::A Geek in Korea::

I do not watch procedural shows. I don’t like CSI. I do not like Law & Order. “Show crime, list suspects, cops talk about doing cop things, and 30 minutes later, a bad guy confesses to everything.” I don’t like self-contained “wraps up in an hour” neat little dramas. I was a fan of shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer that brought in arcs that span entire seasons, with side episodes and smaller filler that made up the “meat” of the remaining episodes.

I have started watching “The Shield“, and I’m hooked. I blame this on Jeff Cannata from Totally Rad Show. I started watching The Shield after Battlestar Galactica went off the air on Fox Korea. I had made it a habit to stay up and watch BSG, and when this show called “The Shield” took it’s place, I gave it a chance because it came very highly recommended by Jeff. He and I have very similar tastes, so I was willing to watch a few episodes. It’s not like there was anything else on television, ever.

I watched most of what I found out to be the third season. For an arcing story, it didn’t seem too hard to follow the characters. Cop dramas make it easy to jump in most of the time for the sake of new watchers. Their are still “busts” from week to week, but fifteen minutes or so of each show is based around the arc for the season.

Now with MegaTV, I’ve started to catch up to what’s been broadcast so far in Korea. I’ve got the first season finished, and I’m working through the second. The back story stuff has filled in a lot of the questions I had, but it’s made me like the show even more. I still hate the same characters, and root for others like I did before, but no one is a saint on this show.

The Shield is a show that should be very predictable, but shocks and surprises me every single episode. Just when you think a character hits rock bottom, they go farther. Just when you think you’ve witnessed the worst, you get shocked by a new crime. Just when you think someone crosses the line, you worry, then see if they can make it right again. The show plays on my expectations of a cop show and does so much better than the standard procedural drama. I understand Jeff’s passion in trying to promote the show to people now that I’ve seen it. It’s a show worth spreading the word about.

Jeff Cananta’s recommend a few other things I like, like Super Mario Galaxy (he defended it while the other two hosts trashed it), some comic books (Preacher), and a few movies that I ended up enjoying. It’s incredibly cool to watch TotallyRadShow, as it feels like I have a kindred spirit working to sort out the good stuff for me and save my time. Now that I found out that they have a Cowon D2 friendly video podcast (!), I can even watch their show easily when I don’t have time to watch the feed in Miro. So awesome.

Further conforming to those internet stereotypes, I went to see Juno yesterday. I had heard a lot of praise coming from NPR and some podcasts. I didn’t expect a movie with a plot such as “Quirky Midwest teen gets pregnant, hilarity ensues” to come over to Korea. There hasn’t been anything showing in theaters worth watching in ages.

However, this is around the time when there is a flurry of Oscar nominated movies all competing in theaters at the same time. I don’t follow the Oscars, and I don’t care who wins, but a diverse set of movies coming to Korea that are decent? It’s about damn time. This will continue for a few weeks, then we’ll go back to the same old crap.

Anyway, we saw Juno. There were only about ten people in the theater. There was a group of Korean woman that spoke fluent English, us, and a few couples. The group of other English speakers was laughing a lot more than anyone else. I was laughing hard enough a few times that I got shushed by my wife. This killed me:

Juno MacGuff: Your little girlfriend gave me the stinkeye in art class yesterday.
Paulie Bleeker: Katrina’s not my girlfriend alright? And I doubt she gave you the stinkeye that’s just how her face looks, you know? That’s just her face.
(Cuts to a girl that has a perfect “stinkeye” look on her face staring at them in the distance.)

I don’t think that the translators did a very good job of bringing out the flowing slang of teenage life. Juno without the dialog is missing a lot. Both my wife and I enjoyed the film regardless of any barriers of language though.

I’m not on board the “Japan’s sexually dysfunctional culture is wacky!” meme. I mean, it is a weird culture, no doubt, but a lot of people are obsessed with Japan that have never been there. Just because it happens in Japan doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen elsewhere. Sure, a lot of weird things DO happen only in Japan, but that’s not a good reason to idolize their culture. Some things are best left “undid“.

