burning up inside
Sorry for late notice.
I will be at the PDX Zine Symposium today and tomorrow, running a table for SolidFuelStudios. I’ll be selling the brand-new first issue of VidHero, VidHero t-shirts, and left-field mini comic about dreams (“Chimera Chic”). If you’re in the Portland area and would like to stop by, check here for more info: http://www.pdxzines.com/
I’m kicking myself for not budgeting prep time to get the websites updated. kick ick. erk.
More later! Soon even!
I took my girlfriend to see The Clone Wars last night. It was thrilling.
A theatre half filled with aging geeks like me, amidst mewling children out to “have a good time”.
My takeaway : critics should be put to death.
The film was a ton of fun. I had a blast. When the story stopped to do something cute, or opaquely confusing, there was always astonishing eye candy to fall back on. I can’t recommend it highly enough as a triumphant continuation of the excellent Star Wars IP. Apparantly it was directed by some guy who directed some of the Airbender cartoons. I was impressed, and am now (finally) eager to watch that series. So should you be.
But really, critics should be put to death. i read all the bullshit reviews posted on aint it cool news and was overwhelmed with a blood lust. Just this messy morass of “please stop making star wars movies that aren’t offering what i want” and “This new standalone addition to the universe of star wars doesn’t measure up to the originals”. die. I can’t believe a critic would dare to mention disliking how the fox logo wasn’t used. wtf. They also attack the movie for using slang and being approachable for children. hatethemsomuch.
and the worst drivel there was (by far) some freak’s endless rant about refusing to cover star wars anymore because: lucasfilm has it in for him legally. because he stole their script for episode 2 and posted it long before they wanted anyone to ruin their multimillion dollar project. boo hoo. because he was asked not to run his review before opening day, and this agreement was enforced arbitrarily in his opinion. what an asshole. He dares to tease that he was the only fanboy critic there who had positive things to say about the clone wars, but now he won’t say it. this is the definition of modern whino-matic criticism, where some idiot puts himself ahead of his function as a critic. So many critics feel a need to sell themselves rather than dissect the art they’ve been presented with – and this guy takes it one step further by trying to hold the creators repsonsible for his lack of interest in doing his job. christ. and i’m slipping into some niche by critiquing the critics. but oh well: hell.
I guess i feel I’ve already said the movie was great, and you should see it. There’s little reason to go into details, because: you should see it. The only thing that stands out in my mind as a flaw was the way the whole military campaign is impossible to follow. Without understanding the big picture, it’s frightfully difficult to gauge how important their goals are. ie, (spoiler?) they need to secure some outer rim hyperspace routes. wha? how important is this really? how are inner rim hyperspace routes being controlled exactly? I just felt this strong gut feeling that if they would show the galaxy and point to clusteres needing to get from here to there, it would make the “war” more real. It seems a common war movie need. But maybe thought that just saying “this is important” would be enough for the kids. ok. fair enough. cool with me.
As for the kiddie elements, and the cutesy slang: so be it. Annoying star wars geeks like to claim Empire was the pinnacle of the series, and then poopoo the endless supply of movies that aren’t remotely trying to be like Empire. These critics are failing you, the audience (the culture?) because they are failing to identify the author’s goals. They’re critiquing some other movie (the one in their day dreams and twisted memories) instead of paying attention to what george lucas is trying to acheive. they can’t let it go, and are this quite blind and useless.
I read an excellent ranting dissertation on this recently, which pointed out the lack of “emotion subtext” in all star wars products which followed the first two. This argument does not keep in mind that star wars is trying to offer a new generation the same popcorn thrills of old serials. The new movies take this (expertly crafted) superficial thrill to an interesting place by slipping in intellectual subtext. But the tribute to serials is the point. Listen closely, would-be critics: who among you would dare critique the old pulp serials for lacking the emotional depth of The Empire Strikes Back? Could you really? if so: please go watch some other flicks and leave the enjoyment of these peculiar works of entertainment art to those of us to are willing to enjoy what lucas is actually striving to achieve.
