It’s tax time, which means wading through several hundred receipts and filing massive amounts of papers that I’ve let collect in small drifts…
Light Blogging This Week
April 5th, 2010Could After Last Season Be Worse Than Exterminator City?
April 2nd, 2010Perhaps you’ve heard or read me mention how Exterminator City is the worst film ever made. (The preceding sentence has an Amazon link to the DVD, but you should not buy or watch Exterminator City. Trust me.)
But now that I’ve been hearing about it, could After Last Season actually be worse? Well, let’s take a look at the official trailer, shall we?
Wow. 93 minutes of footage to chose from, and that’s what they thought would entice people into theaters? “C’mon, honey, we have to see this! It has people talking about directions, a fake MRI scanner covered in paper, and bad CGI circa 1985! What are we waiting for?’
OK, maybe they just didn’t know how to make a trailer. Maybe some movie reviewers have found it an undiscovered gem.
Maybe not.
“This isn’t just the worst film of the year, this is the worst theatrically released film of the decade” raves Ain’t It Cool News’ movie critic Massawyrm. “I will even go so far as to say that it is the worst theatrically distributed film of the modern era. Terrible lighting and sound is just the beginning of this fetid, painful, epic wonderland of suck. A truly unbelievable experience. It’s almost adorable how hard they try to convince you that an unfinished basement, sheets, cardboard and printer paper is a medical facility of any value. It’s kind of like a kid wearing a towel and a bucket trying to convince you he’s a knight. If you watch this, and I know some of you will, do not, I repeat, do not watch it alone. Get friends. You’ll need them when the movie slips into screensaver mode. And beer. Lots of beer. Trust me. Sober is no way to experience After Last Season.”
“After Last Season is as bad as it looks,” opines Hammer To Nails’ David Lowry, “but its badness is of such a quizzical sort that it transcends mere incompetence. It is formally engaging, because it is so formally incorrect. It is not at all unlike its trailer, in that it primarily consists of a series of choices that seem to have been made entirely arbitrarily, in service of a plot that is buried in non sequitur. To watch the film is to take in the vision of someone with a severe case of disconnection: what is most consistently striking about the film is that the gap between conception and realization is irreparably wide. The most direct example (even moreso than the cardboard MRI scanner) occurs when a character reads a story in the newspaper – and that newspaper is represented by a piece of 8 1/2 x 11 paper, fresh from the inkjet printer, upon which has been printed the words ‘Morning News.’”
“From a technical standpoint, After Last Season is an abysmal entry,” says Picture Show Pundits’ Nate Zoebl. “It fails not just because of its lack of funds but it fails because [Director Mark] Region lacks any filmmaking ability whatsoever. Sure, apparently the man was able to pose actors, have them recite lines, and keep the cameras running, but I expect more from my movies than the same criteria I have for family vacation videos. Region’s directorial style is, ostensibly, to have no discernible visual sensibility at all. Actors will routinely be cut out from the camera frame or the spatial relations will be completely out of whack, allowing for tremendous space above heads or showing the actor’s complete body except the upper half of the face. Characters will be bunched in one tiny section of the screen, or Region will suddenly cut back and forth between two different shots that conflict from a geographic standpoint; they don’t visually match up. There isn’t a single shot anywhere in After Last Season that couldn’t have been credited to a tripod for complete creative inspiration….the movie is technically inept on every level of filmmaking with a bad script, bad actors, bad pacing, bad direction, bad sets, bad sound coverage, bad ‘special effects,’ and really bad editing. If Region was dreaming of creating a midnight-movie sensation like The Room then he missed the mark. This movie isn’t any fun whatsoever to watch because there’s not enough going on to laugh at. With The Room, every scene had like eight things wrong with it; that film was a 1000 brushstrokes of bad. With After Last Season, it’s the same forehead-smacking flaws repeated ad nausium. There’s no derisive joy to be had here, folks.”
And my favorite theory about the movie, from Nick Nobel at Your Stupid Minds: “My theory is that Mark Region was in group therapy for a mild social or psychological disorder. As part of his treatment, one assignment involved a creative writing project dealing with his disorder in some way. Region wrote a short screenplay and, compared to the others, it wasn’t too shabby. Ego boosted, he expanded it into a feature and spent the next 10 years hounding friends and family for money to produce it….The way the lines are written, again, feels like someone with a social disorder imitating how normal people interact. I’m sure that was part of the assignment as well.”
