/dev/mull

the fall is another movie with fancy costumes and scenery, much like the cage and mirror mask. it seemed even more contrived than the others, being nothing but an excuse to show off the costumes and scenery. the framing story even comes out and says that the pretty parts won't hold together because the narrator really doesn't care about the story.

by contrast, iron sky, orlando, and even goldmember have plots and characters, and the pretty costumes are just part of making the movie look good. (just sticking to my list from the loncon3 costuming panel, which leaves out plenty of good movies.)

still, the fall might be worth seeing if you really like costuming... just fast forward through the framing story.



i re-watched mad max after doing some mind-numbing work today. i'm rather surprised how little there the movie has. even though it was made after jaws and star wars, the plot is glacial, the soundtrack has sledgehammer subtly, and the "good part" is just the last 18 minutes of the film, with the bit that everybody remembers in the last couple of minutes. see also: the suck fairy.

so i'm a bit surprised anybody bothered to make a sequel. OTOH, the setting and protagonist were now in place, and people did seem to like the end, so why not?

still, i can't really recommend it. which, since i just recommended a contrived costuming showpiece, does seem rather damning.

austin powers in goldmember: if there's any point to this movie beyond showing the lovely costumes, i have no idea what it is. whoever did the costuming had way too much fun with caricatures of '70s disco fashions. the other costumes are very good too.

a few scenes are pretty funny, but there's not enough humor to sustain the movie. alas, had they managed to keep up the humor throughout, it would be worth seeing.

costuming fans should see this courtesy of their favorite net.movie purveyor.

dïe überblönde has foolishly allowed me to drive the net.flix queue, so i'm putting foolish things in it.

the secret life of ben stiller walter mitty looked somewhat interesting when it ran in theaters, but the reviews indicated it was a slight film. i think its real problem is pacing: the obligatory daydream sequences run far too long, and after the first couple, aren't interesting enough to watch on their own. they are dream sequences after all, with little effect on the plot.

( oh, and the movie has a real downer of an accidental moral (utter spoiler) )

orlando is the first on the long list of movies mentioned at loncon as having excellent costuming. it does seem to have an abundance of elaborate costumes, but since i was watching it on a small screen, the detail work is visible only in close-ups. those show some amazing work. still, i wish i could have seen more of the costumes.

tilda swanson plays the title character like she was born for it, despite the movie being an allegorical period piece. since i haven't read the virginia woolf novel of the same name, all i can say is that summaries indicate that woolf's plot seems to have been extensively worked over. the source material appears to be more interesting than the movie, and i suspect woolf had a less heavy-handed way of talking about sex and gender.

edit: dïe überblönde, reading over my shoulder: "'heavy-handed'? i would have said it was too incoherent to have much of a message." another enthusiastic endorsement. (maybe i should have written "ham-handed"?)

so, i can't really recommend either one, even for likely groups of fans.

mr. foss was loncon 3's artist guest of honor. he was also one of the clever people alejandro "jodo" jodorowski hired to create concept art for his failed attempt to make a version of frank herbert's dune. thus, i get to make a single post do two things for me.

i went to one panel discussion on mr. foss's art, which featured three artists (john harris, rian hughes, maurizio manzieri), one fanboy (joe siclari), and no actual chris foss art. most of the audience, and a couple of the panelists ended up peering at their various gadgets to see the examples being discussed. it was odd.

foss is known for a bunch of things¹, one of which is brightly colored spaceships that manage to look exotic but plausible at the same time. for example, this ship, which was intended as a pirate ship for dune:



(from his web site)

the blue stuff spilling out of the ship's hull is spice. the fancy paint job is intended as camoflauge, at least if one's galaxy contains equally-trippy asteroids.

also this thing:



which i'll be damned if i know what it's supposed to do in dune, but it looks like it's constrained by plausible engineering for a bizarre purpose. spice harvester, maybe?

