Gareth Edward's "Monsters" is a odd entry in the "Giant Monster" movie genre, more road movie than thriller, and how you react to it will probably depend on how much you can put up with nothing happening for long stretches - it basically plays like "The Mist" without religious loonies or a lot of monsters or a lot of action. The setup is fairly simple. Six years ago, a NASA probe was supposed to bring back samples of newly-discovered extraterrestrial life but the probe broke up over Mexico. The samples survived and grew into giant walking squids that have devastated a large swath of northern Mexico to the US border. A free-lance journalist working in Mexico (Scoot McNairy) is ordered by his editor to bring back the publisher's daughter (Whitney Able) who's been stranded there. Making their way north towards the now-walled border, they survive several run-ins with the squids until they make it back into America, only to discover the Great Wall of America hasn't worked and the aliens are now pushing into our country as well.
Made for the truly astonishing amount of $15,000 dollars, "Monsters" is both cursed and blessed by its budget. Writer/Directed/Special Effects artist Edwards basically roamed around Central America with his small crew, filming improvised bits and pieces with the locals while creating the monsters on a laptop computer. As a special effects artist, Edwards has created a terrific demo film for himself - it's easily equal to any recent monster film in terms of its special effects. As a thriller though, it's not much. Inbetween times when the monsters show up, the film is basically two people wandering through the jungle making small talk. McNairy is a divorced dad who misses his kids and Able is a blonde babe who's going home to get married to a guy she's clearly ambivalent about. They chat with the locals, who have learned to put up with the monsters coming out of the jungle occasionally, and discover they sorta kinda maybe like each other before they get to America and have to quickly figure out if this means anything. I appreciated Edwards low-key approach but the two characters aren't very interesting between monster attacks and nice scenery with good music will only get you so far. It will be interesting to see what his next movie will be like, but I can't really recommend paying to see "Monsters" in a theater.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Monday, October 25, 2010
Happy Halloween!
Kate Laird over on Facebook asked for some Horror movies to watch for Halloween, which made me start thinking about some of my favorites, so I thought I'd post a couple.
First off, "Horror" movies have mutated a lot over the decades. Horror movies used to be exclusively Monster Movies - the Frankensteins, Draculas, Wolfmen, Mummies, and the like. Later, they also became Giant Monster movies with Godzilla, Them, and such. With "Psycho," Horror movies became psychopathic killer movies as well, and of course, the "Saw" movies brought the Grindhouse ethos out of the defunct drive-in circuit and into the multiplex.
So, to keep this simple, I'm going to stay with horror movies that are scary but not catalogs of brutality and butchery. I'll throw one of those in and the end and explain why.
To me, one of the best horror movies ever made is one that changed the game even though people have never really been aware of it until recently. Dario Argento was an Italian filmmaker who was having a nice career making eurokiller mysteries like "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage" and "Deep Red" when he decided to plunge a little more into the supernatural, and built a story inspired by his girlfriend's tale of a witches coven at the school she once went to. Being an Italian horror movie in 1976 meant you weren't seen by very many people, but the people that saw "Susperia" didn't forget it. Instead of being a gloomy, black and white horror film with ominous music, "Susperia" was a widescreen, color and design drenched film with loud, jangling music by "The Goblins." Argento actually found and used an old three-strip Technicolor camera and filmstock and manipulated the color values to create vivid washes of blues, reds, and purples. It also stared Jessica Harper, a waif-like actress who had caught people's attention in "Phantom of the Paradise". Starting early with one of the then-most violent deaths ever shown on film (which was usually heavily censored), the film was little shown in America, but like the debut of the Velvet Underground's impact on music, young filmmakers who saw "Susperia" were instantly liberated and set out to make comparable films. Films directly influenced by "Susperia" include John Carpenter's "Halloween" and Don Coscarelli's "Phantasm".
One of the best "traditional" horror movies is the original "The Haunting". It scared the crap out of me as a kid and is still pretty potent today. It tells the story of four ghosthunters who come to Hill House, a huge and gloomy mansion deserted during the night where several people have taken their own lives. "The Haunting" never answers the question whether there are "real" ghosts or not, but the house is such an awful, airless, and joyless setting that it's easy to believe this is where dead spirits would live. If you look for this film, be careful to get the original and not the godawful remake.
