Blackmoor Vituperative

Susan and I just finished watching a movie called The Skin I Live In. I want to discourage you from Googling it or looking up too much about it, because there are some twists you may not see coming, and that’s a pretty rare thing. Better not to spoil it.

I will share some things that won’t spoil it for you. First, it’s in Spanish with English subtitles. Hopefully that won’t put you off too much. Now for the plot: Antonio Banderas is a mad scientist. He has a young woman locked in a room in his mansion (and wow, is that some mansion!). He appears to be using her as a Guinea pig for his artificial skin experiments. She doesn’t seem seem to be there willingly, but at the same time, she doesn’t seem altogether unwilling, either.

That’s as much as I can say without potentially ruining it for you. It’s a weird, weird movie. As Susan would say, “Why are foreign films so foreign?”

I do recommend it, though.

Just finished watching Gamera 3: The Revenge Of Iris. This is probably one of the best kaiju movies I have ever seen (and I have seen most of them). A major plot element of Revenge Of Iris concerns a girl who blames Gamera for the death of her parents. It’s true: Gamera smashed her parents’ apartment building into rubble while fighting the Gyaos. Of course, had Gamera not fought the Gyaos (or had Gamera not existed at all), the death toll from the unstoppable Gyaos would have been much higher, but as you might imagine, that’s small consolation to the girl.

I think some of the best villains are those with understandable motivations. In the case of Ayana (the aforementioned orphan girl), you feel sorry for her and sympathize with her, even though she is tragically misguided in blaming Gamera for her parents’ death: she ought to blame the Gyaos. But it’s an all-too-human failing to place blame using emotion rather than reason. That’s an element that’s hard to pull off without being either heavy-handed or simply ridiculous (particularly in a movie about giant monsters), but I think this movie does it successfully.

I am imposing a unilateral un-grimmening! No more grim tidings for at least one week. Time for Christmas cheer and good will.

As a start, here are my favorite Christmas specials and movies, in no particular order. Some are great. Some are just terrible. Some make me laugh. Some make me cry. I love them all.

How The Grinch Stole Christmas (the real one, not the Jim Carrey abomination)
Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas
Santa Claus Conquers The Martians
(Mexican) Santa Claus
Gremlins
Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town
Silent Night, Deadly Night
Elf
Bad Santa
Scrooged
Star Wars Holiday Special
Hogfather
Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer
Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny

Merry Christmas!

When Rango came out in theatres, I had no interest in seeing it. It just didn’t look interesting. Why would I want to see a movie about a chameleon in a western town? Dull.

I was wrong. Susan and I just finished watching this on Amazon Prime, and not only is it a good animated movie (better than the last three Shrek movies, easily), it’s a damned good western — and there aren’t that many of those made these days.

If you have Amazon Prime, see Rango. It’s free. If you don’t have Amazon Prime… hell, see it anyway.

This is a damned good movie.

Just came back from seeing Skyfall with Susan. I confess that I am puzzled by all of the glowing reviews. I can forgive technical absurdities like the biometric pistol (an idea which first got floated around over 20 years ago, and which was discarded because no sane field agent would ever depend on it) and the head of Q branch plugging a known enemy asset into their network (although after the last two movies got so many computer details right, that was kind of disappointing).

The glowing reviews puzzle me because the movie was so slow and dull. Even the theme song is dull. The movie didn’t even have a villain for the first, what, two hours? And when we do meet him, he’s just… creepy. Not scary. Not menacing. Just icky, in the way the grocery store bagger who looks a little too long at your personal hygiene items is icky.

It’s not the worst Bond movie I have ever seen (A View To A Kill and Octopussy are both much worse), but even A View To A Kill had a better villain. Christopher Walken, now, he knows how to play a deranged blonde genius.

Last night’s interstitial Cult Movie Night SPECIAL EDITION was Silent Night, Deadly Night (a Christmas tradition!) and Brick. It was going to be Silent Night, Deadly Night and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, but I was overruled.

Silent Night, Deadly Night is a much better movie than you might think, if you’ve never seen it. It spends a good portion of the movie introducing you to the main character, Billy, and gives you insight into why he later snaps and start killing people dressed as Santa Claus. It also includes a lot more nudity than you see in slasher movies nowadays (something I miss). But it’s not torture porn, like Saw and Hostel — there aren’t long, lingering scenes of people tortured and in pain. The violence is over the top and fun, not sadistic and disturbing. That being said, there are some genuinely creepy and scary parts, primarily in the early part of the film where we see Billy being traumatized by his early experiences.

