Archive for August, 2009
Yeah. That's a lot of Helvetica.
I’ve studied design — I have a degree and everything — I’ve dabbled with typography (and with lettering), and, beneath my veneer of post-modernism and cyborg feminism, I’m a modernist at heart. So, I’ve always had a soft spot for Helvetica, the quintessential modernist typeface. Still, while its history and ubiquity are undoubtedly interesting, I wouldn’t have thought any typeface, even Helvetica, could generate enough material to fill a feature-length documentary. [...]
Tags: 2000s, Design, Documentary, Gary Hustwit, Helvetica
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My mother always talked to me a lot about the sky. She liked to watch the clouds in the day, and the stars at night. Especially the stars. We would play a game sometimes, a game called “What’s beyond the sky?” We would imagine darkness, or a blinding light, or something else that we didn’t know how to name.
John (Eric Close) shows that magic is all about misdirection. Misdirection and telekinesis.
In 1947, a military balloon, part of the top secret “Project Mogul”, crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. Out of this single incident grew an entire mythos of alien crash landings and abductions. And it’s around this incident that writer Leslie Bohem builds his generation spanning alien contact saga, Taken. [...]
Tags: 2000s, Alf Humphreys, Aliens, Catherine Dent, Dakota Fanning, Eric Close, Joel Gretsch, Leslie Bohem, Michael Moriarty, Roswell, Science Fiction, Steve Burton, Steven Spielberg, Tina Holmes, Tope Hooper
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John Oldman (David Lee Smith) ponders.
What if a man from the Upper Paleolithic survived until the present day?
What would he be like? Mortality is one of the defining characteristics of humanity; what would a man be like who will not die? A man who is fourteen thousand years old: he’s not only seen friends and lovers, wives and children come and go, he remembers the end of the last glacial period. He has, literally, forgotten more than any of us will ever know.
Jerome Bixby (1923–1998) was a science fiction writer, most famous for a handful of classic Trek episodes, including “Mirror, Mirror” which introduced the mirror universe, and for co-writing the story for Fantastic Voyage (1966). He began his last work, a screenplay called The Man from Earth, in the 1960s and finished it on his deathbed. Forty years is a long time to spend on a script, but it pays off in one of the most intelligent science fiction films I’ve seen. [...]
Tags: 2000s, Alexis Thorpe, Annika Peterson, David Lee Smith, Ellen Crawford, Jerome Bixby, John Billingsley, Neil Grieve, Richard Riehle, Richard Schenkman, Science Fiction, Tony Todd, William Katt
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Jack O'Neill (Richard Dean Anderson) admires a visual effect.
One year after the mission in Stargate (1994), the Abydos stargate is believed destroyed and the Earth stargate is inactive. However, when a group of aliens, lead by a man with glowing eyes, appear from the Earth stargate, Jack O’Neill (Richard Dean Anderson) is called back from retirement. He leads a team to Abydos, where he finds Daniel Jackson (Michael Shanks) alive and well, and with a new theory — the stargate can go to other places than just Abydos. In fact, says Jackson, there’s a network of stargates all over the galaxy. Just like in the feature, the only other scientist present, Captain Doctor Samantha Carter (Amanda Tapping), initially scoffs at Jackson’s theory, but he’s of course soon proved right, Abydos is attacked, and the stargate program is reactivated. SG-1 (Jack, Daniel, Samantha) heads to Chulak to rescue Daniel’s wife, Sha’re (Vaitiare Bandera), and Skaara (Alexis Cruz, the only actor reprising his role from the feature) and meet up with the “First Prime of Apophis”, Teal’c (Christopher Judge). [...]
Tags: 1990s, Alexis Cruz, Amanda Tapping, Brad Wright, Children of the Gods, Christopher Judge, Jonathan Glassner, Mario Azzopardi, Michael Shanks, Mili Avital, Richard Dean Anderson, Science Fiction, SG-1, Stargate, Vaitiare Bandera
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One of Van Gogh's lesser known works: Crazy Woman and Sunflowers.
There are good directors, there are bad directors, and then there are directors like Jesús “Jess” Franco. I like Franco, but the man is a cipher: his œuvre consists of a great many bad films and a few gems; he seems often to be technically incompetent, but he was good enough to A.D. for Orson Welles; his films are often blatantly pornographic and shamelessly exploitative, but a very few of them are honest-to-god works of genius. You can watch ten of his movies, and nine of them will be awful. Then, just when you’re about to dismiss him as a hack, the tenth will be a weird, surreal, seemingly-accidental masterpiece. I honestly can’t decide if he’s just a hack who happened to make a few good films from some twisted law of probability or if he’s a good director who only occasionally cared enough, was given enough money, and free enough reins to put in some effort. My relationship with Franco’s work is a constant search for those aberrations in his œuvre. [...]