For depressingly real-life style horror movies, probably one of the best, if you can call it that, is another rarely-seen and widely-banned movie, Pier Palo Pasolini's notorious 1976 film "Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom." This adaptation of the Marquis DeSade's final work by the Marxist/Homosexual Pasolini, moves it to the final days of World War II and sets out to show all power corrupts absolutely in the most vile and horrifying ways. The story is simple enough. A group of wealthy and powerful men representing the government, business, and the church in the Italian republic of Salo, kidnap a group of young girls and boys, strip them naked, then set out to corrupt them physically and emotional. Those that learn to enjoy this, they are told, will survive; those that don't, will be tortured and killed at the end. Part of the power of the film is the story of Pasolini himself. Starting as a relatively optimistic filmmaker, "Salo" is the ultimate expression of nihilism - there is no moralty, only power; who has it, can do whatever they want. Shortly before the film was released, Pasolini, who frequented male prostitutes for rough sex, was supposedly killed by one who drove a wooden board with a nail through his skull, but it was also suspected that Pasolini had actually been assassinated and his death designed to look like a sexual murder. Though actually fairly tame by today's standards, "Salo" so shocked film boards and audiences that it was largely banned around the world and rarely seen except at special film festival screenings and on video bootlegs. When the Criterion Collection finally released it as their seventeenth release on dvd (it also had an earlier laserdisc pressing) it was quickly snapped up, becoming one of the most expensive dvd's to buy when it went out of print, commanding prices in the hundreds of dollars. (It has since come back into print.) In short, if you ever want a depressing movie to watch, "Salo" is it.
First off, "Horror" movies have mutated a lot over the decades. Horror movies used to be exclusively Monster Movies - the Frankensteins, Draculas, Wolfmen, Mummies, and the like. Later, they also became Giant Monster movies with Godzilla, Them, and such. With "Psycho," Horror movies became psychopathic killer movies as well, and of course, the "Saw" movies brought the Grindhouse ethos out of the defunct drive-in circuit and into the multiplex.
So, to keep this simple, I'm going to stay with horror movies that are scary but not catalogs of brutality and butchery. I'll throw one of those in and the end and explain why.
To me, one of the best horror movies ever made is one that changed the game even though people have never really been aware of it until recently. Dario Argento was an Italian filmmaker who was having a nice career making eurokiller mysteries like "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage" and "Deep Red" when he decided to plunge a little more into the supernatural, and built a story inspired by his girlfriend's tale of a witches coven at the school she once went to. Being an Italian horror movie in 1976 meant you weren't seen by very many people, but the people that saw "Susperia" didn't forget it. Instead of being a gloomy, black and white horror film with ominous music, "Susperia" was a widescreen, color and design drenched film with loud, jangling music by "The Goblins." Argento actually found and used an old three-strip Technicolor camera and filmstock and manipulated the color values to create vivid washes of blues, reds, and purples. It also stared Jessica Harper, a waif-like actress who had caught people's attention in "Phantom of the Paradise". Starting early with one of the then-most violent deaths ever shown on film (which was usually heavily censored), the film was little shown in America, but like the debut of the Velvet Underground's impact on music, young filmmakers who saw "Susperia" were instantly liberated and set out to make comparable films. Films directly influenced by "Susperia" include John Carpenter's "Halloween" and Don Coscarelli's "Phantasm".
One of the best "traditional" horror movies is the original "The Haunting". It scared the crap out of me as a kid and is still pretty potent today. It tells the story of four ghosthunters who come to Hill House, a huge and gloomy mansion deserted during the night where several people have taken their own lives. "The Haunting" never answers the question whether there are "real" ghosts or not, but the house is such an awful, airless, and joyless setting that it's easy to believe this is where dead spirits would live. If you look for this film, be careful to get the original and not the godawful remake.
