With Anthony Hopkins as the 8th dwarf: Freaky.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a massive fan of the fantasy movie-genre, and as such I am more than willing to cut even the worst of the genre some slack for simply being what they are. Also, as a good gay man, I am not at all opposed to the current spate of action-ish movies that show reasonably buff men in reasonably little outfits, but the line needs be drawn somewhere.
Quite literally drawn, in the case of Beowulf, the latest Gaiman-penned screenplay to hit the silver screen in Holland. This fully CGI’d movie butchering and then raping one of the oldest surviving English stories has truly taken the cake with regards to just over the top application of available techniques and moral values.

There is an idea in animation and animatronics that is called the “uncanny valley”, coming from the idea that the more like a person something looks, the more we feel affiliated with them. In other words, the emotional response to something that looks like a human is more positive than something that does not look human. Up to a point. It turns out that when something comes close to looking human but quite clearly isn’t, we feel negative or uncomfortable towards them, but then as soon as they are less and less distinguishable from humans, we are fine with them as well. In short, the more something is clearly trying to look human, but isn’t, we find it uncanny, and if it is simply looking human, we find it acceptable. Apparently this is the reason people have averse reactions to clowns and zombies, because they kind of look human, but then again not.

Anyway, the problem with CGI-humans is that they never quite look human, for all the progress we have made in the field of hair and water as has been evidenced by the whole Shrek-line of movies, it is still all but impossible to reliably mimic the myriad of small muscle movements and suchlike that make a human really human. Thus CGI-Humans always look slightly, well, dead. And a full movie of slightly, well, dead humans just doesn’t really do It for me. After all, I loved Shaun of the Dead, but it did give me nightmares.
Beowulf, however, will not. Even though for most of its running time it wallowed in the shallow end of the uncanny valley, it had enough moments of reasonably pretty imagery to keep me from totally becoming freaked out. But just barely. That said; a good deal of the reasons I did not allow my willies to shiver me out of the theater is because I could barely keep my eyes of the screen. Not because it was so good, it was not, but because I kept wondering what horrible thing they were going to do to the story next.

The original story is very easy to surmise; Grendel kills people in hall, Beowulf kills Grendel, Grendel’s mother kills people in hall, Beowulf kills Grendel’s mother, Dragon attacks somewhere else, Beowulf kills dragon, but dies himself as well. Thus. 1700 lines of ye olde English masculine bovine excrement, but that’s just about the extent of it.
It is also, just about, the net result of this movie, only not quite.

Grendel, as the quintessential aggrieved neighbour, is a slightly to very grotesque thing, rotten skin all over, massive stature, and missing at least one ear and a cheek, but with an enourmous, and enourmously sensitive, eardrum. He goes berserk every time the king holds feasts in his hall and rather than banging a broomstick or posting a snide note on the communal message board, he just starts banging heads and chewing the communal messenger. Now if I were king, I’d move. But I’m not, and the king that is doesn’t. It’s rather sad, really, as Grendel really does have quite a good point, he is just a little overeager.
Anyways, enter B(eowulf), who as a rule has a tendency to slay or fight just about anything. He goes into the hall, falls madly in love with the zombie queen (CGI again) and decides he wants to have a piece of her graphically enhanced (meh) flesh, and the treasury of the kingdom. He sets his men to feasting while he strips, and when Grendel arrives, they fight, and B tears of the arm of the complaining interruption.

Yes. Strips. B, being brawny and MASSIVELY well bodied, apparently prefers to fight naked. Sure, he comes with all these reasons about how it’s only fair, and that if the enemy is unarmed and unprotected so should he be, but that doesn’t really explain why he starts undressing at the drop of a hat before having seen the enemy, or if there even is an enemy. Crickee, even in front of a fully clothed and well-axe-hung Frysian he starts undressing. Apparently the man like being nekkid. No skin of my back, as said, he has a good body, but the enourmous amount of candles, arms, knees, tables, balustrades, donkeys, lobsters, sea-monsters, dragon-scales, water, pointy helmets and otherwise items of a non-disclosing nature do get a little bit absurd very swiftly. Ah well, we do get CGI bum, and that did very much not suffer from any uncanniness.

Anyways, Grendel dead, Grendel’s mom, played by Angelina Jolie who looks like she is very much enjoying herself being all computer generated, comes to complain the next night. Violence apparently being genetic, she appears to B in a dream while she slaughters and hangs his men in the feast-hall by way of complaining. A slight overreaction maybe, but I know if anyone hurts my family I’m willing to write a VERY terse note so I suppose it all works out the same.