Tags: 2000s, Carmen Montes, Exploitation, Fata Morgana, Jess Franco, Lesbian Horror, LGBT, Lina Romay, Snakewoman, Vampire, Vampyros Lesbos
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Lady Alexander (Luciana Paluzzi) moonlights as Jane's (Camille Keaton) hairstylist.
Before hitting the big time, such as it was, in Day of the Woman (Zarchi, 1978), Camille Keaton spent several years in Italy making low-budget movies such as this one, which has the lovely, giallo-tinged original title Extracts from the secret archives of a European capital’s police force.
The plot concerns three ostensibly British gentlemen and a girl (at least, the script seems to think it’s set in Britain, given the references to the Scotland Yard): Bill (Tony Isbert), a rich boy with a mommy complex; Joe (Máximo Valverde) and Fred (Giovanni Petrucci), a couple of working-class guys who are seemingly just out to scam some money from Bill; and Jane (Camille Keaton). The relationships between our heroic quartet is never made clear, except that all the boys seem to be infatuated with young Jane. And really, who can blame them? [...]
Tags: 1970s, Black Mass, Camille Keaton, Exploitation, Giallo, Giovanni Petrucci, Horror, Jess Franco, José Calvo, José Gutiérrez Maesso, Leonardo Martín, Luciana Paluzzi, Mario Bianchi, Máximo Valverde, Paul Müller, Riccardo Freda, Robert Hampton, Tony Isbert, Tragic Ceremony
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Countess Nadine Carody (Soledad Miranda): mysterious vampire, interpretive dancer.
Linda Westinghouse (Ewa Strömberg) is a lawyer who has a recurring dream about a mysterious brunette (Soledad Miranda, credited as Susann Korda) whom she later, on a date with her boyfriend, Omar (Andrés Monales), sees dancing in a nightclub. The dance involves Miranda taking off her clothes and putting them on a mannequin, which brings the doll to life. “You are very excited,” says Omar to Linda. Linda denies it, but in a session with her therapist, Dr. Steiner (Paul Müller) — who doodles distractedly in his notebook, which quite subtly sets up a recurring theme of masculine disregard for women’s experiences — we learn otherwise; Linda confesses that her dreams of Miranda have more than once brought her to orgasm. [...]
Tags: 1970s, Andrés Monales, Beni Cardoso, Dennis Price, Ewa Strömberg, Exploitation, Jaime Chávarri, Jess Franco, José Martínez Blanco, Lesbian Horror, LGBT, Manfred Hübler, Paul Müller, Siegfried Schwab, Soledad Miranda, Vampire, Vampyros Lesbos
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A comparison of the new and the classic interfaces.
It’s hard to believe now, when they’re known mostly for rushing out one half-finished Star Wars game after another (for one Christmas season after another), but in the late eighties and early nineties, LucasArts were, along with Sierra On-Line, the première adventure game company in the business. For a period of some fifteen years, beginning with Maniac Mansion, they released some of the best-regarded point-and-click adventures of the era. In 1990, at the peak of their powers, they released The Secret of Monkey Island. For a generation of gamers, Monkey Island‘s combination of fourth-wall-breaking comedy and clever puzzles became the standard against which all later adventure games were measured. [...]
Tags: 1990s, 2000s, Adventure, Alexandra Boyd, Dave Grossman, Dominic Armato, Earl Boen, Games, Leilani Jones, LucasArts, Point and Click, Ron Gilbert, Secret of Monkey Island, Tim Schafer, Xbox 360, Xbox Live Arcade
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Colonel Jack (Kurt Russell) and Action Jackson (James Spader) take in the atmosphere.
OK. Let’s get the opening confessions out of the way: I’m a Stargate SG-1 fan, and the last time I saw the feature was more than ten years ago, long before the series premièred. So, I won’t pretend I don’t see the series as the “real” version of the mythos, but I’ve tried to keep an open mind. [...]
Tags: 1990s, Action, Alexis Cruz, Brad Wright, Dean Devlin, Erick Avari, James Spader, Jaye Davidson, Kurt Russell, Michael Shanks, Mili Avital, Richard Dean Anderson, Roland Emmerich, Science Fiction, Stargate
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101: New Girl in Town
Rebecca Locke (Rachel Nichols): New girl in town.
Special Agent Alvarez is found murdered, apparently the work of a serial killer she and the rest of the violent crimes unit (VCU) had been hunting. Her replacement is Rebecca Locke (Rachel Nichols), fresh from a stint as an analyst in Washington, DC. Locke was abducted when she was 10 years old and escaped after several months of captivity. It’s later revealed that the head of the VCU, Virgil “Web” Webster, was instrumental in getting her accepted to the FBI, because he thinks her childhood experience will be useful in catching serial offenders. [...]
Tags: 2000s, Adam Baldwin, Allan Kroeker, Crime, Howard Gordon, Jane Espenson, Katie Finneran, Mutant Enemy, Procedural, Rachel Nichols, The Inside, Tim Minear
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