For depressingly real-life style horror movies, probably one of the best, if you can call it that, is another rarely-seen and widely-banned movie, Pier Palo Pasolini's notorious 1976 film "Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom." This adaptation of the Marquis DeSade's final work by the Marxist/Homosexual Pasolini, moves it to the final days of World War II and sets out to show all power corrupts absolutely in the most vile and horrifying ways. The story is simple enough. A group of wealthy and powerful men representing the government, business, and the church in the Italian republic of Salo, kidnap a group of young girls and boys, strip them naked, then set out to corrupt them physically and emotional. Those that learn to enjoy this, they are told, will survive; those that don't, will be tortured and killed at the end. Part of the power of the film is the story of Pasolini himself. Starting as a relatively optimistic filmmaker, "Salo" is the ultimate expression of nihilism - there is no moralty, only power; who has it, can do whatever they want. Shortly before the film was released, Pasolini, who frequented male prostitutes for rough sex, was supposedly killed by one who drove a wooden board with a nail through his skull, but it was also suspected that Pasolini had actually been assassinated and his death designed to look like a sexual murder. Though actually fairly tame by today's standards, "Salo" so shocked film boards and audiences that it was largely banned around the world and rarely seen except at special film festival screenings and on video bootlegs. When the Criterion Collection finally released it as their seventeenth release on dvd (it also had an earlier laserdisc pressing) it was quickly snapped up, becoming one of the most expensive dvd's to buy when it went out of print, commanding prices in the hundreds of dollars. (It has since come back into print.) In short, if you ever want a depressing movie to watch, "Salo" is it.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Where is "The Sweatbox," Disney?
Watching the wonderful "How to Train Your Dragon" again on dvd reminded me that animation careers are in some ways much more turbulent and bloodier than regular filmmaking. It's rare that directors are fired months into production of a regular film but this happens regularly with animation. What does this have to do with "Dragon?" It's simple - "Dragon" would not have become the movie it was if it wasn't for Disney/Pixar.
The writer/directors of "Dragon," Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, were at Dreamworks because Sanders clashed with then-newly installed Disney/Pixar animation head, John Lassiter. Sanders had written and directed "Lilo and Stitch" with DeBlois at Disney, a film Disney was initially unsure about. Once the film became a success, Sanders was going to make "An American Dog," but Sanders was fired from the production when he rejected Lassiter's "suggestions" for reworking the film. The film was eventually retooled as "Bolt" and Sanders went with his friend DeBlois to Dreamworks.
The reason I've gone into this is that things like this happen mostly behind the scenes and are never documented on camera, except that one time, they were...
In the late Nineties, hot off his success as the director of "The Lion King," writer/director Roger Allers was set to make an Aztec-based epic called "Kingdom of the Sun." As part of the deal to have singer/songwriter Sting do the music, Sting's wife, Trudie Styler. was allowed to film the production for a documentary. Like "Lost in La Mancha," what was supposed to be a warm and fuzzy feel-good film about the creation of a new Disney masterpiece, instead turned into a documentary about the nightmare of a creator losing control of his production because his company had lost faith in him. Brutally captured on film, "The Sweatbox," named after the ritual public criticism that all Disney films are subjected to while in production, showed how Allers attempted to save his movie, was fired, then showed how Disney scrambled to save their investment by retooling the film into something that could be released. "The Emperor's New Clothes" did come out and was somewhat successful; but "The Sweatbox" was shown at the Toronto Film Festival, then released for one week to one theater at the Beverly Center Theaters as Disney was contractually obligated to, and that was it. Disney owns the film, which has many fascinating glimpses into the film that never was, but has never released the documentary and presumably has no plans to.
Like "Frankenweenie," which Disney also buried until director Tim Burton became too successful to ignore and disinterring his early film became one of the conditions of his return to Disney, "The Sweatbox" is a glimpse of a side of Disney that the studio tries to keep hidden from the public; the side that tries to bury things it considers "mistakes." If any of you ever want to wipe the benign smile off John Lassiter, just ask him when is Disney going to release "The Sweatbox" and see how quickly the flowers wilt on his Hawaiian shirts...
The writer/directors of "Dragon," Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, were at Dreamworks because Sanders clashed with then-newly installed Disney/Pixar animation head, John Lassiter. Sanders had written and directed "Lilo and Stitch" with DeBlois at Disney, a film Disney was initially unsure about. Once the film became a success, Sanders was going to make "An American Dog," but Sanders was fired from the production when he rejected Lassiter's "suggestions" for reworking the film. The film was eventually retooled as "Bolt" and Sanders went with his friend DeBlois to Dreamworks.
