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Optical Excellence Double Admin Award [3X]
Super Six - The Academy
Monochrome Award Group Cover Photo
Photocrowd "Zoom Burst" contest: 9th put of 500 entries
Freedom Excellence L2
Into Your Heart L3
Neurolab finally worked out other stores were doing mesh cyber suits, not appliers! Their HUD is still annoying as fuck though..I was trying to edit the halo-armband..and according to the 'smart' hud, I was wearing the ZeroG boots. Hint: I was not.
As the Erythoral knights are now more of a private mercenary company over to usual TTMs, The Erythoral kinghts decided to feild a more rugged and slightly cheeper ZeroG frame. The ST-05g Guai was created using St-05 parts and schematics found in the factory archives. The Guai's have so far been succesful in the ranks of the Erythoral knights and is used widely.
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These are almost exsactly the same as the previous ones I posted except for the labels and the SSR which I shamelessly ripped of from my XVM cavaliers.
C and C welcomed greatly as always.
The only thing I'm sure I don't like about them is the hole on the top of their heads. Any ideas about how I can fix them?
After the NASA DC-8 at Ramstein, we had a special guest at Strasbourg, the first time that a ZERO-G Airbus landed.
It was planned for Paris-Vatry (XCR) but concerning to the latest weather conditions, they decided to come at my home airport.
No sunny conditions but the light was enough bright for a good shot ;)
These snapshot bugs have taken all the pleasure out of taking and sharing pics in Second Life. I've had them now for 4 months. I've tried about 12 viewers, updated my drivers, resized shots, etc. Yes, I can crop shots to pieces but what's the point in that? PLEASE VOTE: jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1641
THE TWELVE AGES OF ULTRON
THE FIRST AGE
In the first Age Of Ultron
Joss Whedon gave to me
A Rocket In A Groot Tree
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Here we go again with another "12 Days Of Christmas" filksong and photo parody!
I was all stoked to see Joss Whedon's second Avengers movie "Age Of Ultron", in May, 2014, so thought this would be a good creative prologue for me to toy with for the 2014 festive season. Space/Time being what it is, I ended up stretching the project over more than one Christmases...depending upon the availability of action figures...hey, they're busy plastic peeps!
Nothing too fancy here, just a Funko Bobble-Headed Groot, A Marvel Mini-Mate Rocket Racoon and the Joss Whedon figurine that was packaged with DVDs of Morgan Spurlock’s geek-culture documentary "Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope."
✜KImono:: inishie3(halu) : kokorotayori
恋文さんの年賀のグループギフトです。本店で配布されています。色合いがｽﾊﾞﾗｼ
kokorotayori
maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/aaa/202/53/23
✜Tunic::: ::c.A.:: Viviane *White*
✜tram F603 hair
✜Air_Kurama Choker_purple_CM
✜*{( konpeitou )}* humiduki-usagi ULTRA RARE: kami no temari
✜pose *icen* zeroG_M08m（手まりのポーズは別）
✜{anc} bloom. orchid guppy / air [magic purple]
{anc} bloom. orchid guppy / air [salmon pink]
{anc} Bdream. umbrella:pink
{anc} Bdream. umbrella:blue
✜8f8 - Double Young Sakura
*“I’ve got a very bad feeling about this.”
This picture has become rather popular and I keep running into it online in assorted blogs and whatnot. Eventually D.K Books saw it and contacted me, asking if I could scan and/or take pictures of some of the individual items for use in their 2010 coffee table book, Star Wars: Year By Year. So, somewhat bemused, I did, and you'll find the results in the Star Wars: A New Hope section, along with credits in the back of the book. This makes me smile because now I get to say "SEE!! I told you there was a reason for keeping all this junk!"
"At last, the circle is complete."
A LONG TIME AGO IN 1977.....
-Australia had its worst railway disaster at Granville near Sydney, with 83 dead.
-The first Apple 2 computers were sold.
-Queen Elizabeth the 2nd toured the world.
-Optical fibre telephone cables were introduced.
-The worst single aviation disaster in history occurred in the Canary Islands when two 747s collided, killing 583.
-The first public telephones with buttons instead of dials were introduced.
-Toy fads included skateboards and.....Slime!
-Fashions included flares, disco hot pants, wide ties, moustaches and sideburns, big floppy hats for women and Punk swaggered down the street with torn clothing, aggro hair, safety pins and chains.
-In music the Sex Pistols and many others put the boot into Punk. Blondie released their eponymous album, David Bowie let Heroes take wing, and the Alan Parson's Project activated I Robot, while ABBA were THE Dancing Queens.
-Jimmy Carter was the US Prez.
-The Roots mini-series was on the telly. In Australia we watched Don Lane, Paul Hogan, and Mike Walsh in their shows. Graeme Kennedy hosted the game show Blankety Blanks, and long running soaps like Bellbird, Number 96 and The Box were winding up. Other shows new or popular that year included: Charlies Angels, Fantasy Island, Three's Company, Eight Is Enough, The Goodies, Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, Are You being Served?, Doctor Who, Fawlty Towers, Soap, CHiPs, The Love Boat, The Good Life, and The Naked Vicar Show.
-The Soviet Salyut Space Station was in orbit.
-UFOs were beginning to overfly Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Peg and Ed Blumquist were just starting to plot their bloody reign of terror, though no one would have believed it, if told.
-Malcolm Fraser was the Australian Prime Minister.
-Sarah Michelle Gellar, Orlando Bloom, Shakira, Tom Welling (Smallville's Superboy), and Liv Tyler were all born in '77.
-Elvis, BIng, Wernher von Braun, Joan Crawford, Zero Mostel, Chaplin and Groucho (and his brother Gummo) all died in '77.
-The Space Shuttle Enterprise (named after the US Navy vessels and the Star Trek ship) was undergoing flight tests as the testbed prototype for the future space fleet.
-Films released that year included Smokey and The Bandit, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, Saturday Night Fever, Annie Hall, Airport 77, The Spy Who Loved Me, Looking For Mr Goodbar, The Gauntlet, Oh God!, The Goodbye Girl, The Island Of Dr Moreau, Sinbad & The Eye Of The Tiger, The Deep, Freaky Friday, ABBA-The Movie, Kingdom Of The Spiders, Capricorn 1, Empire Of The Ants, The Incredible Melting Man, Spider-Man (The Nicholas Hammond T.V pilot packaged for theatrical release), Wizards, Julia, and Herbie Goes To Monte Carlo.
And.. Star Wars!
Actually, I'm not a very keen Star Wars fan now, haven't really been since the series "Jumped The Sarlac" back in Return of The Jedi and certainly not at all impressed by the bloated toy franchise second trilogy...retro first trilogy or whateverthehell those three films were supposed to be. Of course, now we have a new cycle of Star Wars films...but I've evolved a bit since 1977 and the genre 'verse has too, so I'm unlikely to return to the franchise fold in a big way.
I wasn't going to go on a pre-Star Wars VII binge of rewatching the earlier movies before seeing The Force Awakens. Goodness, I'm not even sure I have copies! I think there was a set of preview screeners I got from somewheres, I did dig 'em out before the opening weekend and watched the first two, which proved to be a tactical error. I did eventually buy some copies, and I think Han doesn't shoot first in 'em...
I couldn't bring myself to rewatch that first dreadful wave of bloated S.W preqs, though. Amongst their countless, inexplicably artlessly charmless moments, where they really misfired is not managing to effectively tell Anakin's fall into Vader as a genuine tragedy. Instead it's just...grubby, with a rather creepy and unlikely romance thrown in alongside stodgy political commentary that would've taken Aaron Sorkin's fine hand to make live. It does make me wonder if the prequels had actually come first if Vader would've been seen as being quite so cool.
The genre cinema landscape has changed a lot since 1977. It's a rare year now that doesn't have at least five aspirationally major science fiction movies hit the big screen, and then there's the amazingly deep work being done on television where the long form fiction game plays out in greater complexity than ever. Star Wars isn't the only rodeo in town, and its supervillains and superheroes would probably have to pass an entrance exam to join, say, the Avengers or Guardians Of The Galaxy. But that's okay, the genre is as mainstream as it is now because it's standing on the shoulders of Star Wars, and Star Trek, and 2001, and Planet Of The Apes, and Forbidden Planet....and, well, you get the idea.
Still, my old New Hope was that the new films were/are good 'uns too, and will help kick the genre can even further down the road!
Well, having seen The Force Awakens now, I must admit to being somewhat disappointment, especially now I have Rogue On" to compare and contrast it with. Several things to like about 'Force (truly!) but the intensively cloned plot wasn't one of them. Every time (and there were many) I settled into enjoying the film I kept getting tractored out of happyspace by the realisation that I had seen them do precisely the same thing in A New Hope. They tried way too hard to mimic precise plot details from that very first Star Wars movies. Yet another ginormous battlestation to be exploderated, the inevitable 'chosen one' Jedi rising from humble, deserty origins (a girl, and well past time, too!) with another pouty teenage Sith (Darth Vader's his Grandad!) to play the villain. Add a clumsily realized death for the beloved character, Han Solo. None of it works particularly well, save perhaps the introduction of a rebellious Stormtrooper, which ironically, leaves you awkwardly questioning the multitude of throwaway deaths of the hitherto faceless, thinly armoured soldiers throughout the series.
I don't know if the filmmakers were trying to be stylishly 'meta' but pretty much the entire story was lifted whole from the very first movie, with some bits thrown in from the others. A bit of a let down for me and inevitably it's going to be the Bantha in the room when discussing the new flick. I've since read that the aim was to remind the punters of the original films by presenting familiar plot points, but that didn't work out very with the first lot of prequels, did it?
Yet another prequel, Rogue One, fared much better, because it didn't even pretend to be doing something new, as it plugged so neatly, like an astro-mech droid into an X-Wing socket, into the immediate backstory of A New Hope. It did something entirely grimly necessary, which was to bring a a little bit more adult understanding and realization of the underlying interstellar struggle of the story into play. Simply put, it effectively put the "War" into Star Wars, in a way that rang tragically true, albeit in an admittedly watered down cinematic way. In fact, it's enough good at that, that A New Hope plays more naively as the now direct sequel, almost as if it's set in an alternate, much less nuanceduniverse.
“I find your lack of faith disturbing.”
But, back in the Day, in 1977....I was a potential Star Warrior, and it certainly had an influence upon my eventual uber-geekhood, though not as much as Star Trek did, to be sure. This collection of early Star Wars booty really represents a Road Not Taken by me.
Anyway, May 25th, 1977 was the day the film was released in the US but it didn't open in Melbourne until October 27th. We used to have a pretty big time lag between overseas film releases and them washing up Downunder.
