Writer, filmmaker, game designer
We are very pleased to announce that Commentarium.net, our new film & television website, is up and running. It’s going to be a great deal of fun – for more details about what kind of website we’re envisioning, you can read the first post, or you could skip straight ahead to our first article, Verena’s delightful review of Twilight: New Moon.
Enjoy, and spread the word! We’re counting on you.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I am glad to announce the beginning of a new webseries, dedicated to wonderful and enlightening reviews of computer RPGs, brought to you by the one and only, the magnificent, the wise, the amazingly admirable… RPGcat!
Yes, one of my secret projects has finally come to light. I mean, obviously I do nothing more than publish these, all the real work is done by RPGcat. But RPGcat has graciously allowed me to post these on my website, in exchange for tuna and chicken.
RPGcat says: “You must spread this video everywhere you can, and rate it as highly as your underdeveloped human mind allows you to! If you do not, you will be placing yourself at serious risk of spiritual disaster. Also I will bite Jonas.”
So please, if you enjoy this first episode, keep the cat from biting me, so that I can make more.
Enjoy!
Avatar is now officially the most successful movie of all time.
Now I just need to finish Phenomenon 32 so that I can write that long article that explains why this is a good thing, and why all the people who scream “racist!” the moment they see the film are pretty much racists themselves.
Wow. It has been a spectacular journey, watching this show go from crappy to almost decent to interesting to total failure. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a show crash and burn this badly. Even the last episode of Battlestar Galactica had redeeming features.
At least it made me feel better about bugs in Phenomenon 32. Even if it had a million of them, it would still be better storytelling than this. And that’s not arrogance. Random sentence generators can do better storytelling than this.
You know, this “Avatar is racist/Avatar is Dances with Wolves, but with aliens” shit is getting on my nerves so badly that it’s distracting me from finishing Phenomenon 32. Can no-one actually have a closer look at something and think before they speak? Basic logic and observation will show that the movie is pretty much the exact opposite. Have we all gotten so stupid that all we can recognize is basic patterns without actually thinking about content, about the way art can retell old stories with new meanings? Will we soon be burning copies of The Great Dictator because it’s a Nazi propaganda film?
The first thing I’ll do when I’m done with the game is write a long and detailed reply to this insane meme. It may not change anything, but someone has to speak out. This is just sick.
OK, so Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen really is the worst movie I have ever seen. Or at least in the bottom 3. It’s worse than Red Dawn, which is saying something. It’s racist, sexist, militarist, badly edited, badly written, badly acted, badly directed, boring and above all dumb.
More when Commentarium returns/finally starts up for real. (After the 15th, that is.)
Go see Avatar, for God’s sake. It’s excellent. It’s beautiful, thoughtful, complex, intelligent, touching, and a lot of other adjectives. It’s probably going to piss off a lot of stupid people, so ignore what they tell you and go see it.
Our friend Sebastian visited us yesterday, and there are two awesome things from last evening that I wanted to share:
The first is The Man from Earth, a movie written by Jerome Bixby (his last work, in fact, completed on his deathbed) and directed by Richard Schenkman. It’s a very simple story: a teacher quits his job and decides to move away, and his friends come to his house to confront him about it and/or to say goodbye. Eventually he reveals the reason he’s leaving: he is 14,000 years old and moves on every ten years or so when people start noticing that he doesn’t age.
How is that for an awesome concept? And it’s beautifully executed, too: the whole movie consists of a group of people sitting in a room and talking to each other, but it’s a million times more exciting and compelling than the lastest Michael Bay blockbuster. It may be set in one room, but it’s based on the power of storytelling, of imagination – and in your mind, you see grand vistas, high mountains and vast plains and the wanderings of one man throughout history. Michael Bay can never get special effects like that.
And it’s also deeply philosophical – in a real sense, not in the superficial sense of something like Battlestar Galactica: The Plan. It’s a movie that lingers in your mind and makes you think – about religion, about immortality, about history, about love. If you see this movie with an open mind, you will feel that you were part of something special.
In other words, I totally recommend it. Buy it on DVD, or if you can’t afford that, get it on BitTorrent (and later donate some money on the film’s homepage). You’ll be a better person for having seen this movie.
The second awesome thing of the evening was this excellent and wonderfully hilarious video, which you have probably already seen, but which I had completely missed :
Finally, we also recorded a bunch of lines for Sebastian’s character in Phenomenon 32, the German-Scottish mechanic Klaus McKie. That was cool too. *grin*
Alejandro Amenábar + one of the most important and tragic stories in human history = this movie.
I’ve always wanted to make a good movie about Hypatia and the Library of Alexandria. Looks like Amenábar got there first. If the movie is as good as the trailer, and I suspect it is, I won’t be jealous. Just happy to have a new movie in my top 10.
I don’t think I’ve been this excited about a movie since… I don’t know when.
Edit: OK, let me make this clearer. To me, the Library of Alexandria is the greatest wonder in human history, its destruction one of the greatest crimes. The Library is present in much of my thinking – Hypatia herself is referenced in the introduction to Phenomenon 32, and the TV series I would like to make one day is heavily inspired by it. So I would argue that, to me, this is actually the most important story in human history. I cannot put into words how much it means to me. And the film looks good, it looks really good. You have no idea how badly I want to see it.
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