The reason I've gone into this is that things like this happen mostly behind the scenes and are never documented on camera, except that one time, they were...
In the late Nineties, hot off his success as the director of "The Lion King," writer/director Roger Allers was set to make an Aztec-based epic called "Kingdom of the Sun." As part of the deal to have singer/songwriter Sting do the music, Sting's wife, Trudie Styler. was allowed to film the production for a documentary. Like "Lost in La Mancha," what was supposed to be a warm and fuzzy feel-good film about the creation of a new Disney masterpiece, instead turned into a documentary about the nightmare of a creator losing control of his production because his company had lost faith in him. Brutally captured on film, "The Sweatbox," named after the ritual public criticism that all Disney films are subjected to while in production, showed how Allers attempted to save his movie, was fired, then showed how Disney scrambled to save their investment by retooling the film into something that could be released. "The Emperor's New Clothes" did come out and was somewhat successful; but "The Sweatbox" was shown at the Toronto Film Festival, then released for one week to one theater at the Beverly Center Theaters as Disney was contractually obligated to, and that was it. Disney owns the film, which has many fascinating glimpses into the film that never was, but has never released the documentary and presumably has no plans to.
Like "Frankenweenie," which Disney also buried until director Tim Burton became too successful to ignore and disinterring his early film became one of the conditions of his return to Disney, "The Sweatbox" is a glimpse of a side of Disney that the studio tries to keep hidden from the public; the side that tries to bury things it considers "mistakes." If any of you ever want to wipe the benign smile off John Lassiter, just ask him when is Disney going to release "The Sweatbox" and see how quickly the flowers wilt on his Hawaiian shirts...
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Social Spinning
Spent an interesting hour tonight listening to Bradley Will and Russell Yermal of "Social Spin" talking about the emerging business of establishing a presence for yourself on social networks. A lot of it is standard business etiquette, but the larger interest for me is how the continues to dissolve the old standards. It used to be that it took a huge amount of money and effort to reach people and convince them of your expertise. Now, we just type a few words into a search engine and can reach hundreds of experts, both alive and dead, and tap their knowledge. Even this power used to be limited to desktop computers, but with laptops, tablet computers, and smartphone, there's literally no place where you can't connect to the Internet and tap into the world's knowledge. Yermal and Will are two explorer/adventurers in a vast landscape the limits of which we still can't imagine.
This is the Droid you're looking for...
While I don’t have R2-D2 sitting next to me, I do have his distant cousin as his my companion. For nearly a year, I’ve used Motorola’s “Droid” smartphone and while many of my friends do have smartphones, many don’t, so I wanted to talk about what they can do for you and why you should have one.
Basically, the term “smartphone” is a misnomer - they’re actually pocket-sized computers. Back in the Nineties, I had a Palm PDA that could do roughly some of the same things, but they were isolated, cut off from the Net. With a smartphone, you have an always-connected computer that simplifies many of the routine tasks of life.
For instance, I have little applications, or “apps” on my phone that keep track of what I’ve spent for what, what I eat, how much I exercise and what effect it’s had, and car expenses. I use it to check my bank account and pay bills, use it to track credit card balances, utilities, and dates due automatically. Dropbox lets me store all my writing in a secure server so I’ll never lose it in case of a crash. I can look up where movies are and what time. Scan2PDF Mobile lets me take a photograph of a document and turn it into a PDF file so I can mail it. The Weather Channel and Weatherbug apps let me know if the weather is about to turn crappy so I can go take care of the horses before it rains. TuneIn Radio lets me listen to any radio station anywhere in the world (It’s a trip getting Radio Antartica) Documents To Go let me work on Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files on my phone. Catch lets me take photos or notes of things I want to remember. This doesn’t even count being able to access the Internet and everything that’s available there with browsers that work just as well as the big ones.
