It's been a big week for awesome entertainment - I finally managed to watch the first season of Wilfred and just like The Host, this has found a place in my all time top 10 tv shows. (Ok, so with The Host it was movies but you know what I mean).
For those who came in late, Wilfred is a comedy based around the simple idea that Adam, Sarah's new boyfriend, can understand every word that her somewhat possessive and all too human dog Wilfred says. It appears that only Adam has this skill but rather than being amazed by it, he just takes it in his stride. He realises though that it is unusual enough not to let on about it.
Anyway, it's really not a show about the fact that Adam can understand Wilfred, that's just taken as a given. It's really all about the comings and goings in this three-way relationship.
Sarah has had a rough time with her love-life and Wilfred has been there for all of it. It's a little unclear where Wilfred's protectiveness ends and something a little odder begins but they are inseparable and it's up to Adam to work his way around this.
Wilfred himself, unsurprisingly, is the star of the show. All of the characters are well defined and have a good amount of substance but Wilfred is just perfect.
He draws on all of the qualities of dogs - loyalty, a degree of aggression/menace, a big dollop of charm and a base of stupidity and mashes them up to produce the kind of guy that you might meet at the pub on any given night. Wilfred acts like a dog - he has issues with the postman, sprays to mark his territory, loves to chase a ball (to a point - he's not a fanatic), digs holes in the backyard and he's fine with rooting the odd leg but he also loves watching dvds, eating pizza and nachos, drinking beer, smoking bongs and swearing like a trooper.
Wilfred is unequivocally Australian but I think he also embodies characteristics that are entirely universal. We all know someone like Wilfred. The relationships that exist in this world all ring true as well. Adam is lucky to be with Sarah and he knows it and the luck often extends to the interpretations Sarah manages to attach to some of Adam's actions, which can be hilariously questionable but entirely understandable given the trials Wilfred puts him through in their battle of wills.
It's well worth making the effort to track down this series on dvd - I've seen it in JB Hifi and I'm sure it's around other places. See what happens when Wilfred gets out, when Sarah's ex and his tougher dog come to visit, when Adam calls in a TV vet to help with Wilfred's behaviour and much more.
The performances are all spot on, the writing is superb and it's beautifully made. This is gold.
It all came about from a shortfilm for Tropfest in 2002 as well - which I loved when I first saw it and I'm glad that it got picked up from there. Well done guys.
The Host is an exciting, funny, intelligent, subversive and at times scary Korean monster movie. I sat in awe at some points and happily place it somewhere in my all-time personal top 10. (Which I really keep meaning to get around putting together). I'm pretty keen now to check out other work from its director Joon-ho Bong as well.
It embraces its role as a monster flick, acknowledging the rules of the game and playing by them most of the time but bending or outright flouting them at others. It also crosses genres with such grace that calling it a monster movie seems to diminish it unfairly. (Would you call Jaws a monster movie for example?)(The direct translation from Korean is apparently The Monster as well, which I think works just fine as a title)
I'm quite loathe to reveal too much of the story as there are elements that keep you hanging on in suspense to the very end and I personally hate to go to a film knowing too much about what is going to happen.
In short, a big T-Rex sized razor toothed mutated fish/eel/axolotl looking beasty is spawned in the Han River in Seoul as a result of a U.S military scientist ordering his Korean underling to pour hundreds of bottles of old formaldehyde down the drain.
This part - not the monster obviously, well as far as we know - is based on a true story from 2000 which outraged South Korea, particularly given that the US never gave the guy up for trial.
The action revolves around a slightly slow witted but decent man Gang-du, who runs a food stand on the banks of the river with his daughter Hyun-seo and father Hie-bong. Rounding out the Park family are national archery champion Nam-joo and drunken unemployed grad Nam-il.
Naturally enough, the monster first appears not far from the Park family food stand and Gang-du is soon in the thick of it as the monster rampages through the picturesque riverside area gobbling down locals left right and centre. Well, some get gobbled down and some are carried off to the monsters lair for later. No surprises that this sets up the motivation of the Park family for the rest of the film.
This scene for me really highlighted that we were getting into something special. The opening scenes were stylish and moved well but this is where things really got moving, for a few reasons.
