Sunday, August 19, 2007
Moving to hoakz.com
I'm moving all content on this blog to my hoakz.com site to get better organization of it all...
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Review: Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1/5)
"Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" (IMDB, Amazon) is about three strippers Varla (Tura Satana), Rosie (Haji) and Billie (Lori Williams) out in the desert looking for thrills. They come across Linda (Sue Bernard) and her boyfriend Tommy (Ray Barlow). After killing Tommy, they take Linda hostage, and at a nearby petrol station they are tipped off about an old, crippled man (Stuart Lancaster) living in the desert with a fortune. They decide to liberate him of his money. All they need to do is get past his two sons (Dennis Busch and Paul Trinka). However, it turns out the old man has an agenda of his own and most of the cast end up knife stabbed or hit by cars before we reach the end of the movie...
I have to admit, this movie is from 1965, and apparently, the way they acted in the 60ies are just not in my taste.
This film has huge problems with the script. Let us start with the name. When someone calls something "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" at least I get an image of some kind of incitement/hunt/stress scene. My imagination was that the three "evil" strippers would incite the poor innocent girl to kill some other poor innocent victim. As it turns out, the script contains very little incitement, actually very little action at all.
The lack of action is, obviously, the main problem of this script. The characters (part from Paul Trinka's Kirk) are all trying to ''be'' instead of ''doing''. The three girls go around and snarl and talk "tough" but sadly enough the script fails them; there are virtually no cruelty or toughness for them to act on, leaving the poor actors to try and ''be'' as good as they can, which of course just looks silly. This failure also rubs off on the victim of the story, Linda, making her fear and anxiety seem plastic and phony as well.
The script had me cringing more than once from the outright ridiculous plot turns. Especially the scene at the gas station where the station attendant tip the girls off about the old man, had me thinking of those good old days when I participated in high-school plays.
The script doesn't give much credit to the human psyche either, and it utilizes the "linear cause-effect" type of psychology. For instance, the old man lost his ability to walk when he saved a girl from being hit by a train, so obviously, now he hates trains and girls...
If you want to see how to write a script that will kill all the characters mercilessly, then watch this flick (and by "kill" I don't mean "blood-bath"-kill, unfortunately, even splatter would have made this less painful... most of the characters die, that's true but they're dead long before that happens). Or if you just feel that the good old classics has to be good, old and classic, then watch it and suit yourself! ;o)
I give "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" 1 star of 5. (I'm not gonna f-up my own system by starting to deal out zeroes and minuses but I am pretty tempted...)
I have to admit, this movie is from 1965, and apparently, the way they acted in the 60ies are just not in my taste.
This film has huge problems with the script. Let us start with the name. When someone calls something "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" at least I get an image of some kind of incitement/hunt/stress scene. My imagination was that the three "evil" strippers would incite the poor innocent girl to kill some other poor innocent victim. As it turns out, the script contains very little incitement, actually very little action at all.
The lack of action is, obviously, the main problem of this script. The characters (part from Paul Trinka's Kirk) are all trying to ''be'' instead of ''doing''. The three girls go around and snarl and talk "tough" but sadly enough the script fails them; there are virtually no cruelty or toughness for them to act on, leaving the poor actors to try and ''be'' as good as they can, which of course just looks silly. This failure also rubs off on the victim of the story, Linda, making her fear and anxiety seem plastic and phony as well.
The script had me cringing more than once from the outright ridiculous plot turns. Especially the scene at the gas station where the station attendant tip the girls off about the old man, had me thinking of those good old days when I participated in high-school plays.
The script doesn't give much credit to the human psyche either, and it utilizes the "linear cause-effect" type of psychology. For instance, the old man lost his ability to walk when he saved a girl from being hit by a train, so obviously, now he hates trains and girls...
If you want to see how to write a script that will kill all the characters mercilessly, then watch this flick (and by "kill" I don't mean "blood-bath"-kill, unfortunately, even splatter would have made this less painful... most of the characters die, that's true but they're dead long before that happens). Or if you just feel that the good old classics has to be good, old and classic, then watch it and suit yourself! ;o)
I give "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" 1 star of 5. (I'm not gonna f-up my own system by starting to deal out zeroes and minuses but I am pretty tempted...)