I don't know exactly when I first saw it, I've long since tossed the 14 ticket stubs that would tell the story, but I may have seen it on my birthday, which was the day after it opened. The tickets cost $4.00 Australian each back then, so it cost me $56 plus just to see the film those 14 times. No wonder I never bothered getting the video when it came out!
Anyway, Star Wars was the very first feature film screened in a big city cinema (at the now defunct Hoyts Mid-City theatre) that I caught a bus to see all by myself.
I must have been about 16, which most folks would probably think was quite late. I actually did get around a lot on my own of course, just not to the city much. We had a small town hall in the suburb where I lived, where they played films on a miniscule screen. They even had a piano player for some silent flicks! :) I used to enjoy going out to the city with my mum and we'd go shopping, go to bookshops and sometimes to the pictures...I have vague memories of seeing Westerns and, of all things, a Man From Uncle television story tarted up as a big screen release. We used to get a lot of those here, in fact the cinema is where I saw the original Battlestar Galactica pilot.
But that Star Wars clone came later of course....
I think the only other film I have seen in the cinema more times was Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan....one reason for so many repeated viewings of that was to note down all the books on Khan's makeshift bookshelf so I could read them all! I don't think any other film has inspired me to do quite so much reading, certainly not Star Wars.
A couple of months after I saw Star Wars I caught a screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was enjoying a re-release, perhaps because of the enormous interest in space movies that Star Wars helped kick-start again. Now 2001, was much more my idea of a Science Fiction movie I could sink my precocious intellectual teeth into and its high standards have influenced my genre tastes ever since.
“Don’t call me a mindless philosopher, you overweight glob of grease.”
So, my early Star Wars collection is really quite puny compared to ones compiled by folks who had or have more resources, both monetary and enthusiasm, to bring to this particular sub-genre of fandom.
Still, I think it's a fair cross section of the tie-in publications if not (thankfully!) the other merchandise available at the time. This, by the way, isn't all of it. Just what I thought made a decent composition. I also didn't mess with the set up much, didn't get anal about lining everything up perfectly. This is the raw way I would have pasted all this stuff into, say, a scrapbook, back in the 70s.
"I have you now!"
I was already a bit of a collector before Star Wars. Folks nowadays (groan!) sometimes think that Star Wars started the media spin-off explosion but that's just not so. Every category represented here was already well explored by the Star Trek marketers, at least, before the mid 1970s. Radio, film and television had been churning out saleable junk for decades. Still, Star Wars certainly plumbed new wallet depths.....
“Into the garbage chute, flyboy!”
The items in the list refer to numbered notes on the picture which run roughly left to right, row by row downwards.
1) Magazine. 1977. Star Wars Official Collectors Edition. Marvel Comics International. English Printing. 76 pages plus covers. Cover prices: Australia- $2.95. USA $1.75. U.K 95p.
The cover is the famous Brothers Hildebrandt one. Carrie Fisher used to hoot with laughter at the way they 'enhanced' her legs and breasts! Still, it's a cracking illustration that captures the feel of the movie very successfully. The contents were quite interesting. The usual retrospective on Science Fiction and cinematic influences was always handy, as I'd keep an eye out for films and books. There was a little glossary of terms (why did it take so long to put out a Star Wars Encyclopaedia?) and a comprehensive storybook of the film with lots of stills and articles about special effects, music and production artwork by the likes of Ralph McQuarrie. I really poured over the FX and behind-the-scenes shots in particular.
I still laugh at the breathless questions posed about sequels at the end of the mag. "Will the hero marry the strong-willed Princess Leia? (Ewwwww!) Or will he have to challenge Han Solo to a duel for Leia's hand?" Always with Star Wars it's about the lopping off with the Hans!
“Watch your mouth kid, or you’ll find yourself floating home.”
2) The original Star Wars bubble gum cards. 1977. These are the blue edged Topps ones, or a local Australian variant. 66 in all. You could put several of them together and the backs would form a mini-poster, there were also movie facts. I’ve tossed several of these cards into the picture.
3) Soft cover picture book. 1978. Story adapted by Geraldine Richelson. Armada Books. Wiliam Collins Publishers, Sydney. Printed In Victoria, Australia. Cover Prices: Australia $4.95. U.K 1 pound 45. Canada $4.50. The movie story with really well reproduced stills as illustrations. There was a great shot of Vader on the back cover that I still remember referencing for drawings.
4) Original Movie Programme Booklet. 1977. S.W Ventures Inc. New York. Printed in the U.S.A. Australian cover price unknown but you could get them for $1.50 in the U.S. Remember these? I don't know when they decided that we didn't need programme books for sale at Australian cinemas, but this was probably the first one I ever purchased. I never really saw one again after the mid 80s or so, although have since gotten some pretty nice ones in press kits as a movie reviewer. It had all the bells and whistles: good pictures, a cast list, actor bios and a bit of behind-the-scenes stuff.
5) Magazine. Famous Monsters Of Filmland #137 September 1977 Yearbook. 90 pages plus cover. Cover Price $1.90 Australian. $1.50 U.S. Warren Publishing. U.S. My favourite magazine treat back then, along with the later, glossy Starlog. Absolutely crammed with all kinds of groovy ghouly fan treasures! The yearbook was just a cheap way of recycling stories of course, but useful if you'd missed previous issues. I have several surviving copies from this era. I like the titles in burnt orange...surely the signature colour of the 70s? Well, along with brown and assorted garish greens....
In spite of the cover there was actually minimal Star Wars content in this issue. Everything else though was magic! Features on the Japanese monster Ghidrah, a story by Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Bloch called "The Horror Of The Lighthouse" (Illustrated with movie stills that included Doctor Who's Jon Pertwee playing a cross eyed vampire from The House That Dripped Blood film), an account of a fan's phone call with actor Christopher Lee (Lee, of course, had his own part to play in the Star Wars saga decades later), and those advertisements! Page after page of fascinating odds and sods: Planet of the Apes and monster masks, a Frankenstein bust plaster casting kit, Dick Smith Monster make-up kits, Super 8 films of Zorro, Tarzan, and of course Star Wars, and the projector to show 'em with! Posters, vinyl L.Ps, Frank Frazetta art books, glow in the dark (anatomically correct!) skulls, Star Trek posters that you hand coloured, model Batmobiles, and....curious underwear that featured covers from this mag and its sister titles, Creepy and Eerie.
“You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”
All accompanied by what were allegedly Forry Ackerman's exuberant puns and “Forrest” of exclamation marks..."Every ghoulboy reader...", "You won't be dozing when you read what this half dozen horror stars did in THE BLACK SLEEP!" *Bliss*
The name Dick Smith stuck in my head (THUNK !!) and would later prove pivotal in interesting me in the fine art of monster making myself....
6) Magazine. 1977. Science Fantasy Film Classics Collectors Edition #1 Tandem Corporation Chicago, USA. Cover price $2.00 Australian. 70 pages. This was a thoughtfully produced magazine with some quite intricate, well researched articles. This first issue focused on Star Wars, Forbidden Planet and 2001 making it very attractive to me. There was a piece on the science of light sabres, Robby the Robot and an extended analysis of 2001. A big foldout poster used original artwork to create a homage to all three films. On the back of it was a concise guide to the special effects seen in them.
7) Magazine. Famous Monsters Star Wars Spectacular. 1977. Warren Publishing. New York. 50 pages. Cover Price: $1.55 Australian. $1.25 US. More bandwagon repackaging. The picture captions were frakking unbelievable! For example..."There have been a handful of monumental landmarks in the history of Earth: the discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel, man on the moon*, the birth of Famous Monsters...and now - STAR WARS! Buy ten copies of this issue and they'll send your kids to college in the 21st century." Well, by 'sending to college' they must have meant bus fare, 'cos I've seen this on eBay from $3.00....
“That’s no moon, it’s a space station.”
8) Poster Magazine. Star Wars Official Poster Monthly #2. 1977. Paradise Press, London. Cover Price $1.50 Australian. Identical to the Star Trek poster magazines these foldouts packed in quite a few articles on the back of the poster, which in this case was a neat still of Vader and the Stormies in a corridor of the captured Reb Blockade Runner. In this issue a rather gushing expose on Vader also opinions that "The Galaxy was ruled by wise members of the Senate". Guessing that would be the likes of Senator Jar Jar Binks ? Righhhht. Other pieces included a focus on Tatooine, and how the space dogfights were filmed. Never letting a chance to sell more stuff go by an advertisement lists, amongst other allegedly cool junk, a "Genuine Darth Vader Communicator for sending light signals through deep space." A tricked up mirror, in other words, though the copywriter earnestly assured, "The mirror can be used to see your own reflection!" Guess D.V used it to touch up his lippy, the Sithy!
"Vader was seduced by the dark side of the Force"
9) Artwork Portfolio. The Star Wars Portfolio: Paintings by Ralph McQuarrie. September 1977. Ballantine Books. New York. I was quite used to the beaut Star Trek range of technical manuals and other related material that Ballantine Books produced and wasn't surprised that their Star Wars merchandise was also of a high standard. This classic artwork folio contains twenty one 35 cm X 27 cm colour prints of Ralph McQuarrie's glorious preproduction paintings for the film. Mine are still in excellent nick, and are just as handsome to look at today as they were then. McQuarrie's evocative artwork, if anything, looks better than the finished film. McQuarrie, born in Gary, Indiana, in 1929 is a fine futurist artist, formerly a conceptual design artist for Boeing (his aviation and aerospace art is stunning!) whose film and television work included Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Cocoon (he won an Oscar for that one), E.T, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, *batteries not included, Cherry 3000, Total Recall, and Battlestar Galactica. He has an excellent online gallery at:
www.ralphmcquarrie.com/index.html
10) Soft cover Sketchbook. The Star Wars Sketchbook by Joe Johnston. Ballantine Books. New York. 96 pages. A lot of fan artists loved this book! Ballantine, primed with its Star Trek tie-in experience, was quick off the mark, no doubt because the preproduction artwork was both high quality and readily translated into print. Johnston's work, a mixture of pen and ink and brushed washes or perhaps illustrator markers, is evocative but clear, just the thing for the model-makers to base their work on! Evolutionary sketch sequences trace the design development of iconic hardware from the films and I was particularly chuffed with the modular drawings of the Death Star which explain how the sections could be mixed and matched to make the battlestation look as vast as it did.
There was even a little size comparison chart that showed how humungously big a Stardestroyer was supposed to be! (Ssshh! It's only a model...)
"Look at the size of that thing!"
Joe Johnston worked for Lucasfilm as a storyboard artist straight out of college. Lucas later helped fund his entry into film school, and Johnston became a director in his own right. After graduating he directed films including: Hidalgo, Jurassic Park III , October Sky, Jumanji, The Pagemaster, The Rocketeer, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, and of course, Captain America: The First Avenger.
