...more recent posts
It's Ghost World and not the Apes....
...that have drawn the Mairianne Nowottny and Donnna Bailey (Shell) comparisons.
another reason to dislike Traffic,,,,????
i turned on channel two friday night in Miami, a movie is playing from the late 70's or ealy 80's, i dont know the name but it was about herion, filmed in pakistan, england, germany--let me tell you some parts
the England Drug Head has a daughter whom becomes a herion addict than a prostitute, he whom ignored her early on come to her resue
the top dealer is jailed, the wife runs the show while he's in, he get out cause the wittness is murdered by poison at breakfast after showing him his picture in the paper front page
the top aid of the dealer is murdered while talking to the boss on the phone
the movie ends with the cop walking in on a party at the dealer house, getting in the fight kicked out but does plant a bug
????
Princess and the Warrior--now that was a great love story.
The surfing documentary films of Bruce Brown are the stuff of legend. I only have to say "Endless Summer" and my point is made. He started in 1957 with 8mm. Soon he would find funding and would move up to 16mm. His film "Slippery When Wet" features "Freddy Pfhaler", Kembra's dad. (Her parents were known at the time by their surf names : Phird the Third and Rude Judy). Now all Brown's early films are available on video. Rent them soon.
Abuse Your Illusion
by Michael Atkinson
Village Voice, July 18 - 24, 2001
An exploding plastic inevitable, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within dares you to be amazed by its soulless mimeograph of humanity. In a dystopian future, this is the only type of movie we'd get to see: manufactured by hard-wiring, stamped from market-proven narrative templates, ostensibly distracting in the sheer bulk of its preprogrammed mayhem. All digital, all the time, Final Fantasy is not a cartoon, but rather a simulacrum of live-action Bruckheimer-ness so factory-pressed it should have an I'm-recyclable triangle embossed on every frame.
Think photo-realism without purpose, ironic or otherwise—and painted by nanotechnology. The movie's conspicuous artillery of faux details is its only Power Point, but today digital imaging is so ubiquitous that the achievement is authentically redundant. (Indeed, the masterfully imitated landscapes evoke the similar wonk-craft of "serious" live-action epics like Gladiator, The Messenger, and Contact.) It is said that a full third of the film's budget was spent on making the heroine's wispy hair convincingly wispy; how many heads of organic hair they could've bought is apparently irrelevant. The exercise is so elaborately pointless you'd think the Pentagon had bankrolled it.
Actually, it's a product of the same Japanese codeheads for whom the eponymous game series has been a spurting cash cow. The story itself is reheated Arthur C. Clarke: As giant alien "phantoms" (resembling microscopically photographed mosquitoes) besiege the earth, Identikit humans rally. There's a digital Ben Affleck (with Alec Baldwin's voice), a digital Neve Campbell (with Ming-Na's voice), a digital Jason Priestley (with Steve Buscemi's voice), etc. In this New Age, everything is helpfully color-coded: Silvery blue is good Gaia, leathery red is bad Gaia. For all of the monumental attention paid to visual fidelity (even a few lens flares and moments of handheld shakiness), the techies still can't manage to make two characters look convincingly into each other's eyes—it's like watching Disney World animatronic figures do soap opera.
The ultimate justification for Final Fantasy, it seems, is the wholesale subtraction of people from the entertainment equation; the games triumphed without the wetware, didn't they? But of course, they didn't: First-person electronic gaming revolves around and happens to a very human player, and without him/her, it's just machine love.