B follows her into her cave-lair, the woman is a water-demon, and naked as he is (again) she decides to not fight him but offer him the world if he just sleeps with her. Because she is Angelina Jolie, and the only woman in the time-period in heels (heels that apparently are a part of her body, by the way) B off course agrees, is made king of the land, and lives happily being fought by every other monster and his mother, but surviving on and on.

So far, apart from the not-fighting-but-fucking, the story follows reasonably closely the original story, and as such I have not spoilt too much of the happenings in this movie, while still expressing most of the things I really did not like to much about it or find absurd. Because it is slated to be one of the mayor movies of the winter season, I will not go on and spoil any more.
It is an entertaining move, but really, its crap, funny crap, entertaining crap, crap nonetheless. The main problem is that there is no acting whatsoever that is well picked up by the computer puppets, something I hoped I would look past after a while, but never quite did. I could not escape the idea that if they’d have just done a real life movie, it would have been better.

Stripes at 00110 “If my neighbour complains again, I’m ripping her arm off”

Grtz,
Kevin

EXACTLY

It says something about a movie if the best thing you can say about it is that it is, at least, aptly titled. I realize I’ve said about “the Fountain” that it was aptly titled, and I still stand by that, but the aptness of “the Fountain” can hold no candle to the aptness of “Superbad”, the truly horrendous piece of regurgitated swill I almost forced myself to sit through yesterday.

And I ask myself now; “Why do I do these things to myself?”, why am I so stubborn in leaving a movie theater that I force myself to watch the interminable boredom of “Cashback”, why do I suffer the badly acted thinly veiled morality play that is “SawIII”, why, why, why?
Why? Because I am a movie-masochist. I secretly like nothing better than watching a bad movie for the slight chance of seeing cute people badly acting their way out of a paper bag. That’s why. That’s why I sat through “Cashback”, and “Saw”. Not that my efforts were rewarded or anything, but I live in hope that one day, out of the blue, the next Josh Duhamel will accidentally strip of in American Pie 65 and I can see I at least saw him naked in his first ever movie when he is a big star.

This did not happen, or had any faint hope of happening, during “Superbad” yesterday. Other things that didn’t happen during this truly terrible movie (or at least the 45 minutes I sat through before Housemate evoked the safety-word of movie-leavage) were: Something even remotely funny for those not humor-deprived since birth, the wolverine-vs-freddy style sla(sh/y)ing of that truly annoying and shite-ugly fat kid, the moment the “friends” of the fat kid finally told him to shut the bleeding fuck up and other thigns I really would like to have seen.
Ok, I am being a bit unfair, we did see fat kid’s throat being slit by a security guard, something that pleased me enough to whoop a little mid-movie, but that turned out to be a scene from fat kid’s imagination, something that pulled a well-meant “CRAP!!” from my toyed-with emotional psyche.

Ok, sorry, “Superbad”, movie about three guys, all nerdy, almost all acceptably nerdy for a standard high-school-movie, on their quest for pussy and suchlike, as one has now come to expect from high-school-movies. The three guys: Fat Kid (FK) who seems to be the leader of this little group of misfits but is more than likely just the guy the others hang around with just so people will spit on other people. Nerdy guy (NG) the classic nerd. Glasses, dark hair, pasty. Nerdlike, and therefore to my mind slightly endearing, but massively overshadowed by the sad fact he is friends with FK. And Average Guy (AG) who doesn’t really stand out in either direction, could be cute, could be ugly, but is nothing really. Dresses in brown.

After the initial set-up and introduction of this threesome, the movie tells us basically three things: They are all after girls, they are all idiots, and they should all die. So far, so same as every other high-school movie ever. Not exactly the same, as this movie sucks, whereas most HSM’s do have a certain charm to them. This one does not. From the first moment to the moment where I walked out, with the exception of the times FK was not on screen and the moment his throat was slashed, all it was was pure and simple crap.
Crap. Fucking crap. Effing crap. Rotten-corpse-of-Douglas-Adams flinging crap. No sign or show of any form of humor, charm or elegance in it’s execution, no power behind it’s convictions, no pure and simple movie magic in it’s make and pedigree.

I am certain the acting, however, was flawless. The three K’s did their very best, and did put down two reasonably believable characters and one truly atrocious one. But good acting of bad characters does not make a movie fun to watch. That said, the rest of the theatre was in stitches with every unnecessary “fuck” and every over the top allusion to the character’s rampant latent homosexuality, so it is possible the jokes just passed straight over my head (pun intended).

