Plenty of Nothing

Hans Delbruck, Scientist and Saint

Mai Mai Miracle

Just back from the Ottawa Animation Festival, and a viewing of Mai Mai Miracle, an extremely sweet story of death, drunkenness and revenge among third grade students in rural Japan.

Budget

Film Shoot at Sunnyside Bookshop

Okay, This Has Just Got To Stop

One of the fears I had about JJ Abrams taking over Star Trek was that it would just become a slaughterhouse, like Lost, Season Two.  And guess what?

That's Vulcan on the top, and Romulus below.  Blown to shit.

If this were Star Trek as we've come to understand it I'd expect the next film to be about undoing this.  But more likely we'll get some Hugo-like character saying, "They're all pretty much dead."

The new Star Trek film, though fun and exciting and all Industrial Light and Magic, does not respect Gene Roddenberry's vision, is not optimistic, is not a break from the Bush years as all the papers seem to believe, and is not that different from those crappy Star Wars prequels.  There's mayhem.  Some of the characters survive.  There's no moral.  It has nothing to say about what it means to be human.  Or Vulcan for that matter.

It's Lost, with references to Star Trek: Nemesis and Enterprise, Season Three.

Douglas

(Oh, spoilers.)

[Later: Apparently I am the only person on the planet who dislikes this movie.]

Explore the Solar System?

We've got wide screen TV!

The Awesome Awesomeness of Awesomeness (Now On Film)

They're filming Scott Pilgrim in Toronto right now as we speak, and apart from the sheer awesomeness of it all (screenplay adapted from Bryan Lee O'Malley's manga of unremitting awesome awesomeness; stellar casting including Michael Cera in the lead role, Shaun of the Dead production team, and, fingers crossed, songs by Plumtree), the most awesome aspect of the whole thing is that the city of Toronto is about to appear in a movie in the role of Toronto.

Boss, You Drink Too Much

And them cigarettes are gonna kill you.

Juno As Cartoon Character

Juno is not just a Roman mother-goddess, she's also one of the great great-with-child characters of the movies, with good taste in music too.  "Nu-huh, 1977!"  So it's no surprise she has inspired a well-rounded body of fan art.  The lovely graphic above is by Jeremy Canceko of Cup-O-Robots.  The estimable Illustrated Movie Review gives us this portrait:

And Conner and Rae at Worship City posed for this self-portrait, based on the promotional still:

Though Ellen Page does wear other shirts in the film, it's that orange and white top from the publicity shots that people associate with Juno.  It's like Velma's orange turtleneck, or Tintin's plus fours. Strong cartoon characters tend to stick to one costume, so if Juno were thinking of becoming a Saturday morning cartoon character she's really halfway there already.  I'd watch it.  Douglas

The Warriors (1979)

Douglas:  I was lent this DVD by a 20-year-old who couldn't believe I'd missed it when it first ran.  A gamer born in the Eighties, he probably came to it by way of the 2005 video game.  The film does have some of the qualities of a video game.  A gang from Coney Island travel up to the Bronx to a conclave called by Cyrus, leader of the Riffs.  His plan is to unite the gangs and take over New York borough by borough, but before the gathering is over Cyrus is assassinated, and the Warriors, falsely blamed, have to fight their way home to the seafront.  Yep, it's Xenophon's Anabasis rewrit.  At the time there was a lot of hype surrounding this picture, and the iconic baseball player in war paint came to represent New York's perceived slide toward anarchy.  I actually thought the film was post-Apocalyptic, like Escape From New York.  But in fact the cops are pretty much on top of things, and during the opening sequence there are plenty of shots of the gang members dutifully paying their train fares, though that gets jettisoned once the chase begins.  For subway and graffiti enthusiasts the film is a bonanza.  Much of the action takes place in the actual subway at the time when graffiti was just finding its form.  The Warriors' tagger, Rembrandt, is of the old school, which is to say he has acquired no form at all since first learning his alphabet.  The Baseball Furies are a bit of a letdown, and lose their bats in short order in a fight in Central Park, and the Gramercy Riffs look a little odd carrying hockey sticks, but David Patrick Kelly's character is nicely psychotic, and there's a lesbian rumble.  I'd put it in a young-and-dumb-in-New-York-in-the- Seventies double-feature with Saturday Night Fever.

Heather: Dude. You've lost it. Saturday Night Fever I'd watch again. This was one of those movies I'll only watch once, in a heat wave, with beer, cursing our lack of air conditioning.  There's a lot of running, badly choreographed fight scenes, and young men standing around trying to look pretty. My guess is that every kid in New York who wanted to be an actor and had, or could acquire, the right outfit, got to be in the thing.  I'd forgotten the whole striped rugby shirts, overalls, and feathered hair look.  And I'll be glad to forget it again. Against my better judgement: here's a site  you shouldn't visit.