Gay for Batman

Saw "The Dark Knight" yesterday morning... went to an 11:20am Sunday morning showing to avoid the crowds, and it worked.

This movie is worth the hype. Heath Ledger's portrayal of The Joker is worth the hype.

Don't read about it, don't spoil anything for yourself, just go see it.

It's the only movie I've ever considered seeing a second time in theaters.

Step 1: Shave Eyebrows

Step 2: Buy $3000 worth of Doepfer Modules.



Step 3: ...

Step 4: Profit!!!

If I sound bitchy, I'm just jealous of that modular synth setup. *drool*

Audiosurfin' Some More

Lazy, lazy, lazy, lazy, lazy...


Audiosurf - Haujobb: Faith in Chaos from mtodead on Vimeo.

Haujobb's "Faith in Chaos" from Vertical Theory. I wanted to post a video of waaay back when I first got Audiosurf, but the video quality on YouTube was so crappy it wasn't worth it.


Update 07/26/09 - As you can see Vimeo pulled the videos a while back. Apparently Audiosurf videos got so popular that Vimeo instituted a new rule: No videos of video games. If popularity is detrimental to your business, doesn't that mean the business model is a failure?

Audiosurfin'

Bird of Prey by Destroid. Destroid is Daniel Myer's (from Haujobb) other band.

Audiosurf - Destroid: Bird of Prey from mtodead on Vimeo.

Pusher Elite Mode.
At the very end I fill up my slots with 24 reds, getting the most points possible in a single match and winning the "Big Kahuna" achievement.

Pusher gets a 100% bonus when your match clears the board, so you may notice that I pass up some good blocks waiting for high value clusters to disappear.

White blocks are an automatic 2000 points, so they're highly desirable, but they don't disappear, they have to fall down the bottom, so collecting them at the wrong time can block your board. Reds are worth the most points, then yellows, greens, blues and purples. Unless there's a cluster of blues and purples that I clear as soon as I collect, I'm hitting the blues and purples by mistake. Sometimes I don't even realize I have them on my board for a few seconds - D'OH!

Music is Bird of Prey by Destroid from their album Loudspeaker. Buy it!

(For those so inclined, you can see what I'm talking about in my last post regarding how horrible YouTube makes this shit look here. I even tried doing the 11 minute trick, and while the vid quality is slightly better than the other YouTube vids I've posted, it's still shit.)


Update 07/26/09 - As you can see Vimeo pulled the videos a while back. Apparently Audiosurf videos got so popular that Vimeo instituted a new rule: No videos of video games. If popularity is detrimental to your business, doesn't that mean the business model is a failure?

Terror EBM - Again

This past weekend I felt like Audiosurf'ing some Terror EBM a.k.a Hellektro a.k.a. Aggrotech. Problem is, the only thing I own in that style is Hocico's Signo de Aberracion, which is awesome and probably one of the best albums of the genre - even if half of it is pseudo-Classical instrumental filler.

So I hear all the kids are doing this new thing called downloading music.

Wait, I mean - LEGALLY!!!

Who the fuck would've thought? I own a Mac, so I fire up the iTunes store and look around. But there's a problem with iTunes... last time I checked, Audiosurf didn't like iTunes's .AAC format, and the workaround was to take your .AAC files downloaded from iTunes and burn it to an audio CD and then rip the audio to .mp3.... no. No. NO. Fuck THAT!!!

I just so happened to have been on Amazon.com listening to 30 second previews of songs on each album anyways, (I swear to god once upon a time I was able to listen to 30 second previews on iTunes but I can't seem to do it now... WTF?)* and I pulled my head out of my ass just long enough to realize Amazon sells music downloads as well!

It turns out Amazon's downloads are already in mp3 format, plus the entire albums are consistently $1 cheaper than iTunes. So I spent the next few hours just previewing tracks of pretty much everything, using amazon's recommended shit to check out new bands I'd never heard of. Originally, I thought I'd end up getting something by Psyclon 9 and Dawn of Ashes, but it turns out I don't really like either band all that much.

