Month: October 2004

Dir.Mamoru Oshii
2004
As far as I know, this isn’t based on a manga by Masamune Shirow, but a film-only sequel to one of the best post-Akira sci-fi anime on the last decade.
With “The Major,” the female cyborg hero of the first film, living inside the ‘net/Matrix/computerverse, the sequel focuses on her partner, Bateau, a cyborg with a human brain, and his rookie partner, Togusa, a human with a synthetic brain.
The plot is police-procedural–investigate the homi- and suicidal impulses of pleasurebots (called gynorgs here), who have taken out their wealthy industrial johns. What is causing this breaking of one of the three robotic laws?
As GITS2 (great acronym!) progresses, it becomes apparent that the suicides, as well as Bateau’s outre responses to them (taking on an entire yakuza den with clever holography and a bloody great fun) are chess moves to draw protag and antag together. The solution to the mystery is a nice inverse on the idea that prostitution–in particular child prostitution–destroys the soul.
In between GITS2 delivers some of the most beautiful set pieces and animation so far in animation. Blending 2D and 3D animation, a painter’s eye for light, an otaku’s attention to techie detail, the film demands repeat viewing. Certain sequences deserve a mention: Bateau’s paranoid attack in a convenience store brings us fully into the subjective view of its cyborg brain; Kosuga’s brain-viral attack that leads into a Moebius loop of a nightmare narrative sends the film off into a Borgesian dimension.
It’s a very restrained film, and chilly in its diagnosis. Yes, the “soul” might be what separates the humans from the borgs (even when that line is blurry), but when soul becomes rare it turns into, in a capitalist system, a commodity

Apart from being the master of stick figure animation, Don Hertzfeldt has been posting poems on his blog made of nothing but spam text. Enjoy.

enjoy the status of platinum today
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why arent you watershed goblet
if pizza be the food of love
i can hardly feel the device under my pants

and

what would your family do if you died?
Allow us to show you our quality operation
see the fish come alive!
mature lesbians rubbing their armpits
Find that special someone!
Tooth whitening of the stars
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if you don’t wish to receive these offers, go here

Really, you should check out the rest of the blog. Can’t wait to see the new film, four years in the making!

Dir. Edgar Wright
2004
After many a year of bad, bad, bad zombie films (running zombies=wrong! Resident Evil=where’s the gore?), “Shaun of the Dead” gets it so right, and understands its genre so well, that I immediately want to put it up in my list of Top 10 zombie films (including the first two Romero films and Jackson’s “Dead Alive”).
The key is that the filmmakers aren’t making fun of the genre–they’re placing characters from another genre (slacker comedy) into a zombie film. Big difference. I don’t usually like comedy in my horror, but here it works, because the makers are sniggering “Aren’t horror films stupid?”
Shaun (Simon Pegg) and his useless friend Ed (Nick Frost) spend most of their days lounging about the house they rent, playing XBox, going down the pub, assaulting each other with farts. Shaun has a dead end job in an appliance store, at least, and has a girlfriend, Liz (Kate Ashfield), but his idea of a good time is…taking her down the pub. With Ed.
No time is wasted setting up the zombies–taking his idea straight from Romero, the zombies are activated by a satellite re-entering the atmosphere–and much of the pleasure of the opening third is seeing how long it takes this workaday drone to cotton on to the fact that the dead now walk the earth. (“Sorry mate, I don’t have any change”) he says to one young flesheater as he walks home from the shops. Anyway, Shaun is too wrapped up in his heartache from being dumped to notice.
The rules have been studied well. There’s a rescue attempt (girlfriend, her friends, his parents), a journey across familiar-now-hostile territory, then refuge in a safe haven (the pub) that slowly turns into a trap. Members of the team get bitten, and slowly turn into zombies. There’s a finale of humans vs. overwhelming numbers of zombies.
The television acts as a reality check and a framing device for the horror elements, like in the original Night. There’s a nice scene where they channel surf and we get to see all the cable channel logos, all with the same “standing by” message. In the end, television culture turns out to be as resilient as the humans.
There’s no holding back on the gore in the latter half of the film, and we get a nice homage to Day of the Dead’s stomach-buffet scene. Thank goodness for that–I had nearly given up all hope.
Apparently, Romero loved the film enough that its said the lead and his writing/directing partner will appear in the upcoming fourth installment of the director’s series, called Land of the Dead.
For sheer pleasure and laughs, you gotta go see this.
(If you have a multi-region DVD player, you can already buy this from Amazon UK. I doubt if the American release will retain its many extras.)