10.22.06
Posted in Main, Movie Reviews at 6:54 pm by lee1990
Clint Eastwood hits the home front as much as the beaches in this gut-wrenching look at the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima during the darkest days of WW2.
The story bounces back and forth between the present (which is the home front during the enormous fund raising propaganda campaign that centered on the photo of the flag raising on Iwo Jima), and the very harsh reality of the past (the incredible brutality of the battle itself).
For a war history buff, I must first admit to a factoid that I had never known before: Iwo Jima is a Japanese Island. I had always assumed it was way out in the middle of the Ocean.
The movie is not a rah-rah type of movie, unlike the also extremely well done The Great Raid, but it also steers clear of anti-war cliches. Mr. Eastwood sticks to all the harsh history, starting with the unfortunate and also absolute need to control the truth during war. The flag raising is shown at home as the point of victory, when the actual battle to take Iwo Jima lasted for more than a month after Mt. Sirabachi was taken.
The film avoids all forms of political correctness. It bluntly places on display the wanton brutality shown by the Japanese both in battle and towards their prisoners. The mass suicide by grenade of the Japanese is also displayed. The US soldiers are also not shown as some kind of superhuman saints either (the unfortunate fate of the Native American marine Ira Hayes is blatantly shown and dwelt upon in the movie; it is almost a story more about him than anyone else). It is quite simply the raw brutality of war both on the battlefield and on the home front, and also makes obvious the necessity of both. It also shows the scandal thirst of the media is nothing new; the movie displays on many occasions, and finally dispels the persistent myth that the flag raising was deliberately staged.
All in all, Flags of Our Fathers is a worthwhile, if difficult movie to see.
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10.19.06
Posted in Main, Movie Reviews at 8:14 pm by lee1990
Talk about having an attitude. The gargling, homicidal spirit Kayako is back for another rampage in Grudge 2.
Those not familiar with Japanese horror, here’s a heads up. Their horror directors like to jump around the timeline. The story is often times not told in chronological order. A prime example is the movie Ju-Rei (The Uncanny). This horror movie starts at the end of the story, and moves backwards through the chain of victims all the way to the start of the story, which is at the end of the movie.
The Grudge 2 goes one step further. It starts near the end of the story (in America), moves backwards several weeks (to Japan), then backwards several more (still in Japan), jumps ahead to just before the start of the movie (in America again) several times, and moves in these more or less back and forth transitions the whole time. However, the way the movie is edited makes it appear that all of this is happening at the same time, which can cause some confusion to those who are not paying attention or are unfamiliar with the genre.
All in all, however, the movie shows that the Japanese, used to working with more limited budgets, can deliver more chills and creepy crawlies with just light and shadows and subtle imagery than the video game, CG schlock that ruins many American horror movies (the godawful remake of the Fog that came out last year, for instance).
All in all, this movie is good for a few Halloween scares and succeeds in creeping you out in more than one spot.
Worth the while to see.
7 of 10.
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10.13.06
Posted in Main at 10:17 pm by Holder
It is only mid-October and already it snowed a bit here on the North Coast. Nothing stuck. It was gone before it hit the ground. Don’t you just hate it when winter tries to sneak in ahead of time?
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10.11.06
Posted in Main at 3:24 pm by Holder
If the camel has its head under the tent, is the rest of the camel far behind? Muslim cab drivers are now not allowing passengers to enter their cabs with an unopened bottle containing alcohol or with a seeing eye dog. What’s next? How far will the politically correct crowd go in allowing this sort of thing? Stay tuned and visit Dhimmi Watch. That site is now on my Blogroll. It is a real eye opener.
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10.07.06
Posted in Main, Computer Art at 10:35 am by Holder
My entry at Museum of Computer Art [MOCA] got an honorable mention. “Rush Hour” was a combination of PSP 8 and just a bit of Zbrush. I had made a shape in Zbrush and had copied the shape with the framework using printscreen. That was then pasted onto a canvas in PSP 8. I saw a face in it after rotating it and did some shaping to improve it. I saved a duplicate of the original which I used to fill in the shapes that I drew with the mouse for the body, arms and legs. Another duplicate was shaped into the baseball cap using the warp brush in push setting. The bicycle was made from scratch using various tools in PSP 8. Tie, shoes, hands, backpack, etc. were mouse drawn. The background is one of my cityscapes which I “grunged up” by using some of my original masks. Light effect was then added. Throughout this whole process there was a lot of lightening, darkening, shadowing and “tweeking” going on.
Thanks, MOCA, you made my day. There is another contest going now for the month of October.
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10.06.06
Posted in Main at 8:35 pm by Holder
You think you’ve seen it all and then…
And then a man, who obviously knows he is doing wrong, kills Amish children in a school. I don’t want to hear any excuses for what this man did. This being preceded by other young girls being killed in another school by another man just makes you want to move to another planet. Then there are the religious crazies around the world trying to impose their beliefs on everyone else by doing acts which look to us “on the outside looking in” very similar to what the men did to those young girls. Innocents. Attacking the innocents seems to be the method of choice to make a statement or to try to create fear in people so that you can get your way. And it would be wrong not to mention the religious crazies in the United States who would dare even to consider holding a protest anywhere near the funerals for those Amish girls. Is there a epidemic of insanity that infects humanity every so many years?
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