11) Magazine Cover. Movie News. September/October 1977. Volume 13, Number 5. Cover price: 75 cents Australian. This is actually a cover cut and glued into one of several scrapbooks I made of Star Wars related ephemera, newspaper clippings and so on. I used to hand letter captions for the articles and photos and draw spacey little borders around them. A friend pointed once pointed out that I was still doing the same with Flickr! So it goes. :)
Some of the articles proved useful when I was writing this little monograph. For example, I got the ticket prices and cinema location from the advertisements and reviews. One review, by Melbourne's beloved film critic Ivan Hutchinson is particularly poignant. Who would've guessed that I'd be sitting next to him reviewing films (thanks to my Science Fiction and Fantasy radio show) 17 years later?
“Sometimes I amaze even myself.”
Anyway, I'm glad I never tossed these scrapbooks out, as they're also reminders to me that when it comes to being a fan of anything for me it's also about interactivity. Costumes, artwork, photoshoots, writing...I’m happier than a womp rat in a sand wallow!
12) 12 inch Vinyl L.P Record Album. 1977 (?) Themes From The Movies. Peter Pan/Rainbow Records. The Marty Gold Orchestra. RPG 7233. Cover price $2.99 I threw this one in as an example of how iconic the Star Wars music became. John Williams rousing main title theme was a ‘must have’ addition to any musical compilation, and could likely be found several times amongst any soundtrack buff’s Easy Listening collection amongst their K-Tel record selector! Many a good record ended its days abruptly when those damned things overbalanced and fell off tables....
“Put that thing away, you'll get us all killed.”
Marty Gold’s Orchestra was a staple of space age music covers and you can hear its work on dozens of these compilation albums. The popcorn rendition of Star Wars has the usual disco beat and R2D2 mimicking sound effects but Princess Leia's theme is soooo laid back it nods off and would not be out of place as department store Muzak. Some of the other tracks are hard to fathom, especially main titles of The Deep but The Spy Who Loved Me theme actually benefits from the brassy, sassy treatment. The cover artwork is laughable, though the sleeve hype is worth bottling: “Stupendous! Far out! Exhilarating!”
“What a piece of junk!”
13) 12 inch Vinyl Double Disc Record Album. Star Wars: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra. 1977. 20th Century Records L 45753/4. Manufactured in Australia by Festival Records.
Here’s one that could justify any amount of marketing hype on the cover but instead settles for two words stark against a space black background. STAR WARS. Strewth, it’s not hard to recall how big this was back in the day! Sold in starship cargo hold loads and was one of the all-time most popular soundtrack albums. The double disc format facilitated a nice selection of good quality stills in the gatefold that made it look like a photo album. There was a glorious additional poster of the Death Star battle by artist John Berkey, which I remember clearly had more than one Millennium Falcons dogfighting! I originally misremembered the poster as being done by Bob McCall but a kind visitor to this picture (ta stasiuwong !) put me right. Berkey did quite a few film posters back in the 1970s, with the 1976 King Kong remake poster being one of the best remembered. I also recall his cover for the book Colonies In Space, which depicted a glorious future in space that has still, sadly, yet to come to pass.
John William’s music for the film was mind bogglingly rich, and for many fans of a certain age would prove an introduction to classical music, as I’m sure it was the very first such album they purchased. An enticing entry point to the likes of Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and even Gustav Holst, Richard Wagner and William Walton. As a radio D.J I’ve got a pretty good musical memory, but even without that re-listening to this album now is like having an old friend around for tea. I can anticipate most of the cues and recognise the major thematic leitmotifs at least. Even though the main movements have passed into cliché over time it’s a lot of fun exploring the other pieces, especially some of the more subtle tracks backing the action on Tatooine.
Go on, you know you want to drag it out and sling it on the turntable....don’t bother trying to stop the dialogue quotes scrolling through your head....though I must say that if George Lucas wrote dialogue as strongly memorable as this music I’d still be a fan of the movies today!
As it is, although I’m generally somewhat weary of John Williams’ now universally copied musical style, I still appreciate his immense body of work. My favourite scores of his include: Jurassic Park, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, The Last Crusade, Superman, 1941, Jaws, The Reivers, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, The Empire Strikes Back, Saving Private Ryan, The Time Tunnel, Lost In Space, and Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea.
And this one, of course!
14) I was just starting to record my own cassette tapes back then (the cool new media!) so promptly dubbed a copy of the soundtrack onto a “G-Tape” a cheap, recordable cassette that was very popular. The copy was for my own use, so I could play the album away from the turntable. Still plays to this day, in spite of dire warnings about tape decay. I cut and pasted a newspaper ad for the movie as the cover. Talk about Close Encounters of the Nerd kind!
15) Album Notes (From Item 13) Double sided, these notes provided copious insight into John William’s methodology.
16) Paperback novelisation. Star Wars by George Lucas. 1977. Sphere. Printed In Australia by the Dominion Press. 190 pages. Cover price: $2.50 Australian. Every fan had to have this one! Take home your very own genuine relic of Alderaan.....buy the book, the record, the Wookie grooming comb.....
I started re-reading this just before "The Force Awakens" came out, and realised that I hadn't opened the still crisply feeling novel in three decades.
Thing is, here in Australia at least, the novelization came out well before the film! What a tease....I can remember tentatively reading a chapter or two, trying not to go too far. Spoilers in the Seventies!
“It's all just a bunch of simple tricks and nonsense."
It is immediately apparent to anyone familiar with author Alan Dean Foster’s original fiction and many movie and television novelisations that he ghost-wrote this book for George Lucas. The style, vocabulary and other aspects were highly suggestive and it was hardly a surprise when it was finally revealed that he was the co-author. My favourite Foster novel remains Cachelot, a story set on a world of sentient cetaceans and humans. His novelisations of Alien, Aliens, Dark Star, The Thing and the Star Trek Animated Scripts should serve as models for all such screen-to-print adaptations. I was quite startled that the publishers included a bunch of colour stills in the centre of the book, along with some film notes. Wicked! Oh, and the cover was another John Berkey picture.
17) 12 inch Vinyl Record Album. Star Wars And Other Galactic Funk by MECO and the 1977. Millennium Records DXL1 3043. RAC Victor. Manufactured in Australia by RAC Limited. The original disco remix version of all your fave Star Wars themes! The album went platinum in the US, and the single was a chart topper too. The “Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band” single was the biggest selling instrumental single in recorded music history, being the only certified platinum (2 million units sold) instrumental single ever. Although for the life of me I don’t think the disco version of the Cantina Band is all that radically different from the film version!
The single bore a similar symbiotic pop culture relationship to the movie as David Bowie’s Space Oddity had with 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Carpenters Calling Occupants had with C.E.3.K.
Meco was Domenico Monardo, born in 1939 in Pennsylvania, USA. Whilst the cover is fun in itself with its Robert Rodriguez (not the filmmaker!) illustration featuring Flash Gordon retro-rockets and bopping Spacers it’s Meco’s lively remixes with its funky signature disco beat That You Could Boogy To that made this album a killer. It had some damn fine sound effects, warbling wookies, whistling R2s and more amidst all that synth and orchestral music . Meco kept producing ‘meco-ised’ movie and telly tunes into the 1980s, not forgetting the ...memorably awful.... Christmas In The Stars- Star Wars Christmas Album. He retired from music in the mid 80s and worked as a commodities broker in Florida.
The “B’ Side is completely undistinguished apart from the odd fact that the three tracks are listed as 1. Other, 2. Galactic., 3. Funk. Well, at least the cover notes list the intergalactic session players from the CorMar Galaxy, including (Live from the Planet Fooyea courtesy of the Nomel Tribunal) Thur-M76 and Thassu-L46, amongst others!
18) The cover of Item 13.
“Aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper?”
19) 9 cm Plastic Action Figures. Stormtrooper and Boba Fett. 1977 and 1979. I never got into Star Wars toys at all, these came from a mixed bag of no longer loved toys I found at a school fete. (A Fett worse than Darth?) They do make lovely ‘trophies’ for my Predator figures to drag around when tied together by their feet. Curiously, given my armour and costuming fetish, I never ‘got into’ Stormy armour either. In fact, I’ve always seen these bumbling goons as silly comic relief characters. To this day I can’t listen to Ben Kenobi point at the blaster marks on the wrecked Jawa Sandcrawler and say “Only Imperial Stormtoopers are this precise” without cracking up. Marksmen enuff to hit the broadside of a Sandcrawler maybe...! But nothing smaller. C'mon, a legion of crack Troopers taken out by...teddy bears? Sheesh.
Just when I thought ‘Troops were inept along came Boba Fett to set a new low water mark for armoured incompetency. Although his dad was rather cool in Attack Of The Clones it was pretty clear Jango was no tactical genius either, since his idea of combat smarts involved jumping into an arena full of light sabre wielding Jedi Knights to take them on hand-to-hand! Anyway, I included the Fett figure; cos I have few other Star Wars toys. Weird though, this one has a quite neat little missile in its backpack that’s spring loaded to fire straight up. Would’ve thought that somewhat dangerous for the younglings back in the day!
“You're braver then I thought!”
They didn’t crank up the production lines after the unexpected success of the film in 1977 in time to get major toys into the shops by Christmas. I bet you could hear a vast disturbance in the Force that year as the licence holders cried out!
20) 12 inch Vinyl Record Album. Star Wars And Other Space Themes by Geoff Love & His Orchestra. 1978. EMI AXIS 6340. Geoff Love (who also released albums under the pseudonym of Manuel And His Music Of The Mountains) was born in 1917 in Yorkshire and died in 1991 in London. His Music For Pleasure covers of movie and television themes sold many an album in the 1970s.
The cover themes on this album range from good to indifferent, with some, like Star Wars, being fairly straight forwards with a quite “Big Band’ feel to them. There’s a very cool arrangement of Ron Grainer’s Doctor Who theme that I particularly like. A lot of the tracks slope off into extra disco riffs that are mostly harmless. Some television show title music was halfway onto the dance floor anyway, including Gerry Anderson’s UFO and Space 1999. Beware the magically flat Star Trek theme cover though!
The sleeve artwork plays fast and loose with familiar subjects. The Enterprise is barely recognisable under numerous add ons, the 2001 space station has three wheels, and Princess Leia has a war chest that would swell the coffers of the entire Rebellion...
