects, a few details that seem to have been properly thought through, and a cute rant about the state of the library arts in America. And that’s about it, folks.

    Firestarter: Rekindled site

  • Amazon

    Every so often I get the urge to take in a short film at the good old “Omnimax” theater at OMSI. Yes, even with my chronic motion-perception dizziness, I still want to see what it’s like to be completely surrounded by a projected film.

    Amazon takes you to South America and introduces the viewer to a huge, diverse region. More specifically, it chronicles the journeys of “medicine men,” one from the ancient traditions and one from the halls of Western science, into the Amazon to learn about the properties of its plant life from the native tribes. Along the way we’re shown some wildlife and trees and flowers and trees and fish and trees and naked natives and, er, trees. Did I mention the trees? The Amazon has lots of ‘em, and we get to fly over them very often. It’s clear, of course, that the rainforest fly-by is all from one particular flight and cuts from it are just being interspersed through the 45-minute film. There must be something about having an IMAX rig at your disposal that makes you want to strap it to an aircraft.

    Lest you think I mock this movie, I’d like to point out that it does its job fairly well. What is the job this movie sets out to do? Oddly enough, it’s to show us that both ancient peoples and modern medicine view the Amazon rainforest as a bounty of incalculable value. The movie does this part of its task with surprising grace and style, never once condescending to the viewer or the native peoples it films. Even our high-country medicine man, a prime candidate for inadvertent comedy if ever there was one, is portrayed carefully and casually. He’s just a man on a quest for knowledge, trading what he has for knowledge and medicines that may be of value back home.

    The “Discovery Channel” element comes mostly from the Western scientist who is on a rather similar visit, except this questor gives frequent lectures along the way. This guy didn’t bother me too much, but his film time did feel like being in a leafy green lecture hall somehow.

    When the film gets bored with the human element, it shows us some wildlife. Pink dolphins, jaguars, lots of monkeys, and various fish appear on our screen. This is one of the major problems with Amazon, unfortunately. Note to IMAX filmmakers: I’m sitting in a domed room staring upward at a 70-some-odd-foot screen that fills my field of vision. DO NOT show me extremely close-up footage, blurry even, of animals that I then must crane my neck around awkwardly to see the whole of! In addition, hold the camera extremely still if you’re going to do extreme close-up shots, since while I’m craning my neck around I’d rather not become intensely nauseous because of your inept filmwork! Oh yes, and the next person who feels it necessary to pan across a hanging bridge and then SPIN THE CAMERA for the purpose of showing me the other end of the bridge WILL BE FLOGGED MERCILESSLY.

    Amazon gets full marks for a solid treatment of the major subjects it tries to tackle, those being the medicinal value of the Amazon basin and the odd history of the more-or-less indigenous peoples therein. It doesn’t even waste film time showing us the depredations of modern “progress” as so many other such programs do. They know that if we paid the bucks to see this film then we’ve probably already seen the slash-and-burn footage, thank you.

    Sadly, the film loses a number of score points for needless nausea, silly wildlife vignettes and the neverending flight over green trees. (We’ve seen THAT footage too, guys. Several times. In better films.) How many monkeys-in-trees shots did the movie really need? Why was that jaguar growling so much? Why oh why did they have to spin the damned camera while showing us the canopy bridge?

    If you have a strong stomach, or you’re really compelled to learn some interesting things about the area that you may not have picked up from years of watching PBS, TLC and The Discovery Channel, head down to OMSI or your local equivalent and catch a showing of Amazon. Otherwise, save your wallet and your tummy some grief.

  • The Count Of Monte Cristo

    I enjoy a fair number of what might be called “guilty pleasures” by those of higher brow than myself. Among these are anime, sword-and-sorcery programming, music by aging rock and roll bands, and swashbuckling period pieces. Monte Cristo is, of course, an example of that last category. The good news is that it actually is a pleasure and not merely guilty.

    The best way I can describe this film is that it’s a straightforward tale of good guy, bad guy and lady fair. Betrayal, hardship, revenge, true love and even some light humor are all well-balanced elements in this film. There aren’t many surprises, not even for someone who hasn’t read the novels, since most of the elements that may or may not have been original in Alexandre Dumas’ original work have been used and abused in countless books and films since.

    You know what? It doesn’t matter. This movie is fun, it’s good to look at, it’s pleasant to hear, and the funniest parts are the sly parts where the audience is let in on the joke that nobody else is meant to see or hear.

    There’s nothing outstanding in the acting, the swordplay, the cinematography, the music or any of it, really. It’s not really meant to be a groundbreaking film, after all. It’s a throwback to the good old days of swashbuckling epics, and that is a blessing for the most part.

