Just something fun I whipped up the other day.
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Well I finally saw it. Not all that bad. I don’t think I’ll be going giving it a gold star or anything. While I am glad of a Science fiction that is not just an action film with accessories I need them to do more a film not following formulae.
Anyway as it as been said many a time it’s essentially using aliens in Johannesburg as a metaphor for apartheid and I suppose refugee camps as well. As the film starts with a nearly identical premise to Alien Nation only they take it from the South African Perspective, which means put all of the alien refugees into a camp, that quickly turns into a slum.
They explain away why culture stays mostly unchanged is that one all of the technology that the aliens have only work with their DNA, and two all but two of the Aliens we encounter seem to be a marginally sentient drone caste. Based on this you wonder how the heck they got so much tech (that wasn’t working) down off the ship.
Anyway it does the usual things about corporate greed and man’s inhumanity. It occurs to me that a nice clean professional laboratory in the right context would be far more terrifying than the borderline abattoir they drag the protagonist too once he gets infected by the “prawn” dna.
So anyway for a dramatization to our first exposure to an alien species (technically two species as there are these scorpion creatures that the “Prawns” use in cock fights) It’s pretty well done, and uses the documentary format very well.
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Just finished a paying gig. It’s the banner for a Lawyer’s blog on business relations with China. The title of the blog is China Branding Blog. The original concept was to have a red chinese dragon on one side and a green western dragon on the other. Unfortunatly, while I had a good execution of that one, it really didn’t work. While the western dragon shows up in heraldry and everything, it’s not the cultural icon that the chinese dragon is. Anyway we finally went with the Chinese dragon and replaced the other dragon with a panda. It came out pretty nice though the final version had to be radically reformatted for the final version. Anyway I’m still using this previous version for the Portfolio. Hope you all like it.
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Well I did the Art walk last night. I’d “done” it before doing illustration demonstrations over at the Dreaming. But this was the first time I actually walked and looked at the various displays. The first was some of the photography of my friend J Kovach, of Feral Sky Studios, at Gargoyles. The second was at Upper Playground, a new high end t-shirt shop, that was showing the works of Alex Pardee. Most of his work consisted of very bizarre surrealist cartoons, very well done though.
It was the first time I had ever checked out Upper Playground since it had first opened up a couple of months ago. It was crowded and lively and I got myself stuck in an unmoving line to see the exhibit. Just as I was beginning to get very annoyed I realized I was standing in the autograph line.
The really depressing thing is that between this and J’s opening is this is the closest thing I’ve gotten to going out for a night on the town.
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Well I went and saw a sneak preview of Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo on the Cliff, or just Ponyo according to Disney marketers, and it was very much up to the master’s usual standards. It is very much going back to the simplicity of his works specifically for children like Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service.
Artistically it was amazing. All of the backgrounds were done in pastels which reminded me of the use of watercolor in Lilo and Stitch. The animated figures clashed against the background slightly but not enough for me to have had a problem with it. I can’t help wondering if they could have fixed that by running the cells through a special filter or something similar.
One small nitpick I had with it was after the spectacular entrance of Ponyo as a human child running on the backs of a tsunami in the shape of giant fish, the ending felt anticlimactic in comparison. That’s okay though. Miyazaki’s quiet meditative scenes are just as good as his spectacle’s.
If I had one real complaint it was that the closing theme left a nearly inextricable earworm.
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Well here’s a bit of exciting news Lulu, the print on demand service I do my collections on, just worked out a deal with Amazon which means Rhapsodies is now on Amazon which means better visibility!
So what are you waiting for, come get your copies of Where Do You Want Your Drummer?, AKA: Havana Sunset, What Happens on the Road, and my one experiment with science fiction, Sasha: Slower Than Light, today!
And even if you can’t buy today reviews and ratings are very much appreciated!
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