-
after all
2006-07-28 10:26:06
I think "Return of the Living Dead" is still my favorite 'zombie' movie. It's just so hilarious, and yet, the acting is so great it doesn't seem like it's intentional comedy. I mean, sure, the teenagers are all fake as crap, especially the 'goth' girl with her "Do you ever fantasize...about being killed...?" That entire little group makes me roll my eyes, they're too openly stereotypical - the black guy with the jewelry (who's cute, but clearly a token among the white cast), the good girl who talks like a barbie but is so sweet it's okay (yeah, right), the punk (who, admittedly, does play his role well when it comes to his car - "I don't have any windows, I busted them!" - love that line, very incharacter and funny). They're all too dumb.
BUT!!! Frank is wonderful. I love that man. I love the way he screams, he overreacts constantly, but I *know* men like that. You can almost hear him choking up during half his linees. Maybe that's what critics mean when they complain about acting being "over the top" but it seems a lot more realistic to me than any manufactured screaming and crap. He *moans* and you can hear the grimace. His visual acting is great and all, but he'd make a wonderful voice actor. Honestly, I know of no other movie where just the audio makes me grin. And the kid is pretty good, too. I love his "Rigormortis...! What do you *mean* rigormortis??" Seriously, after watching the newer "Dawn of the Dead" remake, and the comedic wanna-be-horror "Shaun of the Dead," this movie is refreshing.
It's sad that the modern movies take themselves so seriously. They use so much gore and screaming and flashy explosions, that they miss out on the good old fashioned feel of movies. It's not just a difference between comedy and horror. "Dawn of the Dead" tried to be cute and funny when it showed the gang playing around in the mall - note the old man trying on high heels. But it didn't come off cute. It came off stupid and embarrassing. The scares weren't scary, either. The zombie baby was nice and dark and its eyes were pretty and all, but mostly it just made me raise an eyebrow. Are we supposed to feel bad for the baby? Or the people who kill it? Or the world where even babies become zombies? Or is it supposed to be scary somehow? I don't see the point of that scene (mini-storyline) at all. It had no emotion attached, and while I did like the wife being all tied up and snapping with her teeth (she hissed well), there was no emotion in the sequence. And then they make the emotionless 'filler' scene worse by following it immediately with a cliche speech by the token black man (the 'father' clearly doesn't count since he disappears with the wife right away). I'd swear they stole that right from that shark movie (Deep Blue? I can't remember the name, but it was 'smart' sharks attacking an underwater lab). Except the smart-shark movie was just copying a dozen other movies where the token black man plays preacher to the poor bestricken group.
Bottom line is that I didn't care about anyone in that movie. The heroine was a bossy loudmouth who got annoying long before she started stealing every scene to lecture and order the men around. From minute one in the hospital, she could have been anyone - then her immediate "my husband just had an artery bitten open and now he's screaming crazy so I better grab my car keys" - to her "sure he's going to become a zombie and eat us, but you can't kill him" - and the later "I don't want to die here even though everyone dies eventually and going out there will be a much quicker death than staying put". She's stupid and uninteresting and not even useful as a sex object (the shower scene was nice and gratuitous, but the slut-blonde character was the sexy one). I might have felt a little sorry for the Russian (?) pregnant woman, but she disappeared from the screen so fast I didn't get to know her, let alone get to form an emotional attachment to her. She could have been a pregnant dog and I would have had the same emotionless response to her plight. [Note: I dislike dogs, so mneh.] The main guy was kind of witty and geeky in a "I'm likable and in control without being in your face about it" way. But I didn't feel bad when he makes his revelation at the dock in the end. I don't really care one way or the other. He ruined his likability when they pulled that melodramatic "Being a father...I think that's the job I was best at..." line. My eyes are rolling just thinking about it. From the first scene to the last, the only person I slightly felt for was Andy and that's only because he was cute from a distance and his end was so pointless you have to feel that they all might as well die now because if they don't they'll trip on a rug eventually and choke to death or something equally stupid and pointless. Once I saw the "home video" of Andy in the extras, I didn't really feel sorry for him anymore. The whole "Sniping's out. It's like that hobbit dragon thing, once you shoot one of them, two more show up." That's crap. The creators know it and I know and used-to-be-likable Andy knows it. I can't feel sorry for a guy who spends over a month playing Holiwood squares and chess when he could have taken out 200+ zombies per hour (according to him). Even if there were a few hundred thousand out there eventually, he could have cut it down a *lot* by the time they sent the food over. And the escape would have gone much smoother with less zombies. The fact that he didn't even try proves he deserves to die. Lazy idiot. Mneh. I stopped liking him after I found out they wrote his character as secretly being stupid and deserving of a pointless death for wasting so much time on nothing.
