Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Saturday, December 10, 2005 The Title: It's like High Culture meets Low Culture! Hola, empleados!I spent the last few days in a delirium of laziness, and it was great! Resident Evil 4 has been rocking my superficial little world, as I've forsaken all but the essentials to play just one more level of murderous European villagers on the rampage. I think I've finished approx. 80% of the game, so I'll probably be free of it by this time next week, which is just as well--holidays are coming up, newsletter is gonna be next week, and I'm trying to be a productive human being despite what all the time logged in front of the PS2 has to say about it. I don't know what difficulty level Resident Evil 4 is designed for, but it's the sweet spot for me: the puzzles aren't too hard, the boss levels usually get worked out in two or three tries at most. It's challenging enough to be rewarding but little more than that, which is just perfect. In that regard, it reminds me a lot of God of War--which was mostly just level after level of cool shit (and only got terribly hard at the very end). I had a cool thing happen at the comics store yesterday--this woman came in looking for the Alex Ross Wonder Woman one-shot (we were sold out), and was fretting about what else to get. Somehow in the process of talking about one thing or another, she mentioned that her dad was a horror writer, James Herbert. "Oh yeah. James Herbert," I said. "He's quite good." "Have you read him? Almost no one in the States has." "Uh, a little," I said. I'd read Fog, and started Fluke before putting it down, and said so. Somehow this ended up with us talking about Stephen King and her passing along a fun fact here and there (her dad and King are friends), and a handshake, and an offer by me to come by the store again. It was pretty cool. Me being me, though, I've been worrying about it a bit since. James Herbert is a good horror writer--I sort of discovered him at the tail end of my interest in horror fiction, so maybe that's part of why I never chased down more books by him. But I never did. And now I play Resident Evil 4 for hours at a time. What does it mean when someone who used to really love to read horror fiction spends more time playing a single video game than he spent reading horror fiction in the last year (or two)? It either means that I don't love to read it any more, or maybe horror fiction is at a keen disadvantage to all the other horror-based media out there these days? posted by Jeff | 4:56 PM | Thursday, December 01, 2005 The Pitch: It's like The Morning After meets Kill and Kill Again! Okay. So it's December 1st, and I'm being very bad about continuing my nanovel. I'm essentially sitting around on my butt playing Resident Evil 4, napping, and checking my email 50,000 times. Oh, and I went and got my teeth cleaned which, considering the weather today was absurdly life-threatening, is not as slight an accomplishment as you might think.But nonetheless, I'm doing all sorts of things to keep myself from actually trying to get my protagonist out of his current jam and into the next one. To prove it, here's some very brief reviews of movies I've seen lately. In reverse order: 10 Things I Hate About You: I liked this when I first saw it, and wanted to show it Edi, since she's also a fan of Willie The Shake. It's very charming, but I noticed some very big plotholes when I saw it for the second time. There's really no reason for the prom sequence at all, or for any of the characters to pursue their respective goals or actions, except that every teen movie must have a climactic denouement at the prom. Still, Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles are charming, and I'd be surprised if Stiles ever got her self-conscious enunciation to work as well for her again. The Machinist: Somehow less than the sum of its parts, this Memento-ish thriller has a special effect so gruesome it makes the entire run of Fangoria magazine seem like Highlights for Children: Christian Bale's emaciated body which causes involuntary shuddering from the viewer whenever it's unclothed on screen. And there's also some lovely direction, art design, a strangely anachronistic soundtrack, and Jennifer Jason Leigh onhand to bless the production with the exposing of her ta-tas. It has all the makings of a classic, and yet it goes on about forty minutes too long, tries too hard to keep the viewer guessing and ultimately settles on an ending bordering on the trite. Kind of a shame. Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events: I rented this after reading the Onion A.V. Club's interview with Daniel Handler, since much of its space was given to discussing the commentary track between the director and Handler in the character of Snicket. That track is intermittently very funny (whenever anything remotely bad happens to the Baudelaire orphans, Handler/Snicket moans: "Oh, Dear God! Oh, No! Please shut this off!") but runs out of steam quickly--the director gamely tries to pretend he has no idea what's going to happen next so as to allow more situations for H/S to moan about, but it's more uncomfortable than amusing. As for the movie, its art production is exceptionally gorgeous (there's a peacock's feather design on Count Olaf's vest that still knocks me out) but because the film doesn't understand the difference between humor and wit, it's a far from successful adaptation. That said, the movie is worth seeing (if you can rent it for a dollar or so) because of the exceptional end title sequence that understands the Snicket books and their influences (Night of the Hunter, Edward Gorey, German Expressionism, gothic melodramas) with far greater acuity than the director or the countless listed producers. I watched those end titles at least three times. posted by Jeff | 5:27 PM | |
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