So one of the editors at the local Stranger weekly newspaper has been featuring cool local artists/band posters for the past several months. They are sometimes hard to find in the paper – usually back amid all the weekend band/club ads – but they are usually pretty cool and almost always have links back to the artist who did them. As I’m always jonesin’ for cool backdrops on my computer, I wanted to find these online, and got some help from the Stranger’s webmaster today on lining them up from a search result.

Click here to enjoy!

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saw Up again a few nights ago. What a great movie – and somewhat different than the usual Pixar fare.

On the one hand, the animation keeps on getting better and better – the balloons above the house look almost real, and it’s interesting that they’d make a movie about an old man and his early child dreams of South American adventure (?). And the usual Pixar ‘warm & silly’ touches are there too (talking dogs with several recurring jokes, gentle slapstick humor throughout, a weird chocolate-loving bird named Kevin, etc.).

I also appreciate Pixar’s continued willingness to subtly slam the corporations (not that Hollywood doesn’t make a lot of income doing that anyway) but Pixar is more sublime than most, barring say, WALL-E (that movie is a more extreme position on the subject :)). Here the anti-corporate commentary largely takes the form of Carl’s house being ‘built around’ by skyscrapers (reminds me of the old lady’s San Francisco firehouse in Herbie Rides Again) but there’s also implications for both the two heroes (Carl and explorer scout Russell) and villain (Muntz) concerning the underlying theme of adventure and seeking the unknown. The ‘real world’ is never kind to that one, to be sure.

There are definitely varied movie and pop-culture influences at work here – at least in my mind. Muntz’ airship is right out of The Island at the Top of the World; kerewin noted the house + balloons as possibly inspired by James & the Giant Peach; and my own (i’m sure unintended) reference is the Alpha dog’s distorted voice (heard at two different times in the movie) being identical to Conan O’Brien’s Pimpbot 5000 – too funny. And the whole ‘travel adventure’ artwork seen early on by Carl and Ellie as kids is very reminiscent of the earlier Pixar movie The Incredibles (I’m thinking of Mr. Incredible in his office looking at all his old glory newspaper articles, and of the artwork in the closing credits, too – classic stuff!)

But what makes Up more than a bit different than other Pixar movies (and other family fare) is their willingness to inject a lot of sadness into the movie and plot. The early montage of Carl & Ellie’s life together by itself is enough to get out the hanky, but it doesn’t stop there. Although they balance it somewhat by the various triumph(s) in the movie, this is still a much sadder story than most – one of our friends is adamant he’d never bring kids to this movie, way too depressing! 🙂 But to his point, I think at least some of that sadness is aimed far more directly at adults and you have to be one to really appreciate WHY it is sad and not simply transition periods between the more action-oriented portions of the movie. Maybe it’s not sad per se, but rather, poignant and wistful? The writers obviously make strong points about ‘live life to the fullest’, ‘don’t forget to look around you for the adventure you already live’, and themes to that effect. Sage advice indeed – but rare in an animated family movie?

I guess that’s what continues to make Pixar special and their movies stand out from the crowd. While I think the next couple movies are going to be sequels (Cars 2, Monsters Inc. 2) hopefully they’ll continue with the original, unique stuff.

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watched the original TRON last night. Given how recently we saw the sequel, it was good to go back to the original for comparisons.

1) I missed the nuance of ‘clu’ in the original until this time. You may remember early on when Flynn is trying to hack the MCP (before he goes ‘into’ the computer himself) he has a tank running around with a program that looks like him – that’s Clu – seen far more prominently in the sequel of course. Sadly the ‘loose bit‘ seen here (and a bit later) didn’t make the sequel….

2) LIked the far more prevalent Recognizers here. In the sequel, they basically get one scene early on, and that’s kinda it. Here they are much more a part of the plot, including when Flynn steals one and flies it (not entirely successfully) to the I/O tower to meet Tron and Yori. The Recognizers for me are one of the definitive icons from TRON, and I wish they had done far more with them in the sequel , doh!

3) They make far more effort to tie together the computer world, the human world, and the relationship between the two here. Which of course ends up as background in the sequel, but if they hadn’t done it the sequel would be extremely confusing (rather than just sort of).

4) The plot holds together decently – there are some slow spots, yes – but on balance, it sets up the villain(s) well and then provides several good guys to battle them in various ways (although not really explaining what the MCP ultimately wanted to ‘do’ once it infiltrated all the computers in the human world – wait for the rise of/fight Skynet? :))

5) I am still amazed at the lameness of the critics slamming this movie in their reviews of the sequel. It is patently obvious most of them never watched it, or were too young for the original (and then never watched it priot to the new one), and/or simply don’t get it, period. Yes, many ideas from this movie have been done later and arguably better in other ways, but TRON showed the way and visually has a style all its own (doesn’t hurt having Syd Mead and other renowned artists/conceptual designers setting a pretty high bar, either).