21) Paperback Original Novel. Splinter Of The Mind’s Eye by Alan Dean Foster. 1978. Sphere. Printed in London. 222 pages. Cover Price: $2.75 Australian. 85 p U.K. This was the first of the Star Wars original fiction spin-off novels and it was a beaut! Fresh from his ghost-writing of the movie novelisation Foster locked his S-Foils into attack position and zoomed into this action packed adventure on the swamp world of Mimban. This novel may have been intended as the template for a low budget sequel to Star Wars if the movie had proved less successful than it was. Intriguingly it contains stray story elements that fell by the wayside in early versions of the first film’s script, and also a fair amount of sexual tension between Leia and Luke. (Aw, c’mon, let me have just one restrospective snigger!)
22) Home-made Audio Cassette Tape. The Making Of Star Wars documentary. Broadcast GTV-9, Melbourne, Wednesday 7.30 pm. March 8th 1978. In the days before VCRs all I was able to do to preserve fleeting moments of television was to make audio tapes so I could listen to them over. Hello, ubergeek, remember?
23) Commercial Audio Cassette Tape. A Stereo Space Odyssey- Music From Star Wars by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. 1986. Tee Vee 5. London. Side A covers Star Wars themes and the B Side is a seriously grand planetary suite cobbled together from pieces by Strauss, Wilfred Holcombe and Tchaikovsky. This is the best B-Side for a Star Wars knockoff album that I’ve ever heard, and for my money, was more than a match for the A-Side.
Well now, there you go, it’s been a nostalgic flight down the old thermal exhaust shaft. Congratulations if you made it this far far away, as these notes take as long to scroll by as all the six film titles rolled together!
And, since he didn’t get a bloody medal at the awards ceremony on Yavin I’ll let Chewy get the last word...again!
“Waraggghhh!”
Yeah, back in the day, I liked Star Wars. "Let's face it, this is not the worst thing you've caught me doing!"
"G Force One" on the ramp at Titusville after doing some flights on the space coast. Another one of those I never thought I would get in my personal collection! What an awesome aircraft!
(BEST VIEWED LARGE AND CRUNCHY !!)
...It was billionaire industrialist Tony Stark's OTHER addiction that inspired the colour scheme for his most famous Iron Man specialty armour...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the Marvel Comic limited series Iron Man: Hypervelocity #5 of 6 it's suggested that Tony Stark got his colour scheme for his armour from his elementary school colours.
Fair enough! They'd know. But a while back I saw a terrific picture that fellow Iron man fan ElDave posted in his photostream:
www.flickr.com/photos/eldave/471883835/in/set-72157600123...
(Ta ElDave, this one's for you and your Invincible Iron Legion!)
Anyway, that got me wondering where Tony REALLY got his signature colours from.....
Well, okay, ya got me. It's supposed to be red & gold, but, strewth, what's a variant foil cover between fans, y'know? That's the eternal decision that faces us Shellheads, yellow or gold?
Well, until they make metallic M & Ms (or I spraypaint some gold!) for the sake of the gag it's yellow, mm'kay?
I suppose, to be patriotic, I should have used Smarties, the chocolate treat that pre-date M & Ms, that have been popular in Australia since the 1930s, and upon which the U.S candy is modelled. Somehow, Iron Smarty doesn't quite have the same ring to it.... ;)
Anyway, my sculpt of an Iron Zombie action figure proved a little more complex than I initially thought, the Super Sculpey not being tough enough to articulate without breakages I've had to make moulds of my sculpture and am casting it up in strong thermosetting plastic. So, while I'm pottering away with that I wanted to build something that would take a little less time and this is what came to mind.
Bemusingly, I know precisely how much time it took to sculpt Iron M & M since I whipped him up whilst watching an episode of the new British Robin Hood series, a fantasy time travel show called Life on Mars and a cracking good documentary on Atheism by the courageously rational Richard Dawkins. So, around two and a half to three hours, all up. Since I didn't need to articulate this wee bloke, the Sculpey was perfectly up to the task. Yes, I know Tony doesn't have his moustache and eyebrows on the outside of his face plate! It's a caricature, right?
Painting took a bit longer, since I used the Humbrol range of model kit enamels, which I thought would adequately replicate the toy/chocolate candy gloss that I wanted.
Yes, the back is detailed, and I even got carried away with the boot jets, but you'll see that in another photo soon.
The biggest problem with the photoshoot (which I wanted bright and comically lit) was making sure that nobody ate the bloody M & Ms (me included!). As it was, I ended up with one less red one than I needed to spell out TONY STARK, but then, that's what Photoshop is for, eh? Of course, I can stop eating these things any time.
Any. Time. Soon. Justonemore. 'N one after that for the road.....right?
Now, I wonder what a War M & M Machine would look like done like this? Hmm!
EXTREME WEATHER ALERT:
BERRY STRONG WINDS.
THUNDERSTORMS.
SEVERE HALLE.
-----------------------------------
This punny piccy is just for the Halle of it.
It was Bastille Day, the phrase "The Storming Of The Bastille" popped into my brain....and I thought, "Y'know, I reckon that just needs a little X-tra superhero goodness!
You get two for the price of one with ol' Stormy now. Ororo Munroe is an Avenger too, as well as in the X-Men.
The background painting is a watercolour by Louis Laurent Houel (1735-1813), entitled ''Prise de la Bastille'' ("The storm of the Bastille"), which is in the Bibliothèque Nationale Française.
Halle Berry, of course, 'hails' from the "X-Men" movies.
N794AJ Zero-G Boeing 727-227/Adv(f) ....A nice surprise to see the "vomit Comet" parked sweet... at Fort Lauderdale FLL
Poor wee beastie, all alone in the void!
I did this one straight into Gimp, without any dithering about in MSPaint first.
Just another component widget lost from someone's space station....they really should tether these thingies!
The refitted Airbus A310 aircraft is on the runway and ready for its first flight for weightless research next week. Although the aircraft can weigh up to 157 tonnes, skilled pilots will angle its nose 50° upwards to create brief periods of weightlessness. At the top of each curve, the forces on the passengers and objects inside cancel each other out, causing everything to float in weightlessness.
During the climb and pulling out of the descent, the occupants endure almost twice normal gravity. A person weighing 80 kg on Earth will feel as if they weighed 160 kg for around 20 seconds.
Conducting hands-on experiments in weightlessness and hypergravity is enticing for researchers in fields as varied as biology, physics, medicine and applied sciences.
French company Novespace has conducted these ‘parabolic flights’ for more than 25 years. Last year they acquired a new aircraft to replace their trusty Airbus A300. Most seats were removed to provide as much space as possible inside, while padded walls provide a soft landing for the researchers – the changes in ‘gravity’ can be hard to handle. Extra monitoring stations have been installed for a technician to monitor the aircraft system’s as it is pushed to its limits – this is no transatlantic cruise.
The inaugural scientific campaign will start on 5 May, a collaboration between Novespace’s three main research partners: ESA, France’s CNES space agency and the DLR German Aerospace Center.
Experiments include understanding how humans sense objects under different gravity levels, investigating how the human heart and aorta cope, looking at how plants grow, testing new equipment for the International Space Station, trying out new techniques for launching nanosatellites, investigating whether pharmaceutical drugs will work without ‘gravity’, understanding Solar System dust clouds and planet formation as well as investigating potential propulsion for martian aircraft.
If you want to know more about these experiments and the parabolic flights, join us on Wednesday 6 May at 13:00 GMT (15:00 CEST) for a live ESA hangout with the researchers and space agency experts. Ask questions live in chat or via Twitter with hashtag #ZeroGhangout.
Credit: Sébastien Rouquette
My son Max finally agreed to lend me one of his #Transformers (the smallest…): it will be one of our 3 0-g indicators.
Mio figlio Max ha finalmente accettato di prestarmi il suo #Transformers (il più piccolo...): sarà uno dei nostri tre indicatori di #ZeroG
Credits: Paolo Nespoli
Quite saddened by Leonard Nimoy's death. What a fine actor, and such a distinguished, varied and long career as a photographer, director, producer, and writer.
I remember in the Iron Man comic books that Tony Stark once recalled that Star Trek was one of the few non documentary television shows that his father allowed him to watch.....
As both father and son were first class futurists, that made entirely good sense.
Pretty sure that Tony would've appreciated Scientist Supreme Mr Spock and his cool logic, Scotty's combat engineering prowess, and Captain Kirk's cheeky dash and way with the space ladies....
I used the big NECA 46 centimeter (18 inch) Avengers Movie Mark VII Iron Man figure to model the original hand picture, as it has mighty mitts, even if the fingers don't articulate sideways and I had to Gimp around photo editing to get the Vulcan greeting.
I miss Original Spock...
The UNEN Botticelli is a heavy interstellar cargo vessel, of a class which first went into production in 2203. This vessel was purchased by the United Nations of Earth for use in mining and cargo transport to the outlying colony of New Courland, near the edge of explored space. In 2221, the Botticelli went missing with a full cargo, and was presumed lost- whether from a technical failure, a meteor shower, or something else, no one knew. Then, a few years later, New Courland received a corrupted emergency transmission from the vessel. The sender claimed that the Botticelli had been intercepted by another ship, originating outside of known space. The UNE covered up the message to avoid encouraging a possible terrorist group. Little did they know this encounter would be the start of something far greater than some small-time pirates…
Stats:
Length: 216 studs/1,080 meters
Crew: 38
Capacity: 144 cargo modules, each 96 meters long; can also be configured with additional fuel/habitation modules, or even additional weapon systems when traveling through pirate space.
Weapons: 6 particle flares, to defend against pirate boarding ships.
Parts: 2725 bricks
The Botticello's crew stays in these two rotating habitation pods, or in the cockpit at the very front during docking. During acceleration, crew gravity is provided by the engines' force. After they finish firing, the pods fold outwards and rotate 180°, generating artificial gravity through centrifugal force.
That was pretty fun to make. I generally prefer more realistic, near-future sci-fi, and I knew if I ever did a SHIP it would be from this genre. I started off with every intention of making a real-brick SHIP, but after two attempts, I realized I didn’t have the parts to make the ship I wanted to. And so I turned to LDD.
There were still plenty of problems with doing something this size, such as taking 90 seconds to rotate the model 30°, or accidentally deleting every Technic pin in the model. That wasn’t fun to repair. At least photography wasn't a pain. I rendered all these pics to a crazy-overkill level of detail, so make sure to view in all sizes. (And I have the transparent PNG, I'll FM it to whomever does the poster this year :) All in all, I’ll parrot everybody else who built a SHIP, and say I’m quite happy with it and I hope you like it. Oh, and thanks for reading through this SHIP-sized text wall :P
The Botticello's crew stays in these two rotating habitation pods, or in the cockpit at the very front during docking. During acceleration, crew gravity is provided by the engines' force. After they finish firing, the pods fold outwards and rotate 180°, generating artificial gravity through centrifugal force.
"VIDEO KILLED THE RADO STAR?"