Multimillionaire or not, he is still an artist. Let him do what he wants. Let the artist be.
Prepping to run another table at another small fest (the pdxzine fest, http://www.pdxzines.com/). This week i’m cranking out a quick mini comic called “Dream Girls,” based on a dream my girlfriend had many years ago. (she kept a dream journal, and I asked her to select a couple dreams she wouldn’t mind me interpretting) I’d love to keep on making endless minicomics that concern the strange dream logic states of girls. weee.
The idea is to make one of these so-called “personal diary” kind of comics, that the indie comics crowd seems to gravitate towards. While i think vidHero is embarassingly personal, they seem to view it as a super hero bullshit (not even pompous criticism bullshit, which i intended people to mistake it for). blah blah.
anywho. millions of things afoot. But a roommate is asking for a ride to the MAX. sooo, more later.
Well, it’s almost 4am. so this will be brief.
I watched the 1994 film Radioland Murders earlier tonight, and managed to enjoy it on several levels. though overall, I couldn’t recommend it to anyone genuinely hoping to enjoy the time it would take to sit and stare.
Robert Altman’s “A Prairie Home Companion” did a much better job of capturing the crazy atmosphere of a large group struggling to put on a live radio act. Ben Stiller’s “The Cable Guy” did a fine job of stealing the whole climax and updating it to relate to our more current obsession with bad television (instead of arguably-bad radio), by focusing much more on the revealed villian as a fleshed out character (so he is less preachy in the final reel). But wow, theCableGuy ripped off this movie’s ending HARD. Like shot for shot. weird (er… cool? Hip ahead of it’s time?).
LE SPOILERS MAY FOLLOW:
All in all, the idea of a phantom of the opera twist on a goofy fun radio broadcast event was pretty neat. nifty even. Too bad the jokes almost all fall flat. eek. I’m not sure if it was the actors, or the editing, or the directing. but. yikes.
I found myself thinking “this would be much better as a bugs bunny cartoon” (due to the strange brief characters and the slapstick idiocy). And then the main character popped up in a total Carmen Miranda suit. …! (With the whole fruit bowl balanced on a scantily clad tropical woman’s head). This was used to great effect in a classic bugs bunny cartoon. sooo. I’m probably not alone in wishing the movie was animated. Chalk it up to yet another filmmaking failure to emulate the elasticity of cartoonery.
Ra. And i’m too tired to dig deeper for broad movie making perspectives. and i’m not sure it deserves much more thought. The idea of the show’s best writer being the prime murder suspect, and slipping last minute script page revisions in to oust the true villian in a live performance, which leads to villian delivering the lines the writer wrote and then accidentally turning on a mic and being broadcast live as the evil character the actors were just portraying on stage- was totally delightful. And his rant on technology and patents hinted towards interesting broader commentary.
But in the end i just hated the guy playing the lead (writer), and couldn’t enjoy the movie. yeargh. I’d only recommend it for “completist” Lucas fans. Many interesting ideas, and a very sweet nod to the zany great radio show stylings of a forgotten time in entertainment. But poorly paced, full of groans, and hard to endure.
Rating: a million stars (out of infinite).
(I plan to pop out more random movie reviews like this. Try sorting by category if you’d like to just read reviews)
I really need to get into the habit of posting daily about the endless “goings ons”. Its 3am. so maybe today is a loss.
but here’s a quick attempt: Polished the colors for the third (final?) bit of movie concept art i’ve been fretting over for a local filmmaker. Will post in my Deviant Art Account when they’re all done. Next up is polishing t-shirt logos for Waldow. Possibly some tattoo “angel wings” art for another friend.
But this will be the week of Jedi6 space sequence end-gaming. Next week is Carrie’s dream comic, and the following week is board game polishing. These are uber tasks i’m laying down to ensure they get finished well before hell freezes over. Sooo, today i went out and bought a variety of things for the jedi sequence. Some toys that looked vaguely like alan and jeff (just spent an hour painting the mace window to have hair and be wearing the proper red-lapeled coat. Painting Mutt’s tshirt black was a cinch. hopefully post photos in here once I snoop out a miniUSB cable). I had to use some wire cutters to remove their legs so they could both fit in the cockpit of the jedi starfighter toy i bought last month. wee!