Friday, July 13, 2007
At day's end
At day's end
when crickets sing
and darkness fall
the evening might turn cold
but no less beautiful
when crickets sing
and darkness fall
the evening might turn cold
but no less beautiful
Review: Paycheck - Let the future be untold (4/5)
Paycheck (IMDB, Amazon) is a story about Michael Jennings (Ben Affleck) who is an engineer, or to be more precise a reverse engineer. Michael is paid to take competitor's work and reverse engineer it into something his employees can make into a products of their own.
Since it would be very bad if information about whose technology was reverse engineered into what, Michael's assistant Shorty (Paul Giamatti) helps removing all of Michael's memories of the project once work is finished.
A once in a lifetime opportunity comes along as Michael's old friend Rethrick (Aaron Eckhart) offers him work that will give him stocks in Rethrick's promised-to-become-great company. Michael takes on the three year project, even if he risks losing his memory for the whole period, and that of a probably blooming romance with one of Rethrick's employees, doctor in biochemistry, Rachel Porter (Uma Thurman).
Three years passes, Michael finds himself back where he once begun, in Rethrick's office, his memory wiped and all that stands between him and his millions, a trip to the bank.
That is however, when problem starts, because Michael finds not only has he switched the personal effects he once had to leave before entering Rethrick's employee, he has also forfeited a 100 million dollars worth of stocks in Rethrick's company.
Why did Michael say no to the money and, of significantly less importance, what became of his personal effects? Michael soon realizes his former employees and the FBI are out to get him, and his bag of assorted effects seems to be the only thing that keeps him ahead of the game. A game, that if lost, could cost him his life...
!!!! WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW !!!!
The main theme in Paycheck revolves around the future. People are not supposed to know the future and if they are told what will happen in the future their lives are taken away from them, and loses purpose and meaning. Paycheck is also about mankind and our destructive use of technology, and how, like the men that invented the Atom bomb, we sometimes believe ourselves to invent something that will give us peace when in fact it threatens to destroy us completely.
The central Sci-fi artifact in Paycheck is a machine that through a kind of palmistry can read a persons future. It turns out Michael Jennings has looked into his future and found that if the machine is allowed to continue working it will predict a great war, that mankind (or perhaps as usual U.S.) will go to war in order to prevent... which of course will set the nukes flying, ending if not all of civilization at least one major metropolitan, most certainly several.
Love is another theme in Paycheck, and the acting between Affleck and Thurman is one of the nicer things about the movie, and being a kind of sucker for romance myself, I find it smooths over a few otherwise rough spots.
One of my major complaints about this movie is the copious amount of car chases. In this aspect it is almost as bad as The Island (IMDB, Amazon) where the main characters spends about half the movie running or fleeing from someone or something. It must be possible to create drama and action without chase scenes!
However, the largest problem I find in this story is the twenty items in the paper envelope. This is a key element to the story and as far as I can imagine how time and time manipulation would work, Michael should have failed after using his first item.
The problem is that the items fits like puzzle pieces into Michael's future, but once the first puzzle piece is used, the future changes. All of a sudden it wont be as easy to predict where the next piece will fit, unless of course, the machine can work with several possible futures and apply probability theory, which would still make the items further down the line less probable matches than the ones in the beginning.... something I judge not to be portrayed correctly in the movie.
Another funny thing about the movie is the number of braincells needed to remove Michael's memory of his first assignment (the A-life woman). I count four, possibly five braincells.... now now... I think it's a bit more complex than that. Speaking of removing memories... anyone wondering who removes Shorty's memories once he's seen what Michael remembered? Or is he an employee of (was it Nextgen?)
Finally, having just plowed through Alias (IMDB, Amazon) I have to wonder how long Michael will stay dead and disappeared when he so openly affiliate himself with his old pal Shorty's plant nursery. After all, shouldn't it take FBI about two hours to figure out Shorty is a good person to keep tabs on, and another fifteen minutes to bring Michael in and continue their interrogation where the fire alarm interrupted them earlier... where the Palmistry-machine predicts he will meet his demise, by the way.