Well, just about, I'm a tad knackered at the moment!
G’day, I’ve been a wee bit quiet for the past few weeks as I reviewed movies at this year’s 2007 Melbourne (Australia) International Film Festival. I broadcast the reviews over about two and a half hours all up on my show, Zero-G: Science Fiction, Fantasy & Historical Radio, on 3RRR FM. (rrr.org.au)
The above picture is the sign on the Erwin Rado Theatre at 211 Johnson Street, Fitzroy, where the MIFF has its headquarters. The building's nothing much to look at from outside, really! But the sign...well, THAT has character!
Below the MIFF offices, the theatre, named after the director of the Film Festival from 1957 - 1983, has a charming old 69 seat cinema that can screen 16mm and 35mm film as well as DVD, LaserDisc, VHS, Data and MiniDV.
The MIFF’s access to the theatre expired at the end of 2007 and, ideally, it really should have its own dedicated screening facility, as other major city’s film festivals have. Still, the office itself has now moved to a more central location in Melbourne, which is handy!
To find out more about the MIFF go here:
www.melbournefilmfestival.com.au/
Anyway, I thought I’d post some of reviews here, inspired by films that I particularly enjoyed at this year’s event.
The full transcripts can be found at:
-AACHI & SSIPAK-
SOUTH KOREA
This continuously violent South Korean animated adult feature presents a future where human excrement is an energy source. Citizens have a monitoring chip attached to their arses and particularly productive individuals are rewarded with addictive drug laced munchies called Juicy Bars.
I shit you not.
The story begins with a roadwarrior highway battle as the swarming blue mutant Diaper Gang (!) attempts to truckjack a cargo of Juicy Bars, only to encounter a devastatingly lethal cyborg enforcer who makes Judge Dredd look like a human rights campaigner.
Headshot bodies fall at a rate that would impress Aeon Flux and Samurai Jack combined as the repressive government, assorted roving bands of bandits and con men, including the title characters Aachi and Ssipak (pronounced ‘she-pock’) along with a feisty would-be actress, all compete for the Juicy Bars.
Given the outrageous level of mayhem and the giggling concept that lies at the, er, bottom of the plot, it’s hardly worth noting that the animators cheerfully raid pop culture for many sequences, including the films Aliens and Indiana Jones & The Temple Of Doom. The latter is extensively overmined for one tunnel chase set up.
The animation is quite stylistically vigorous while the off the wall social commentary reminds me a little of the kind of thing that animator Ralph Bakshi attempted in his Fritz The Cat days, well before the likes of South Park and its shock-anime kin. There’s also something to be said for the biting political satire that runs through the narrative, which results in the government and gang leader being merely two opposite sides of the same ruthless coin.
People with kids could have pointless fun banning them from seeing this film, but apparently MTV’s thinking of doing a telly series based on it anyway, so, futile or what?
Subtle it isn’t, but it is a species of wicked fun that will gather bums on seats!
Director Joe Bum-jin
2006/90mins
-A FEW DAYS IN SEPTEMBER-
ITALY/FRANCE/PORTUGAL
The first film directed by screenwriter Santiago Amigorena, A Few Days In September
(Quelques Jours en Septembre), is a laid back but quite charming French spy thriller that makes espionage a family affair...and a realistically bickering family at that.
Elliot, mostly alluded to or played as an off screen voiceover by Nick Nolte until near the film’s conclusion, is an ex-CIA agent with knowledge about the upcoming 911 attacks. He hopes to trade the information for a stake that will enable him to reunite and live with his biological daughter and step-son, legacies of two seperate cover identity marriages in France and the U.S.
Much sought after by various factions, Elliot entrusts his grown up children, Orlando (Sara Forestier) and David (British actor Tom Riley) to the capable care of Irène, a cool, experienced French secret agent who used to be Elliot’s colleague. The potentially overwhelming meta-story takes a back seat to the character relationships, which makes a nice change to the usual breathless adventures that would normally puff up this kind of story into a by-the-numbers action thriller.
Juliette Binoche brings marvelous, stylish depth to her role as world wise spy Irène, providing a wryly sophisticated setting for her charges’ inevitable romance. (What IS it with the French anyway? After Irène’s arm is injured she turns up wearing a chic scarf as a sling, but of course!) Always gorgeous, the actress pitches the character as being adept enough at her deadly trade so that she can afford to enjoy herself while she works. Forestier is all sharp edged, angry eyed angst as she works through father/daughter issues while Riley nervously cooks (his character worked in a restaurant) for the two formidable women who have abruptly complicated his life with their Amazonian expertise with firearms. I also very much enjoyed the arch Franco/American banter between Orlando and David.
Seeking Elliot through the medium of his children is William Pound, a whacko ‘wet work’ assassin who has a penchant for poetry, drives a florist’s delivery van and has a mobile phone plagued by the world’s most annoying ringtone. Pound’s character is tightly wound by John Turturro, who played one of the convicts in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and also an equally obsessive relative of the title character in the television series Monk.
A Few Days In September benefits from first rate cinematography, including some playful soft focus shots that whimsically render Venice and Paris, cheekily explained by Irène’s habit of removing her glasses to ‘see things differently’. There’s also a cracking good shot through the dark framed doorway of a Venetian Chapel which reminded me of a signature frame from a John Ford Western, only instead of Mesas and sagebrush we get the Venice Lagoon and a passing ocean liner.
Although this film lingers perhaps a little too lovingly on the wrangling entanglements of its main characters I still found it pleasant and rewardable viewing. Amigorena certainly knows how to inject off-beat life into his characters.
Director/Screenwriter Santiago Amigorena
2006/115 mins
-BUG-
USA
When down on her luck small town waitress Agnes White (played by Ashley Judd) invites eccentric drifter Peter Evans into her seedy motel room she receives much more than she bug-aned for!
Director William Friedkin (The Exorcist, & The French Connection) gets almost unbearably psychological in this cross genre movie that wisely adds no excess fat to the one set, pressure cooker Tracy Lett’s play that it’s adapted from. As the two main characters’ relationship slowly emerges from a far too tightly spun chrysalis the film builds to one of the most intensely wound paranoic conclusions seen on screen.
Michael Shannon is gauntly convincing as Evans, a role that he pioneered in the original stage play and intially at least, reminds me a little of a young Steve McQueen or perhaps, Joachim Phoenix. Harry Connick Junior has a supporting part in the film as Agne’s ex-convict, ex-husband.
Bug’s maddeningly paced escalating tension is supported by an appropriately chittering score, composed by Brian Tyler, who also gave us soundtracks for the films Constantine, Bubba Ho-Tep, the Children of Dune miniseries, as well as episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise and the upcoming Aliens Versus Predator 2: Survival Of The Fittest. Speaking of Star Trek, Ashley Judd also played Ensign Robin Lefler in Star Trek: Next Generation.
Bug is a film that creeps up on you and by its final scuttling rush will definitely get under your skin...one way or another.
Director- William Friedkin
Screenwriter-Tracy Letts
2006/101mins
-EL TOPO-
(MEXICO)
El Topo (“The Mole”) was director Alejandro Jodorowsky's third film. The infamous Mexican allergorically surreal Eastern/Western is presented at the festival in a very fine new restoration (a bit of a shock for those used to seeing it in its customary raddled grindhouse/cult prints!) along with its natural companion piece, The Holy Mountain.
This comprehensively startling but compelling film begins, not unlike the Lone Wolf And Cub Samurai series, with the black clad, flute playing gunslinger El Topo (played by the director himself) riding across the wastelands in company with a taciturn child companion. After a blood drenched encounter with drunkenly bestial bandits El Topo replaces the boy with a seductively manipulative woman who urges him to become the greatest shootist in the world by seeking out and defeating four master gunfighters.
As with the wuxia martial arts films that this story frequently references the quest for the masters proves dangerous, difficult, baffling and wonderous.
The gunslinger’s odyssey to achieve enlightment and mastery is populated with exotic encounters and inventive, symbolically charged imagery. Deflating balloons signal the start of duels, capering outlaws with shoe fetishes rape feminised sand paintings and carve bananas with sabres, civilised townsfolk prove more depraved and debauched than the wasteland bandits, herds of rabbits mysteriously die at El Topo’s feet, incestuously deformed trogalytes living in oil drums tunnel to escape their underground prison, and live bullets are caught and deflected by butterfly nets.
This visual melange is supported by Jodorowskys and Nacho Méndezs evocative music which, by turns soothing or jarring, echoes across the many desert based sequences and permeates the locations, which frequently read more like artistic installations than sets grounded in any kind of mundane reality. In fact, there is a timeless anachronistic feel to the desert that makes you question whether this is nominally a period Western or indeed set in some kind of post-apocalyptic Stephen King future.
El Topo is rendered even stranger by its renowned mid-film gear change, one of several enigmatic transformations that can be interpreted as Buddhist inspired reincarnations of the title character.
Just imagine what might have been if Jodorowsky had pulled off his mid-70s adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune, with its intended cast of Salvidor Dali as the Emperor, Mick Jagger playing Feyd Rautha and Orson Welles as Baron Harkonnen? As it is the Acid Western tradition at least got another outing in Jim Jarmusch's more recent film, Dead Man, which, for all its many remarkable charms, by comparison to El Topo is cast into monochrome shade.
A bizarre chimera even by Zero-G's notoriously unhinged standards El Topo is a cult classic given gloriously grotesque new life by its own recent transfiguring restoration.
Director/Screenwriter Alejandro Jodorowsky
1971/125mins
-FIDO-
Canada/USA
Fido fiendishly expands upon the gag featured in Shaun of the Dead (amongst other films) that zombies could be domesticated to perform simple tasks. Zombies helping in the kitchen? Uh-oh, better make sure they keep those rotting fingers are kept hygenically away from food preparation surfaces with a pair of crisp, clean white cotton gloves....
In an alternate 1950s the all encompassing ZomCom, which apparently helped win the Zombie War, protects and serves the walled small towns of America. Now, we all know that the only reason to provide zombies with clever electronic control collars is so that the gadgets can malfunction; cue zombie outbreak! It’s the slyly subversive juxtaposition of wholesome mom and apple-pie Leave It To Beaver sitcom with Zombie killing procedural that lends this consistently bemusing film a wicked Addams Family style where Pop naturally reads Death Magazine and scenes shot in cars are filmed using good old fashioned rear screen projection.