For example, this article is basically “The Mystery Method” in Japan. Working on the theory that even a creepy dude like David Copperfield can get a girlfriend, other people use magic to trick women. BUT IT’S IN JAPAN. That’s worth an article? Must be a slow news day at Wired.

So, why am I blogging about it? Because of this quote:

“Since joining Mr. Fujita’s school, I have had five successful relationships,” says Hachioji Robocop, a 27-year-old civil servant who has been taking the course since 2004. “I lost my virginity six months into the course, and now I can now communicate with women. I’m very grateful.”

This guy’s name is Hachioji Robocop. ROBOCOP. A man with the last name Robocop should NOT have problems meeting women in Japan. They LOVE robots in Japan! Unless all the anime I’ve seen is leading me in the wrong direction, and all that “The Japanese are so weird” reporting is messing with my head, I imagine things heading in a terrible direction for this man because of his name when he approaches women.

Seeing as this is Japan, you’d expect H. ROBOCOP to simply stop a random woman on the street and say:

“PANTIES. DROP THEM. YOU HAVE 3 SECONDS TO COMPLY.”

Or, when things go badly on a first date:

“DEAD OR ALIVE, YOU ARE COMING WITH ME TO MY SMALL APARTMENT FULL OF LAME ANIME FIGURES.”

After whatever awkward pawing has left H. Robocop unsatisfied, he’ll realize what he’s done.

“MADAME, YOU HAVE SUFFERED AND EMOTIONAL SHOCK. I WILL NOTIFY A RAPE CRISIS CENTER.”

Remember how awesome Memento was with the whole “Movie going forwards and backwards at the same time” thing? There is a movie that completely and utterly blows Memento out of the water for time-traveling and general “WTF?”  messing with the audience. It was made on a $7000 dollar budget, and is a Sundance winner. It’s probably one of the coolest movies I’ve seen in a long time, and I can’t wrap my head around it yet.

Primer

Which is available, in it’s entirety, at Google Video. (77 minutes)
Intensive Film Warning: This is a movie where you have to pay close attention to EVERYTHING that happens, watch carefully, and you STILL won’t understand it the first time around. You aren’t even supposed to. Anyone that claims to understand this movie the first time around is a savant, or a liar.

This film does not go out of it’s way to explain anything that is happening, and throws science jargon around a bit. It’s a cruel mistress, but rewarding in the end. It’s really amazing that this film was created at all, and despite the SHOESTRING budget, looks SO good. The budget never seems to impact the film at all.

The Basic Plot

Primer is a story about four engineers that work out of their garage trying to get rich inventing something and filing patents. Two of the engineers discover a weird effect as a byproduct of their latest experiment, and decide to cut the other two out of the group as they decide the best way to cash in on this new invention. As they begin to explore what they can do as a result of their invention their partnership is strained when they have different visions of the best use of the technology. Things happen, causality is played with, and your brain will start to hurt.

I saw it. Now what?
Here is a timeline explaining WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED after you watch it the first time.

I’d like to spread the love for this film, and also talk about it. If anyone else has some mind blowing movies to watch, please share in this thread.

The mechanic of Time Travel in Primer
A general description of the plot.
Wikipedia
Interview with the maker of the film.
An entire FORUM dedicated to trying to figure out this movie.

Cross posted with the Geek in Korea forum.

Remember when the Batman franchise started off the “gritty comic book remake” genre?  Following the “Superman” model of progressively shitty sequels, there was Batman Returns, then Batman Forever, then finally, in 1997, a Batman movie so bad it took a very long time before anyone was willing to reboot the franchise again. Batman & Robin was a movie that almost killed the superhero movie genre for a time until Spiderman came out. (Speaking of which, Spiderman itself had a several crappy sequels too.)

Rifftrax, headed up by Mike Nelson, did me a great service by making fun of Batman & Robin. I remember hearing  news about that movie when I was in high school. Being a former comic book reading fan, I felt it was my duty to find out all sorts of information about movies based on characters I liked.