Despite these obvious short comings of the movie I've found it to be good entertainment, the relation between Michael and Rachel, and the thought of predicting the future and it's consequences handled in a very probable and refreshing way. I give Paycheck 4 out of five stars.
Since it would be very bad if information about whose technology was reverse engineered into what, Michael's assistant Shorty (Paul Giamatti) helps removing all of Michael's memories of the project once work is finished.
A once in a lifetime opportunity comes along as Michael's old friend Rethrick (Aaron Eckhart) offers him work that will give him stocks in Rethrick's promised-to-become-great company. Michael takes on the three year project, even if he risks losing his memory for the whole period, and that of a probably blooming romance with one of Rethrick's employees, doctor in biochemistry, Rachel Porter (Uma Thurman).
Three years passes, Michael finds himself back where he once begun, in Rethrick's office, his memory wiped and all that stands between him and his millions, a trip to the bank.
That is however, when problem starts, because Michael finds not only has he switched the personal effects he once had to leave before entering Rethrick's employee, he has also forfeited a 100 million dollars worth of stocks in Rethrick's company.
Why did Michael say no to the money and, of significantly less importance, what became of his personal effects? Michael soon realizes his former employees and the FBI are out to get him, and his bag of assorted effects seems to be the only thing that keeps him ahead of the game. A game, that if lost, could cost him his life...
!!!! WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW !!!!
The main theme in Paycheck revolves around the future. People are not supposed to know the future and if they are told what will happen in the future their lives are taken away from them, and loses purpose and meaning. Paycheck is also about mankind and our destructive use of technology, and how, like the men that invented the Atom bomb, we sometimes believe ourselves to invent something that will give us peace when in fact it threatens to destroy us completely.
The central Sci-fi artifact in Paycheck is a machine that through a kind of palmistry can read a persons future. It turns out Michael Jennings has looked into his future and found that if the machine is allowed to continue working it will predict a great war, that mankind (or perhaps as usual U.S.) will go to war in order to prevent... which of course will set the nukes flying, ending if not all of civilization at least one major metropolitan, most certainly several.
Love is another theme in Paycheck, and the acting between Affleck and Thurman is one of the nicer things about the movie, and being a kind of sucker for romance myself, I find it smooths over a few otherwise rough spots.
One of my major complaints about this movie is the copious amount of car chases. In this aspect it is almost as bad as The Island (IMDB, Amazon) where the main characters spends about half the movie running or fleeing from someone or something. It must be possible to create drama and action without chase scenes!
However, the largest problem I find in this story is the twenty items in the paper envelope. This is a key element to the story and as far as I can imagine how time and time manipulation would work, Michael should have failed after using his first item.
The problem is that the items fits like puzzle pieces into Michael's future, but once the first puzzle piece is used, the future changes. All of a sudden it wont be as easy to predict where the next piece will fit, unless of course, the machine can work with several possible futures and apply probability theory, which would still make the items further down the line less probable matches than the ones in the beginning.... something I judge not to be portrayed correctly in the movie.
Another funny thing about the movie is the number of braincells needed to remove Michael's memory of his first assignment (the A-life woman). I count four, possibly five braincells.... now now... I think it's a bit more complex than that. Speaking of removing memories... anyone wondering who removes Shorty's memories once he's seen what Michael remembered? Or is he an employee of (was it Nextgen?)
Finally, having just plowed through Alias (IMDB, Amazon) I have to wonder how long Michael will stay dead and disappeared when he so openly affiliate himself with his old pal Shorty's plant nursery. After all, shouldn't it take FBI about two hours to figure out Shorty is a good person to keep tabs on, and another fifteen minutes to bring Michael in and continue their interrogation where the fire alarm interrupted them earlier... where the Palmistry-machine predicts he will meet his demise, by the way.
Despite these obvious short comings of the movie I've found it to be good entertainment, the relation between Michael and Rachel, and the thought of predicting the future and it's consequences handled in a very probable and refreshing way. I give Paycheck 4 out of five stars.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Show and tell
"Show, don't tell."This piece of advice has been repeated in several discussions I've had and books I've read on the subject of creative writing. Being from Northern Europe (Sweden to be precise) some of the literature I've grown up with does the opposite. It tells a story. Very little details, broad strokes, brushed by in high speed.
