| 14 January 2004 at 15.09.59 ZuluTime
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Posted by Gremlin [24.8.14.102 - c-24-8-14-102.client.comcast.net] on 14 January 2004 at 15.09.59 ZuluTime:
I want my computer back. The thing died on Saturday night. It's really bugging me now.
Of course, in a way, there are a few neat effects caused by losing the laptop. It's kinda like the M*A*S*H episode in which Hawkeye got hit by the plot device and went blind for a few days. I keep noticing all these weird little things out there.
One of the weirdest things I've seen so far this century happened yesterday. I went off to take a bath. And that involves going into Twitch's room.
Zombi the Cat, of course, followed me in. Zombi is somewhat retarded. She's got this sort of waterfall thingy in the kitchen already, but she's obsessed with water in other rooms of the house. So she keeps learning the hard way that leaping into the tub is a good way to get drenched. Not that 'learning' is the best verb for her condition.
So now I've got this wet cat leaping about the room, unfairly acting surprised about it all. Twitch, of course, had run out of the bathroom the instant I got the door open in the first place; she wound up on the sofa out in the living room, with Hunter.
Twitch has become a lot more territorial since Zombi moved in. So her first act of freedom was to attempt to mark the sofa with what can only be referred to as Iguano™. Hunter managed to bodyslam her onto a blanket first, but that didn't quite make it all better.
So Hunter threw Twitch back into the bathroom and slammed its door. Now I've got an iguana and a wet cat, who are roughly equal in snout-to-vent length, in the same room at the same time.
For the most part, the two get along. But Zombi was all wet, and apparently unaware how silly she looked with her hair all spiked up. So, to make up for all that, she thought it might be fun to lick the iguana's face for a while.
Twitch was backed into a corner at the time. So her metre-long bullwhip of a tail was useless against Zombi. Instead, she reared back on her hind legs to get away from her. Zombi just moved in closer.
So now Twitch the Biped counterattacks. Still on two feet, she hisses at Zombi. Zombi, despite myriad other possible manoeuvres, fell back on her rear feet, standing up and doing exactly the same thing Twitch was doing: hissing and bobbing her head like a rabid parrot.
So. Here's the frame. I've got a cat who looks like Sid Vicious, standing at the same height as an iguana who looks like King Dinosaur, and they're matching each other move for move, in mirror image. Meanwhile, behind Twitch, there's the literal mirror, which reaches the floor; so I've actually got four of these creatures dancing about as bipeds.
Not that I happened to have a DigiCam in the tub, for some reason. Or, of course, a computer to download the snaps to. Or, really, much time to do much about it at all. The whole thing went on for about five seconds or so. Then Zombi, who wasn't trapped between a predator and a mirror, cut to the side, leaping up and--of course--back into the water.
These are the reasons why Hunter is known daily to croon 'Awww...Kitty's stoopid...'.
Also, I got round to watching a few more films I've been meaning to get to. In this order....
Hot Wax Zombies on Wheels. Um...sound effects, tits, stock footage, tits, antirepublican jokes, tits, a cast of forty-seven-year-olds, tits, sawdust, tits, LaBamba, and tits. I'm not exaggerating when I report that I've seen Super8 silent films of kids manipulating Star Wars figures in sandboxes with more production value and plot than this waste of silicon contained. When I get my computer back, then when I get SiteoftheLivingDead up and running, this is going to be the zombiefilm against which all others are judged. I can't imagine a film being worse than this. And yes, I've seen Hysterical.
28 Days Later. There's probably no need to link that one; people are already aware of it. But I should explain something real quick about this film.
Until now, I'd only seen this film in DivX. I got a copy out of the UK before its US release. I'm not sure whether I still have that copy here; if so, I might go watch it again, simply because I'm getting the feeling that there are two different versions of this film. For now, I'll concentrate on what could be called the US version.
I'm not sure whether this technically qualifies as a zombiefilm. I'm not entirely certain what would prevent it from being a zombiefilm, of course. If anything, it's a bit too intellectual to be a zombiefilm. And, of course, its zombies aren't quite exactly undead. Personally, I don't figure that zombies absolutely must be undead, so much as braindead. Otherwise, every zombiefilm before 1968 would be disqualified from the category. And, of course, simply allowing anything alive beyond the grave would induct Dracula and Frankenstein's monster as a zombie, too. It would be a bit weird to figure that Abbot and Costello met zombies, but the RageInfected guys in 28 Days Later didn't count.