Also shopped for some things i thought would be key to the “ultimate weapon”. Ended up blowing around 30 bucks on trash cans and tubing and toys. Fred meyer’s didn’t have the trashcan lid i wanted so i had to hit home depot. When i reviewed the current animatic a few hours ago, it seemed clear that i was spending way too much time and money on this thing. hmm. no offense. ugh. erg.
Earlier today i finally sat down and painted the two planetoids i crafted out of paper mache. the red and blue paints were fun, but carrie offered some black paint… and i may have gotten carried away. In the crazy bright sun, they look awesome. but inside, they just look black (until you get very close up). Anywho. done.
And i guess that’s it. Less you count staying up way late last night working on Vitreous Humor. Re-watched kill bill vol.2 with carrie (her first time). started to re-watch mad max earlier in the day, but as usual i got tired after the awesomeness of the opening sequence. blah blah. I’m not sure how much personal bullshit to throw in. hmm.
Might be worth noting some exciting developments for the vidHero movie (plot pretty much nailed down during recent trip to Seattle), and theCommercialMovie (figured out Kshawn’s stand up political comedy act, and how to rework the ever expanding plot as a tv series). but. eh. hopefully these details will show up soon enough. … more later. sleep time.
woof.
The comic has been sent off to print (finally). Had a lot of trouble sorting out all the tech bits for proper pdfs (appending all pages into one file, assuring it was at proper dpi, assuring all fonts were included, assuring images were at max resolution with proper compression). So i just ended up going with 300dpi tiffs of each page. hopefully this won’t lead to more delays. (groan). I need to put up some recent work on my Deviant Art account. hmm.
Currently, i’m trying to land a small job for a local filmmaker, designing costumes and making concept art. I drastically underbid, because i figured it’d be a great portfolio building exercise. Nerves are slowing me down. but it should be pretty kick ass work, even if i don’t land the job.
Still fucking around with the logo for Carrie’s IncognitoCostumes business. I didn’t quite understand what was wrong with this “Scissor fairy” icon i worked up, so I just settled on a simple icon using the letters “I” and “C”. Put it on a business card mockup that i thought was kind of brilliantly retro (like 140 years retro) and bleak. I’m not sure if she’s happy with it, but she’s asked for a few further tweaks. hmm. While settling that, I’m planning to just put up her webpage with current logo/fonts. So it will move forward.
My game pitch “Fun Funeral” was selected by the local PAGDIG learning project 1 group, so i’ve been putting together a slim design document to help everyone discuss and nail down the details. Worked up 4 specific “macabre puzzles” (which could easily be reused/tweaked for multiple uses). But had planned 5. These are like genres of puzzles. hmm. Several ideas for the 5th, but none seem up to par with the quality of the first 4.
Need to finish my vidHero t-shirt design (had to drop the original simple design of the logo on the chest with “H” extending up to the throat and down to the belly, because the printer can only handle a 13″ square area). Planning to put the logo inside a personalized/weird video tape diagram. Just haven’t had that spark of inspiration to nail down the specifics of this video tape diagram. Took a few photos for reference. lightly worried it’ll end up either too boring, or two blocky (like a heap of macaroni on your chest. I’m thinking of this old Pearl Jam t-shirt in particular. It was cool when you studied it, but from a distance it just looked like a block of shit).
My plan to whip up a quick fun board game using business cards on a backing board has ballooned into 3 separate games. Ie, the first concept didn’t play very well (too much math calculation distraction), and ideas to fix it have split off into their own solid concepts. The idea was to just let two people play out an epic fight. But now i have a separate “Hospital Bills” (number-modifying card game) and “Three Act Deciding Moment of Art” (overlapping tiles) games, which haven’t been playtested to ensure they are fun/concise enough. Still brainstorming through the original idea, trying to think up a more unique approach to the limitations of card size and board size. The original idea of just ripping off this cool fencing card game has proven very elusive. blechk.