Not that we’re talking Black and White telly, nosirree Bob! Fido is filmed in full, glorious technicolour, complete with ginormous finned automobiles, two toned shoes and compliant Stepford housewives who wait at the front door for their patriarchal hubbies to take the martini from their submissive, manicured hands. Happily, Carrie Anne-Moss in one of the main roles, as Helen Robinson, is more of a buddingly feisty Desperate Housewife after the armed and dangerous example of Bree Hodge. (From The Matrix to a zombie packed Pleasantville is indeed an ironic career path!) It’s not long before Helen kicks over the domestic traces following the example of her young son, Timmy (knowingly played by the intriguingly named K’Sun Ray) and his new pet zombie, the Fido of the title, embodied by Billy Connolly. Connolly plays the long suffering Fido with toothy glee, moaning and groaning and lurching in the throes of what could easily double as a hangover of fatally heroic proportions.
Keep an eye out (easy to do in a zombie film) for Dylan Baker, as the nervously cheerful Bill Robinson. Baker has had the sleeper part of Doctor Curt Connors in the Spider-Man films and, as comic book fans anticipate, should eventually get to mutate into the super-villain, The Lizard.
Fido is my genre pic of the Festival, in the tradition of another year’s shambling B-schlock spoof, The Lost Skeleton Of Cadavra. I ask you, how can I not enjoy sinking my teeth into a film where a pet zombie is addressed with a line like: “What’s that Fido? Timmy’s in trouble?”
It’s enough to make Lassie dig her way out of her grave!
Director- Andrew Currie
Screenwriters- Robert Chomiak, Andrew Currie, Dennis Heaton
2006/91mins
-HANSEL & GRETEL-
GERMANY
If you go down to the woods today.....you’d better take your copy of the Brothers Grimm Cookbook For Baking Independent Elderly Female Cannibal Sorceresses.
German director Anne Wild and screenwriter Peter Schwindt settle for a straightforward retelling of the classic rural ‘stranger danger’ story wherein the devious Gretel proves the most resourceful of two deliberately lost children who end up on the menu of the obligatory member of the local Guild of Almagamated Wicked Witches & Confectioners.
Deliberately lost? How do you think the kids got to be wandering around in Blair Witchburg in the first place? Sometimes tactfully omitted from modern retellings of this familiar story is the neglected element of child abandonment, a practice forced upon starving families in situations of plague, famine, wars and other social upheavals. In this case, it’s the pragmatic step-mother who pushes her more sentimental but nontheless compliant woodcutter husband into cutting loose the kids.
In early versions of the story it’s usually just the natural mother who suggests jettisoning the offspring...a much more useful cautionary tale for parents to use as and Awful Threat when disciplining naughty anklebiters.
Leaving aside observations about how Hansel and Gretel underlines the historical distrust of skilled single women of independent means this is actually a moderately creepily staged film. The woods are suitably threatening, and the witch herself, though certainly not up to Buffy The Vampire Slayer standards is a reasonably nasty albeit dimwitted piece of work...
I never can figure out quite why witchy poo needed to go Hannibal Lector on kiddies when she was capable of whipping up enough food to fatten a small army, not to mention all that square footage of gingerbread real estate. Let’s just assume it’s an alternative lifestyle choice, along the lines of supergenius Wile. E. Coyote yearning after Roadrunner drumsticks in spite of the fact that he had enough credit to order truckloads of expensive gadgets from the ACME Corporation.
(On the subject of ghoulish folks developing a fondness for ‘long pig’ just what DID those darling children do with the oven fired witch after they fried her arse?)
We all know how this ends, after making off with the witch’s portable property the kids, in a remarkable act of forgiveness, share their taxfree windfall with their deadbeat dad...though their step mother has obligingly dropped dead in the meanwhile.
Hmm, did anyone actually see step-mama and Ms Witch in the same room at the same time?
Don’t expect a Post-Modern fractured fairytale from Hansel and Gretel and you won’t be led astray by what’s essentially a traditionally told, moderately unsettling film.
Director- Anne Wild
Screenwriter- Peter Schwindt
2006/76mins
-THE HOLY MOUNTAIN-
MEXICO
If you thought Alejandro Jodorowsky’s third film, El Topo, was weird...well, no caca Sherlock!
Wait until you get a load of this....
His next surreally allegorical outing, 1973’s The Holy Mountain, scales even more whackily experimental heights. Like El Topo, The Holy Mountain has also been recently, lovingly restored, all the better to trip out on the eye bulging psychedelic imagery!
Again, as with El Topo, the nominal protagonist is on a messianic quest to achieve enlightment. Even more ironically symbolic in this case since the central thief character bears a strong and exploitable resemblance to the traditional representation of Jesus Christ.
Horácio Salinas plays the hapless thief, leaving Jodorowsky himself the catalytic role of a tower dwelling alchemist who charges him to accompany seven influential but materialistic powerbrokers to Lotus Island where they will achieve eternal life once they have climbed the eponymous Holy Mountain.
Initially the dialogue is thin on the ground but soon ramps up to cheerfully inexplicable levels where a line like “hypersexed brown native vampires” can pass without comment or indeed comprehension. Politics, art, sexuality, and filmmaking, amongst many other subjects, all cop a satirical hiding in this extraordinary film which relies heavily upon fantasy imagery drawn from tarot cards, astrology and religion.
Just listing a few of the oddball ideas gives you an idea of the unique scope of Jorodowsky’s fevered imagination.
Two women are ‘cleansed’ of clothing, make-up, jewellery, false nails, and hair by a black robed priest who himself has ebony varnished fingernails. A screaming man lies covered in tarantulas...no big acting stretch there! The Invasion of Mexico is renacted by lizards dressed in Mezoamerican costumes battling frogs wearing Conquistador armour and missionary robes. (I have my doubts about this sequence, it sure looks like the poor frogs are really being blown up by explosives?) A mulitple amputee writes cryptic messages in the dirt with a severed animal leg. Parading prostitutes turn out to be just as holy as priests. Roman soldiers cast the thief in plaster and create a line of life-sized crucifiction merchandise. Art factory paint coated nude backsides stamp out images on a production line while live body painted nudes are built into installations so they can be fondled by gallery patrons. Gas masked soldiers attend dances and machine guns and hand grenades are painted in rainbow colours. Spartan like warriors pursue a cunning plan to emasculate 1000 heroes to create a shrine of 1000 testicles....and nevermind what they did with the other 1000! Eviscerated victims spill chicken guts....and I mean they literally pull chickens from their wounds’ while Liederhosen wearing Teutonics trip on drugs and strongmen are able to turn intangible and teleport through entire mountains.
Distantly reminiscent of Fellini’s Satyricon, and to some extent Roma, The Holy Mountain also boasts the most startling Orgasmatron machine since the erotic cult film Barbarella, in the form of a Giant mechanical vagina that’s manipulated like a theramin.... well, if a theramin was played by a giant dildo!
Is it any surprise, really, in the wake of the cult success of El Topo, that The Holy Mountain’s producer Allen Klein also managed The Beatles and that those fans of all things psychedelic, John Lennon and Yoko Ono helped fund the movie?
Landmark or landfill experimental film? The Holy Mountain remains an obvious precursor to movies like Eraserhead, The Cremaster Cycle, and The Qatsi Trilogy.
Climb it at your own peril. (You know you want to!)
Director/Screenwriter Alejandro Jodorowsky
1973/114mins
-lLS-
France
Clementine (Olivia Bonamy) and Lucas (Michael Cohen) live happily in pastoral rural isolation in a rundown chalet in the Romanian woods, until one night they are attacked by....THEM! No, not by lurching giant ants from a 1950s horror film but by...well, that would be telling. Some horror films take their time building suspense but Moreau and Palud’s shiversome first feature nails you straight to the wall and keeps you hanging there for the economical just-over-an-hour’s running time. And I do mean ‘running’.
The adept direction and unrelating pace set within the atmospheric confines of the old chalet (a dream of a location to create nightmares in) is ramped up by genuinely unnerving sound effects design, an evocatively tense soundtrack, solid if necessarilly Spartan performances by the two leads, and the teasing revelation of the nature of the besiegers.
There’s nothing particularly new about the ingredients stirred into this terrifying mix. In fact, you could, after the credits have rolled and the lights come up again, sit back and tick off the horror cliches one by one, starting with the usually tiresome pronouncement, “Based On A True Story”. Commentators seem uncertain about the veracity of that, but in this case it adds to the overall feel of unease that permeates the ending of this film. I found myself thinking, “Y’know, I can see how that could actually happen....brrrr!”
Ils...it took me a while to realise that the title is merely the French word for “Them”... is one of the most disturbing horror films I’ve seen in some time, and all without buckets of blood or lashings of sickly inventive torture porn. With its efficient minimalist approach it’s very close in tone to the best of the New Wave of Japanese horror that burst upon the West several years ago now.
Directors/ Screenwriters- David Moreau and Xavier Palud
2006/70 mins
-ISLAND OF LOST SOULS-
DENMARK
A big budget supernatural fantasy for young adults that's part Spielberg, part Lucas, with an added dash of Harry Potter, but which ultimately wears its ample CGI well to create an enjoyable and in a few places reasonably scary film.
When two children move to a quiet country town the last thing they expect to find is a haunted island plagued by a supernatural confluence of kidnapped souls. When a young girl taps into the mystic mayhem it results in her brother being possessed by the spirit of a centuries dead member of an ancient order of sorcerous crimefighters.
The film's young actors are capable and ‘self possessed’ in the face of some quite formidable magical opposition, including a new and nasty take on that familiar player from Central Horror Casting, the living Scarecrow, along with a necromancer who could be brother to both Nosferatu and the Star Wars Emperor, right down to the cadaverous features and handy ability to cast Sith lightning from his fingies! I especialy liked the offbeat character of the trainspotting psychic investigator who inevitably comes to the kid’s aid in their hour of dire peril.
A fun little romp that’s no longer than it should be at an economical 100 minutes.
Director- Nikolaj Arcel
Screenwriter- Ramsus Heisterberg
2007/100mins
Sessions
Sun, 12th of August, 1:00 PM
ACMI
-KHADAK-
Belgium/Germany/The Netherlands
Bagi, played by Batzul Khayankhyarvaa, is a young nomad, who, along with his family are wrenched from their nomadic existence by the Mongolian government who want to consolidate people in towns, villages and cities as the fledgling democracy gears up to enter the 21st century’s global economy. After rescuing Zolzaya (Tsetsegee Byamba), a beautiful female coal thief, Bagi boldly goes where nomad has gone before on a shamanistic quest that culminates in fantastical revelations about Mongolia’s future relation with the environment.
Khadak is underpinned by a hypnotically compelling narrative fascination with magic realism that often contrasts the shabby reality of the concrete high rises with the colourfully organic traditional nomadic traditional yurt dwellings.
