In a moment of moral weakness and/or possible lapse in sanity, the fine folks over at FFWD have bequeathed me some blog space on their (higher traffic) website. Click here if you care even a little bit.

A new Star Trek trailer materialized on Apple Trailers today, and I’m willing to tentatively assign it descriptors like “thrilling,” and “sweeping.” But really, it’s pretty much what you’d expect. It highlights the action and the mystery of JJ Abrams’ reimagined universe without giving too much away, and introduces all of your old favourite characters as (emintently more salable) hardbodied young actors. The only question it raised for me (Trekies [and ers] are veritably shitting their pants) is why any government would place a spaceship in the care of a bunch of hot young people. I mean, even Lee Adama looks like he’s in his early thirties. Or maybe in the future the only requisite for command of a spaceship is driving a car at a cliff and then jumping out, only to be saved by obvious wirework. Whatever. Go watch.

This is a piece I did for my university paper’s yearly funny-mag a few years ago. I came upon it accidentally while searching for an ancient set of questions I worked up for a Weird Al Yankovic interview that was supposed to happen a year ago, but never did, and I thought that it was prime blogging material. It was originally designed to spoof the style of our city’s leading newspaper (and the city’s hilariously offensive turbo-capitalist culture), so residents of Calgary may get more out of it. But, as the title of this post implies, hobo jokes are fairly universal. So here you are, internet, a five hundred word dead hobo joke. You’re welcome.

Grab your buckets and your garden hoes, because it’s time for the seventh annual Frozen Hobo Cleanup, sponsored by the Downtown Association!

“I’m glad to be doing my part!” exclaims Dominique Brown, sloshing a steaming chemical cocktail out of her HoBucket(TM) as she gallops down a white-washed fourth ave. The sleet drenching the sidewalks bursts into acrid steam as the fluid contacts it.

“[The HoBucket(TM)] is specially designed to contain the mixture,” said resident Downtown Association scientist, Dr. Fujimori, when questioned about the primary method used to unfreeze the dead homeless from sidewalks and alleyways. “[The mixture] is essentially just water and some miscible polymers to keep it [hot] without needing to be re-heated. It’s the same principle that goes into hot packs that you might put into your gloves or boots while skiboarding [sic]. The only drawback is the poisonous gas created when it’s mixed with real water, or snow, sleet, ice, or whatever have you, so we encourage all of our volunteers to wear protective masks.”

The use of the HoBucket(TM) marks the most meaningful change for the Downtown Association’s hobo cleanups since they managed to rent out firehoses to clean out the “muckier areas” (abandoned warehouses, gravel pits, etc.). Unfortunately, some constitutionally embedded human rights laws kept the DA from turning the hoses streetside.

“It isn’t like those have stopped us before,” said Downtown Association Executive Director Greta Snowfeldt. “I think by next year we should have hoses filled with the HoBucket solution. We’re in talks with the mayor.”

Plus, the poisonous gas isn’t all bad, or so said volunteer Brown.

“Sure, it doesn’t smell great,” said Brown, pulling on her gas mask and Haz-Mat hood. “I think it does some nasty stuff to their skin. But I feel like I’m doing a good thing, helping to keep Calgary beautiful!”

Unfortunately, some of the homeless people aren’t quite as hypothermic as they’d like, and being covered in searing liquid doesn’t put them in the best of moods. Such was the case with volunteer Brown, as a recently-unfrozen, psychotic vagrant lunged at her, pus leaking from the blisters on his face, his eyes white with rage and scar tissue. Dominique Brown is remembered fondly by her parents and little sister as someone who gave her life for her city’s aesthetic. The vagrant was put down by a Downtown Association “Public and Wet Works” Team later that day, as he scavenged the suburbs for food scraps and errant pets.

“Well, a positive spin-off of the poisonous gas is that it usually ki—erm, placates the refuse in question, but we’ve had some mishaps in the past,” said Fujimori. “Sometimes it gives them this weird—I don’t know—Retard strength. I cant really explain that.”

All and all, the Downtown Assoication thinks their clean up project has been fruitful over the past seven years—and well worth it.

“Yeah, I’d say I get some real fulfillment from my job,” adds Snowfeldt. “It’s a lot of brave men and women out there who sign up—at great personal risk with no promise of monetary gain—to help keep this city clean and beautiful. God bless them.”

