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this short was just released by Ridley Scott regarding the upcoming Alien prequel this summer, Prometheus. Can’t wait for this movie! This short features Guy Pearce and reveals some backstory – this isn’t in the upcoming movie…

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from today’s Savage Chickens – funny! Older GZ comics linked below….

Older GZ’s

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After all the monster movies I’ve seen over the years (many multiple times – after all, WWGZD?) I finally got around to watching the original Rodan movie yesterday. They reissued it on DVD with both the original Japanese version (english subtitles) and the dubbed American version and conveniently, the SPL had it.

My review here is going to be short – simply stated, there wasn’t near enough monster/destruction/mayhem! So rather than try to write more words about too little action – I give you a far better Rodan review (word and wit-wise) courtesy of Stomp Tokyo! Other reviews by these maniacs are linked off the blogroll on the lower left. Enjoy!

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what better way than from Savage Chickens? 🙂

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Started watching the 2001-2004 Cartoon Network series Samurai Jack again while I ride the exercise bike in the basement. I’ll chart my fave episodes here as I go.

So far, from Season One:

The Beginning, Parts 1-3. Here we see Jack fight Aku, get sent into the far future, get his name, and help a group of dog archeologists(?) enslaved by Aku to their freedom. I like the setup in Part 1, which to me also seemed a bit inspired by the start of Yellow Submarine where the Blue Meanies attack Pepperland. Jack’s arrival in the far future is our first sight of how Aku has changed the world. It’s interesting, to be sure, and gets further revealed in each episode of the series from there on. What’s also interesting is that it’s implied Aku rules with an iron fist and enslaves a lot of the world – but there sure seems to be a lot of people running around in the jungle and big cities irrespective of his rule? Kinda weird.

Jack and the Three Blind Archers. Jack assaults a mysterious tower on a remote island that contains a secret well possibly able to grant his wish to go home to the past and rid the world of Aku. The tower is guarded by three unbeatable archers that have easily and completely defeated legions of soldiers’ previous attacks. This episode is one of the earliest to really show Jack’s commitment to his discipline – he carries out part of the assault blindfolded based on his observations – and the episode (like many others) contains a strong moral lesson. Certainly the latter is fairly stereotypical for martial arts subject matter, but even in a kids show the story doesn’t insult the viewer.

More to come!

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So I watched the movie Monsters this evening. I had never actually heard of this movie, even though it apparently came out in 2010. It was on the DVD rack while I was walking out of the library, so I checked it out. While I don’t think it will be contending for The Academy anytime soon, it’s an interesting movie for a number of reasons.

The plot is pretty simple – NASA detected evidence of alien life several years ago and sent a probe, which returned to Earth but crashed in the general region of the US/Mexican border, and caused an alien infestation. As a result, a big swath of territory – mostly in MX but some across the southwest US – has become the ‘infected zone’ and is walled off on the US side, while heavily bombed and monitored by US and MX troops to attempt to control the aliens. The central character(s) are a young(er) freelance photographer in MX (trying to take closeups of the aliens he can cash in when back in the US) and a young female, possibly a marine biologist (hinted at but never confirmed) – whom he retrieves from a hospital on behalf of her father (his publication employer back in the USA) and together they try to get back to the USA – he to his estranged young son, she to her fiancee so she can get married and resume her life.

So while this story has been done in quite a few variations, not all of them science fiction (e.g. road trip, quest/journey movies, etc.), there are interesting departures from even the recent versions of this theme.

First, while the monsters here largely look like huge, 100-ft+ walking octopi with many extra tentacles, you don’t get much of a sense of them as characters (e.g. unlike District 9) nor much variation (unlike Cloverfield), although they seem to have a stationary incubation form too. The ‘infected zone’ here is much more a quarantine rather than an implied racist encampment as was the case in District 9 (or even the much earlier Alien Nation).

Second, the film goes out of its way, possibly due to a lower budget (not sure) to have long sequences of bleak music and no dialogue between the characters or their Mexican handlers (a variety of boat, truck and caravan drivers/armed guards help transport them north for much of their journey). While sometimes this gets a bit repetitive – other times it provides moments of reflection and identification with the main characters – what would YOU do in such a situation? How would the world deal with such an ‘infected zone’ if it actually existed? Would the Mexican govt. tolerate frequent American jet-bombing raids over their country in the name of killing aliens? The main two characters discuss at least some of this with their handlers around the campfire one night, and again, while not much dialogue there either – it still provokes thought for them and the viewer – the mexican perspective is quite different.

