15 July 2004
MOVIE: THE WORK OF DIRECTOR MICHAEL GONDRY (2003).
 The Work of Director series displays a catalog of Michael Gondry's music videos. This guy's a visual gimmick artist, to be sure, but damn: he's got some kick-ass gimmicks. There's that trippy Bjork video of steadily shifting mountain ranges, for starters. And the all-Lego animated White Stripes video for Fell in Love With a Girl. Gondry seems to have a penchant for obsessively constructed stop-action sequences, or video projection superimposing a layer of activity on an otherwise still live set. Super, super clever. Even throwaway artists like Kylie Minogue get treated to a dizzying one-shot sequence in which events repeat and layer on top of each other, until we finally wind up with four Kylies singing the same song, on the same set, as if four parallel universes aligned just for the duration of the video.
My favorite, however, has to be his video for the Chemical Brothers' Star Guitar. It's shot through the window of a moving train. As the landscape speeds by, you realize that all the trees, farmhouses, and hills are passing in time to the music. Awesome. Gondry captures, with exactness and precision, the quiet bliss of staring at the moving world from behind glass, while marvelling at how the continuously morphing scenery can change with such breathtaking suddenness. Something I used to do all the time in Japan, before I returned to the Land of Cars.
In compiling this collection, I wanted to go for quality over quantity, but in the end it's quantity that is remembered.
MOVIE: ANCHORMAN (2004).
A news anchor in the '70's struggles to preserve his old boy's network in the face of new female competition. This latest Will Ferrell vehicle is so chock-full of rapid-fire randomness that I could barely keep up from laughing so hard. First of all, Ferrell's idiot sincerity is relentless enough to make Leslie Neilsen proud. Second of all, it contains an animated sequence with Ferrell and Chrisina Applegate (who has finally come to terms with her Married with Children comic legacy) involving unicorns. Third of all, there's a jazz flute performance. And fourth of all, it parodies Gangs of New York. What else do you need?
Along with Ferrell and Applegate, you've also got Steve Carell (from The Daily Show, which I predict will eclipse Saturday Night Live's flagging capacity to churn out comic mega-stars), and cameos by Ben Stiller and a bunch of other comedians--all pleasant surprises. Oh, it's too much. I must see it again for closer study.
San Diego. It comes from sandiega, which is Germanic for "whale's vagina."
GAME: CHAMPIONS OF NORRATH (2004).
 Finally, thought Nicki and I: our neverending quest for a multiplayer co-op shall end with this game. But not so. While this hack-n-slash action RPG was fun simply by nature of being able to control our characters on screen at the same time, it had pretty major problems. The graphics, for instance, were too detailed. So detailed, in fact, that everything took on equal weight and contrast, making baddies almost invisible at points. The spoils of battle, too, were rendered in overly-realistic proportions, making them so small that some measured only a few pixels across; they would basically vanish against the floor of a dimly lit dungeon. And man, the designers really didn't even try to design compelling levels--there was just one randomly-generated dungeon after another. So pretty often we had to backtrack over and over again just to figure out what we were supposed to do next. Couple that sort of meandering with the game's careless loading screen timing and placement (at some points, it forces you to sit through three loads in a row), and you've got one tedious experience.
There were fun moments. Leveling up was always fun, even if the skill trees were too simplistic to really be satisfying. It was fun to cooperate on a common mission. And it was fun to flail about with dual weapons or cast spells just to see the particle effects fly. But in the end, every upgraded weapon, spell, skill, or bit of armor was rendered so-o-o-o super duper teeny on screen that we could hardly perceive any difference at all. Kinda killed the fun of pimping out our characters. That said, we did wind up finishing the game, but that's only because there are so few good games out there. It appears our quest for a decent multiplayer game still stretches out before us. Lo, methinks I caught a glimpse of one, upon yon alp! Alas, no.
- GAMEPLAY: Hack 'n' slash button-mashing goodness coupled with the chore of character inventory housekeeping.
- REMINISCENT OF: Diablo II, only greatly reduced.
- LIBRARY WORTHY? No-no-no. A Ratchet & Clank multiplayer co-op? Now that would be one for the humidor.
MOVIE: DAY OF THE JACKAL (1973)
Oh, movies were different back in the early seventies. Slower. Longer. Very little camera movement.
The Day of the Jackal, while better than the stunningly bad 1997 re-make starring Richard Gere, Bruce Willis, and (embarassingly) Sidney Poitier, still left me baffled and exhausted. The story, if you didn't already know, is about cops chasing a man-of-a-thousand-faces assassin hired to kill the French prime minister. Almost all the drama is shot in flat studio set lighting by a stationary camera running on a tripod. The acting might as well be a prototype for our now de-facto Law & Order Acting School of Non-Acting, where characters are reduced to factory workers shuffling the plot along.
But whatever. The craziest things about the movie were both a) the complete lack of computers and b) the constant smoking of cigarettes. Seriously. Evidence is typed up on manual typewriters, handed to motorcycle couriers, and then driven to police headquarters, to be brandished by triumphant detectives. "Four thousand passport records?" barks one, at one point in the movie (it doesn't matter which). "It'll take all my men eight hours to comb through the lot!" And here I am, like an asshole, thinking, "It would take one guy ten seconds if you had put all that stuff into a database." Amid the two hours of non-stop paperchasing, characters pause to light up. Board rooms, restaurants, it don't matter. At one point, a cop busts a suspect in the street with a butt dangling from his lips. Antiquated details like these make the movie at least amusing.
But not amusing enough. Two and a half hours later the cops find and kill the Jackal (no surprise there) and then the film simply stops moving. We took the DVD out, placed it back in its rental case, and spent the rest of the night finishing Champions of Norrath.
13 July 2004
PHOTO DIARY.
I ended five months of popping pills today by taking my last and final dose of Accutane. I'm as dry as a lizard, my hair's falling out, my joints ache, and my triglyceride count's up, but my skin is finally free of acne. Worth every minute, O yes.
PHOTO DIARY.
Everyone loves bumper stickers. Here's one that says Viva Bush. It's kinda the opposite of Viva la revolucion.
And of all the perversions of our beloved Calvin, ranging from him giving the finger to pissing on the enemy du jour, this one of him bowing to pray reigns as my favorite. Note the shadow cast over his bent figure by the towering cross.
PHOTO DIARY.
I went to pick up Nicki at Union Station the other day. Yes, Los Angeles has a train station, and it has tall ceilings with beautiful rafters.
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