In the end, I bought Unter Null's The Failure Epiphany and The Retrosic's Nightcrawler. After playing in Audiosurf for a while, I decided it would be fun to record some videos and post them on YouTube.

YouTube sucks.

Seriously, it makes good looking, well compressed video look like dick. I can record something where the track bounces and YouTube's junk compression quality just kills it. Part of the problem, I guess, is that YouTube displays things at 425x318, but always compresses to 320x240, meaning your video is always "stretched," making it look blocky and craptastic. Now, this doesn't matter for live action shots, it seems, but computer generated stuff tends to come off looking like shit.

So I switched, to Vimeo. I see a lot of other Audiosurf videos posted there, as well as various synthesizer videos over at MatrixSynth (linked to the right). I've never noticed Vimeo videos taking longer to load than YouTube videos, and the picture quality is much better.

So without further adieu - TERROR!!!


Audiosurf - Destroy Me from mtodead on Vimeo.


Audiosurf - Perrey & Kingsley from mtodead on Vimeo.

Postscript: I've been reading up on tricks to get better picture quality on YouTube, and apparently you have to cheat it and make your video 11 minutes long and encode to .flv using some obscure DOS-type utility... blah blah blah. No thanks.

Oh, and apparently there's also this, but I have no idea how they managed to do that.

*Edit: I finally figured out how to do this - you just double click on the song title for a preview. I thought this would've put it in my shopping cart. DOH!!!

Update 07/26/09 - As you can see Vimeo pulled the videos a while back. Apparently Audiosurf videos got so popular that Vimeo instituted a new rule: No videos of video games. If popularity is detrimental to your business, doesn't that mean the business model is a failure?

Of Wendigos and Waterways...

Almost done cleaning off the DVR - granted there were a handful of things that I just said "Fuck it, I'm never going to watch this," and deleted. For example, Eaten Alive (crocodiles? blah.) and The Crazies (Sorry George, but outside the first three "Dead" films, your track record isn't so good).

Ravenous - I had been meaning to see this movie since it came out in 1999, but 1999 - 2005 was when I was in college and didn't really watch many new movies (nor listened to many new CDs). It takes place right after the Mexican-American War, and the protagonist is an American soldier who chose to lie down and play dead rather than fight. As luck would have it, the Mexican soldiers put him on the bottom of a pile of dead Americans at just the right angle that a whole bunch of blood poured directly into his mouth and down his throat. The premise of this movie is that cannibalism makes one supernaturally strong, albeit constantly hungry. The lead character crawls out from under the bodies and singlehandedly captures a Mexican fort. He is honored as a hero at first, but then when he tells his superiors that he captured the fort by playing dead, they decide he's a worthless coward and send him to a remote outpost in Northern California.

The idea that cannibalism = super strength is apparently based off the Native American legend of the Wendigo. In Ravenous, when someone eats another person, they become a Wendigo. They get supernatural strength and are nearly impossible to kill, but always crave human flesh and are never satiated. As luck would have it, the small Californian outpost ends up entangled with another Wendigo, and whereas the protagonist quit eating all meat after his ordeal in the war, this new Wendigo revels in the power derived from eating human flesh. Sure enough, there's only one way to stop the bad guy, and that's to eat more people!

Overall, this movie was pretty good, though for some reason I expected it to be gorier than it actually was. I should also note that the bouncy main theme music was actually used in some Seat Belt PSA they used to play all the time on the Milwaukee buses between 2003 and 2005. Let's see, a PSA about the importance of buckling your child's seat belt properly, what music should we use? I know, how about the theme music from that movie about Pre-Civil War soldiers eating each other!

Wendigo - Larry Fessenden is awesome. He directed this movie and a vampire movie called Habit. Both are low budget indie flicks I caught on IFC. In Habit, a New Yorker goes through a midlife crises, breaks up with his longtime live-in girlfriend to "see other people," and soon finds himself involved with an alluring, enigmatic woman who knows how to get fucking freaky. However, the more time the protagonist spends around her, the sicker and weaker he seems to get. Could she be draining the life out of him? Habit is awesome because the majority of the movie is shot in the areas of New York City that one doesn't usually see in film and on TV. The plot is a little slow, but the interaction between the characters is very engaging.