I had a faint hope that somehow that movie would be good. I even saw it in the theater. The only repressed memory that remains of the experience is when the film ended, with the three “Bat” characters ran in front of a spot light and then the music faded out to some terrible Smashing Pumpkins song I thought was cool at the time.

What sets this Rifftrax apart is that the script came from fans, not the actors themselves. Usually the Rifftrax crew is responsible for watching the movies dozens of times and coming up with jokes to ease the pain. Instead, the Rifftrax forums put it upon themselves to write the script and then edit it for the performers. Sadly, I didn’t know about this, because I would have been willing to watch that film multiple times just for the chance that one of my jokes would be spoken by Mike Nelson himself.

Anyway, the fact that this is a fan production is evident as the movie goes on. While the jokes were funny, and sometimes hilariously funny, there are more gaps in Batman & Robin than any other rifftrax I’ve watched. Even Mike, riffing entirely alone, would talk more during Roadhouse than in the last 30 minutes of Batman & Robin. There are minutes without dialog from the performers. I’d rather have silence than a lame joke, and it’s clear that most people didn’t make it through the entire movie when they had donated their scripts. There were a lot of missed opportunities in the last few ridiculous minutes of the movie that desperately needed to be heckled.

I’m not sure if the writing process will always produce a “front loaded” script, or that people just give up when they realize they have to watch a crappy movie over and over to write something funny. However, if given the opportunity to ever participate in any future events of this kind, my strategy for writing a joke to get into a script would be to start with the last thirty minutes of a movie and heckle everything I saw. Something would stick, and then I’d be immortalized in Internet geekdom by being able to say I heckled with the best.

My wife got a call from the KT company about a service we could sign up for. This is a normal thing, as she get offers for free phones for using their service without upgrading for several years. They usually call and offer a phone if she’ll upgrade her service plan to something slightly more expensive for a few months.

This time it wasn’t about a phone. It was about a product tied into our Internet service. We have “Megapass” Internet. There has been a product roll out of “MegaTV” in Daejeon, and we got an offer for three months of free service. What’s “MegaTV“? IPTV. What the hell is that? Imagine on-demand movies in a set top box delivered via the Internet. It’s like AppleTV, except without the stupid.

When I came home from work, there was a wire from my Internet connection socket over to our television. The MegaTV box sits like a cable box, and when you fire it up it’ll show a menu. It’s not programmed with live television channels like cable, but instead has a large list of titles available for instant viewing. Choose a title, and it’ll play. The stuff is compressed. The newer the material is, the better the compression seems to be. The grainy action stuff reminds me of something slightly better than DiVX 3.0 era compression, not that great, but watchable.

There are newer titles available for a small fee, like a pay for view movie, except it’s ALWAYS available to watch. You don’t have to wait for a title to start, you just press a button and it begins. It also will remember where you stopped watching something and bookmark it for the next viewing.

While the number of foreign movies is as larger than any corner store, they have several television series too. I started watching “The Shield” a few months back, and now I can watch the series from the beginning. This alone will make it worth the low subscription fee if we keep it past the free trial offer. The Shield ran on the same channel that carried “Battlestar Galactica”. If THAT ever came available, I could watch the entire series with my wife with subtitles. That would kick tremendous ass.

Right now, both my wife and I are weary about greater access to on demand movie and television access. She said she had intended to run some errands, sat down to see if there was something she wanted to watch, and only realized the time she had wasted when I came home from work.

I got up and watched a movie this morning. Deathproof was free, and it was so bad it left me with a headache that lasted for five hours.  I had to take a nap because it hurt my brain so much. At least it was well compressed and looked better than some of the older movies I had checked out. Planet Terror is 100x better in every regard.

Then, I went and upped the ante by purchasing a Rifftrax for “Batman and Robin”. (HOLY CRAP. WHAT AM I DOING?! VOLUNTEERING TO WATCH THAT? WHY!) The MegaTV service has nearly half of the Rifftrax catalog on demand. If working out the sync issues is easy enough when watching it on the TV, this could be a regular thing for me.

I had called some friends to see what they were up to this weekend. They mentioned a trip to a console gaming room, and then a trip to the movie theater to see Cloverfield. I had planned on seeing that movie, so I was totally in.