The good thing with showing, instead of telling, is that the story reveals lots of details that can easily capture the audience. You get to feel, hear, see, smell, taste what the characters experience. You get to "be there."
However, there are other concerns than revealing detail. The downside to showing instead of telling is that everything takes forever. You can hardly have a character sneeze without writing half a page about it.
Stories that show too much lose tempo, and become dreadfully long. I've seen amateur authors write a normal sized story (say about 3-400 pages soft cover) in twice, three even five times the number of pages, and when you analyze the story for this specific aspect you find everything is shown in painstaking detail.
I'm willing to bet, if you take your favorite book or author and analyze their texts you will find both showing and telling. This is done because showing gives detail, whereas telling gives speed, and higher tempo.
With telling you can manage the weekend trip to aunt Ruthie's in a page, even half a page, with showing you could spend the whole book writing about it (I'm sure several authors have).
I can think of one reason this rather strange advice has been introduced in books on creative writing; it may have been borrowed from books on screen writing. When writing a manuscript (for the movies or the stage) being visual and showing details becomes important, unless the characters will start blathering the piece to shreds, or the crew filming the whole thing will have to improvise details. However, recent developments in movies have introduced a narrator as a story telling tool, and the theater has had story telling in it from the beginning (story telling may even have been the beginning of theater).
Telling or showing can both be as capturing for the reader if done right. When to use which becomes a question of what story you are telling, the rhythm versus details, and the ultimate measure is more about feeling than anything else. You have to read and write until you gain an ear for when to show and when to tell, in order to write the story you want with the rhythm that will capture audience the most...
Sunday, July 8, 2007
Review: Ultraviolet - Xenophobia (3/5)
Ultraviolet (IMDB, Amazon) is a story about Violet, an ordinary woman whose life changed when she was infected by a virus that turned her into a feared and hated hemophage. She was incarcerated and experimented on, and perhaps these experiments cost her the child she was bearing when infected, perhaps the infection itself did, regardless, Violet escaped and now she is out to steal the government's latest and most deadly weapon in the fight against hemophages.
The hemophages have superhuman strength and speed, but at a cost; few live longer than a decade. Since the virus that causes hemophagism infect on blood contact, the number of hemophages should have grown had it not been for the government's prosecution.
Like vampires the hemophages have pointy eyeteeth, but unlike the vampires they do not require sucking blood and taking lives to survive. They are far from demons, and rather unfortunates infected by a deadly and infectious disease, and the only demon thing about them is the demonizing of them done by the government.
!!!! WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS BELOW !!!!
On the surface Ultraviolet is an action movie with several very well executed fight scenes that takes the technology to the edge, but under the surface hides a theme as old as mankind itself; xenophobia, or fear of strangers.
Even though we never get to see a crowd throwing sticks and stones at Violet, we get to see what the government, presumably with silent consent from the public, does to the hemophages. "Forcing them to wear identifying arm bands and rounding them up in special camps..." Sounds like something we have seen before?
I would not call Ultraviolet deep or philosophic, but if it can argue successfully against xenophobia, I am all for it. In our age and time we have way too much fear of strangers, and given how we handle the fact that a fraction of fanatics from a certain part of the world might set off bombs in our home town -- by fearing and restricting most everyone who has ever set foot in said part of the world -- we need to learn to see the world in the perspective of the oppressed. It is doubtful, had the virus of Violet's world been released in our world today, we would have done anything else than performed just as badly as in the movie.
Since I have seen both Equilibrium (IMDB, Amazon) and Æon Flux (IMDB, Amazon) it is not hard to draw some parallels between the three movies. The female heroine of Ultraviolet and Æon Flux, for one. The fight scenes, and usage of guns as a form of martial art in Equilibrium, and the equally astute usage of guns in Ultraviolet (even though there are no Gun Kata in Ultraviolet).
There are more parallels but they should be seen, so if you have not yet watched Equilibrium and Æon Flux, you should at least take a look at Equilibrium, which in my opinion is the most perfected of the three.
