Well, we seem to have fallen into senescence. The Wordpress 2.5 upgrade seriously broke a number of things. And the more I’ve learned about Wordpress the more I’m capable of doing which means the more complex revitalizing this project has become and the less likely I am to do it.
Am currently looking for shortcuts. Stay tuned, although I guess I don’t blame you if you don’t.
Look. I respect gymnasts. I really do. Any sport that requires you to be flexible and beautiful and yet also requires you to be strong enough that your muscles threaten to pull your skeleton apart deserves respect, if not horror. But I’m not responsible for Gymkata. I have to imagine that anything I can possibly say about the sport pales in comparison to the damage this movie’s done.
Here’s the basic idea: Gymnastics expert Johnathon Cabot (played by World Champion gymnast Kurt Thomas, who looks like Christopher Robin with a mullet) is recruited by the United States government to travel to a backwater Eastern European nation called Doofania (note too self: look up real name) to compete in a deadly athletic competition called “The Game.” This “The Game” is not to be confused with Queen’s Game of Love:
Nor should it be confused with that other “The Game” the gangsters are always talking about:
No, this “The Game” is a deadly gauntlet of a race. Losers die, the winner’s nation gets the right to build a satellite sub-station in the country. Or open a Subway franchise. Something like that, starts with an ‘S.’ Anyway, it’s not important.
What is important is that Cabot gets to beat people up by jumping, leaping, and using conveniently placed urban-environment gymnastics equipment like this pommel horse:
In the process he reunites with his long lost Dad, falls in love with the beautiful (apparently adopted) daughter of the Emperor Premier of Doofania, and learns how to climb stairs while doing a headstand. I suppose we’re supposed to think gymnastics is a tough, serious sport. And I used to think that until I watched Kurt Thomas flirt-by-backflip strategy.
Gymkata has to be one of the stupidest movies of all time and you owe it to yourself not to watch it.
Q: Are we not men? A: We are… Daft Punk?
On a bizarre, alien planet, a quartet of blue-skinned rockers are getting everybody to get up off their butts and jam. In fact, their entire world is so entranced by their music that they don’t notice an oncoming alien invasion until it’s far too late. In minutes, the live audience is gassed and the band abducted. With a spacebound hero hot on their heels, the aliens take their captives to their home world - Earth - where they change the colors of their skins, fabricate Earthling memories, place them under the influence of mind control devices, and set them loose as a hit pop act called “The Crescendolls.”
Over at the not-safe-for-work Suicide Girls, George Romero is interviewed about his upcoming DVD, Diary of the Dead. Reading through the interview, this passage in particular caught my attention. Romero gets asked how he feels about the high-speed, super-strong zombies that populate recent movies like 28 Days Later and the re-make of Romero’s own Dawn of the Dead.
Oh boy, I don’t believe they can do it. I mean, the stuff I said in the film is exactly [what I think.] I think their ankles would snap. It doesn’t make sense to me. I used to get asked, after the Return of the Living Dead movies, “Well, how come your guys aren’t coming up out of graves?” Because no individual zombie has the strength to dig through all that mahogany, man. So there’s a little set of rules there, anyway, that keeps it, at least in my mind, somewhat reasonable.
I like zombie movies, but aside from Shaun of the Dead and Romero’s own Land of the Dead, I find I have very little use for modern zombie films. The reason for this can be summed up in two words: Fast zombies.
Of course, Romero has a good logical reason for why zombies shouldn’t be fast or particularly strong. They’re dead. Dead people shouldn’t really be faster or stronger than they were when they were alive. As for me, I have a storytelling reason for why I don’t like it. Fast zombies lose the very element that makes zombies uniquely scary among other movie monsters.
A super-fast, super-strong zombie has nothing to distinguish it from a vampire or a werewolf or any number of creatures put on film by Hollywood over the years. They’re all beings who can outrun you, outfight you, and who want to feast on your flesh (or, in the case of a vampire, blood).
A slow, shambling zombie, however, is uniquely scary because of what it means if it actually catches you. If one of the new breed of movie zombies - fast, strong, and eerily intelligent - grabs hold of you, it’s not a big deal. They’re faster than you. They’re stronger than you. For some reason, they’re just better than you. Being caught by a slow zombie, however, means one of two things. Either you have been caught in a situation in which defeat is inevitable or - more likely - you seriously screwed up.
In other words, when a slow zombie chows down on your brain, there are no real excuses. There’s a better than even chance that it’s your own fault.
Trace (I think that’s Trace) tries to adjust Regina Carrol’s makeup.And then suddenly there were more movie-mocking projects than you could shake Torgo’s stick at from the old Mystery Science Theater crew. The most recent version, Joel Hodgson’s Cinematic Titanic, is the first to return to the silhouettes-on-a-movie-screen format. I received my copy in the mail earlier this week, and the Elf and I sat down to watch it once we got the kid to bed.