Another poorly voiced movie... I've been watching (or rather listening) to "The Village" lately, as well, and that movie just makes me sad. The acting is awful from start to finish. It's not because they aren't sober enough to read the tongue-twisting conjunction-missing boring-as-fuck lines Shyamalan wrote for them. No, it's because they lack any and all realistic intonations in their voices. I won't even touch on their facial expressions. Just the voices alone make me wonder how they ever got famous. I'm an old Aliens fan, so I *know* Sigourney can do better than that. o.O
Night of the Living Dead has them both beat as far as the voice acting goes. I think Frank alone could carry the movie (he's the heavyset man who takes the 'nice but oh-so-painful way out). The bug-eyed owner of the mortuary is a close second, though. His first reaction to the severed arm made me love him for life. That's quality acting right there. Why can't newer movies have reactions that seem even half as real as the ones in this "over the top" comedy-horror flick? And why isn't 'Frank' in more movies? I need to look him up. He's just so damn likable. [Note: I mean that in a purely platonic way. I'm a fangirl, sure, but I don't lust after heavy old men no matter how much I adore their screaming/moaning/yelling abilities.]
Ah...and I like the soundtrack, too. I really, really want to do a trailer using this movie. I remember I made a copy of the trailers when I first got the movie so I could use it, but I don't make trailers. I don't even watch them usually. It's just the idea of seeing anime turned into a zombie story. It would be so much fun. ^_^;
I'm renting the original 'of the dead' quartet - Night, Dawn, Day, Land. I don't think I'll like any of them, but it'll be interesting to see how the genre started. I didn't even know the original Night of the Living Dead was in black and white. Weird. I'm looking forward to finding out if zombies really do look scarier in black and white. Modern zombies just look bloody and gory. Old zombies had much more style. ;p -
lala bandwidth
2006-07-27 02:58:33
So I've been browsing the forum and putting off writing in between turning Elastoids into cards and stocking up on Laser Cannons while listening to The Village on my portable dvd player (only have one tv for the playstation). And I read some journals - at least two people have commented on bandwidth in the last hour or so. I got curious and checked my own. I'm not sure if the other two people were using their total bandwidth for the year, but I don't like what I get when I compare the amount to my own stats. I went through a lot of trouble to take a bunch of my crappier vids down when we first got that bandwidth counter. I have too many bad videos that are still inexplicably being downloaded each month. It took forever to get that little mess of them removed from local last time. Yet - if I'm comparing stats the right way, I'm still sucking an outrageous amount of bandwidth on old videos.
Example: my very old - done with screwed up aspect ratio that remains tiny even at fullscreen, complete with fuzz despite the lack of resizing, little to no editing, and a *Dub* Sailor moon song - YYH Kuwabara + Yukina amv is still being downloaded. 8gigs for a 20-something mb video? Why are people downloading that? It was one of my first amvs - I think there were 11 in total, all made in the same day, telling you how thrown together they were. It looks awful, is edited even worse, and the vid description doesn't even sell the video in a way that encourages downloads. I don't wanna remove *all* the vids from my original set, because they stand to show that I have improved over time, at least as far as capture quality goes. But I don't want them being downloaded by that many people. Ew. I have new vids with pretty quality and average editing that don't take up that much bandwidth. It's like someone taking their welfare check, kindly provided by working people, and wasting the money on a broken down lawnmower - even though they don't have a lawn and the mower has weeds growing out of the engine. Sure, the owner of the broken down lawnmower might benefit, but it's still gross. Yech.