Brick, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is completely different. Brick is a film noir mystery set in and around a high school. That might sound camp, but Brick works because everyone in the movie takes it deadly seriously. It works because in high school, every ridiculous little thing is deadly serious. There’s very little violence, some mild language, and no nudity. An episode of CSI has more violence in first fifteen minutes than Brick has in the whole movie. Yet the movie is rated R for “Violent and Drug Content”, showing you what a load of crap the MPAA ratings are.

I had to double check to make sure this wasn’t an Onion article. This is amazing. I thought the media robber barons had successfully brainwashed everyone in Washington.

Copyright was an Enlightenment-era social experiment: use the power of government to prevent people from selling or copying creative works without the consent of the creator for a limited time. As originally conceived, I think it was relatively reasonable. However, the current perception (perpetuated by large media companies that seek to own and control our cultural heritage) that when someone creates something once once, that they (rather, the corporation they work for) should be able to monetize that and prevent other people from sharing it or building on it forever has caused and continues to cause severe damage to our common culture, and to the culture of future generations.

If current copyright law had always existed, there would be no libraries, because there would be nothing to put in them.

Update (2012-11-18): That didn’t take long. Less than 24 hours after this “eminently sensible copyright position paper” was posted, the paper has been pulled and the Republicans are falling over themselves to placate the media robber barons. Money doesn’t win elections, but this makes it abundantly clear that money does buy politicians. (In case you doubted it.)

Should you want to read the paper, I have a mirror of it here, and there are also a mirror at KEI, and another from the MD Pirate Party.

We saw The Dark Knight Rises last night. I’m not bothering with a spoiler warning, because it’s unnecessary: the movie is just that predictable. I started looking at my watch after about 70 minutes. That’s not a good sign.

The first half of the movie is a strung-together series of Long. Serious. Monologues. After a while it picks up, and turns into a dull, predictable remake of Batman Begins (a fantastic movie).

I liked Anne Hathaway, but she wasn’t onscreen enough to salvage the movie around her. Dull and predictable sums it up.

Oh, and if you think the ending needs further explanation (why anyone would need the ending explained is a mystery to me, but apparently some people go looking for ambiguity), this toy can explain the ending to you.

I am completely sincere when I say Batman & Robin was better in damned near every way. If you’d told me a week ago that I would say that, I would have laughed at you.

Edit: Someone saved me the trouble of listing most of the problems I had with the Dark Knight Rises script. They leave out one noteworthy problem: the “these guys are the League of Shadows, no wait, now they’re revolutionaries, no, wait, now they are suicidal goons … who the hell are these guys, anyway?” problem.
(Note: Google erroneously marks this site as malicious.)

I am watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. The kid made a tsunami and then deliberately didn’t destroy the Fire Nation fleet with it. I would have sunk them like stones. I guess I’d make a poor messiah. And… um, while I was typing this, the movie ended abruptly. What the hell?

Other than the abrupt, inconclusive ending, I didn’t think this movie was all that bad. Certainly not as bad the negative things I’d heard. I’d say it is on par with The Neverending Story, and that’s some kind of classic, isn’t it?

I typically have DVDs or something from Netflix streaming in the background while I work. As it happens, today I am running through the Universal Frankenstein movies. The movie currently running is Bride Of Frankenstein, which is actually my favorite of the series.

So I am typing away, adding validation to web forms (not a sexy project, but important nonetheless), and I notice that the sound of howling hounds is really loud. I stop and listen, and then I pause the DVD — the howling continues. The howling is coming from the woods behind Castle Blackmoor, out toward the creek that feeds the moors. Curious, I went outside to look and see what was doing all of this howling.

I got to the edge of the path which leads off down to the outpost, and the howling stopped. Not abruptly, mind you: it just sort of faded away. As I stood there, the woods were eerily silent, somehow made even more eerie by the bright sunny sky above. The sounds of wildlife, birds, churring insects and so on gradually came back, and then a bit later, I heard the howl again, so far away that I could barely hear it.

At which point I realized that I’d come outside without even taking along a pistol, much less a proper rifle, as one might reasonably do when investigating a mysterious howling on the moors. Imagine how foolish I’d have felt if I’d found the source of the howling.

It’s easy to criticize the behaviour of victims in horror movies when they do foolish things: going into dark basements alone, going outside to investigate strange noises, chasing an escaped cat in one’s space-underwear, and so on. It’s much easier to make foolish choices than we’d like to think, particularly when the sun is bright and the sky is clear and we are in a familiar environment where a monster has never attacked us before.