Art & Criticism – Page 4

The Death of Stalin

Published on February 28, 2020Leave a comment

It took this clip on Reddit to prod me to go watch The Death of Stalin today. It only needed eleven seconds to convey the mood of the movie rather better than the awful official trailer above, which simultaneously tries to make it all more serious than it should be and leans too hard into nudging you in the side for the humourous bits. But this is Armando Iannucci bringing the same energy of the thick of It and In the Loop; eleven seconds of Zhukov dramatically taking of his coat works so much better.

Zhukov, with Khrushchev and rather nauseatingly, Beria, is the hero of the movie after all and gets that heroic entrance. They’re the ones who act, who get things done while the rest of the cast bumble around. These are all as venal and crooked and steeped in blood as the rest of them, but Iannucci still likes them the way he liked Malcolm Tucker. They’re fun, they get to do things and they get to curse.

This is just a romp of course, a mockery. Russia was right to ban it. It tramples right on the neo-Soviet myth making of Putin and his cretins, while it makes that whole gulag business look a jolly jape too. The victims are nameless, shot of screen; the executioners get to tell jokes. The villains at the heart of it all are humanised, the same way the asshole politicians of Iannucci’s early works were. And because it is a romp, don’t take its historical inaccuracies so seriously.

Is there anything more to it than just a spectacle piece for a group of good actors to get their teeth in? Not really.

Rocketship X-M — Sci-Fi Sundaze

Published on February 23, 2020Leave a comment

Trigger for when the fictional moon landing from the 1950 Rocketship X-M is less sexist than the actual moon landing programme a decade later.

Yes, that’s right. Unlike the real moon programme, he crew of the Rocketship X-M includes a female scientist next to the ex-air force pilots. Granted, she’s partially there for the romance subplot but it still struck me. She’s treated as one of the crew, just as professional as the others in a way that some much later, ‘better’ movies couldn’t do.

Rocketship X-M was made as a cheap cash-in on a more prestigious film on the same subject that also came out in 1950: Destination Moon. This was when you could still film a movie in eighteen days to take advantage that another project had been delayed by a month. It’s one of those movies I’ve read about a long time before I saw it today, back in the day when if your local videostore didn’t have it, you could only read about it in science fiction encyclopedias from the library. I thought I knew what to expect, just some shlocky, badly acted movie only relevant because it was arguably the first movie of the 1950ties sci-fi boom.

It was better than that though. There’s an earnestness to it that’s unexpected in a b-movie. There are no monsters, no things men wasn’t meant to know, but a desire to get the science right. It actually starts with a long infodump disguised as a press conference explaining how the ship will get to the Moon from the Earth and it sort of get things right? They actually use a multistage rocket and talk about using the Earth’s orbital spin to give them enough velocity to get to the Moon in 48 hours. A pity then that once the journey is underway, they run into a meteor storm and hear them whoosing past them with the deep rumbling sound you’d expect from a bunch of rocks travelling in a vacuum. There’s a fair bit of bad or outdated science like that in this movie, but it doesn’t really matter. At least it is trying to get it, if not right, at least plausible.

We can’t have a space movie without something going wrong on the movie so the ship promptly develops engine troubles, which they manage to fix, but unfortunately once it starts to accelerate the crew gets knocked unconscious and they managed to miss the Moon and end up on …. Mars. Not exactly plausible, but bear with it. This is of course a pre-Viking Mars, still twentysix years in this movie’s future, so it has an almost breathable atmosphere where you don’t need a real space suit. And of course it has an ancient, now vanished civilisation, but no Barsoom style planetary adventures here.

No, the reason there is no more ancient Martian civilisation is because it destroyed itself in a nuclear war. Even seventy years later, the scene in which the characters realise that is gripping, even with the obvious matte painting backgrounds and red filter landscape. It gets a bit more hokey once they run into the degraded into barbarity survivors and most of the crew dies at their hands. Those that survive reach the ship and make the trip back to Earth, only to crash at the very end. The movie ends with the main scientist behind the project being asked how he feels now Rocketshipp X-M proved a failure. His answer is that it isn’t and that they’re already working on the X-M 2.