The console gaming room was in Rodeo Town department store not far from where I work. Since this is my most frequented shopping place, I had actually seen the place we were headed to weeks before and had checked it out. I had passed it up because there wasn’t any kind of game I’d have been willing to play on a lunchbreak.

Our group of four had four hours to kill before the film. We got hooked up with four different screens, four different Xbox 360’s, and some copies of Call of Duty 4. I’ve never played a game on the Xbox before, I don’t play modern shooters, and I don’t really like team based death match stuff, but this game was a blast.

There are different soldiers with different attributes, weapons, and abilities, and they all change the game in subtle ways. I was a touch overwhelmed with the controls for the first hour or so, but once I adjusted to the playstyle and weapons I felt like I was having a good time. I don’t have the patience for sniping though.

The Cloverfield movie was really interesting and different. I went in completely unspoiled. I didn’t know more than what was on the poster.

The monster and the “meta-story” that was going on in the background was interesting, and I’d be willing to follow another set of survivors through whatever was happening to find out more of what was going on. The problem is that the way the story was set up, no one else DID know what was going on.

The shaky camera wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be, but occasionally it stretched my belief to think someone would hold on and continue filming despite the obvious danger. There were several parts that left me scratching my head, as people walking around unarmed, expecting to be attacked when things are readily available to defend themselves with is an annoying oversight.

My feeling of the movie is that it belongs to the “Youtube” generation, and is something you experience as much as you watch. It’s fundamentally different to everything I’ve seen for a long time, the same way that “Survivor” was fundamentally different than everything else on television 7 or 8 years ago. I’m sure it’s going to inspire a lot of other movies in similar styles, which I’m not sure is going to be good for movies ultimately. There are only so many “Blair Witch Projects” I’m willing to watch. The Koreans in the theater let out a groan when the movie ended, and a lot of people complained of headaches because of the subtitles. I don’t think I could have watched this with subtitles.

I liked it a lot more than I expected I would. If I had been spoiled to the plot, or had been following the viral video stuff, I’d probably have felt disappointed. Since I didn’t have any expectations whatsoever, I was pleasantly surprised.

…in the Mist.

HOLY CRAP. That movie has an ending worth watching. Do yourself a favor and watch this movie if you haven’t been spoiled for the ending yet. WOW. I haven’t been to a nail biter like this in the theaters since “The Others“.

Last night we went to see American Gangster. I hadn’t been following it, but it was recommended by a few reviewers I like to follow. I’m not big into the “gangster” genre most times, but this was a very enjoyable movie.

I thought it was really interesting and very well made. I liked the stories working in parallel, as well as the way the details of the world around them were so well done. Touches like the Vietnam updates on television working as a sort of time line for the rise and fall of the characters worked really well.

The drug use always makes me queasy. Watching people do heroin just really grosses me out. There were a lot of scenes in this movie that grossed me out with needles popping in veins and people in a drug haze that really was terrible to watch.

The very first scene was extremely graphic violence and shocking. So, “It’s going to be this kind of movie?” I thought as someone was burned alive, then shot. This was to let you know the gangster character was a cold blooded killer from the start and to stop you from feeling too much empathy for him.

Still, for being a bad guy that ruined thousands of lives, you still care about the gangster character. I have to credit Denzel Washington’s amazing performance for that. Even if he was a “bad guy with a heart of gold”, he was still ruthless. He might have taken care of his family, but he used them in his schemes and profited from it too.

I’ve seen three of the last four Denzel Washington movies released in Korea, and I walk out of the theater every single time blown away. I never got to a movie with the intention of seeing one particular actor, but it might sway me to choose one movie over another. He’s probably my favorite actor at the moment because he hasn’t delivered a bad performance.

Russel Crowe’s character was also interesting. He was a cop beyond bribery and trying to do the right thing professionally, but a terrible father. The scene in the courtroom when he is fighting for his child from a bitter ex-wife that puts him in his place was very good. Seeing him rise to the occasion because of the epidemic of drug crime was great. The film made an interesting point about the police force, penitentiary, and law systems being dependent on criminals to perpetuate their work. Sometimes the police just want a cut of the action because it’s in their best interest to let things keep going so they can keep their jobs. I had never seen that sort of idea put forth in a movie before, and would love to see that explored in another film. Any recommendations?