]]> http://francisism.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/c-drive-refuse-dead-hobo-jokes-never-go-out-of-style/feed/ 2 francisism http://francisism.wordpress.com/2008/07/03/hancock-is-harder-to-make-nob-jokes-about-than-you-might-think/ http://francisism.wordpress.com/2008/07/03/hancock-is-harder-to-make-nob-jokes-about-than-you-might-think/#comments Fri, 04 Jul 2008 04:35:48 +0000 Kyle http://francisism.wordpress.com/?p=47 ]]>

Completing my workdump all over this page, here is a link to my review of Hancock, wherein I have a huge nerd meltdown. This is the second paragraph, which is easily the dorkiest, and also gives a pretty good sense of how I felt about it:

Borrowing tropes and imagery from the asshole superheroes of modern comics, The Authority (circa the Mark Millar-Frank Quitely run), and the grown-up badassery of Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, the first part of Hancock stands up to the best superhero movies Hollywood has on offer, franchise or no. Unfortunately, a mid-story twist pushes the film toward the mythology-infused nerdfest of Neil Gaiman’s Eternals or Miracleman, and while this more sober, action-oriented affair is still handled with care and competence by director Peter Berg, all of the film’s initial charm slowly bleeds away. The high-concept of the film’s second half never delivers, and by the end it amounts to little more than a slightly-more-clever Heroes.

My official review of WANTED is up over at FFWD, though I had to shorten it by 300 words to get it into the space. Published here, for your viewing pleasure, is the unabridged review, which I like more, but what do I know?

Jump, and all will be revealed.

Mark Millar’s Wanted was a 2003-04 comic book series about Wesley Gibson, “one of the most insignificant assholes of the 21^st century” who discovers he has the supernatural ability to kill people. In a world where all the cape-clad superheroes have been exterminated by an unstoppable league of villains called The Fraternity, he can’t fly, he can’t shoot lasers from his eyes, he just “straight up stops motherfuckers from breathing,” with guns, knives, and whatever else happens to be laying around. A clever distillation of the comic book power fantasy, Millar’s analysis of the way we identify with pop culture icons argued that even the most average, simpering weakling would turn into a mass-murdering rapist if all consequences for his actions were removed—which is essentially what the discovery of superpowers does.

Timur Bekmambetov’s film version is an extremely liberal adaptation, to say the least. The explicit content has been toned way down in general, but the major changes are diegetic. The Fraternity of supervillains is replaced by a fraternity of assassins who all possess supernatural ‘bullet bending’ abilities that are given a psuedo-mystical rationalization involving weapons that look like something out of Leonado DaVinci’s sketches and an eldrich loom that tells them to kill people. It’s all rather like something J.J. Abrams would come up with in the throes of fever, and in a way, the change makes sense as a reflection of the change in medium. The heroes of golden age action cinema are Chow Yun Fat and Bruce Willis, not Superman and Batman, so it’s a justifiable—though probably not intentional—transposition. Though source material has certainly not been ignored, it’s been treated more as inspiration than gospel, and, frankly, the differences aren’t that important.

References, in-jokes and cribbed monologue abounds, but the film version of Wanted is closer to The Matrix than it is to the original comic book. The bombastic set piece action is equal parts outrageous, hilarious and thrilling, and it trades the Wachowski’s loose understanding of Descarte and Plato with an even looser understanding of John Stewart Mill and Pierre-Simon Laplace. This does, as the Internet hivemind feared, drain the story of any kind of poignancy or relevance—but let’s face it, Millar’s original script wasn’t much more than explosive action sequences strung together by an abject pretense toward Grant Morrison’s mountaintop drug-guru philosophies. In fact, like many good adaptations, the significant derivations from the source material free the film from answering to the original themes and messages in every way, making it an entirely different beast altogether.

Though Bekmambetov’s grasp of Leplace’s Demon might be flimsy, his hold on The Law of Exploding Rats is absolute. The law states, basically, that they are awesome, and when hundreds are used as the first steps in a fifteen minute gun-ballet through a textile mill, they are totally awesome. In addition to this crucial philosophy, Bekmambetov also has a solid comprehension of the Hitting Guys With Ergonomic Keyboards In Slow Motion Paradox, the Shooting People While Your Gun Is Already Inside Someone’s Head Problem and the classic epistemological argument that Shooting Bullets Out Of The Air With Other Bullets Is Way Cool. It may be a distant cousin of Millar’s original story, but the vital element has been maintained: The giddy, adolescent, completely unironic lunacy.

Wanted is not without its problems, but they’re shared, for the most part, with every other lovably dim-witted action-blockbuster. There’s at least one obvious, mile-wide plot hole, character motivations are paper thin and the exposition is handled with cruel, uncreative efficiency. One flaw it borrows from Millar’s comic is the ending, which was a strong contender for laziest writing ever done by a mammal. It’s been significantly altered in the film, but the message is essentially the same, and not an iota more intelligent. But Wanted is not trying to be an intelligent film. It’s not even trying to be a moderately clever film. It’s trying to be a film with exploding rats in it, and in that, it succeeds marvelously.

