1st Foursome of ‘13

Random Vids

Fascinating multiplication technique taught to Japanese kids, via Gizmodo.

Nice Illusion from Io9.

Stunning papercraft music vid, via This is Collosal.

Animated Assault

The ultra faithful animated adaptation of Frank Miller’s ground breaking Batman graphic novel concludes with the The Dark Knight Part 2. The story picks up with the release of the Joker, who, fuelled with the reawakening of his caped nemesis begins to wreak havoc across Gotham and the inevitable final, bitter showdown ultimately instigates a battle between Batman and the establishment lackey Superman. The animation is excellent and sports some quality voice acting from Peter Weller and co and continues DC’s success in adapting it’s more mature works for the screen with plot and dark cynicism intact.

 

Berserk: The Battle of Doldrey is the second part of the retelling of the grisly medieval fantasy anime and, like DKR above, it’s a high quality product. The Band of the Hawks ingenuity and brutality on the battlefield finally bring them to the King’s attention but when they boldly tackle an impregnable fortress their success has unforeseen consequences for everyone involved. The animation is some of the finest around and the filmmakers commitment to blood and gore is admirable but like the first film the plot is seriously truncated and without the time for nuance it feels more cartoony than it should.

Rind Mending Beads

Oliver Sacks turns out a nice survey of our current understanding of sensory unusualness in Hallucinations. Specialising, as he does in geriatric neurophys, the book opens with tales of Charles Bonnet syndrome whose sufferers, as their eyesight fails, are prone to vivid and intrusive visions but the book soon moves onto similar stories, spread across all our sense modalities and variously prompted by drugs, disease and degeneration. It's a good read, that shouldn't trouble the laymen but yet enough detail about the more exotic perceptual aberrations to keep the more educated interested. Another worthwhile read from one of the best communicators of psychological understanding.

Robert Irwin’s novels have entertained me previously but having never read any of his academic works I was wary about his autobiographical effort, Memoirs of a Dervish. It is, however, a entertaining and fascinating glimpse of the author’s experiences of the swinging sixties and his meandering, spiritual journey from Oxford University to an unusual Algerian Sufi community. Irwin’s droll retelling of escapades with the mystically inclined and the drug addled are interspersed with vignettes of life as a fledgling intellectual and self deprecating reminiscences of his time in the ‘scene’. Though it’s a little slight there’s plenty of chuckles along the way and he sneaks in a well reasoned, seasoned perspective on the Age of Aquarius and Western spiritual seekers.

Specialised Drollery

Alan Arkin's directorial debut Little Murders is a savagely dark comedy about romance and the vapidity of modern life set during a crime riven 70's New York. Elliot Gould stars as a hollow, nihilistic photographer who is wooed/coerced into marriage by a tradition-tied singleton but their burgeoning, plasticky life together is perpetually tested by the casual violence rife in the city. There's a decidedly manic energy to proceedings and it’s bitter script gives each character plenty of er, colour and lots of room for big, theatrical swipes at the contemporary mores of the day. An impressive, sadly neglected satire that has a deliciously dark edge.

Crispin Glover, professional odd bod, makes an early appearance in the barmy road trip/buddy comedy Rubin and Ed. When the reclusive Rubin is recruited by a failing salesman to attend a culty conference event he decides to bury his dead, frozen cat in the desert instead and an uneasy, unusual friendship blossoms between the two flawed morons. Glover and Hessemen put in bravura performances as the mismatched duo and their peculiar, highly amusing adventures have a surprisingly poignant effect despite the all the bizarre-ness. Another forgotten little comedy gem with a script to die for.

Scifi Scenery

Twisted horror/comedy John Dies At the End gets butchered down into a reasonably successful 90mins by  Don “Phantasm” Coscarelli.Two slackers get drawn into some fantastical hijinks after ingesting an other-worldly drug called Soy Sauce and fumble about dodging death and some unsavoury and unusual characters. The dark, deadpan wit of the novel is mostly intact and there’s a lovely grubby sheen to the production but the sfx occasionally betray its low budget and the plot’s over simplification is at times baffling with some of the funnier, weirder scenes omitted, still a pleasantly offbeat slice of nonsense.
There’s more juice in the recent adaptation of Dredd with plenty of eye popping action decorating it’s deliberately straightforward plot. Karl Urban stars as the titular antihero who, whilst indoctrinating a rookie into the world of instant justice in a degenerate, over populated future, gets trapped in a drug lord’s tower block and a brutal slaughtering ensues. The unabashed action and perfunctory script keep things ticking along nicely and the modest introduction of the comic’s key elements nicely set up a sequel or two. It’s a shame then that despite it’s charms it bombed at the box office.

Page Based Productions

Cronenberg’s shiny/grimy adaptation of Cosmopolis (a sharp knife in the shallow guts of 21st Mammonism) retains some of it’s edge despite the uneven performance from Twilight Pattison. The film follows the book quite closely with most of the billionaire-on-the-brink’s varied antics included during his slow limo crawl across a gridlocked city and I’m sure there’s a fair bit of dialogue lifted too but there’s not enough time to give either their significance. It’s a fine looking film and there’s still plenty of smarts behind it’s gleeful, grim comedy so it’s worth catching but I’d recommend the novella first.

Another thought provoking, nuanced novel, Steppenwolf, got a big screen version back in 1974 and although good, similarly lacks the depths of the original. Max von Sydow stars as the melancholic scholar who, adrift after WW1, finds his mind and life lifted by an unusual jazz loving woman oh and lots of drugs and esoterica. The acting is excellent, the production not so much, peppered unnecessarily with some dated, gimmicky animations and sfx . Still there’s an effectively dreamy, dissolute weirdness that pervades proceedings and like Cosmopolis plenty of the big thoughts are intact.

British '78s

Richard Burton stars in the curious British paranormal chilller The Medusa Touch from 1978. The chronologically jumbled narrative follows a detective’s investigation into the attempted murder of a man who’s witnessed a few too many tragedies but perhaps unsurprisingly a far darker truth is slowly revealed. This is a low budget curio which, despite some of it’s frippery, musters an effective brooding atmosphere that ticks along nicely towards a suitably grim finale and of course It does help to have Burton in the centre of the piece exuding a smouldering menace that far outweighs his screen time. Understated & underrated.

Shape shifting aliens, cannibalism & lesbians feature in Prey, another British horror from ‘78 that, although quite ridiculous, has a potent, dreamlike atmosphere that masks most of it’s shortcomings. On arrival to Earth the alien adopts human form and infiltrates a nearby mansion only to loaf about for days winding up the squabbling lovers that live there – so far so idiotic and though the script  is half baked and the acting, er, shit it somehow kind of works. There’s some nice directorial touches but I guess it was the sheer weight of all that strangeness that kept me watching to it’s baffling denouement. Probably just for aficionados of cult crap but there’s enough here to justify a remake,