You see the whole monster, in broad daylight, early in the film. There's no lurking in the dark, only revealing a shadow here, a scary extreme closeup of a fanged mouth there, trying to build the horror of a beast that ultimately isn't that flash anyway. There are no disposable individuals getting picked off one by one while an innocent town moseys along in blissful ignorance. Right from the outset, it's on.
Now there are any number of reasons why monster movies have conventionally taken this approach but at the top of the list, you always suspect that it's because the monsters just don't look that impressive. This one though, brought to life by the good folks at Peter Jackson's Weta, is the goods. It looks credible and seems to actually exist in its environment, it seems to have weight.
From here the story moves on, still paying respect to the genre but maintaining its own approach. You get the military taking over the area, the plucky family on the run from the government, the whole "I know something really important but noone believes me" thing, a little trapped in hospital by the man horror, it's all there and it's all gold.
The film maker also has a clear appreciation of these conventions - there's a couple of beautiful moments in the mass memorial service / evacuation hall that sum this up. (And incidentally, how often do you see the whole grieving mourners thing when a monster rampages through a city?). A bio-hazard suited official enters the hall and is met with a hail of demands to know what is going on. He says that rather than tell them, he's sure there is a report on the tv news which will explain everything (a hallmark of lazy story telling in movies) and flicks it on. Nothing, it's all just standard programming. Oh, I guess the news isn't on yet is his response.
The dynamics of the family are what really make this film work - it just feels real and right and this strong emotional core props up the rest of the story. Everyone seems to act credibly as well - there are no "why would you do that" moments at all.
I guess it's hard to judge the acting when something is in another language - although they say that only 7% of communication is verbal anyway but again it all seemed strong and I felt connected with all of the main characters.
I took a quick squiz at some of the posts on IMDB about this film afterwards and it was interesting to see that some people felt that it got "all Michael Moore" and political. Sure, the Americans (and to an extent the Korean government as well) were the bad guys to some extent (concocting a virus/contagion threat to cover up for the formaldehyde thing) but I didn't see anything different in this to that which film makers in this genre have been doing for the last 30 years or more.
Perhaps it's taken more personally when it's not American film makers using the US Government as the bad guy.
Anyway, I'll spare you my fanboy-esque ranting for now and just urge you to get out and see it if you're not averse to this kind of thing. As far as gore goes, there's nothing overly confronting - a fantastic scene involving lots of bones and some surgical ickyness but there's almost no blood and/or guts in this at all when I think about it.
I should just mention the dynamism of this film as well - it has any number of moments that take you from genuine hilarity to biting social comment to worrying about the characters and back again in the space of moments, all happeningly seamlessly.
Here's the trailer - it's the U.K version and I don't think it does it justice and it's interesting that they spin it so heavily for it's scary/horror elements when it is a much more well-rounded thing. Focus groups I guess.
Here's the Korean one by way of comparison - it lacks subtitles but really does seem to capture the spirit and drama of the film much better
I read this story on Gaming News site Gamasutra the other day and I'm still trying to figure out exactly how a game movie based on The Sims might all play out. (Damn it, hoist by my own pedantic petard, thanks for the tip Shane)
According to a new report, Electronic Arts' best-selling franchise The Sims will be getting a live action film treatment from 20th Century Fox, with Eragon and Norbit producer John Davis at the helm.
Variety's website is reporting that the Fox has picked up the feature rights to Will Wright's massive hit franchise, and will be producing the live action film under producer Davis and screenwriter Brian Lynch.
Lynch has previously scripted his own feature length film, Big Helium Dog, which has yet to see release, and was the writer for the Spike:Asylum series of comic books based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer spinoff TV series Angel.
Electronic Arts' Sims studio head Rod Humble is said to be managing the conversion. He told Variety, " The Sims has done an interactive version of an old story, which is what it's like to have infinite power and how do you deal with it. Given that that's an old story, you can imagine how easily that would translate to traditional story telling."
Nothing further of the film has yet been announced, including plot details or any proposed cast.
Given that there is no story to The Sims - beyond that of living, consuming, breeding and dying - how exactly is this going to work. It doesn't worry me that the scriptwriter has worked on comic books primarily, they offer some of the most sophisticated forms of story telling around at the moment although these at least had some kind of character history and language to go on. The writer also wrote Scary Movie 3 (I'm not sure what that means but at least they are taking the project seriously)
I have thought that it might make an interesting story to look at life from the perspective of a character in a game - particularly if they aren't the player character but someone incidental - and their relationship with the game controller so that might be an angle they will take here.