The film overflows with powerful imagery, including a simple but effective camera roll that causes an iconistic prayer-scarf draped tree to turn upside down as the land itself is inverted by mineral exploitation and pollution. A deserted town, in reality an abandoned former Soviet barracks, stands in for one potential future. Tractors, used to haul the disassembled yurts, are started and allowed to run aimlessly free across the steppes as the government agents burn the nomads’ links to their former lifestyle behind them.
Khadak doesn’t always offer too nostalgic a view of the nomadic struggle; many of the former rural folk cheerfully adapt to their new circumstances and some seem to pragmatically thrive, especially Bagi’s mother, who ends up running heavy machinery at the coal mine where immense draglines swing with saurian grace across the screen.
The film’s reverberating score resonates across the wind blown, echoing steppes, giving way to some moments of pure musical bliss, especially when some of the newly urbanised young people get together for astonishing ‘jam’ sessions.
Both lyrical and hard edged Khadak is a film, like Martin Scorsese’s Kundan, whose exotic sights and sounds will be welcome guests in my yurt for as long as they choose to stay.
Directors/Screenwriters- Peter Brosens, Jessica Hope Woodworth
2006/105mins
-LAST WINTER, THE-
USA/Iceland
It’s damn cold in Northern Alaska but not cold enough, as tough but soft centered Ron Perlman’s advance oil drilling preparation crew discover when they set out to re-open an isolated test drilling site that may be viable in the face of looming energy shortages. The arctic circle tundra is thawing rapidly, unleashing the kind of environmental horror movie that used to be in vogue back in the 1970s and which is all too timely now as global warming makes its presence felt in the real world.
Perlman, as usual, is excellent, giving the kind of inflected performance that graced Hellboy, Cronos, City Of Lost Children and his impressive work in the television fantasy series Beauty & The Beast. The ensemble players are also deftly sketched in, often in a low key fashion that adds realism.
Director Larry Fessenden successfully follows up and even references in one brief bit of dialogue, Wendigo, one of his earlier, not entirely disimilar horror outings. As with some other genre films in this year’s festival the horror elements are timeless; from the simmering sexual and tensions and hostility between the boffins and the bluecollars to the classic scenario of the besieged ice station. The latter is a character in itself, in the ‘Thingy’ tradition of both Howard Hawks and John Carpenter’s seperate adaptations of John W. Campbell’s seminal very Cold War science fiction novella, Who Goes There? Best possible use is made of this stunning location, as the screen often becomes an overwhelmingly vast white or dark canvas to trap and diminish the hapless blue collar workers.
Crystal clear sound design helps ‘sell’ the visuals and the impressive CGI special effects are first rate, without ever detracting from the practical drama of the sheer dangers of living and working in such an extreme environment.
The Last Winter is a cunningly ambiguous chiller that cleverly maintains a plausible alternative explanation for the film’s lethal events up to and possibly including the final admirably restrained frame which begs teasingly to be opened out into a wider shot but leaves the audience wanting more, leaving room for a possible but unecessary sequel.
Oil be back!
Director- Larry Fessenden
Screenwriters- Larry Fessenden, Robert Leaver
2006/107mins
-MEN AT WORK-
IRAN
A carload of Iranian buddies on their way down the mountains from a skiing holiday stop for a toilet break at a precipitous roadside layover and discover a monolithic rock
that just HAS to be tumbled down the slopes.
If you’re a bloke, you automatically know how it is.
If you’re a woman, equally, you KNOW how we are!
An amusing exploration of male bonding and stubborness this happily crazy film is guaranteed to contain no sociopolitical allegory whatsoever (really!) and the Iranian writer/director has asked that the U.S please refrain from invading his leg of the Axis of Evil until he has finished his next project.
Director/Screenwriter- Mani Haghighi
2006/75mins
-SEVERANCE-
UK
When completely politically incorrect arms merchant Palisade Defence rewards its crack Euro Sales division with a team-building weeked in the woods of Eastern Europe the mismatched but archtypal bickering office workers soon find that they’re not quite the ‘gun’ group that they thought they were.
Yes, the comparison of choice is The Office meets Deliverance and that’s fair enough because what makes this movie so gormlessly funny is the inept Brits Abroad schtick combined with an equally knowing, wickedly timed take on the horror slasher genre that puts most inept Hollywood fun with fear spoofs to more shame than ever. The only time this film ever really fumbles is when it takes the horror too seriously, which is not all that frequently, though more noticably and perhaps inevitably, in the apocalyptic last reel.
Oddly, Severence’s particularly grungy baddies who get to fold, spindle and mutilate our heroic twonks remind me very much of the “Stalkers” from the recent popular video game, which itself references the Tarkovsky film and the less well known science fiction novel that classic is itself based on, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic.
The heavyweight British ensemble cast is a real corker here, and one of the most enjoyable in the festival films I’ve seen this year, including at least one former Bond villain (Toby Stephens who was Gustav Graves in Die Another Day) and the always wetly amusing Tim McInnerny who plays to his well known Blackadder type (He was both Lord Percy and Captain Darling) as the incompetent boss of the Palisade’s party.
I won’t be the last reviewer to note that Eastern Europe has become destination of choice for horror filmmakers of late. Attracted by threatening woodlands, abandoned buildings and low cost production facilities the exotic locales also perhaps wallow in a degree of smug and possibly premature Western superiority in the wake of the economic collapse of former Eastern Bloc foes. For the moment, these once hard to access countries are providing filmmakers with a place to set their stories ‘beyond the glow of the streetlights’. Again, as with other festival genre films, Severence does benefit from a marvelously decrepit Old Dark house of a location.
Severence is laced with joyfully understated sight gags, dialogue to listen for, and a good deal of well meaning irony regarding corporate responsibility. The icing on the cake is a musical score that fiddles with both ominous gypsy curses, pop tunes and even riffs off We’ll Meet Again as featured in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, to which black comedy there’s more than one reference.
Severance gives awful new meaning to the term, “You’e fired!”
Director- Christopher Smith
Screenwriters- James Moran, Christopher Smith
2006/90mins
-STILL LIFE-
HONG KONG/CHINA
An intimate but involving look at the disapora of displaced persons produced by China's Three Gorges Dam mega-engineering project as seen through the eyes of two people.
In the first part of the film coal miner Han Sanming (played by Sanming Han) returns after 16 years absence to his former home town of Fengjie, only to find its 2000 years of history submerged beneath the waters of the dam. Taking a temporary job in demolition, he searches for news of his ex wife, whom he hasn’t seen for 16 years.
Still Life never wanders far from the dominating horizontal visuals of the mighty Yangtze River and the monolithic concrete and steel dam. The apocalyptic rubble of the yet-to-be flooded part of the town forms another powerful metaphor, a full stop to the flow of linear time represented by the River, which itself has been given pause by the immense project.
It’s a hard life for Han, though undoubtedly far less dangerous than the notoriously hazardous Chinese coal mining industry, and it provides some extraordinary imagery.
Men in supposedly protective suits with sanitising back pack sprayers wander through gutted homes. Friends are made amongst workmates to the jaunty ringtones of their mobile phones as they exchange numbers...a socialising ritual that later prompts one of the film’s most poignant moments when a mobile ‘s unanswered ringing signals a tragic accident. Condemned buildings collapse with tired grace in the distant background as they receive explosive coup de grâces.
The second half of the film segues into another quest for closure, as Nurse Shen Hong (Tao Zhao) journeys to the town looking for her own estranged husband.
Again, the dam is another defining presence in the story, providing a backdrop for the final resolution of Shen Hong’s search.
One baffling scene (and I’d welcome any light that anyone can shed on this!) sees Shen staring at a large monument in the distance. It appears to be a Chinese alphabetical character, rendered in concrete. As she turns away, rocket motors ignite at its base and the whole giant structure lifts off into the skies. I assume this is some kind of reference to the recent successes of the Chinese manned space programme but am not sure as to why it’s relevant to the story? Unless it’s just a bit of triumphalism? Or indeed, because Shen does ignore the startling sight, perhaps it’s meant to be ironic? Enquiring minds need to know!
Actually, the overall philosophical conclusion drawn at the end of Still Life does read a little bit like some kind of inspirational tract to me....but that may just reflect my own bias, or again it could be ironic, and I won’t spoil the ending by going further into detail. (Well, cross cultural puzzles have always attracted me to World Cinema!)
Still Life is a beautifully visualised, thoughtful film with a measured pace that aptly reflects the larger elements that form the canvas that its smaller, but no less important, human dramas are played out against.
Director/Screenwriter- Jia Zhang-ke
2006/108mins
-THE WAR TAPES-
USA
Rather than be 'embedded' in a U.S military unit in Iraq filmmaker Deborah Scranton chose to give cameras to three National Guardsmen to record their own experiences deployed with Charlie Company, 3rd of the 172nd New Hampshire Mountain Infantry. Scranton provided additional remote directorial aid via text messaging and email to the three soldiers, Sgts. Stephen Pink and Zack Bazzi, and Specialist Michael Moriarty, whose stories were chosen from an overall pool of 1000 hours of footage.
The soldiers’ personal and professional accounts are sobering and revelatory and never less than enlightening.
Though it does this remarkably cohesive documentary something of a disservice to cherry pick material out of its sturdily engineered overall context it’s necessary to give some idea of the range of material included in the film.
We see several ambush eye views of the destructive force of roadside Improvised Explosive Devices which, though initiated and responded to with varying degrees of control by both combatant forces, usually result in chaos and confusion, death and destruction, for bystanders. One soldier matter-of-factly tours a vast graveyard of combat lossed vehicles, shattered and gutted by I.E.Ds, casting in an increasingly ironic light President Bush’s triumphantly naive 2003 announcement that “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended...”
The complexity of night operations are mirrored in the silvered eyed stare of soldiers seen through the eerie but tactically invaluable lenses of night vision equipment , rendering one formation of troops strikingly like a formation of stolid Terracotta Warriors. The detached professionalism of the soldiers understandably falters when a night time convoy kills a woman who was then struck repeatedly by each truck in turn.
The irony of soldiers and hired civilians (drivers and security guards) risking and losing their lives to protect re-supply cargos of, for example, cheese for hamburgers, is not lost on the troopers who wonder loudly if the complex and highly profitable logistical tail is wagging the policy dog? In fact, they’re refreshingly unguarded in their speculations about what they see, from their perspective as boots on the ground, as the reasons behind the ongoing war. Their observations are pithy, and to the point...or, rather, multiple points, as the individual opinions cover the entire spectrum of current controversy, from oil driven conspiracy to patriotic war on terror.
Soldiers will always enthusiastically relish the opportunity to grouse about their lot, reserving special venom for the shortcomings of their equipment, training, rations and orders. One complaint amongst many was that these soldiers received little or no cultural instruction to help prepare them for operating in the Iraq theatre, which ommission makes it hard to both know the enemy or understand your friends. Even a simple misunderstanding over a commonly used hand gesture for ‘Stop’ can, in the local environment, be fatally mistaken for ‘Hello!”