Is this it? Is this where we are headed? At least the “Naked Gun” movies had some planning in their badness. “Police Academy” lost it after a while but started smart enough through their bad jokes. “Revenge of the Nerds” had charm, “American Pie” was in places really, truly funny. But now we are getting these movies that seem only intend on being disgusting, stupid or demeaning, and if they can at all manage it, they go for all three of those. I thought I’d seen y worst movie with “Date Movie”, and I was wrong.
The worst part is that this movie is praised critically and through box office acclaim, it is “the next big thing” and the actors are lauded and feted around Hollywood. WHY? WHY in the name of all that is good and beautiful in the world WHY are we celebrating the type of jokes that special kid in the back of the class used to make until he was put into remedial teaching?
Honestly people, saying fuck fifteen times in a row is NOT funny. Showing an 8-year old drawing dicks is NOT funny, even though some of the dicks absolutely were. Watching a woman drink from a fat of her own fat is NOT funny. All these things, however, are happening in movies RIGHT NOW and there are audiences the world over that are laughing their retarded heads off watching this execrable garbage.

Can’t we get back to a world where humor was not based on excrement? I understand Mel Brooks’ statement that tragedy is when I cut my finger, and comedy is when you fall into an open sewer, but really, there is a massive difference between schadenfreude and filth.

Ah well, I am rerunning my episodes of the office to get the taste of FK out of my brain, then to go on to some actually funny things that don’t make me cringe.

Stripes at 00100, by now a well-known combination.

Grtz,
Kevin

30 Days of Night

Well, what to say… I like vampire films. In fact, with the possible exception of vampire bats when applied to my own specific hairdo, I roughly like vampire-everything.
Vampires, as a psychological archetype or an evolutionary mental exercise, are massively interesting creatures. And every vampire novel or movie sets up its own vampire back-story, and ideas behind it. Part of the charm of watching a vampire movie for me is figuring out how they stack up to other vampires, given what we are told in any story.

Dracula was able to walk in daylight according to Bram Stoker, but Bela Lugosi would have burned horribly in the same situation. The Hunger's Miriam and John Blaylock had no problem with daylight either, and lacked fangs as well, but drank blood nonetheless, with the aid of a little knife secreted in a necklace. (An idea re-used in the badly homoerotic The Brotherhood) The Hunger, by the way, also has the strange distinction of being a very elegant movie about two people who are clearly and undoubtedly vampires, yet the word “vampire” is never used or seemingly considered.

That said, almost all vampire movies or novels have to exist in an internal universe where-in there exist no other vampire movies or novels, but there is an abundance of arcane text about same, because, as a rule, vampires target fringe groups, for the tasty drug-laced blood and the lack of uproar over a couple of missing people, yet nobody ever immediately jumps to the conclusion of undead fangy stalkage.

Now I know vampire fan-dom is a little more widespread among my circle of friends than some other groups of people, but I know that as soon as the sucked-dry corpses of urban outdoorsmen start showing up under Amsterdam’s bridges with two puncture marks on their necks, the first thing somebody will say would be: “euh, maybe it’s a vampire” as a joke if not the first sketchy lines on a psychological profile.
But no, vampires are always the last possible refuge of the well-thinking character, and then only after we have seen several instances of turning to dust, glowing red eyes, massive fangs, and turning into bats/wolfs or otherwise creepy animals.
Of course, I realize movies would sell a lot less well if they consisted of one victim, a victim’s friend who says “people, it’s a vampire”, other potential victims stocking up on garlic, crucifixes and the like, and a defeated vampire scuttling off into the moonset within the first five minutes of filming, and thus there has to be a certain tension, a moment of discovery, and somewhat of a hunt to allow for all the product placement that a modern movie needs to stay alive. This is also one of the reasons why vampire ideas keep changing with every new movie and every new book, because if established vampire-detergent always works, there is no tension.

Still, there’d be more tension than there was in 30 Days of Night, the first of two vampire movies to hit Dutch cinemas in the coming period. Now I am not expecting particularly much of the second one, but it has to be better than this exercise in dual sided stupidity.
Some spoilers ahead, by the way.