I can see this possibly working as some kind of quirky comedy (or perhaps, given the irresistable urge this game seems to spark at one point or another to "torture" your characters by putting them in rooms without toilets or doors and getting a little Gitmo (Guantanamo) on their arses it could be a horror film)
Or apparently you could just drop a whole bunch of satellites on the characters all at once. (You really can find everything on YouTube)
It's World Environment Day today (I feel a little bad now that I overslept and decided it was too cold without gloves to ride to work) so I thought it might be good to take a quick squiz at a couple of rather cool options for transport.
I'll spare you my rants and sprays about the obstinancy of the climate change deniers - or realists/pragmatists as our glorious Prime Miniature would term it - and their insistence that a 10000:1 level of acceptance of this issue requires lengthy debate (a.k.a stalling). If you've never read Andrew Bolt's thoughts on this and feel like getting riled up, check him out here.
Ok, so option one is a very cool tool that has been added to a handful of the maps in Google Maps, a little something called Street View.
(Click for full sized view)
The Google team has taken 360 degree photos at what seems to be about 10m intervals on every street in large chunks of major U.S cities including San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami, and Denver. The detail isn't crystal clear but good enough and it has raised some issues around privacy but all in all, it's a pretty amazing thing. I just spent a good 20 mins wandering around New York City, which looks much more samey in terms of architecture than I was expecting.
This video explains the whole thing fairly well - the orange superhero suit is a little disturbing though.
Your second option, if you find you actually need to go places in a physical sense, is to offset your person carbon emissions through an organsation like Greenfleet.
For $40 they will plant 17 native trees, which should be enough to absorb the 4.3 tonnes of CO2 emitted by a standard family car in a year.
Now I realise that it's easy to feel that this is such a trivial drop in the ocean that it's barely worth doing but it's as much about taking a degree of personal responsibility and picking a side. It's about having a positive attitude that by using our collective numbers we can form a groundswell that a government in the thrall of its megacorporate mates can't ignore. (Try as they might)
I submitted my final assignment for the semester (or "session" as they somewhat strangely call them) at 11.58pm on Friday night (which registered on their system as 0.03am Saturday, damn it). It was a website with a list of annotated references to articles and papers about using games in education. Check it out here if you like. (It's basic but there are a few interesting papers)
It's been a fairly intense couple of weeks - all my own fault, can't start working without a looming deadline, you know the drill - and so the sense of not having a stack of work to do on Saturday was entirely welcome.
I've crammed so much reading and so many ideas, all of a relatively serious nature, into my brain in the last few weeks that I decided to try an off-line (no computer) day on Saturday. I had a nice bike ride to brekky at a vego cafe (beautiful black rice porridge), made a massive pot of soup, cleaned up a little around the house and played a little guitar (my poor neglected guitar).
It was only when I got into the guitar that I succumbed and powered the Black Beast up, so that I could record my playing. (Yes, I truly am that awesome that my every note - including an extended time tuning up - should be saved for posterity. Well it sounded cool at the time and in that particular state of mind. Honest. I did also have the thought that even though much of it could well suck, it might be handy for sampling and remixing.) Recording through the microphone of a $10 headset wasn't as bad as I'd thought/hoped. Moved the computer off the desk as well after realising that it really is quite noisy and am now loving the extra space.
We had a bunch of people over for dinner and I rounded up the night watching the first 4 episodes of Wilfred (more on this later but it's one of the best comedies I have EVERRR seen).
More chilling on Sunday - reading the papers, getting ever closer to 100% completion on GTA: Vice City Stories (2 unique stunts and 1 rampage to go) and a little more pottering on the 'puter and then had a little much delayed quality time with the Pussycat, who'd been off surveying birds for work.
Wrapped it all up picking tunes for the radio show today, one of which will unfortunately not be Nina Gordon's snaggarific take on Straight Outta Compton (language issues) but tune in to Lost Highway (take 2) this Thursday and you might hear it. (Hip new Gippsland band The Negotiators have made the playlist however with the track Weeds)
It's so nice to have time to get stuck into all my left by the roadside projects.