Wendigo came out after Habit, and is about a family of New Yorkers getting away in the country for a weekend. The main character is their son, who is played by the youngest Malcolm in the Middle urchin before the sitcom hit big. The mother is a psychiatrist and the father is a photographer, so the impetus behind the plot is urban professionals versus the local with a chip on his shoulder. Now this ain't Deliverance or Calvaire, all but one of the locals in this movie are just nice, normal people. It's this one guy, Otis, whom the family butts heads with. The movie starts out with the family hitting a deer in the road. Otis and his two friends were hunting that deer, and when it turns out the deer's antlers got busted in the collision, Otis holds it against the father, who was driving the car. Otis's two friends just laugh it off like normal people, but the dad starts seeing Otis hanging around everywhere they go. Speaking of the dad, the dad in this movie is the single best dad in any movie - ever. He's not abusive in anyway, he's not mean to his son, yet he doesn't come off as sappy and fake. He ends up being the most sympathetic character in the movie.

Oh, did I mention there's a Wendigo in this movie too? In this movie, the Wendigo is simply a spirit that eats and never stops eating. It's also the major flaw in this movie. Really, this movie doesn't need a Wendigo for anything to happen, and the Wendigo itself reminds me of the "Jackolope" sketches from when America's Funniest Home Videos first came out (why do I know this?!!). On the other hand, I guess if this movie didn't have a Wendigo, it wouldn't have been tagged as "horror" and I probably would've never watched it.

Tideland - I loves me some Terry Gilliam. Every movie up until The Brothers Grimm is just pure gold. I grew up on Time Bandits and the Adventures of Baron Munchausen. In High School, I saw 12 Monkeys, connected it with TB and AotBM and made it a point to see Brazil and The Fisher King. When Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas came out, I convinced my mother to take me and my younger sister to see it. Every one of those movies - PURE GOLD. Then he tried to make a Don Quixote movie, ran out of money, did the Brothers Grimm and then Tideland.

When it first came out, people hated Tideland. HATED IT. It's based off a novel, which is apparently one of those novels that is quirky just for the sake of being quirky. The protagonist is a little girl whose heroin addict parents both die, leaving her to fend for herself in a dilapidated house in the middle of rural nowhere. The only people she has contact with are the creepy neighbors, a witch-like sister and a retarded, epileptic brother. The title comes from the fact that the brother likes to pretend he's a captain on a submarine, that the grassy fields are the ocean, and a nearby train is a shark.

Bad things about the movie: 1) Remember the annoying child actress from Silent Hill? Yeah, now you get to see her do a Southern Accent for two hours. 2) I think the reason why people HATED this movie is because a type of "romance" develops between the main character and the (grown up) retarded brother. The last half hour you're just filled with dread that any minute he's going to molest her or something. I mean, it wouldn't be that out of place in a movie that BEGINS with the little girl cooking heroin and shooting it into her father. I've met people who didn't like The Professional because they felt there were undertones of a romantic relationship between Leon and the girl. In Tideland, there are no undertones, they declare their love for one another and imagine themselves married. It's really fucking disturbing.

There were many points during this film that I wanted to just stop it and turn it off. It's long, there's a sense of despair, you expect the absolute worst to happen - Requiem for a Dream was great, but I don't really want to see that happen to an eleven-year-old girl.

But the most fucked up thing?

When it was over, I was glad I watched it. It's stomach churning while you watch it, but afterward, I thought to myself, it's another dark fantasy by Terry Gilliam - just as Time Bandits was a dark fantasy, just as Brazil was a dark fantasy, etc. Some of his movies have happy endings, others don't. Maybe the source material wasn't exactly the best thing to adapt, and maybe this would be Gilliam's worst movie had he never done The Brothers Grimm, but even a bad Gilliam movie is better than a lot of other movies out there.

So there, I'm the only Tideland defender I've ever read.