And there are tons of other tasks piled up as well. short videos of “Spaceship to Hell” and “Brain Cell”. Writing up reports for solid fuel website. Redoing a daredevil art submission for a contest that is already over (the art i did submit was kind of embarassingly shitty, and i have this new doodle in my sketchbook that perfectly captures what i was thinking). Several scripts have been written for a “Mind Molds” strip, and just need to be drawn. I set up Paypal with my business checking account, and now need to figure out shopping carts here on the site. Need to write up the final script for issue 2 of vidHero (integrating some recent cool ideas for crazy layout tricks). Supposedly, I was going to finish the first draft of the vidHero movie script by the end of June (but now i’m waffling on the seemingly cliche “first time out adventures” nature of it).
bleh. this has all left me exhausted. Currently I am staring at a wall dreaming of vegging out with some video games. erf. Guess it’s break time!
Just finished absorbing all the tasty details of the criterion DVD set for Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers. Really damned satisfying look at the story, the ’46 “classic film noir” approach to the movie, the “solid student film” version made by tarkovsky, and the ’64 “bad ass pulp” take on it. Also includes Stacy Keach reading the short story, along with critics dissecting, and studio notes, and actor interviews. Really amazing to see such a short story interpretted and laid out in so many different ways.
Mostly i’m astonished how much i still care about the very simple idea of “a tough guy who’s lived a bad life, but won’t fight back when his Killers show up.” Something about it is so awesome, that you can approach it from tons of different angles and it’s still pretty interesting. why? WHYYYYYYYY???
Anywho. In vidHero land, I’m finishing up the cover art (eek, color. ugh), and have decided to go with a 24 page print, and just include a concept letters and art 2-page spread, and an advert for Jonason’s upcoming comic, James and Robot. Credits and copyright inside the front cover, solid fuel pimpage inside the back cover. The plan is good. Just need to execute.
Instead. I’m about to blow 50 bucks on gas to drive down to my folk’s house and do some laundry. discuss recent events. wee. While this has always seemed pointless from the front, it has always turned out very inspiring on the back end.
One the comic is done, I’m planning to finish off this “space battle fx sequence” for Alan Winston’s star wars fan film “Jedi 6: Queens of the Sith”. Just 5 years late! woo hoo! I think it has a lot of potential, based on the blue screen acting (being funny), and the high impact comedy action that is planned. But i can’t decide if it would be better to complete it as a sub par computer graphics animation (with perfectly controlled timing) or with sub par paper mache and models (celebrating the lack of budget and time, but less likely to be well timed). Part of me really wants it to be a great action sequence demo reel. but this probably isn’t important to the movie. hmm.
After this, the plan is to finish the vidHero movie script (with an eye towards shooting over the summer). But part of me wonders if i shouldn’t just shoot a trailer and try to seek funding to shoot the full script. Seems wise to leave the pain and suffering of shooting a 90 minute movie to a less “crazy” idea. For many months, a little voice has been wondering why one would write a big crazy fx laden super hero action movie, but shoot it as a no budget bullshit amateur video. slim chance of success. WHEN DO WE LEAVE!
Now part of me is wondering if the current structure for the movie is all wrong. just like the comic, i sense that it’s a relic from an old mindset that only cared about being funny. I don’t think comedy is my forte. And after dwelling on the whole mass of Ernest Hemingway’s “the Killers” it seems clear that my movie pitch was schizo, and embarassingly shallow (in both structure and characterization). I’m thinking maybe i should excise the whole first half hour (of hospital-based vigilante training gags/backstory) and just focus on making a movie about a city vigilante. The hospital segment seems like it’s own story, and has little to do with the movie’s ultimate goal (of violently critiquing the body of work of a certain fame-fringe director).