I've gone down a lot in the last year, partly due to having deleted the old vids that were getting the most (inexplicable) downloads, partly to the fact that I'm not making jack these days. It still seems like a lot when I see the remaining really-old-crap-vids continuing to suck bandwidth despite their low star score, low-to-average op scores, and poorly written vid descriptions. It's certainly not word of mouth making people download those things. Donation time will roll around soon and we still don't have a "delete local" option that lets you remove videos so you can host them on your own website instead of on the org. I've tried that - they turn you down if you're not planning to replace the video. I dislike having to tell the same old line over and over again when it's painfully clear I haven't 'remastered' any of the vids I've had taken down. Well, I remade one of them, but I still didn't replace the original on local. I just moved them to alternate hosting so they weren't attributing to my org bandwidth count. We should be allowed, if not encouraged, to host our own videos if we want to. I didn't have a site when I uploaded those crappers, but I have one now. If they require a replacement in order to delete the local copy, the direct link should suffice. It's like they want you to make up some story, even though both they and I know it's crap, just as a technicality. Makes my nose twitch. Gr.
Comparisons -
July 2005 = 160gigs
July 2006 = 70gigs
Now, July wasn't my biggest month last year, either. Still, looking at the download stats, it's the older vids that are sucking up the most, not the newer ones. You wouldnt' think there were enough bored people on the org to just keep downloading those things. This isn't you-tub, you know? We're supposed to be picky about what we watch here. I don't mind a few crappers taking, say, 500mbs each (since they're tiny files to begin with). But 10+ gigs is ridiculous. You shouldn't download everything you see - those stars and op scores do account for something when there's a whole bunch of them and they're really low. Maybe I should make that a motto and put it on those old vid descriptions, or just a capslocked DON'T DOWNLOAD THIS CRAPPY AMV. It would be quicker than having to do another mess of deletion requests. ;p -
Re: QC & shoujo ai anime
2006-07-23 15:34:51
I've been running across a lot more girl/girl anime descriptions lately. I'm still trying to catch up with the known shounen ai anime, so I haven't had a chance to look up the shoujo ai ones (soft yuri - I don't think they're explicit anime). One that's definitely girl/girl is Strawberry Panic. Unless they're really misrepresenting the anime, the main character has a pretty straightforward crush on one of her female classmates.
I *know* there are a lot more that have been getting notice lately. I just don't have any shoujo ai rec websites I check regularly. I don't even know where to look. ^_^;
A few years ago I heard that it was nearly impossible to find shoujo ai - not yuri, which can be found in just about any het hentai anime, since it's all for the guys, anyway - but actual romantic girl/girl stories. Utena, from what I've been told and what few dvds I've rented, actually has a lot more het pairings than it does shoujo ai romance. I tend to use Sailor Moon as my premiere shoujo ai anime - only one real pairing in it, and they're minor characters, but they're open and it's a sweet romantic pairing. It gets better in Stars.
I remember reading a description about two best friends who grew up together and end up finding their relationship is different from what they thought (romantic). But I can't remember the name of it since I never got around to finding and watching the show. >.<
Loveless has a shoujo ai pairing in it. Very straightforward, too. They're romantic, angsty, and sweet. And I didn't even get squicked out when they kissed. ^_^;; I like unconventional romances, but I still tend to get uneasy at two girls kissing each other. It has to be a really romantic pairing for it not to bother me. The girls in Loveless are like that - I ended up liking them, so I didn't mind that they were...er...tactile in their affections. It's a really short shounen ai anime, so it's neat that they slipped some shoujo ai in there, too.
.-.
The vid idea -
I've been watching a lot of newish shounen ai series lately, so that's the 'lesser known' anime I was thinking of using. A lot of the background details in the song - like the school, the 'jocks', the 'cheerleader', the setting and stuff - those lines gave me perfect matches right away. I'd need to do a little cut and paste to get the main character in the scenes, but it would fit the lyrics *so* well. ;p
I actually thought it would be fun to take a well known 'straight' character and put him into the story, using the more unknown anime to create the story around him. I thought about Sasuke (Naruto) for a while - just for the excuse to make Sakura the 'dike' in the story. ;p She does have that old friendship/rivalry thing with Ino, and it would be funny to twist the scenes of her pounding on Naruto into her torturing Sasuke instead. Plus the whole idea of Sasuke secretly being into S&M is just laughworthy. But that was my first fangirl idea for a lead role in the vid, screwing with a well-loved 'straight' guy.