Based on what I'm calling the UK version, I'd count this as one of the scariest fucking films I've ever seen. Elements exist in the US version, but a lot of the scariness is lost. I'm not sure why, exactly. I suppose one factor is that the US version was on DV, on a television measuring 1920*1080. Seeing a film compressed to 640*360 tends to become a little disorienting somehow.
But that's all about cinematography. Which is rarely something you get in a zombiefilm. Leaving the story itself.
Particularly now that I'm building the perfect beast here, the premise of the film is arguably terrifying. The more research I do on the origins of diseases, the less incredible and more probable an extinction-level pandemic actually becomes. Bob Bakker's theory that the Maastrichtian extinction could have been caused by a raging disease always sounded logical enough to me, but I never really gave much thought to the possibility that the same thing could happen to homosapiens. If I had more greed than ethics, I could probably change the focus of Pandemic a little, change the title to Pestillence, and sell a billion copies to the christworshippers alone. It worked with Left Behind, after all.
One thing I wasn't thrilled about with this film was the plot device. I just went through a similar conversation with an evolutionary biologist, regarding Pandemic. That the last thing anyone needs is another story in which the Evil Scientists are responsible for Ragnarok. In the case of this film, the Evil Scientists are responsible for creating the virus, and the Retarded Activists are responsible for releasing it. Which, of course, is slightly more probable, here in reality. I have yet to meet one of these Animal Rights Pussies who can or will understand that homosapiens are animals too. Because, then, they'd either have to allow people to kill animals, or go out and prevent snakes from eating mice. For that matter, I'd like to see one of these 'tards scold everyone for killing bacteria one of these days; last I checked, Salmonella typhi was a lifeform.
Anyway: something else I couldn't tell from a DivXed 640*360 file was that this film was shot entirely on what appeared to be a CanonXL1S. That impressed me. It shouldn't have, really; I've seen decent films shot on 16mm which worked cinematically with enough postproduction. Still, seeing a MiniDV camcorder producing a commercial film was just cool. Holding out for Sony's HDCs to drop under a hundred thousand bucks might be unnecessary after all, if the same cassettes you can find at Target and BestBuy can be pixeldoubled up to something viewable in a cinema now.
I should mention the alternate endings to the film, which I hadn't seen before getting the disc. Most of them were just variations of the original. Characters live; characters die; the ending of Lucifer's Hammer is borrowed to hint that, somewhere out in the world, civilisation continues to exist. The 'radical alternative' was kinda neat, though. Impossible in function, of course [when the 'answer to infexion' was proposed in the alternate, Hunter I and pretty well simultaneously told each other 'that's not gonna work'], but interesting in that sorta TwilightZoned way. I'll leave that spoilerfree, though. If you're really that interested, it's probably worth it to you to get the disc. And, I'm sure someone out there has probably ripped and uploaded the whole segment already.
So. Presuming that we can call 28 Days Later a zombiefilm, it's another one to judge other films against, from the other side. By necessity, nothing will ever preclude Night of the Living Dead as the archetypal zombiefilm, but this might prove to have been the next transitional species, now that zombiefilms are starting to take themselves seriously enough to bother having an explanation behind them. Sure, Resident Evil had a budget and an explanation; but it was as serious a film as DeadAlive was.
There's a film I should watch again. Astonishingly enough, a virus transferring from an Ateles gumbi, recently discovered moving at six frames a second in the rainforest, is probably the least laughable excuse for zombification I've ever seen in a film. Pity Jackson didn't have the same effects team for that film that he had for Trilogy of the Rings ten years later.
Oh: one more amazing thing about 28 Days Later. It wasn't 'fixed'. The scenes of London as a ghost town were actually shot live. Somehow, these guys convinced the bobbies to clear out the streets for a few minutes at a time so they could film one guy wandering about. I don't know how they got that to happen. In my experience, getting an English cop to do anything is like getting Mark Fuhrman to hand out flyers for the Black Panthers. It just never works out very well. Strange.
More later....
--Gremlin