Keep in mind one theoretical advantage After Last Season should have going for it: Exterminator City was a low-budget direct-to-DVD release, while After Last Season actually had a theatrical release. Granted, it was only four theaters (one of which was Austin; dodged that bullet), and theater owners were actually instructed to burn the prints afterwords rather than sending them back. (No, really. This is not a late April Fools Joke…)
And here’s a pretty amused video review:
Need one final bit of evidence? On the film’s official site, the first favorable quote is from a random Amazon customer review, while second is from a random IMDB user review. (Danger, Will Robinson!)
For the record, for those of you I regularly view movies with (you know who you are), do not obtain this movie and inflict it on me. After Exterminator City, I’ve come to realize there are limits to how bad a film I’m willing to sit through. After Last Season sounds like it could very well exceed those limits.
On the other hand, reading about it did accomplish one thing: I think I may now be ready to see The Room…
And just for the sake of reference, here’s the robot swordfight scene from Exterminator City. Remember: This is the best scene in the entire movie.
Fark’s Awesome April Fools Joke
April 1st, 2010A three step process for maximum enjoyment:
- Go to each Fark tab for April 1st in turn.
- Read the first letter of every headline.
- L0LZ!
Well done, Drew. Well done.
Stross and Doctorow to Write Sequel to Atlas Shrugged
April 1st, 2010Book Proof Received:
Little Women and Werewolves
March 29th, 2010
No, really.
Louisa May Alcott and Porter Grand’s Little Women and Werewolves
Del Rey, 2010, $14.00
I try to create a parody, and instead it comes out as prophecy.
Mocca’s “I Would Never”: No Ironic Hipster Value Whatsoever
March 28th, 2010Ever now and then you stumble across something that, given your general tastes and outlook, you shouldn’t like, but you do anyway. “What, you like that?” asks your friends. “That is so not you.”
Take Mocca’s “I Would Never” as an example, a simple, charming pop song done in an easy-listening style that went out of fashion at least 40 years ago. I chanced across this a few years ago searching for something else, and every now and then get a yen to hear it again, which then necessitates trying to remember the name of the artist. And then I find it again, only to discover that, yes, it’s still not on iTunes.
So I’m embedding the video here as much as a blog sticky note to myself as sharing it with others…
Mocca seems to be a Indonesian pop band which has done several albums of material in this style: Poppy, upbeat, cheerful, and deeply un-ironic, which must be a crushing disappointment to jaded hipsters everywhere. It’s just well-done and…pleasant.
Sometimes that’s enough.
Seems A Little Steep
March 25th, 2010This video was posted to a Fark thread on rickety bridges.
The view is less awe-inspiring than bowel-clenching, especially when you get to the parts where part of the trail has fallen away…
Books Read: Kage Baker’s The Women of Neil Gwynne’s
March 24th, 2010Kage Baker, The Women of Neil Gwynne’s
Subterranean Press, 2009.
By now you’ve probably heard that Kage Baker died of a particularly aggressive form of cancer on January 31 of this year. I did not know Baker (I may have said hello in passing one Armadillocon), and thus have no particular insight into her as a person. Her death probably makes The Women of Neil Gwynne’s, the tale of a bordello in the employ of a cabal of Victorian Steampunk inventors, a prohibitive Hugo and Nebula favorite.
Alas, I have the same response to this that I had to Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key, another Subterranean novella from her I read last year: Competently executed work that largely failed to engage me. Not everyone can be Tim Powers, but there’s an art to writing mock Victoriana, and Baker just didn’t nail it here. There’s a certain dry English reserve, but nothing from Ben Johnson/Oscar Wilde axis of cutting dry wit that really makes a work of this sort sparkle. Plus it doesn’t help that the real plot doesn’t get started until a third of the way into the book.
Books Read: Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris
March 23rd, 2010I know Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris is regarded as a classic, and the version I read (the U.S. first edition) evidently suffers from being “double-translated” (Polish to French to English), but this is still a bit of a dated slog. The characters combine the flat-effect of stereotyped scientists with the foolish incompetence of a horror-movie protagonist. Strangely enough, the only time the book really came alive to me was when all action ceased in favor of a an entire chapter of infodump on the various forms the living ocean created on the surface; it’s a shame Lem decided to spend the majority of the novel on the truly tedious psychological struggles of the deeply uninteresting characters examining the living ocean rather than the ocean itself.
A Photo Tour of Depopulated Rural Japan
March 21st, 2010Just what the title says, and quite fascinating. For all the urban bustle, many parts if rural Japan are turning into ghost towns, driven by the relentless population decline and aging demographics.
In 2010, Japan is the oldest society that has ever existed in the history of humanity on the planet, and will remain so, not remotely challenged, for several decades at least.
(Hat Tip: Fark.)