The end sequence with the aliens is also different than most such movies (certainly way different than Cloverfield’s end and any Godzilla/kaiju movie I’ve ever seen) but it doesn’t explain much, either. It leaves the interpretation up to the viewer – but at least a few of those have to be on the optimistic side?

The effects are on balance pretty good but I suspect they kept alien activity to a minimum to save on money. Nearly all the movie seems to have been shot on location and this is pretty effective – I have to believe that the burned out neighborhoods they show in the infected zone had to have been (still) leftover, abandoned housing from Katrina or similar. Certainly much of the journey would not have lent itself to special effects, although it’s not clear whether they are really in Latin America or not. There is at least a decent amount of hand-held camera work, again reminiscent of Cloverfield, but not nearly as frantic in most cases.

What’s also interesting is that the various Mexican characters – almost none of which have names or many scenes, they usually function to keep the plot rolling forward in most cases – seem to take the situation in their same ‘live life as it comes’ way they always have. Even as the Americans proceed deeper and deeper into the infected zone, there are still people living there and trying to survive, same as always. A veiled commentary on the US? Perhaps….

Ultimately, the overall impression is one of a world even more paranoid and unstable than the one we already live in – not unlike that of 28 Days Later or Children of Men, especially the latter’s very bleak, dystopian view of the future world.

Anyway, if you like such movies, you may like this one as a quick view – it’s only 90 min. or so long.

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Finished reading Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card today. This is my second time reading this book – I read the rest of the series more or less as they came out the first time around, but not sure if i’ll get to that this time. But wanted to reread this again as I found a short story ‘prequel’ (Mazer In Prison) recently in the Federations anthology and reminded me what a good book this is.

it’s also kind of funny because if you walk around with this book in your hand (was reading it on the bus yesterday afternoon) people will always speak up and say what a good book it is – even though those speaking don’t usually look like sci-fi fans – last time it was some old women touting it when they saw me in downtown Salt Lake City carrying the book (where I lived then). Kinda weird.

The book holds up well on a second read – despite being a person who likes to reread books, lately I have noticed on re-reads things I didn’t earlier (Heinlein’s Friday being a noteworthy example – far too many descriptions of eating huge meals in far too much detail – last time I checked, this was sci-fi, not Food Network?) that lower the book’s interest for me somewhat. Here, not so. While I still sometimes get annoyed about the ‘kids language’ used from time to time in the book – it is a book about a little kid being turned into a star-fleet commanding killer, after all – otherwise the writing works well at getting inside Ender’s head as well as a few key other players around him (not all, to be sure – but that’s what at least some of the later books try to do). I think his inner struggle between what he knows they are doing to him vs. how he regrets a lot of it by the end of the book could have been made stronger, but again, he’s a little kid and likely couldn’t have completely understood it at that stage anyway.

And while this book is about space opera to a degree – it’s much, much more about the way humans use one another to achieve their own ends (for better or worse, in positive, neutral or negative ways). Peter, Ender’s older brother, certainly represents both ends of the spectrum on this point, depending how you look at him and what part of the book you are reading. And how you look at him through Ender’s perspective.

In a nutshell, Ender is a gifted child who takes many of the qualities of his older (also gifted) brother and is trained to maximize them for the purposes of fighting an interstellar war – essentially commanding the fleet by remote control. The book mostly covers his experiences and development in Battle School and how he is trained ultimately to think he can only rely on himself, while the rest of humanity may have to ultimately rely on him for survival. His sister enters the scene early on, then later, acting somewhat as his conscience as his humanity is in many ways removed by his military training over time.

Highly recommended, if you like military-style sci-fi. Certainly influential in its own way, but harder to duplicate (IMHO) than say, Starship Troopers, which lately seems to have spawned many series of military sci-fi on its own (or taken together with The Forever War). I think it’s fairly certain that any book post-Ender that tries to have children fighting remote-control space battles, coupled with themes of ‘growing up too soon’ or ‘lost/never had a childhood’ – would be deemed derivative and a copy fairly soon after it appeared.

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new promo video for the show. Also, the site has been updated – the excitement begins!!!!!

http://nwpinballshow.com/

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