JCVD
JCVD is a strange yet endearing movie. French/Belgian in it’s characterization, awkwardness, conflict and style, the film is Jean-Claude Van Damme playing . . . Jean-Claude Van Damme. The film trashes his the real Jean Claude’s name as the JCVD character is mistakenly blamed for holding up a Brussels Post, loses his daughter in a custody battle (she is humiliated for having a washed up action star father), shot, and ultimately jailed for extortion.
The opening scene is a several-minute single-take action shot that includes every single 90′s action movie cliché all rolled into one fantastically awesome fight scene.
As we move between multiple viewpoints of the film – Jean Claude enters a bank to retrieve a cash wire and is caught up in a robbery & hostage situation and mistaken by some of his own fans as the perpetrator. Police, family and fans alike join in the standoff.
But the centerpiece of the film is a strange reverie where JCVD rises on a lift to the rack lights on the soundstage and delivers a single-shot gut-wrenching monologue. He tearfully details his own rise and fall as a Hollywood action star, his failures, custody battle, failing career, near bankruptcy and drug addiction. He pleads to be taken seriously again – after all, he is just a man, an actor.
It’s the most convincing scene in the film, perfectly acted, emotional. JCVD is torn apart as an invincible Hollywood action star but rebuilt as a pitiable, even likeable person . . . yet he is impersonating himself. An actor playing a caricature of himself. Charlie Kaufman would be proud.
Fashion Obsession: Luxury Sneakers
Leather ultra-high-top sneakers by Rick Owens, Diesel, Diet Butcher Slim Skin
$1200, $200, $600
The new trailer for Where the Wild Things Are is up on Apple.com. Looks beautiful. Visually, exactly how you’d imagine.
Alexander McQueen McQ diffusion line for Target? How’d I miss that one? Too bad there’s no men’s line . . .
Video ability for the iPhone 3? Sounds likely to me.
Tony Spaeth weighs in on SyFy
iPhone OS 3.0
Apple revealed the details of the upcoming iPhone OS 3.0 today and released the coinciding SDK to developers.
Definitely a few great additions to the consumer side of things (Search, MMS & Cut/Copy/Paste) but I think that the detailed developer APIs were possibly more exciting than the impending and obvious consumer updates. Everyone was screaming about Cut/Copy/Paste but it will be immediately taken for granted. It’s not so much a killer feature as it is a basic function people were missing.
Among the hilighted new APIs and features for developers are In-App Purchase, Peer to Peer, Push, Maps, Turn-by-Turn GPS support, VoiceOver, the External Accessory framework and iPod Library Access.
(Let this mark the beginning of the gradual decline of GPS stand-alone units as the iPhone and other cell phones erode their business . . .)
The In-App purchase is going to be huge. I cannot overstate it. Huge.
Paid content expansion for games has been wildly successful on PC/Mac, platforms (Xbox/PS3/Wii) and platform games such as Rock Band and will greatly expand the potential revenue stream for game developers.
Additional levels for arcade-style games, added weapons and abilities for RPGs, added clothing/accessory/fashion models for simulation games and added music tracks for pattern-recognition games. (I wouldn’t be surprised to see Activision & Harmonix jump in on this immediately with additional mobile versions of their franchises)
It will be interesting to see how out-of-app paid content purchases are handled, if they’re handled at all. It will obviously require a hefty update of iTunes to handle the (yet another) additional content type.
I wonder how many developers are up right now brainstorming on what additional ‘paid content’ they’ll add to their apps . . .
SciFi Channel rebrands to . . . SyFy?
Today, the SciFi Channel announced their intention to become SyFy, removing the brand’s already tenuous attachment to the Science Fiction genre and the suffocating ‘Channel’ in one fell swoop.
The response has already been overwhelmingly negative.
The name, to be sure, is uncomfortable. It’s a modification of the network’s original identity and intent. But honetly, with few exceptions (BSG – BattleStar Galactica, MST3K) the network has been an anemic attempt at creating a fertile field for new Science Fiction. It’s become a home to many poorly constructed made-for-SciFi specials and scifi reruns that other networks created.
The “Science Fiction Channel” as a brand was already cheapened the mass of non-scifi shows and movies already. SFC could not live on Science Fiction alone. Afterall, their top television show, Battlestar isn’t so much a ‘scifi’ show as it is a character drama that happens to be set in space.
The tag ‘Sci Fi’ was already made meaningless and redunant.
In addition, the name “SciFi Channel” is a reminder of constricted limitations and is difficult to extend beyond television given the awkward name. With the SciFi moniker, would not every single thing they produce be burdened by the “SciFi Channel” brandname, even if it were horror, fantasy, drama.
The general public is begining to realize that ‘Science Fiction’ isn’t so much about space or robots, as it is about imagining people in unique situations that, often times, are similar to our own. BSG and many great ‘SciFi’ films are not meditations on techno-babble futurism but about humans and ideas. The best ‘Science Fiction’ has dealt with genocide, suicide, defining the human experience, fear, hatred, sex, paranoia, love, hope — these are not foreign concepts to any forms of entertainment, art or culture.