I’m more and more obsessed with the idea of making contained art projects that function as aggressive critiques on failed directors. I think there’s something in floating in this idea that has the possibility to be a very modern/challenging evolution of art. It ties into this idea i have that critiquing anything art related has become pointless, since everyone is now an artist. The abuse of art, action, and criticism, could cross the gap between criticism and art in a way i don’t think i’ve ever seen. But it’s also almost overwhelmingly likely to come off as a pretentious. Like an geeky moronic tribute to the genuine motivations of the french new wave movement. That is, if anyone can even see past the first layer of each project. which will no doubt be a shitty layer of failure. hmm. SO BE IT?!?!?!?!
So. This is the approach i’m sticking with for today. 🙂
I’m not sure optimist is the word to describe someone who knowing walks into a train wreck of self expression on the off chance it might make their life worth living.
Erk. I’m rather sick right now. Fairly congested and dizzy. Soooo, to briefly rant about trivial details (and pretend they represent progressssss!), here’s what I accomplished today:
– purchased chicken wire, paint, spray snow, Obi Wan’s jedi starship toy from Episode3, several kinds of tiny halogen light bulbs, 2 sample metal parts for chain link fences (which look like one of vidHero’s shoulder projectors, when held together). Most of these are elements for a jedi space sequence I’m planning to finish off for Bravado Entertainment (only 5 years late!). I guess I’ve already started. hmm.
– sawed a fine piece of wood in half, and screwed 7 supports into my wall, to finally finish this shelving project i started a couple months back.
– thought a bit about what to write in the first issue of the comic, in lieu of a proper letters page. Many ideas and complicated pun filled thoughts. But ultimately I haven’t typed out a word. erk.
– watched the 1964 version of the Hemingway’s The Killers. Loved it.
– bought some food. Cooked BBQ chicken legs for dinner (for moi, and the 2 roommates).
– bought the book “how to make web comics,” and am 110% sure it was a wise decision. now i just have to read the damned thing. and think about it. and implement it. bleh.
and in possibly related news (of creative processing), Carrie and I sang a certain song last night, for our friend Kshawn to put in his documentary. I thought it was kind of hilariously perfect. And he seemed to enjoy the final cut i sent him (of COURSE! how could anyone resist it’s rough imperfect charms!). but he also seems to be making it clear we’ll need to do another take. which I expected. but … somehow i hoped wouldn’t be necessary.
erf. so that is all. monday is over. time for sleep. must shake this head cold. erk.
that headline was another alternate title for issue two (been fiddling around with various goofy/bad phrases).
in related news, Issue one is officially done. sent it off to 2 pals for thoughts. will print out on my crappy printer for other friends to review/comment on.
But really, i think it’s close enough. Only planning to entertain advice about glaring typos. All other feedback can be applied to issue2, cuz this bitch is cooked.
Next up is the cover (color! eek!), and then prepping extraneous pages to flesh out the print run (letters, copyrights, sketchbook, previews, etc.).
So I want to be excited! but instead i’m kind of exhausted and defeated by the process. woof. more later.
well, two good friends have commented on the “final” revision of issue one.
a little disconcerting that it appears the issue “works much better” now. but is also totally derailed from what jonason was thinking of when initially helping me write the script. it’s no longer about two movie geeks going to the movies. now much more of a rumination on Joel Schumacher and his movies (to a fault? is it too much Schumacher for any audience to enjoy? or not enough? wha?) and it’s pretty dense with text again.
i’m a little bummed at the moment, as I’d hoped to put it to bed happy. so i’m thinking i’ll go back and try to work in more of jonason’s dialogue where/if i can, to preserve some of the character. not sure if this is possible but will try. and then i’ll put it to bed angry. Hope it works despite the total change of tone.
It’s like turning Clerks into Daredevil. Kinda worried that it’s just massaging the worst of both genre’s (failures?) and not nearly daring enough.
Hoping strangers will be able to pick it up and enjoy it. that is the only remaining goal. urgh. And vaguely praying that it will indeed get better in the remaining two issues. and that Jonason won’t just jump ship completely because it ain’t his style of story anymore. eek. urgh. sleep. work.