p e n g u i n d e v i l

There is a house up the street from here, a nice enough house, in a nice enough area. Though to me it still seems like a regular house. A nice big old craftsman. I was surprised to see that it was for sale for 798,000. Now who knows if it will fetch that price but in this town, maybe it will. I looked it up to see that it last sold in 2003 for 256,000. Though in our attempt to move there are many factors that point in different directions: jobs, dread and expense of moving all this stuff across the country, weather… This exemplifies the most telling reason to move. This real estate market (while certainly not the worst on the west coast) seems to be spiraling out of control. For people who are interested in buying a house to actually live in permanently, this kind of thing seems untenable, while northern Vermont with its variety of nice homes in the “under 150” range and lack of cities seems too tempting to ignore.

If only this was the Portland of 10 years ago… It would be much more tempting to stay.

For a relief from this line of thinking, a sci-fi movie was in order…

Imagine that you loved The Matrix and wanted to make a comic book out of it… But since you couldn’t just redo “The Matrix” you figured out a different twist for the story. Then imagine that comic book gets made into a low budget Hollywood film? Yep, I watched Equilibrium! No, we aren’t all living in a computer construct, this time emotions are outlawed but like before, we have our “Neo” to figure out the problem and fight to bring people back to reality. We all remember how terribly cast Keanu was in The Matrix (well, in everything after Bill and Ted’s), it happens again, this time with Christian Bale. Bale is now the “dressed in black, quiet and shoots like no one possibly could” action hero. At first it seems a bit cheap, but that it might be alright, then there’s the scene where he leads a violent police raid on some bad guys who have committed the misdeeds of looking at a painting and playing a 7″… Once you see the dead man on the portable turntable with the dramatic religious chanting for music, you think… is this a joke?

kill ’em all and break their records!  Bale plays John Preston, very stiffly (sometimes his voice even sounds like Keanu). As in 1984, there is a man whose visage fills walls as he talks propaganda to the people. The propaganda is maybe the worst part, it comes in the form of exposition to let the movie watcher know what’s going on but it’s under the cover of the instructional/inspirational messages to the people… Speaking of things that everyone would know already, speeches about how everyone takes this drug to cut off feelings. That’s the angle behind this story, but really, what does that even mean? How would a person act if they had no sense of emotion? What thoughts would they think? I don’t know, but I don’t think this movie had those answers.

Preston is a Cleric (think the Sandmen from Logan’s Run) and he and his partner drive around in a tacky white Cadillac with all ornamentation removed and instrumentation covered with white… His first partner is Sean Bean, who is easily the best player in the movie but he’s taken care of early for reading a book of Yeats (“Sense Offense” is actually what they call the crime), but his second partner sure smirks and smiles a lot for someone with no emotions. And there are a couple of scenes in which Preston takes people by surprise and they spew four-letter words. Very non-emotional. In terms of the rest of the movie, the CGI backgrounds are not well done, the battle scenes aren’t good and are overly unrealistic (without the excuse that Neo had), people don’t even die realistically! However, there is some inventive combat and if you want to see choreographed (though not up to Woo’s standard) gun fighting, sword fighting and “gun as sword” fighting and lots of one versus many fight scenes… Maybe it’s for you? I think it’s another one for the sell stack.

combat or modern dance? 
american psycho, part 2