The timing is also interesting given that their flagship (pardon the pun) show, BattleStar Galactica, is set to expire this Friday evening after a “heart-breaking” 2-hour series finale. Perfect timing for a new direction or redefinition of the brand.
So how do you both retain the clear attachment to the original brand, redefinie the brand’s extendability and remove the attachment to the concept of a ‘Channel’ which is slowly becoming outdated given DVR, iTunes, Hulu and BitTorrent?
You rename your brand: SyFy
It retains brand awareness while shedding the limitations of the previous moniker.
I’d call it a success.
Sunny Day Real Estate Reunion? Hell yes.
Movie Review: Watchmen
The photograph is in my hand.
It is the photograph of a man and a woman. They are at an amusement park in 1959. In twelve seconds time, I’ll drop the photograph to the sand at my feet, walking away. It’s already lying there, twelve seconds into the future.
Ten seconds now.
The chapter/issue of Watchmen that settles on Dr Manhattan (née Jon Osterman) is one of the most solemn, sad and provoking pieces of literature I’ve ever read.
In so many comics, films and television shows we imagine omnipotence or superpowers as empowering and thrilling and yet never wonder about the side effects. What if the simplicity of things once hard removed the motivation to do them in the first place? If you could do anything you wanted, what would have value?
There would no longer be motivation for human acceptence because your abilities transcended relationship. No longer is sex a motivation as the mystery and pleasure of it has been replaced by the knowledge of its workings on a quantum level – broken down into a series of nerve firings and fluid exchange.
The veil as been lifted and so many things that were hidden, even to the smartest men on earth, were now part of your moment by moment consciousness. The affect of that idea in Watchmen reminds me of a similar idea in Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind directed by Michel Gondry. How can you have any attraction to someone whose flaws, mistakes, imperfections and absence you are already experiencing?
In Gondry’s film we see the main characters Joel and Clementine fight against the draw of impending fate – for them to be drawn to each other and unavoidably end up hating each other and separating in a bitter break up. Yet, even when confronted with their past/future on pre-recorded tape.
Dr. Manhattan is similarly affected but unlike Joel & Clementine, he does not see or hope for an alternative. His future is certain, especially considering he cannot affect the outcome.
If Manhattan were a feeling character, how he could not keep from destroying himself? But he is curiously unaffected by the certainty of his previewed future.
He is ultimately a somber, lonely character. No longer a true member of the human race, unburdened by self-awareness or shame but still burdened with a knowledge he cannot rid himself of. His distance from what humans perceive as time, as emotion and as love he is almost machine-like. Except that this seemingly typical android-come-human prototype (or the reverse in this case) has no aspirations to become what he once was, it is simply unfathomable.
Like Adam’s eyes opened to the knowledge of good and evil – he cannot return to innocence, even as a ‘god’.
In the end, solitude is the only option.
That’s something Zach Snyder got right.
Insanity, murder and the Mask
Rorschach’s character remained largely unchanged in the film save a couple strange choices:
In the novel, Rorschach sets a maniacal trap for the child-killer, much like the self-preservation-testing traps set in the SAW series of films. He handcuffs the killer to the wall, gives him his own hacksaw he used to cut up the little girl and lights the place on fire. The set-up is murderous to be sure, but it’s also poetic justice given that the murderer won’t cut through his own skin to save it.
In the film, Rorschach instead violently murders the killer with his own weapon. I found the original idea to be more in-character, in line with his insanity . . . yet with a tinge of right justice. And eye for an eye.
Possibly it was modified to make up for other details of his actual murders that were left out of the movie.
Density
How do you adapt a graphic novel of 6-7 hours reading time — One so dense that it is often read 3-4 times over to fully absorb?
Well, you don’t. You have to pick and choose from the multiple themes, storys, characters and plots in the book and hopefully cull the most poingant or adaptable ones and try to bring them to the screen as accurately and clearly as possible.
Watchmen is possibly one of the densest books I’ve ever read both in visual and story detail. Zach Snyder’s attempt to bring this novel to the screen is almost as ambitious as the novel itself. Visually, the film is dead-on. Richly detailed environments, realistic to embarrassing awkward costumes – the prototypical comicbook heroes. The changes he did make were often to update the references the original costume designs made, e.g. turning Ozymandius’ costume into a mockery of the Shumacher ‘rubber nipple’ costumes from Batman and Robin.
I think this film will be enjoyed more upon multiple viewings. The film was largely successful at what it sought to accomplish – to bring about the characters, themes and the tone of the book.
Ideally, people who really enjoy the film or are at least intrigued by it will pick up the original story, the graphic novel and hopefully enjoy it as much or more than the film.
Thumbs up.
About this Blog
Variegating
1. Having streaks, marks, or patches of a different color or colors; varicolored; mottled; dappled
2. Distinguished or characterized by variety; diversified.
Drew Pickard is a graphic designer employed at Pop in Seattle WA. He is an amateur photographer, a collector of Galactic Heroes, big-picture obsessor and has a lot of opinions about stuff.
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