The first 27 minutes of A Scanner Darkly rocks…
Apr 18I spent the weekend attending a bi-mon-sci-fi-con sort of dealy, NorWesCon. I have friends who write sci-fi, and NorWesCon is where they give out the Philip K Dick award, so there are a lot of writers in attendance, lots of book dealers, lots of publisher parties to scam into, cool people to hang out with and have conversations that don’t involve Star Trek, that sort of thing. Overall, a fun way to spend a few days.
The highlight this year (besides watching two elderly nerds nearly come to blows over a political debate) was that Warner provided the first 27 minutes of A Scanner Darkly. I have two points to make:
Firstly, I’m very disappointed in the nerds in attendance. The segment was to run at the end of an hour and a half of movie trailers. These are trailers that are online. They’ve seen them before. And yet they booed the guy running the show when he announced they were short on time and would skip the X3 trailer. And when he announced to stick around for A Scanner Darkly, about half didn’t. They just weren’t interested. Some nerds they were.
Secondly, the first 27 minutes was just awesome. Having made a point of reading the book before the movie hit theaters, I can tell you it’s pretty damn close to the book. The only real alteration is that it’s not set in the 70s, it’s “7 years from now”. Every other change I noticed were omissions – little things that aren’t needed in the movie (and for all I know may appear later in the film.)
Disney to create Pirate MMO – Chris is dubious
Apr 13Disney has announce they’re doing a massively multiplayer video game based on Pirates of the Carribean – the game will be free to download and install, but there will be a monthly subscription. This is in the wake of Toontown, an MMO where you got to be a toon. I played Toontown and it was fun, but it has some catches. The first was names were heavily censored, which is fine. I didn’t need to see a cartoon rabbit named “j3w-h8r” running around (I actually saw that name – and H1tler. Because people are fucks.)
The second catch is that being a Disney game, they are very paranoid about people being able to talk to one another, their rationale being that this is a slippery slope to child molestation. And they’re not half wrong, though there’s certainly a large amount of protecting themselves from litigation behind it, not just protecting kids. So, the solution was that there was a fairly robust set of canned talk. I think if you were friends (a system I don’t properly recall – it was four years ago), you could chat, but here’s my point: talking to a handful of people normally while everyone else runs around going “Arr!” is fun for about 15 minutes, then it starts to suck. So, I’m curious how it’s going to work.
In the meantime, why not play Puzzle Pirates? Same idea, only you interact through puzzles. Jobs on a ship? Abstracted as a puzzle. Want to have a sword fight? A puzzle very much like Super Puzzle Fighter. It’s free to play (there’s more personalization if you play), and it’ll run on systems that will burst into flame if they tried to run a 3D game, I’m telling you.
The Life and Times of Juniper Lee
Apr 12Judd Winick has created a cartoon and no-one told me? It’s kind of like Buffy meets that Jackie Chan cartoon, only written by Winick, who writes some good stuff. I stumbled upon it by accident last Sunday. I may have to watch more. When the episodes have titles like “My Mind on My Mummy, and Mummy on My Mind” how can you NOT want to watch?
For those of you not in the know, Winick has written or does write a lot, A LOT, of comics, including Exiles, Batman, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, etc. I started reading his stuff with Barry Ween, Boy Genius (awesome stuff – a must read) and Blood and Water, a really good vampire limited series for DC/Vertigo. Apparently he was on Real World, so he plays some small role in the Reality TVpocalypse, but his stuff is too funny to hold that against him.
WikiWikiWhack: Judd Winick, Barry Ween
What's "fast food" in Chinese?
Apr 11
A friend just came back from a trip visiting family in Hong Kong – I got a knock off set of Constructicons (or was it Destructicons – they were just outside my time in Transformer land) out of the deal, which is awesome. They made up names for them, which start logically enough and then just get wierd – the dump truck is Feeding and the crane truck is Sanitation.
Anyhow, he was telling me about the toy you can buy at KFC there – I know! They have KFC there! Now, I’m a big fan of fast food. The food is ok, but the corporate machinations are something incredible. You know guys who study sharks or tornadoes? Yeah, that’s me, only with fast food. It can kill, but at times that power is a sight to behold and be in awe. So, this kind of thing was right up my alley.
Artist Eric So (I’d seen some of this action figures before) has created a line of little dudes with sign language for heads. Absolutely incredible. The letters that require a gesture? Those dudes have clear plastic arrows indicating the hand movement. There’s one for every letter in the alphabet and KFC HK has them.
At two bucks a pop, I’d buy em. And the plane ticket. And accomodations. And the promotion is over now. And… aw, never mind.
A Scanner Darkly mystery artists
Apr 09
So, I’m pretty excited about the new Philip K. Dick-based movie, A Scanner Darkly. It’s hard to say why, other than a) I’m a fan of PKD and b) the art-style looks fantastic. The picture is rotoscoped, which according to a recent article in RES magazine, let them shoot for under 9 million, and still visually achieve some of the crazy effects the story calls for (most notably the scramble suit) – not to mention the effect lends itself to a story centered around a group of drug addicts.
I wrote a whole big, long bit, but you can read that after the jump – right now I want to talk about the trailer and a mystery it contains – well, a mystery to me. And mysteries where there’s an explaination within reach just drive me nuts. I’ve been watching both trailers over and over. I’m too busy to totally obsess, but if I had the time, I would. Actually, after you read this, you may decide that I did obsess, but trust me, I’m fine now.