the rest of the art for jodo's dune is equally bizarre. ( this large image is h.r. giger's interpretation of the harkonnen fortress )

jodo also rounded up other ground-breaking artists, some of whom had never done SF work before, and a number of whom were gems in the rough, like dan o'bannon, who was best(?) known(?) at the time for his models and SF/X for dark star. (giger, for that matter, was also basically unknown outside of the european art circuit.) and, what the hell, he recruited salavdor dalí and orson welles to star in his movie, too. because.

well, because jodo had escaped editorial control at that point. his previous surreal films, el topo and holy mountain had done well enough -- indeed, well enough that he'd been given a late-60s megabuck budget to make holy mountain, no small sum then -- that he was convinced that he could make art. which was great, but he seemed to be assuming some studio would cough up the huge piles of money it would take to make this movie. er, and he could have a running time as long as he wanted. i have little doubt that if somebody could have sat on jodorowski and caused him to see sense, he would have made another great movie. but that didn't happen.

i think the strangest decision he made was to dismiss doug trumbull as a "technician", who couldn't be a "spiritual warrior" to help jodo make his "vision". that was the first time i've actually had my jaw drop at a statement. jodo wanted to top 2001, which said "technician" did the SF/X for. y'know, the composite sequence of the bone turning into a spaceship, the orbital waltz, and some trippy ending nobody understands... that complete waste of celluloid. *boggles* the technician later went on to make another forgettable bit of tripe called blade runner, which would be forgotten in part because of its utterly pedestrian visual interpretation of the story's world. also some popular crap named close encounters of the third kind. when jodo was right, he was very right, but when he was wrong, he completely fucked up.

that said, dan o'bannon and the other clever artist types were brains behind the images behind alien. and curiously, a fair amount of the visual styling for dune ended up in flash gordon, though the connection is pretty tenuous.

the documentary included a bit with some jodorowski fanboys trying to explain how the concept art influenced other films beyond those two, but the similarities are dubious or trivial. the one piece they said was pioneered for jodo's dune was a robot's first-person view of a scene, with electronic imagery and augmented vision overlays (cross-hairs, information about images in the scene). which does look a whole lot like the concept art, but it's also in westworld, which was already in theaters when jodorowski started his project.

as a documentary, the movie isn't quite worth seeing, even at the nominal cost of getting it electronically. well, perhaps if you're very curious about an arrakis that never was. or you're really into the artists who were involved.

the pacing is off. when i was watching the beginning, i was becoming frustrated at how long it was taking to get to the actual subject of the film. it seemed like an eternity was being spent on jodorowski's previous work... and then i looked down at the timer, and saw that it had been only fifteen minutes. i'd say that's a pacing failure somehow. it does get better, though.

art in the documentary is worth seeing, i guess, and some of the interviews are interesting, but it all becomes much of a muchness. jodorowski was a visionary, but he developed a messiah complex, and departed what was possible. despite his bitterness about how movies are funded, 2001 was funded by the same system and alien later was... but kubrick and ridley scott figured out how to sell surreal images, not be seduced by them.


1: buried lede-ing footnote: chris foss also did the illustrations for the joy of sex.

our trip to england ended with a side trip to sheffield and the peak district national park. i have some pictures of those. i'm going start posting them before i post stuff stuff about the con itself, mostly because i have to turn my fragmentary notes into something coherent.

one of the places i visited in sheffield was the kelham island museum, which is about sheffield's once-mighty steel industry. one of the museum's centerpieces is the don river engine, a 12,000 horsepower (~9 megawatt) steam engine that used to drive a rolling mill:



since rolling mills make steel sheet harder by squeezing it between rollers, they need to be able to reverse direction to run the sheet back and forth repeatedly. despite the engine's obviously huge rotational momentum, it was able to reverse in under two seconds. consider the similar problem of getting a tractor-trailer rig up to highway speed and then getting it to shift into reverse in two seconds. now consider doing that without leaving most of its power train scattered along the highway; that's what this engine used to do. they even have a movie of it doing that.

the museum ran the engine for a few minutes while i was there, but between the crowd and the difficult light (from one end of the room) i didn't try to get any video... so no hard-core steam-on-steel action. but have some steam-age industrial porn anyway.

( steam engine pornography, cut to protect innocent eyes )