Another guy that jumped to mind immediately was Atobe, from Prince of Tennis - he's one of those super rich, carefully manicured, elitist straight guys. If you know the anime, the idea of him being taken down by a girl is hilarious. But I don't think it would really work with the latter part of the vid - he's a little too straight. I'd end up having to use the chibi-episodes. Which would be fun, but probably not a good idea. Plus, he doesn't have a straight best friend to be secretly gay with, and that's half the fun. :(
So...I'm still brainstorming the lead role. I'll post in my journal if I come up with a definite (must use him) decision.
It's kind of neat communicating annonymously via QCs. I didn't think enough people actually read journals. ^_^;; -
possible new vid
2006-07-23 02:21:46
I got a strike of inspiration, one of those obvious things that just snap together out of nowhere. I've been wanting to do a crossover vid, maybe with some more self-animated scenes. I got a couple ideas that would be neat to see, but they were given to me, so they're not really mine. This one is all mine. ^_^;
It would be another fanfic-based video, like Gmen was. I made up a role playing game that takes a group of players through various anime settings, with assigned tasks in each realm. That in itself wouldn't be too hard to depict in vid format - I have a capture card now (well, I have an external capture *device*) so I can get the ingame scenes for some of the tasks. That's where the self-animation comes in since the quality isn't pretty at all. I don't know if it's the way I'm capturing it, or just the way ff8/7/chronocross/etc do their in-game graphics. I can redraw the backgrounds, spiff up the monsters a little, and then import my anime team. The anime realms would be even easier since I have the dvds for all the tasks I've used in the fic so far.
I think the hardest part would be the introduction. The screening to pick the team involves a lot of older military types and aside from a few shots in Gundam Wing, I don't have many sources that feature old, bland looking men. I'd have to create the portal, too, since they keep going back there between tasks. And a few of the rest areas weren't based on any source, so I'd have to flub those together or make them from scratch. I think it would be fun to close on one of the scenes with all the imported characters and the players just hanging out together. I'd probably have to draw that, too, since the animation styles would really clash if they were all in close contact with each other.
The weapons, too. I don't think I've seen an anime where a character uses a scythe aside from Rurouni Kenshin. I could use that as a model, sans the bells and chains, but it would probably look funny next to actual anime footage.
That doesn't even touch on the main team - Trigun characters do not look good next to gundam wing characters.
Then there's the storyline behind The Game. I wouldn't want to leave that out altogether, but it won't make sense mixed with the rest. It would look like random angst/romance/wtf scenes thrown into an already seemingly random and strange crossover video.
No one will get it except the readers. The editing won't be effectsy enough for the amv editors. And no one will seems to think "I drew the entire frickin scene so I want to see it" as a good excuse for not throwing a dozen layered effects on top of an otherwise clean scene. It'll be a remix of what I got from Gmen and Dark Half - lots of what the hell is this? That's really cool but you should have put bouncing breasts in it. They won't like the song, and it's so difficult to find a song that fits that I'm not going to change it. And my brother will pull that "you should have given the prepared scenes to a real editor and had him make the video for you" crap.
I actually wouldn't mind doing that. I don't like editing. I can't edit. But I can make scenes for the video and put them together for some effect pro to cover up with random stuff. The main problem is who would want to effect-up someone else's simple video? Especially if it's a weird video concept they're not interested in.
I'd end up putting it on youtube just to find viewers. I'm still getting comments on Dark Half, and it doesn't even have action in it, let alone properly moving scenes. And then I wouldn't even be able to appreciate the feedback since I don't know any of the people over there.
It would take at least a month of full time editing to make the footage. Longer if I try to find an editor to beta it and help me turn the simple vid into a real amv. Then I'll be left with a short video that took forever to make, a crapload of folders clogging up my computer with psf an tga files, frame sequences, test clips, and almost nothing salvageable enough to do anything with. And then I'll be sitting there thinking how many chapters I could have done during that time if I'd just dropped the hobby and stuck with what I know.
And still, with all the reasons I shouldn't want to make the video, I'm still giddy at the idea of what it would look like if I went ahead and did it. Anyone who tells me no one makes vids for themselves, I send back a droll statement that I must do it for myself because I'm masochistic like that. I can think of no other reason I would torture myself with eyeburning tedious work to make something I know - before I even start - no one but me will get. I certainly wouldn't work so hard to talk myself out of doing it only to falter in the end and give in to my spoiled inner masochist. She wants. She knows it'll hurt. She doesn't care. And damn, if she isn't really good at convincing me I don't care either as long as she's happy and I'll have something to give me a few hours of giggling when it's all said and done.