Rocketship X-M then, is more of a science fiction than a sci-fi movie, perhaps the first to take the idea of space travel seriously as more than just a way to get the heroes to the scene of the action. And it only existed because George Pal was a bit behind on his movie…

Subtle and not so subtle horniness — Friday Funnies

Published on February 21, 2020Leave a comment

Sometimes you can tell from a throwaway panel like this what really gets the mangaka out of bed each day:

Neko no Otera no Chion-san: two girls in working trousers on their knees in a shed seen from the rear only their butts in shot

It is clear from the shot (and the many similar shots throughout this series) that Ojiro Makoto likes her butts. Some extra time and care has been taken to render those buttocks. Of course the same is true for roughly 100 percent of cartoonists and their particular fetishes, but what I like about this is how mundane Ojiro makes it. This is the third panel of the first page of the twelfth chapter of Neko no Otera no Chion-san, a manga about a teenage boy who moves to live with his distant, slightly older cousin and grandma. While he’s the protagonist, he’s not in the scene. Instead the page opens with a shot of cardboard boxes filled with crap, left over cleaning material and the like before the second panel shows a crowded garden shed, more a storage unit than anything else, with two girls dressed in typical work clothing talking about cleaning it. The final panel then, the one above, is a logical progression, rather than a staged cheesecake shot. There’s no posing, the clothing conceals as much as it highlights and Chion and Hiruma are pretty rather than beautiful. An everyday sort of horniness.

Azur Lane Slow Ahead: a 4-koma gag strip interrupted by a cheesecake drawing

Compare and contrast with a typical chapter from Hori no Su’s Azur Lane 4-koma: Slow ahead, a gag strip where every page has a bit of cheesecake on it like this. Unlike in Chion-san, the fan service is strong in this one, your eyes immediately drawn to that intrusive panel of Cygnet posing. It’s not bad, but it interrupts the flow of the comic. Cygnet both poses and is dressed for fan service, thighs and breasts on prominent display. For what it is, basically an advert for the Azur Lane game, very much a waifu collector game, it’s not bad, but it lacks the subtlety of Chion-san. And for me, that makes the latter all the more stronger. Because ultimately Neko no Otera no Chion-san is about a teenage boy moving in with his attractive, not that much older cousin, that sort of everyday horniness fits the mood of the series far more than an intrusive shot like the above would, even if it’s nominally “sexier”.

It Came from Outer Space — Sci-Fi Sundaze

Published on February 16, 2020Leave a comment

The trailer for It Came from Outer Space really wanted to let you know how awesome its 3-D effects are:

Pity that the version I watched missed them. What remains is a plodding, dull, dragging story that takes far too long to get to the conclusion.

A meteor falls to Earth near Sandy Hook, Arizona and a local amateur astronomer and his school teacher fiancee get their neighbour to take his helicopter to take a look at it. He climbs into the crater and discovers it’s actually a crashed space ship, but before he can show it to the other two the crater collapses and the ship vanishes underground. Already tought of as a bit of a heads in the clouds egghead, nobody believes him, certainly not the local sherrif. But then people start disappearing, some coming back but not entirely themselves. When the astronomer’s fiancee disappears too, the sheriff organises a posse to capture or kill the aliens. Meanwhile our astronomer hero himself has managed to make contact with the aliens and realises they are not hostile, just ‘borrowed’ the towns people to help them make repairs to the ship. The climax is a race against time as the posse closes in and the astronomer tries to stop them long enough for the aliens to get away.

This could’ve just as well been told as an half hour Outer Limits or Twilight Zone episode, instead of an eighty minute movie. There’s too little plot for too much time and the suspense doesn’t hold up for me. I do like that the aliens here are mostly benign, if rather impolite to kidnap and then duplicate people without consent. You can’t argue the paranoid sheriff is entirely in the wrong to mistrust their motives. This being based on a Ray Bradbury idea I have the feeling that the moral is supposed to be that humanity has to grow up before being able to actually meet other civilisations, but the aliens didn’t cover themselves in glory either.