I give Ultraviolet a 3 out of 5 stars, mostly due to the action scenes but also for being a little bit more under the surface.
The hemophages have superhuman strength and speed, but at a cost; few live longer than a decade. Since the virus that causes hemophagism infect on blood contact, the number of hemophages should have grown had it not been for the government's prosecution.
Like vampires the hemophages have pointy eyeteeth, but unlike the vampires they do not require sucking blood and taking lives to survive. They are far from demons, and rather unfortunates infected by a deadly and infectious disease, and the only demon thing about them is the demonizing of them done by the government.
!!!! WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS BELOW !!!!
On the surface Ultraviolet is an action movie with several very well executed fight scenes that takes the technology to the edge, but under the surface hides a theme as old as mankind itself; xenophobia, or fear of strangers.
Even though we never get to see a crowd throwing sticks and stones at Violet, we get to see what the government, presumably with silent consent from the public, does to the hemophages. "Forcing them to wear identifying arm bands and rounding them up in special camps..." Sounds like something we have seen before?
I would not call Ultraviolet deep or philosophic, but if it can argue successfully against xenophobia, I am all for it. In our age and time we have way too much fear of strangers, and given how we handle the fact that a fraction of fanatics from a certain part of the world might set off bombs in our home town -- by fearing and restricting most everyone who has ever set foot in said part of the world -- we need to learn to see the world in the perspective of the oppressed. It is doubtful, had the virus of Violet's world been released in our world today, we would have done anything else than performed just as badly as in the movie.
Since I have seen both Equilibrium (IMDB, Amazon) and Æon Flux (IMDB, Amazon) it is not hard to draw some parallels between the three movies. The female heroine of Ultraviolet and Æon Flux, for one. The fight scenes, and usage of guns as a form of martial art in Equilibrium, and the equally astute usage of guns in Ultraviolet (even though there are no Gun Kata in Ultraviolet).
There are more parallels but they should be seen, so if you have not yet watched Equilibrium and Æon Flux, you should at least take a look at Equilibrium, which in my opinion is the most perfected of the three.
I give Ultraviolet a 3 out of 5 stars, mostly due to the action scenes but also for being a little bit more under the surface.
DVDs catching up?
Once upon a time a CD was large. Huge. You used it to save lots and lots of data.
Then came MP3s, movies, digital cameras with millions of pixels and suddenly the CD was small. And the DVD came, and for a while it was large... I don't think it ever was huge.
Today I would have to use more than 300 4.4 GB DVDs to save all my data, and that only includes the data on hard drives. Making back-ups becomes a question of selecting what to back-up and what to leave for chance. A real pain.
But there might be light at the end of the tunnel.
Researches at the Technical University of Berlin claims they've managed to put up to 500 GB of data on a CD/DVD-sized disc
This is (layman's interpretation) done by using holograms. The disc is transparent (wonder how that will work with labeling?) and uses ten layers of data (to compare with blu-rays that use two, and ordinary DVDs that use one). Anyway, sometime around 2010 they might be able to fit as much as 1 Terabyte to a CD-sized disc.
That's probably the same time as hard drives comes in 10-20 Terabyte sizes, and soon after the 1TB DVD will once more be insufficient.
Wheehoo...
Then came MP3s, movies, digital cameras with millions of pixels and suddenly the CD was small. And the DVD came, and for a while it was large... I don't think it ever was huge.
Today I would have to use more than 300 4.4 GB DVDs to save all my data, and that only includes the data on hard drives. Making back-ups becomes a question of selecting what to back-up and what to leave for chance. A real pain.
But there might be light at the end of the tunnel.
Researches at the Technical University of Berlin claims they've managed to put up to 500 GB of data on a CD/DVD-sized disc
This is (layman's interpretation) done by using holograms. The disc is transparent (wonder how that will work with labeling?) and uses ten layers of data (to compare with blu-rays that use two, and ordinary DVDs that use one). Anyway, sometime around 2010 they might be able to fit as much as 1 Terabyte to a CD-sized disc.
That's probably the same time as hard drives comes in 10-20 Terabyte sizes, and soon after the 1TB DVD will once more be insufficient.
Wheehoo...
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