Great news Prospero’s Price, the Kickstarter Project my friends Aron and J were working on just reached their 3000 dollar target with 12 days to spare! Let’s see how far we can pad that number in the next two weeks. so show some love and click the Prospero’s Price Banner add on the bottom right side of this page.
Well I had a nice night at an Oscar party last night. (To be honest when I say Oscar party what I really mean is a regular dinner party where the Oscars just happened to be on in the background. The conversation was fascinating and lively.)
Usually I don’t bother with the Oscars. For the most part I consider them the industry’s night of self congratulation with the old boy’s club out in force with the occasional political statement thrown in for good measure. For the most part I usually don’t expect the best and most interesting films of the year to be nominated let alone win.
In fact this was the first year in a while I hadn’t seen a single film nominated. So I wasn’t even rooting for anyone this year.
But still it was fun. Watching all of the expensive gowns being paraded on the red carpet, watching Ellen DeGeneres hamming it up, being very confused when John Travolta got Idina Menzel’s name extremely wrong before she performed “Let It Go” (and while we’re on the subject of great performances Pink sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” was pretty cool too. And most importantly the look of ecstatic glee on the face of someone who wasn’t quite expecting to win… PRICELESS.
Today’s sketch is another example of the ever fun activity of sketching moving targets with the local Empire of Medieval Pursuits group (or as a friend of mine who participates calls it, “Medieval Fight Club”) who practice over at Gasworks on Sunday afternoons.
For this week’s selection of film I went with two very strange, but very different love stories.
The first Miracle Mile, is a film I probably one I wouldn’t have watched when it came out in 1989. As a child of the cold war inevitable nuclear armageddon was a frequent subject of my nightmares and with a few notable exceptions, like Watchmen, I did not like being reminded.
Miracle Mile is very much a product of it’s time and is full of just about every cliché that the eighties and the nuclear war genre have to offer. Sometimes it almost feels like satire. What was the most interesting thing about it for me it wasn’t really about the doom of oncoming nuclear strike but the fear of it. As the hero desperately tries to find and rescue his love in time, he spreads the rumor that the world is going to end in the next hour and it snowballs causing chaos like an invasive meme. By the end of the film San Francisco is in flames even before the strike. In a way I would have been interested to see what the movie would have been like if it had turned out to be a false alarm instead of ending with the… well… end.
The next film Wristcutters: A Love Story is road trip comedy about love and suicide set in a bleak colorless afterlife where all the victims of suicides go, a place “just like here only worse”. Despite the fantastic premise Wristcutters is wonderfully low key and realistic to the point that you almost have to be reminded about the fantastic elements. It presents the feeling of otherness through a muted filter and other elements so subtle that they have to be pointed out to us by the characters. Even the most blatant magical bits like a black hole underneath the passenger seat in the protagonists’ car and actual miracles are taken in stride with the characters so you find yourself ignoring them with them. All in all a fascinating film I look forward to watching again to catch more of these nuances.
I confess my childhood interest in Godzilla is mixed. I don’t think I could call myself a fan. For various reasons including my mostly limiting my television viewing to PBS and a general wimpiness when it came to horror films I didn’t even SEE a Godzilla film until I was fifteen. But despite not watching the movies I had read all of the books about them, so my knowledge was actually good regarding most of the Showa Era. So me and my friends would create our own adventures of Godzilla which had little to do with the actual movies.
Since then I’ve been catching up. Most of them are fun romps though few capture the power of the original film. My favorites include Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack and Godzilla: Final Wars There were a few outright bombs which unfortunatly includes the utterly painful American remake.
So when I heard about a new American Godzilla film I assumed the worst but thankfully what I heard about the director, Gareth Edwards’ enthusiasm about the project and seeing the teaser and first trailer I started to get my hopes up. Now I realize that trailers have become an art form unto themselves so a good trailer no longer means a good movie. But now that I have seen the second trailer… I think I will be an optimist now.
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Today’s Rhapsody is a Brazilian Rhapsody by Jean Absil.