It Came from Outer Space: the astronomer hero as seen through the eye of the alien

Shot in black and white in 1953, based on an idea of Ray Bradbury, this is at least a good looking movie. Not sure how much difference the 3-D effects would’ve made, but in the 2-D version they are sparse. We get shots of the ship crashing and leaving, but the most ambitious scene is when the astronomer finally comes face to face with an actual alien, rather than an alien possessed human. We first get a shot of him through the alien’s eye, then slowly his body is revealed to the astronomer and us. While it looks a bit naff, it’s at least an attempt at a non-human looking alien.

It Came from Outer Space can be seen as part of that 1950ties wave of Cold War paranoia sci-fi movies, but doesn’t fit neatly in it. The aliens do not kill or hurt anybody, are ultimately benign and not here to take over. They just want to go home.

Sci-Fi Sundaze is an attempt to get me to watch more classic science fiction movies and blog about them. Sci-fi is a bit of a curse word in echt-fandom circles of course, something Forry Ackerman couldn’t have expected when he coined it to give science fiction a cool new name ala hi-fi. Sci-fi is shlock, all the bad stuff ‘we’ left behind in the pulps, proof that media sf could never catch up to the written stuff. That’s all bollocks of course.

What I’m interested in is taking a closer look at three long maligned waves of sci-fi schlock. First, like with this entry, that whole flood of quickly and cheaply made 1950ties science fiction thrillers, the purest expression of ‘sci-fi’. Second, there are the pre-Star Wars seventies dystopias like Rollerball or Logan’s Run. Sometimes these had little more going for them than awesome sets, but it’s still worth looking closer at them. Finally, there’s the eighties science fiction boom. Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Alien had made science fiction a blockbuster genre and boy were people ready to cash in. So let’s look at all the Star Wars ripoffs, the nuclear war armageddon Mad Max clones, all the sci-fi horror movies winking at Aliens. These are the movies I’d get from the videoshop once I saw all the good sf movies.

Aiura: the horny slice of moe anime

Published on November 23, 2019Leave a comment

After a hi-energy opening Aiura proper opens with a few lovely landscape shots, but it’s the first look at one of the protagonists that set the mood for the rest of the show:

Aiura: this anime really loves thighs

Horny.

Broadcast in 2013, Aiura is a short length (5:30 minutes) anime series, based on a four panel gag manga, about three high school friends hanging out and having meaningless conversations with each other. Just another slice of moe series, but for its running time. Short as it is, it’s even shorter than its runtime suggests. It has a minute long opening, a minute and a half long ending, another ending halfway through the episode which eats up another twenty seconds or so. In all, there’s only two and a half minutes for the actual show. The quality of those two and a half minutes though… For what’s largely a throwaway anime, this is really well done. The backgrounds are brilliant, the character designs are cute and the animation is very well done.

Aiura: this anime really loves thighs. And butts.

Four panel gag mangas are somewhat difficult to translate to anime, lacking an ongoing plot as they do. When done on autopilot, you just get a series of setup/setup/punch line/reaction jokes where you can almost see the panel borders. You need something to punch it up to make it work in anime. What Aiura brings is horniness. The original manga is significantly less horny than the anime. There’s little room in a four panel, top to bottom, usually cramped gag strip like this for the sort of shot as shown above after all, even had the mangaka been interesting in doing so.

The horny lens through which the anime has adapted Aiura helps keep it interesting. This could all have been static shots of high school girls talking to each other. Instead, we get shots like this, with one of the girls taking off her wet sock, lovely animated. You can see the animator likes their thighs, but the camera doesn’t leer nor do you have any of the bankrupt boob jokes you’d usually see in slice of moe series. All those slightly horny shots keep you interested while the jokes are being told.