The fact that the Iraq conflict is, in reality, fought amongst peoples homes rather than some spiffily titled combat theatre, warzone or neutrally termed area of operations is thoughtfully underlined by frequent segues to the soldiers’ American homes, either when the troops have returned or during their absence. Surface impressions notwithstanding there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of difference between U.S and Iraqi civilians; folks, it seems, are alike all over. Stateside sequences touch upon the complicated effects that the deployment had on civilian family members, the problems of post traumatic stress disorder suffered by the veterans, and the more obvious physical injuries. For example, one of the soldiers has carpal tunnel syndrome in his hands, the result of vibration transmitted through the grips of his vehicle mounted machine gun on patrol. He also has to cope with back pain from wearing body armour in a confined space.
Crammed with ‘real time’ feedback from ongoing conflict The War Tapes makes a provocative companion piece with the 2005 documentary Gunner Palace. For balance I would also add to the recommended viewing list: Control Room (2004), Baghdad ER (2006), and My Country, My Country (2006)
Director- Deborah Scranton
2006/97mins
-WELCOME TO NOLLYWOOD-
USA/NIGERIA
Never heard of the Nigerian film industry? This inspiringly cheeky doco will rectify that and should be seen by all budding filmmakers seeking new ways to practice their art.
Something like 2400 movies per year are produced in Nigeria, making it the third most prolific film industry in the world. Film? Well, that’s a nostalgically generic term to describe the Nigerians’ enthusiastic bypassing of conventional film stock and its complex and expensive infrastructure in favour of digital video distributed directly and cheaply at local marketplaces on DVD or VCD.
The 300 or so Nigerian directors have an already rich tradition of oral storytelling to draw upon, and have embraced multiple genres usually lensing them through an action adventure filter, which has fostered a support industry of movie fight Action Camps where actors can learn the stunt fight business. Although one director claims “We don’t do science fiction” Nollywood nevertheless loves fantasy, especially religious based melodramas with plenty of demons and angels, sorcererors and witches.
Period films set in Nigeria often have a luridly portrayed but understandably anti-slavery element, which alongside with the witchcraft angle concerns some commentators who argue that focusing on these aspects promotes stereotypes.
A visit to the set of a film grounded in the recent Liberian war shows the Nigerian director, who at least partly funded the movie himself, putting his actors through boot camps to learn how to fill out their soldierly roles, including veteran advisors from both sides of the original conflict. The actors go through production hell but ironically are brought low by a botched contract with the caterers...
Nollywood; not entirely different from Hollywood!
Director- Jamie Meltzer
2007/58mins
-U-
FRANCE
A lyrical French animated feature with fluidly drawn artwork and an equally languid, but elegant plot as a Princess Mona is faced with choosing between new love and a beloved friend, who happens to be a unicorn. The charming, anthropomorphic animal cast could have been drawn by Dr Seuss, and the story is a souffle of flirtatious love with a playful musical topping.
Directors- Grégoire Solotareff, Serge Elissalde
Screenwriter- Grégoire Solotareff
2006/71mins
THE TWELVE AGES OF ULTRON - THE FIFTH AGE
In the fifth Age Of UItron
Joss Whedon gave to me
Five Mandarins
Four brawling nerds
Three drenched men
Two mortal foes
And a Rocket in a Groot tree
-------------------------------------
"OKAY SQUADDIES, TIME TO VILLAIN UP !!"
Last time I 'filked' "The Twelve Days Of Christmas" I simply went with the line 'Five Golden Rings" and riffed off the RIngs of Power from "The Lord Of The RIngs". Thinking of rings in a Marvel Universe context led me to Iron Man's arch foe, The Mandarin.
In this set up, Joss Whedon has clearly pipped his Mandarin at the post, while setting up the shot.
The four, non citrus Mandy's front to back, are:
-A 2008 Hasbro 5.5 cm (2 inches) Superhero Squad semi-articulated figure, spun off from the popular animated television series. Only the arms rotate, but really, so long as the Mandarin can deploy his alien tech Makluan RIngs, that's all he needs!
-2006 15.5 cm (6 inches) Marvel Legends Face-Off Series 2 figure, green and yellow variant. This came in a boxed set of hero/villains that featured Iron Man wearing his modular armour. A variant set contains a red and yellow Mandarin 'facing off' War Machine. The articulation in this figure is limited by the heavy rubberised robes but no worries, it looks pretty impressive anyway!
-The 26 cm (10 inches) 1995 Toy Biz Deluxe Mandarin figure that tied in to the mid '90s Iron Man animated television series. These larger toys were actually the size that the toys were sculpted at originally, the patterns then being resized using a pantograph down to the smaller 13 cm (5 inches) figures. (The 5 inch figure featured in the second Age Of Ultron photo, as one of the mortal foes.)
-This beauty is the 30 cm (12 inches) 2014 Hot Toy, which of course replicates The Mandarin from the most excellent 2013 Iron Man 3 movie. The likeness of Sir Ben Kingsley, playing The Mandarin at his devious best, is astonishing. I've been an Iron Man fan since the 1960s and was amazed by the audacity of the portrayal of his old nemesis in the movie. All credit to Sir Ben and to Director Shane Black. "I never saw it coming!"
For a lot of these low angle, tabletop photoshoots I am now, incidentally, using a sturdy but flexible heavy Joby Gorilla Pod tripod. The really nice thing about DSLR's mounted on a solid tripod is repeatability. I just pull the SD card and check out the shots on the computer while the camera stays in place. It's easy to go back and tweak elements on the set. Of course, it would be even easier with one of the new cameras that can WiFi piccys straight to an iPad, on the spot. Oh, wait, duh...it would be just as simple to cable the beast straight to the computer, I guess!
With all the fussing around with the lighting I did with this one I'm rather glad the actual set up wasn't too prissy, I just leaned the figures up against each other so they wouldn't fall over, and were 'looking up' at the camera. Joss Whedon was firmly planted too, so that eliminated one variable.
Hmm, I'm told this piccy stumbled into Flickr's Explore the day it was uploaded, who can understand the wonder and the mystery of it all?
While out at a restaurant I spotted this sign, which seemed rather appropriate to Mr Stark's particular circumstances.
It occurred to me later that I should have set the figure up so that it covered the 'O' so that the sign would read, "NO ALCOHOL BEYOND THIS PINT".
Which just goes to show that I don't think in puns ALL the time, just so you know.
□hair and musk--*Dura* & {-MK-}Collaboration01-MIX C
@Kinky Monthly
maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Delmars/117/193/22
□pants--[BODY FACTORY] Storm Pants (Black)
@MOM
maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Sunset%20Ambiance%20Island...
□collar--.Shi : My Refuge
maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/After%206%20Days/99/37/21
□sneaker--[VALE KOER] QUEENS RUNNERS FATPACK
maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/KOREA/121/128/2001
□pose--*icen*zeroG_M03
maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Everfrost/6/184/1200
--------------------------------------------------
www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvvItrHEfRA
( ³ω³ )
While the Gallant was a very effective design, it's design focus of Surface Combat inevitably led to the need for a dedicated Space Combat suit. The SK-S13D and MP-GAT(MSV) were only stopgaps and each had it's limits, the SK-S13D was limited in it's maneuverability and the Suit lost a lot of flexibility due to being locked into it while the MP-GAT(MSV) had to deal with high costs to convert and to provide a sizable force would have put significant strain on the number of Gallants left for the other variants. That being said, they did provided significant information and essentially acted as prototypes for the MP-L4N "Lancer".
The Lancer is a unique design that makes use of everything learned from the Sled and Space Mobility Gallant Prototype. The Thruster pack from the Space Mobility Gallant was refined and includes a smaller pair of secondary thrusters to complement the 4 primary thrusters. The Legs which cause the Technical Staff headaches when working on the Space Mobility Gallant were replaced with 2 'Maneuvering Vanes'. The thruster Vanes are essentially a collection of adjustable maneuvering thrusters with the entire 'Vane' mounted to a modified Powered Gallant Pelvis Frame and Joint. Individually each maneuvering thruster is weak but when working together and properly oriented they lend the Lancer unprecedented Maneuverability. As a result the Lancer requires large amounts of fuel during operation which is mounted in a large External Tank with 2 small Reserve tanks, one on each Maneuvering Vane.
The Upper Torso, while visually similar to the Gallant's, has been completely redesigned to advantage of operating in Zero-G. The Manipulators still function on the Universal Standard and can handle a wide range of weaponry.
The removal of the Legs does result in the Lancer not being able to function outside of Zero-G(Tests are scheduled for how they function in the Moon's Gravity Well) and as a result they require a special mini-gantry when being stored outside of a Zero-G environment.
The Picture above showed Technicians and Pilots inspecting the first delivery of Lancers from Northrop-Grumman.
Had some fun with this one, inspired by the idea behind the Zeon Dra-C design, but done up more to my tastes.
THE TWELVE AGES OF ULTRON
THE SECOND AGE
In the second Age Of Ultron
Joss Whedon gave to me
Two mortal foes
And a Rocket in a Groot Tree
------------------------------------
"Curse you Mandarin, I'll teach you not to leave citrus fruit out for Santa again!"
Okay, the two new toys in this one are the mid 1990s Toy Biz 13 cm (5 inch) figures that tied in with the Iron Man animated television series of the time.
Red and silver metallic Iron Man on the left, and his arch foe, The Mandarin, on the right.
Shellhead's armour is the Mk 11 Modular Suit, whose components could be removed and mixed and matched with other toys in the range.
The Mandy's forearms and hands were cast in transparent plastic and lit up at the touch of a button on the back.
I shot this one with the trio standing on mounds of plastic waste shards set up on top of the light box.
□hair--.Shi Hair : Quixotic / Unisex
@Uber
maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Uber/143/93/27
bracelet--Messiah x .Shi : Maschil / Hand Bracelet
ring--Messiah x .Shi : Maschil / Ring #1
ring--Messiah x .Shi : Maschil / Ring #2
ring--Messiah x .Shi : Maschil / Ring #3
@K9
maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/kustom9/116/64/22
□meshlip--violetta. -male meshlips 01 Yve
maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Chebi/85/155/3802
□wing--.Shi Hair : Odette / Semi-Rigged . (Wing Accessory)
.shi
maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/After%206%20Days/99/37/25
□pants--tomoto, slim pants white
□feather--{anc} feather chips {whitedye black}
{anc}
maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Rigi/43/101/3799
□pose--*icen*ZerogravityPoseM_box(*icen*zeroG_M03)
*icen* new branch at Avon SIM