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.
Get More:
Movie Trailers, Celebrity News
Today’s Rhapsody is a Brazilian Rhapsody by Jean Absil.
My good friends Aron Tarbuck and J Kovach have a Kickstarter Campaign this month for their project “Prospero’s Price” all about The Tempest, the Cthulhu Mythos and… Well, I’ll let Aron explain it himself:
I am very proud to announce the project that J Kovach and myself have been working on! We have launched a Kickstarter for this, and if you are interested; please follow the link below: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1569820395/prosperos-price-a-lovecraft-and-shakespeare-tale
We did not simply wish to retell any existing story, but create something new that builds upon to both the works of HPL & the Great Bard. The Tempest is not simply one of Shakespeare’s finest works, but also ladened with a great many elements that have long been unexplored. There is also a great deal of symmetry between many of the Lovecraftian concepts and this specific tale. I hope to provide a very unique tale that is not at all pedestrian and quite unusual ….
As a long time fan of the Bard I like all the questions that occur to me when this idea comes up.. Just what was the book Prospero buried? Just who was Sycorax? the list goes on.
Anyway I have the banner ad on the right sidebar for this campaign and I’ll have it it up for as long as they need it. Show them some love.
This weeks’ double feature is just a little short because… okay I confess I was weak. I could not watch the first film in this week’s selection, Heaven’s Gate in its entirety. I toughed out the first hour and a half and had to take a break. Then when I told my friends I was watching it I kept getting pitying looks and questions about why I was doing this to myself… and then I started reading old reviews calling it one of the worst films in history… and killing the Western as a viable genre… So rather than tough it out I gave in to peer pressure and gave up.
I won’t say it was utterly terrible the world building of the period was good and none of the performing was bad but… it was all the little things but mostly the pacing. I know what they say about the modern American having the attention span of a gnat but it took them an hour to tell us what the plot was!
Anyway after watching an incredibly bad expensive film I finished my double feature with a very good and VERY cheap film, Primer.
Primer is probably one of the smartest and complex time travel movies you are ever going to see.
There are two things I like about it.
The first is it doesn’t talk down to you. The technobable is grade A backed with real physics, it assumes you are smart and does not wait for you to keep up. You have to watch it more then once to catch everything that’s going goes on.
The second is how they portray scientists. As the son of an academic I get REALLY tired of all of the portrayal of scientists in media from absent minded flakes, idealists who ignore evidence that doesn’t fit their world view, arrogant hubristic elitists, or even incompetents. Our two heroes whatever else their faults (and they had plenty) were careful professionals who used the scientific method and checked their work.
I was amazed by how they were able to do so much with so little and enjoyed it, so I guess for this weeks viewing, one success out of two isn’t all-bad.