I give it a week. Maybe I won't start on this idea. But it's going to be niggling in the back of my head with every new scene I write. If I don't jump to a different story by the end of the week, I just might break down and readraw a frame. Just one. That's all it will take to make me obsessed with this thing until I have the finished product. A stubborn, spoiled, obsessive-compulsive masochist with too much time on her hands. Those should never be allowed into a new hobby. If I'm lucky my reoccuring short attention span will save me. We'll see. ^_^ -
WordPerfect 10
2006-07-21 04:13:42
This isn't amv-related, but this is where I go to gripe, so I'm griping here.
I hate this program! I want my windows 98 "microsoft word" program back! I hate hate hate hate wordperfect10 so much I'd like to strangle the man who designed it. It sucks. Sucks, I tell you!
Ah...that's a little better. Not much, though. >.<
I only use the program to spellcheck. I do all of my writing in WordPad now. I copy and paste sections to spellcheck them in WorldPerfect10. I hate the thing. Its spellchecker doesn't recognize modern words and the thesaurus sucks turtle dick through a straw. Frickin moronic thing.
I have lots of typos, right? I tend to use words in writing that I only vaguely remember having read, and words that I know for sure no one has ever spoken aloud in my presence (or even in movies/tv). So half the time I can only guess at the spellings. I used a simple word - premises. I spelled it wrong so it showed up on WordPerfect's red-underlined list. I went to respell it and the word looked wrong. I checked the thesaurus and sure enough, the respelling it gave me was for premises - as in premise, like what you'd see in a debate class. I've seen that word written all the time, so I recognized the meaning. I tried variations of the spelling to get one that would have a synonym for "grounds" - nothing in WorldPerfect's Thesaurus was spelled anything like the "premises" word I was looking for. I tried all sorts of synonyms trying to get the word to show up so I could find the proper spelling for it. Nothing.
So I tried an online thesaurus. Guess what? I'm a moron, yes. But WordPerfect 10 is a moron, too. And it gets sold for money. Premises is the same spelling for both meanings - premise or 'grounds/location'. I knew the word I was using was a synonym for 'grounds.' That was actually the first synonym the online thesaurus gave me. So why the hell didn't WorldPerfect's thesaurus have the alternate meaning listed? It gave six different verbs and one noun for the whole 'premise' definition and not so much as a hint linking the exact same spelling of the word with the meaning I was using it for.
I should really just trust my instinct more and give up the whole spell-checking with that crapass program. I used to be the top at those spelling bees in grade school. As long as I spelled the word really fast and didn't stop to think about *how* I was spelling it, I was never wrong. If it was a word I'd read somewhere, I remembered what it looked like - even if I didn't consciously remember it. When I stop to think about spellings, I mess up all over the place. Trust the gut and screw that stupid program. I blame high school for it, honestly. My papers were twice as long as my classmates and I was one of the slowest typers in my stupid typing class (what the hell kind of class teaches you to type, anyway). So junior year I ended up typing a lot - and I got really fast with all the stinking extra practice I had. Doing my own stories on the side when homework was done didn't help (no computer at home, poor people don't own computers). I ended up working ahead in my accounting class so I could skip out early and use the computer lab for my own stuff. Lots and lots of super fast typing. I'd probably make a suitable secretary if I counted my words per minute. Anyway, the point is I type too fast to catch the typos now. And wordperfect can't tell context from Japanese words - the suggested corrections it gives are crap. The thesaurus (to check the suggestions for suitability) is worse crap.
I hate that program. God do I hate that program. I wish WordPad had a spellchecker and a wordcount. Or that I could copy Microsoft Word from my old craptastically slow windows 98 comp onto my pretty little xp so I'd have something to write in that actually works. WordPerfect has all the fancy little additions and none of the basic necessity simple programs take for granted. Maybe that's life. The more advanced things get the more basics they leave out. Or maybe my luck just sucks. I don't know. I just hate that program with a fiery passion and wanted to share.
JOURNAL: Arigatomina
Current server time: Sep 13, 2025 04:40:17