My interview with the RZA is up over at FFWD. Actually, it was up last week, but I’ve been playing this free game about murdering aliens, and have been forgetting to do things as a result. The image accompanying the story and cover illustration are also totally The Sex, and were done by Travis Sengaus, who is awesome and makes me look good though I have never met him.

I don’t often bother linking to theatre writing here for two reasons:

1) The limited number of people interested in such dross already know exactly where to find it.

2) Despite the fact that I enjoy it more than pretty much anything else I do, I feel a slight pang of shame every time I write anything about local theatre. I think it’s just about the most cliche, “bad/failed writer” activity possible.

That said, this article is interesting for reasons quite removed from the usual “intimacy of theatre” load, and quite in spite of my mediocre abilities. In it, Director Scott Roberts talks about his current mount of The Duchess of Malfi, where he draws aesthetic influences from comic books and–God’s teeth!–videogames. Beyond the nerd explosion that happened in my brain when I found out about the confluence of Jacobean theatre, Big Daddies and Frank Miller, I thought it was very cool that working artists–however small-time–saw no distinction between pop culture and the canon. Basically, their position is that it’s impossible for us to appreciate classic works as they were intended, because we’re so far removed from the original context. So rather than updating the work itself in a kitschy or banal way, they’ve opted to update the reference frame instead. This wouldn’t work for everything, obviously, but it’s still a refreshing perspective.

My review of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian is up over at FFWD. I’m linking to it for three reasons:

1) It was a stupidly expensive film, and that (whether you like it or not) makes it noteworthy. Art is a business, and ignoring that is naive.

2) I’m reasonably happy with the way my review turned out, though there was one minor error introduced in editing that will hopefully be straightened out soon.

3) It’s opening weekend, and if I link to it, I’ll get lots of traffic. This is important because I quantify my self worth with my readership statistics.

Speed Racer is a tale of corporate espionage as told by a cartoon parrot on methadone that is also on fire.

Because I’m too tired to write anything coherent, I’m just going to share my thoughts with the internet through the magic of lists:

THINGS THAT WERE GOOD

The Racing. This was an important thing to get right, seeing as it occupies about half of the title. The Wachowskis nailed a diegisis-specific type of racing that accounts for the cars’ vertical mobility while also incorporating a history of real-life racing and the precedent set by the source material. Visually, it’s somewhere between drift, Mario Kart and an acid flashback. Completely thrilling every time.

The Kung Fu. An excerpt:

TRIXIE: Was that a ninja?

POPS: More like a nonja. Amazing what passes for a ninja these days.

Brilliant.

Christina Ricci. As always, totally slammin‘ in a way that makes me kind of uncomfortable.

Colour and motion. The entire film is a celebration of colour and motion in the medium. This is what makes everything else work. There isn’t a single static frame in the entire film. Everything is moving all the time. Even outside the action sequences, most screen transitions are done by having a talking head wipe across, which I think is an incredibly efficient way to handle exposition between scenes (or even beats, in some cases).

WHAT FAILS

The story. Shit. It was doing so well, too. The first ten minutes are handled wonderfully–the aforementioned visual techniques make the exposition agile. Three temporally distinct narratives take place at once, and the presentation makes it easy enough for a child to follow (which is kind of the point, actually). Unfortunately, absolutely every element of the backstory and every subsequent development is re-trod in painful, rote exchanges that are presumably designed to give the action room to “breathe.” In this way, Speed Racer’s weakness is exactly what Iron Man did right: Just because it’s an action/kids movie doesn’t mean that the “low” beats have to be cliche or boring. Put simply, the movie is two and a half hours long, and it should have been one and a half. And all it would have taken is the excise of about half the retarded little brother/retarded fucking monkey scenes.

The Villains. Colour does not make characters colourful.

OVERALL

Worth seeing, even if it only suggests a fresh, new way of telling stories rather than actually showing us how that would look.

I’ve noticed this recently. A few years ago, movie snobs who wanted to set themselves apart from the vulgar intentionally used the word “film,” wherever they could. This didn’t bother me too much because, elitism aside, it is technically more correct. “Movies” is an anachronism borrowed from a time when a distinction had to be drawn between movies with sound and those without–”movies” and “talkies.” I never bothered to adjust my own speaking when someone politely corrected me once–I still use the two interchangeably–but I couldn’t begrudge those who did. But now it’s just getting out of hand.

Now I’m seeing “cinema” start to replace “film” in everyone’s vernacular, and it’s almost indefensibly pretentious. You could make the argument that it’s a reflection of the current shift toward the discussion of film now centering around the way we watch movies rather than their textual content, but I’d counter that argument by calling you obtuse.

There’s more to this.