    One thing about this movie, however, is so offensive to me that I docked an entire mark from the score on account of only a few seconds of film. When the final climactic swordfight begins, the movie suddenly rips you back into reality by pointedly reminding you that it was made during the Computer Age. Yes, that’s right, suddenly we get about 30 seconds of hyper-speed jump-cut digital editing! What the hell? The rest of the movie behaves so well, so gracefully, so like a movie that could have been made at any other time in the history of film… only to squander that grace with a lame, offensive, poorly-done attempt at heightening the intensity of the action at the last.

    Nearly two hours I spent drawn cheerfully into the world of the film, only to be reminded, unpleasantly so, that I was in fact sitting in a modern movie theater. Grr. It’s a good thing that the rest of the movie is so damned good that I can almost… almost… forgive the filmmakers for that one major gaffe.

    Overall, if you like period-piece swashbuckling melodrama, see Monte Cristo. If you’re into Matrix-style cyberpunk wire-fu, see something else.

  • Links LS 1999

    I’ll have to preface this review, the first I’ve done of any software package, by pointing out that I’ve been playing golf on PCs and game consoles for years. Not all the time, perhaps, and I’ll go months without swinging a virtual club, but I keep coming back to the digitized-golf genre again and again.

    It’s kind of sad, really.

    About five years ago, give or take, I won a website design contest put on by Microsoft. To be more accurate, I was one of a number of winners. The prize was, oddly enough, $100 worth of Microsoft products. I picked up Windows 95, a Sidewinder Pro joystick, Fury^3 and Golf 3.0 out of that deal. The Sidewinder Pro won’t work with machines that have 100MHz-and-up bus speeds, Fury^3 is a lame rehash of Terminal Velocity, and I’ve long since given up Win95 for Win98SE and Win2K.

    Golf 3.0, however, still gets a spin on our machines. It’s sadly dated, of course, as the graphics quality is so-so in its best moments. Putting is pretty easy, and you only get two courses so after a while the only challenge is in not screwing up the swing. (When you get right down to it, that’s probably the main challenge in any golf game, digital or otherwise.)

    So we’re at the outlet mall yesterday, stopping in at the Kay-Bee Toys outlet for a laugh, when I notice a copy of Links LS 1999 in the software dumpster. “Hmm,” I say to myself, “What have we here?” A few minutes later we leave the store with a brand-new $7.99 copy of the game.

    What did I get for my money? Vastly improved graphics. Four courses. The ability to conjure a variety of view windows in which I can aim my shot. Instant-replay that actually looks good and is useful. Much, much more realistic physics. A wide variety of gameplay “modes,” mainly consisting of fun rules/winnings changes.

    If you’re a golf-gaming nut, you’ll obviously have better software than this on your PC. If you’re a much more casual digi-golfer like me, then go out and find a copy of Links LS 1999 for a few measly bucks and be happy. I certainly am.

    (Final note: Access Software was purchased by Microsoft, and the next version of this game is Links LS 2000, a virtual re-release that only adds some courses and the ability to connect to Microsoft’s gaming zone. Yay. For my money, stick with the cheaper and identical product and duck the Microsoft empire once again.)

  • The Redemption Of Althalus

    A few years ago I picked up a little paperback titled Pawn of Prophecy. I enjoyed the characterization, I liked the handling of what could have been an overdone plot (the quest for the powerful bauble), and I loved the dialog. Many books later, I cherish the Belgariad and Malloreon series as some of my favorite light fantasy reading. I also enjoy the Elenium and Tamuli trilogies, though at a lesser degree and for different reasons.

    It was with a certain amount of trepidation that I approached the reading of The Redemption Of Althalus, a one-off fantasy work representing the latest efforts by the Eddings pair. So how is Althalus, you ask? In a word, underwhelming. If you want more words, I’d simply say, “Go read the Tamuli instead.” Or even better, “Go read the Belgariad instead.”

    Here’s the book summary: Wisecracking thief pairs up with sensual overbearing goddess, collects motley crew of lesser heroes to handily defeat ill-defined enemy forces, continually engaging in occasionally-witty banter and unsurprising character revelations. Oh yeah, they have nearly total freedom to move in time and space. And the climax of the story is a kind of insane Mobius strip finale that wraps up so very tidily that you wonder what the hell all the fuss was about in the first place.

    If you’ve read previous Eddings material, you’ll recognize almost everything in this book, and you’ll actually resent what little has been added. It’s as though they deliberately took the weakest parts of the earlier works and melded them with a truly offensive Plot Device. Okay, so the interpersonal stuff is at least as fun to read as anything else they’ve done, but it simply cannot carry an otherwise lifeless story.

    I suppose we should all be thankful that they only wrote one book in this new world. I’d have been truly angry to have finished a trilogy full of this nonsense.