I’d say American Gangster is a solid film worth checking out if you have the time. It is a long film, but it doesn’t feel that way because it is so well made.

Tags: americangangster, Russel Crowe, Denzel Washington, movie, awesome

It comes to no surprise to people that know me that I’ve taken an interest in what the cast and crew of the cult hit show Mystery Science Theater 3000 have been up to since the show has stopped being produced.

Mike and the “Scifi” era cast of puppeteers are involved with Rifftrax. Rifftrax is brilliant. It works like a bonus track to a DVD that you put on an mp3 player. You hit “play” at the same time, and then pause the track if it gets out of sync. It’s low tech, but it works surprisingly well. I’ve downloaded multiple movie riffs from this service. It’s cheap, fast, and often hilarious.

The downside of the Rifftrax method of heckling movies is that acquiring the movie and playing them is separate from the riffing experience. You can buy the movies at their site, but nothing connects the two to keep them in sync. If you have the movies on hand, or can rent them, this works perfectly however.

The Film Crew is a sort of “professional comedic commentary”. They are the same guys doing Rifftrax, but their commentaries are added to movies on commercially released DVDs of old movies. They have short skits and whatnot. This is basically a way of repackaging an old movie one more time. I haven’t heard much about this as a method of releasing DVDs or continuing the idea of MST3k.

The newcomer to the post-MST3k era is Cinematic Titanic. Basically anyone that isn’t involved in the Rifftrax is now part of Cinematic Titanic. This is more of the old Comedy Channel and even KTMA crew, although Mary Jo Pehl has worked with both era crews, and has even been featured on a rifftrax of Glitter.

Cinematic Titanic’s take on the riffing process is a little different. Rather than treading the same ground that Rifftrax does by hitting the current crop of bad movies in any rental store, they’ve purchased the rights to a bad film. They have live studio riffing sessions in front of a green screen, and superimpose themselves in front of the film, much like on the original MST3k program.

This means that while you get a terrible movie being heckled by old school MST3k pros, they are distributing it as a DVD unto itself, not as a small audio file you listen to in addition to the DVD. You buy the DVD, which has the movie, as well as their commentary track imposed on top of it.

This is a much more expensive endeavor. They have to film actors on a set, do post production, and all sorts of other things Rifftrax doesn’t have to do. They also have to find and purchase terrible movies and own the rights to distribute those movies. Rumors have linked George Lucas as to have put up some cash for this, and the people at ILM have had their own private viewings of this process.

The first movie for Cinematic Titanic looks extremely bad and befitting the name. I can already see how licensing the movies will cause nightmares for this service. Their first movie was originally titled “Brain of Blood”, but had to be renamed “The Oozing Skull” to satisfy the owner.

Also, while Cinematic Titanic currently owns DVD distribution rights, they don’t own “Burn to DVD” download rights. This was one of their promises at the beginning to distinguish them from Rifftrax. They were supposed to allow anyone to download the video, burn it to DVD themselves, and be able to watch it at home without ever needing to go through the process of physically shipping a DVD anywhere.

Not only that, but due to the high demand of this first DVD, the online service that lets you purchase the movie is back ordered. The service they are using is requesting people wait up to 10 days for them to burn enough copies to get them sent to everyone. Way to miss the point of digital distribution entirely.

Not only that, but the service isn’t even available in Korea according to their website. I hope this means they are only not shipping physical DVDS out of the country. If this means I’m not going to be able to purchase a digital copy, I’ll just give up on the idea of Cinematic Titanic entirely.

I hope in a few months I’ll be able to watch a movie that should already be available, but isn’t due to technical limitations and distribution rights. Cinematic Titanic is great in theory, but in practice has yet to deliver any laughs to me.

Tags: MST3k, Cinematic Titanic, Film Crew, Rifftrax