In short, my life is on my phone now. And what if it’s stolen or lost? Well, my girlfriend’s Droid was lost and stolen a few months ago, but I have an app called “Mobile Defense” on it that’s basically LoJack for phones. She left the phone in the bathroom at her office building, went back to get it, and discovered the phone was gone. Without Mobile Defense, that would have been that, but I went to the Mobile Defense site, called up her phone, and without the thief knowing it, was able to tell it to start signaling where it was. My girlfriend went over to the house, where a much-surprised mother went back and got the phone back from her daughter, who claimed she had just taken it to keep it safe and was going to return it the next day.
So, if your cellphone contract is up and you’re wondering whether you should get a smart phone, my advice is definitely yes. No matter how simple or complex your life is, you’ll find very quickly that having a phone like this will help you keep track of your life and organize it in ways you didn’t think possible. Good luck and have fun.
Basically, the term “smartphone” is a misnomer - they’re actually pocket-sized computers. Back in the Nineties, I had a Palm PDA that could do roughly some of the same things, but they were isolated, cut off from the Net. With a smartphone, you have an always-connected computer that simplifies many of the routine tasks of life.
For instance, I have little applications, or “apps” on my phone that keep track of what I’ve spent for what, what I eat, how much I exercise and what effect it’s had, and car expenses. I use it to check my bank account and pay bills, use it to track credit card balances, utilities, and dates due automatically. Dropbox lets me store all my writing in a secure server so I’ll never lose it in case of a crash. I can look up where movies are and what time. Scan2PDF Mobile lets me take a photograph of a document and turn it into a PDF file so I can mail it. The Weather Channel and Weatherbug apps let me know if the weather is about to turn crappy so I can go take care of the horses before it rains. TuneIn Radio lets me listen to any radio station anywhere in the world (It’s a trip getting Radio Antartica) Documents To Go let me work on Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files on my phone. Catch lets me take photos or notes of things I want to remember. This doesn’t even count being able to access the Internet and everything that’s available there with browsers that work just as well as the big ones.
In short, my life is on my phone now. And what if it’s stolen or lost? Well, my girlfriend’s Droid was lost and stolen a few months ago, but I have an app called “Mobile Defense” on it that’s basically LoJack for phones. She left the phone in the bathroom at her office building, went back to get it, and discovered the phone was gone. Without Mobile Defense, that would have been that, but I went to the Mobile Defense site, called up her phone, and without the thief knowing it, was able to tell it to start signaling where it was. My girlfriend went over to the house, where a much-surprised mother went back and got the phone back from her daughter, who claimed she had just taken it to keep it safe and was going to return it the next day.
So, if your cellphone contract is up and you’re wondering whether you should get a smart phone, my advice is definitely yes. No matter how simple or complex your life is, you’ll find very quickly that having a phone like this will help you keep track of your life and organize it in ways you didn’t think possible. Good luck and have fun.
Monday, October 18, 2010
The Journey of a Thousand Miles begins with a single...
I'm Michael Mayo and I want to welcome you to my blog, "Mayonnaise." Why this title? Because whenever anyone wanted to be "clever" about my name, they called me "Mayonnaise." I hated it, but when I was casting around for a title to this blog, I realized that "Mayonnaise" would be something easily remembered, so I finally accepted my destiny and decided "Mayonnaise" was it.
As for what "Mayonnaise" will be, well, it's probably best just to describe it as a work in progress. I'm primarily an author these days working on publishing and publicizing my book, "Alex Walker and the Circus of Secrets," but I have other projects and interests I'm working on as well, such as raising a baby horse who's a surprising, wondrous terror; not to mention learning how to operate in the Blogosphere, Facebook, and all the myriad aspects of marketing and social networking that didn't exist my first go-round as a free-lance writer. It's a very different world than it used to be, and I hope you'll join me on my quest to discover it.
As for what "Mayonnaise" will be, well, it's probably best just to describe it as a work in progress. I'm primarily an author these days working on publishing and publicizing my book, "Alex Walker and the Circus of Secrets," but I have other projects and interests I'm working on as well, such as raising a baby horse who's a surprising, wondrous terror; not to mention learning how to operate in the Blogosphere, Facebook, and all the myriad aspects of marketing and social networking that didn't exist my first go-round as a free-lance writer. It's a very different world than it used to be, and I hope you'll join me on my quest to discover it.
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