The idea of a vampire troupe hounding a small town waaay up North is not a bad one in its own right, and as such a good premise for a vampire movie. The town Barrow, setting of this little piece, apparently has no sun for a set period every year, during which most of the town moves to sunnier (or sunny, at all) climes elsewhere, and only a skeleton crew of law-officers and suchlike maintaining vigil in the dark of sunless days. So far, so good. During this period, the vampires decide attack and obliterate the town. Good plan, no light to burn the lily-white skin, reduced visuals for the human meatsicles, all nice and ready for the pickings.

So what’s wrong? Well, stupidity is wrong, for one. And ugly vampires, also wrong (but slightly forgivable). And more stupidity.

These vampires are smart enough o hatch a plan like this, are incredibly fast, know how humans work well enough to set bait and try to trap them into coming out, but no when in the thirty days except for the absolute last day do they start setting fire to possible hiding places.
Foolish things.
Once more it is proven it is a good thing I personally am not an undead scourge on human society, cause y’all’d’be fucked.
If it were me leading an intrepid band of undead explorers, the first thing I do is take as many humans out as possible, as is done in the movie as well, good. Then, during the first night, when the remaining humans have gone to ground hiding, I start setting fire to the houses. This will mean that any humans left inside will run out pretty swiftly, ready for the taking.
Considering the fact that there are only a couple of hundred houses in town, to about 25 vampires, this ensures that the whole town will be burned to the ground, bled dry and fed upon within about 4 days of the given 30 days of darkness. Given the fact we are told over the course of the movie that there are about 4 or 5 more towns nearby that are also completely dark, this means you can be back on your sun-blocked boat before day 25 and undo your belt for a good bloody burp.

But no, Vamps decide to wait with the burning until day 30. Why? No idea. Meanwhile they barely get to eat, and they also spectacularly fail to find about 30 hiding survivors. Vampire idiots.

Do the humans do better? Well, yes, but a) barely and b) only because of the aforementioned vampire stupidity. If you are fighting a vampire, and it is conclusively shown that only beheading will work, would you not start beheading them? I would. But no. You’d apparently continue trying to bring them down by pillow-fighting them, snowballing them, trying unsuccessfully to burn them, whatever. So they have to hide out on someone’s attic, with no food or water, and they still manage to not only survive, but come out looking chipper and in some cases remarkably well-shaven.
And don’t start up about the fact they can melt snow for drinking water. True as that may be, it takes MASSIVE amounts of snow for even a little bit of useful water, and considering there are about 9 people there, this would be a 24 hour job, that nobody is doing. Also, there just plain isn’t enough snow to do this without being noticed by anything paying attention.

There are a lot of moments in this movie that are just plain stupid, or barely understandable. Does this make 30 Days of Night a bad movie? In my opinion: yes. Was it an enjoyable-for its stupidity-movie? In my opinion, yes again. It is worthy of seeing for two real reasons: 1) the movie’s premise is well thought up and executed, if a little bit shaky, and 2) the sheer pleasure of picking it apart. The tension is build well in some rare spots, but mostly underdone by the obvious attempts at sorry comic relief.

Stripes at 11110, for 30.

Grtz,
Kevin

Looking for a career.

Having left school at the tender age of 17 after being fully bullied for about 12 years straight, I cannot say I am worse of than I should be. In fact, I am very well of. I have Boyfriend, whom I love and who loves me, I have good friends, an ok family-life, and a beautiful house to live in, owned by aforementioned Boyfriend.

For me, the only thing currently lacking is a good/great career. For me not the wealth of wealth attracts me, but the possibility to do something I love doing, and to do it for a living. I have been writing this little blog for over two years now, to practically no success whatsoever but with great enjoyment, and it has been a good way to refine and grow into a reasonable writing style (to my mind, that is), I have written columns for company magazines, and even some reviews for a now defunct Fantasy magazine, and I think I consider myself good enough to “do something” in the field of creative, or not so creative writing.

As to this end, I have started writing to a couple of magazines today, linking to this blog, and asking around for a reasonable step to take to get into writing on a structured plan. I am slowly working on some short stories, trying to get some ideas for a lengthy novel, but at the moment the slightly journalistic bend of columns and suchlike draw me more than anything else.
So if there is anybody on my blog who likes it enough to return every now and then, and I do realize I have made that difficult with the slightly erratic frequency of my blogging, please point some people towards me. I need a working network right now, and I am not getting there as yet. And if one of my regulars know of a way into columns or suchlike, please let me know, either through the blog or through kevin.linnekamp@gmail.com
I am very willing to take any writing opportunity tossed into my lap, money at the moment is less of an issue than just getting read and known.

Thanks for your attention,
Stripes at 00001, “shameless pleading”

Kevin