This movie is not Citizen Kane – and perhaps by today’s standards it looks kind of dated – kerewin commented more than once on the ‘lame special effects’ – which I have to counter with ‘dated’ – they aren’t lame! And maybe you had to grow up at that time during the earlier ‘rise of the computer’ in our daily lives vs. now. But seen vs. much of what has come later – and especially how lame at least half of the vaunted Star Wars movies have been and the third Matrix movie, etc. – there’s certainly plenty of room out there for an alternate vision. Viva TRON!

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So finally was able to watch my library copy of Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage. This is a documentary of the Rush story, from early-70’s beginnings to present (2010). It also has some bonus stuff on the second DVD, deleted scenes, and some rare concert footage from VERY early on (the original three playing at Toronto high schools, which at the time were the ‘tour’ given the band wasn’t 21 so not in bars).

All in all, this is a good show, and has a nice mix of fandom (e.g. other musicians talking about why Rush mattered to them or to music generally), musical history of the band (album histories and capturing a bit of events at each one) and sporadic concert footage spread throughout. While I could have done without Gene Simmons (is that guy in EVERY rock documentary these days or what?) his comments are actually restrained and kind of funny, and Geddy Lee also gives KISS their due in terms of how much they helped Rush early on.

One thing that is also noticeable is how nerdy a band they really are. They even joke about how early on, their fans were nearly all men. Then later on, still nearly all men. Only in more recent years have they seemed to gain female fans of any amount – which is good, but I doubt it had much effect on their musical direction or appeal – still way nerdy compared to most bands. They really don’t sing much, if at all, about the usual rock ‘topics’ – sex and drugs – something that got them a lot of crap from UFO while on tour in the UK/Europe (funny anecdotes from Geddy on that).

It’s also interesting to note how Alex/Geddy were the founders and have the history together all the way back to grade school, whereas despite Neil Peart having now been in the band around 40 years, he is still (jokingly) called ‘the new guy’, because he was the second (and only since) drummer. The sequences with him are somewhat different than the other two – he’s definitely a different breed of cat, much quieter – nice guy, but definitely more intense and a bit ‘brooding’ vs. the other two.

I knew that Neil’s daughter had passed away in a bad car accident while they were on tour many years ago, but didn’t know that his wife had passed on not long after too. What a terrible, sad experience – they relate how they thought it was the end of the band – they really didn’t do anything for almost 5 years before Neil came around and wanted to get things rolling again. I’m glad he came through it, but it sounds like it took a long, long time.

I think a couple additional things might have improved this film a bit, though. For one, I would have liked a closer look at their composition process – how do they sit down and come up with stuff, what does it look like? They talk about this a bit but not in real detail, more high-level.

Second, I know that Geddy and Alex write the music for the most part, and Neil writes the lyrics in many cases. How does his writing process work? He is a voracious reader, and it’s obvious his lyrics come from all that reading – but how was he ‘inspired’, etc.? While he’s a pretty private guy, at least a minimal conversation about it would have been pretty cool.

Also, some anecdotes about specific songs might have been neat – you can see a few in the liner notes on some albums (e.g. Red Barchetta is based on a sci-fi story, etc.) but say, where other songs come from? Some are obvious (LimeLight, Subdivisions, etc.) but others?

At any rate, it’s always interesting to see what the band guys are really like – are they ‘normal’ people, self-absorbed jerks, wankers, or? Rush are definitely the former, and have largely maintained cool heads throughout their long career – cheers to them!

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Watched the anime Vexille (note: major spoilers in the Wikipedia link!) tonight, post-skiing. Vexille, named after one of the main characters, tracks the story of a completely isolated (diplomatically, physically and technologically) Japan; a malevolent plot courtesy of the internationally known Daiwa Corporation (makers of all kinds of advanced androids and robot tech); and the US Navy S.W.O.R.D. commando team sent to infiltrate Japan to figure out what’s going on after breaking up a secret meeting in the Colorado mountains. This show is kind of a mixed bag, however, for the following reasons:

1) The animation, done by the same team that did Appleseed, is good. I still think, however, that Appleseed was considerably more dazzling overall in appearance than this movie. Sometimes the visuals are very stunning, and other times they seem like the animated intro’s to a PS2 game or something (the ones you always skip past by hitting ‘X’ repeatedly so you can get to playing the actual game?). Also, in some ways this movie’s look seems to directly mimic Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within in a number of scenes also.

2) There are parallels in the plot between Vexille and Appleseed too – I won’t reveal them to avoid spoiling it, but on the bright side, this movie doesn’t have the heroine shouting ‘Briareos!’ over and over again like Appleseed does.

3) The Jags (metal-seeking ‘worm whirlwinds’ in the Japanese wastelands) are obviously a Dune sandworm ripoff, plain and simple.

4) The characters (excepting possibly Maria) aren’t really developed well, if at all – they are pretty flat and one-dimensional.

5) Finally, one of the last battles between Vexille and Kisaragi (Daiwa Corp’s resident mad scientist) is pretty unbelievable.

Wikipedia references other reviews that call out Vexille for going over ground already covered by Ghost in the Shell – I agree with that in some ways, but Vexille put a reverse twist on the whole ‘man vs. machine’ debate (central to many of these similar anime) which had potential but became fairly formulaic in the end, not unlike the recently reviewed Sky Crawlers. The quest for better anime goes on!

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