The Secret Matinee in Exile: And then he _steps_on_ the banana

Something you can do in a film that you can’t do in a story is a sight gag. A sight gag is a surprise communicated with a visual. Usually, these are funny, since surprise contributes so much to humor. Many of the films in this year’s Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival had awesome sight gags.

Of course, describing a sight gag is like explaining a joke. Even if you do it really, really well, you lose a lot. But we’ll do what we can -

In Bless You, Godzilla rampages through a city at the behest of the city’s celestial creator. Like most of the fun movies this festival had to offer, most of what makes it fun is visual. The monster is cute bordering on darling as it rampages through the city while the creator looks on. The main sight gag plays off the title - since “bless you” might be about the god-like celestial being, or not.

In Mirage, the main character - an Inuit boy - and his dog wander into a world of wacky things, where water falls up, carrying fish along with it. The boy instantly sees a big time saver for him in his fishing, stringing a net across a hole in the ice and having the water fill his net with fish. This - and a ton of other very funny gags - make this film hilarious without a word of dialog.

Remember 2001: A Space Odyssey? Astronaut goes through perils in space to reach a portal to some other kind of place?  It was a very visual movie. The film showed docking with a space station over classical music - and just let it play out in its own time. Later in the movie, we see the ship in space, floating along. We see the crew, running and eating. Finally, the climax of the movie is visions of the universe beyond what we know.

Spacetime Fabric Softener is the same thing, but more fun. Presented as minimalist animation of a suited figure on his football-shaped rocket, our astronaut navigates through dangers to reach a portal to other realities. We watch the considerably more zany visions pass in front of the astronaut on his way beyond the infinite.

Werewolf!

There wolf. There castle. There hotel.

See what I did there? My word gag plays on your knowledge of the genre of monster movies. Honeymoon Suite does just the same, as a man checks into a luxury hotel during the full moon. Between the reactions of the hotel staff and the other guests, the film offers us a bunch of gags and - once we’ve had some fun - brings the story home with a more soulful moment. The werewolf hasn’t always been this way, and he is, still, fundamentally a good person.

Some of the movies that I’ve talked about have been little more than the gag itself. Maybe you can tell from my tone that I enjoyed these movies. Sight gags are well suited for short films, when you have space, but not time, to tell a story.

The Magic Salmon was one gag after another and they did not wear thin, although they might have in a longer film. The story was in the form of a chapter of an old-timey serial. Fun, but if not for this exile, I would be watching an actual episode of an old-timey serial.

The Secret Matinee in Exile: Death’s Cold Hand

A few reviews from the festival - SPOILERS - I give plot summaries that give away stuff that I don't think will ruin anything for you, but SPOILERS anyway.

And thanks to Laurel, from whose blog I swiped the URLs for the movies. Go see her reviews, here.

Some of the films in this year’s Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival followed a theme of mortality. I don’t just mean that people died or could die. That is a given. You have a long a life and a short death - but the latter can’t help but take up some of your head space.

For instance, in Emit, we find a world where people live backwards, the stork brings an old woman to the hospital to die - and meet the husband she’ll be married to for her entire life, along with their son and seven year old granddaughter. The husband-to-be is overwrought at meeting his bride-to-have-been, but his granddaughter reassures him.

She remembers when she met her husband - and it was wonderful.

The hospital is still a place of beginnings and endings, deaths and births. The grandfather has so much to look forward to - back on - but his children know that there’s only seven years before they have to give up their daughter forever.

And she knows it as well.

Extra points for making every woman - and some of the guys - compress their legs together when the characters were right outside a birthing room. Think about it. Yeah.

For two brothers in Red Summer, the end of the world is a long way away. That’s what their mother and grandmother are determined to convince them.

The family wile away the summer days under a red sky. The adults cling to normality, telling the boys nothing, and there aren’t many other people still around to tell them. They do decide to have Christmas in July this year. After all, why should you wait for presents?

In a poignant ending, the older brother promises to protect his little brother from catastrophe with a magic charm - just as the adults tried to protect them.

No surprises, here, but if you can’t surprise, then be honest.

When The Decelerators were children, they thought they had forever, as well. This group of twenty-somethings, feeling their lives rushing by, invent machines that let each of them freeze themselves in time at one perfect moment. The narration explains all this - running from beginning to end, enhancing the video and being enhanced by the video. Each person chooses a perfect moment to live forever and each moment chosen says everything we could know about the person.

And there was one person left behind, who didn’t believe she could find a perfect moment, now that everyone else was gone. She discarded her decelerator and resigns herself to living - what she thinks of as - a diminished life, until the time stream, itself, decides to remove her.

But not everybody takes mortality lying down.

In Drain, we see two plotlines, both disturbing.

One follows an old woman, in a wheelchair, wrinkled and worn with time, and young man, who seems to be a technician of some sort.

The other follows a baby being abducted, taken to a safe house, cared for by a woman who seems sweetness and light, and then delivered, on order, to someone else.

Then the procedure, where the old woman is zip-tied to her chair and given a bite-block.

After an induced seizure, the woman is young and vital. We know, now, what the plastic tub with tubes must contain.

If it had ended here, this would have been a fun and effective little horror story, but there was a grace note, if you will. You see, we didn’t need to know the old woman’s motive. Living in terror of death, feeling it come up on you - those would be motives enough, even if we think that nobody would do such a horrible thing.

In the final scene, we see her walking on the beach, in a bikini, smiling at the surfers.

She got young and now she’s going to go get some.

The Secret Matinee in Exile: What is she wearing?

Yesterday, the Grand Illusion starts its Secret Saturday Matinee. For twelve weeks, there will be a different fun movie, along with an old time serial of Batman and Robin. This is superheros month. Superhero movies from an era before digital effects.

But I had to miss it because yesterday was the Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival at the Cinerama in Seattle. Laurel and I go every year - except for the year when we thought we could just buy tickets at the door.

Although missing the matinee makes me the Sad Panda, we have a lot of fun movies to see.

Before we get to that, let’s talk about the costumes.

This festival is run together with EMP which includes a Sci-Fi museum. Every year, they display some costumes from their collection in the lobby of the theater. Here were the ones on the south side of the concession stands:

The costumes are The Dude, Leeloo, Tyrell, and Robin Hood.

One clarification - when production company makes a movie, they don’t just have the costume designers make a single costume for a character. According to the Lord of the Rings additional material on the DVDs, they made ten copies of the same costume for Frodo in good, clean condition, and then ten in torn, dirty condition. Since movies are usually filmed in a different order from the order of scenes in the final movie, you have to have clean costumes for scenes early in the movie. And you need several to allow for wear and tear. And for Lord of the Rings, there also had to be matching costumes for stunt doubles and for other doubles.

So, the costume on the left there might or might not have actually been worn by Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski. They may not have needed as many as the Lord of the Rings movies, but still.

That said, it’s kinda nifty to look at the costumes and recognize artifacts from Battlestar Galactica or Blade Runner. These are the shows and movies that I grew up with.

Notice the second costume from the left?

Well, that’s from The Fifth Element, where Bruce Willis saves the whole galaxy and Lola in a remake of the cult classic Heavy Metal. (No, the actor isn’t actually the same as in Run Lola Run. The Fifth Element woman did go on to be Alice in the Resident Evil movies, though.)

So, what’s that orange thing she’s wearing?

I recognize a shirt, even without its midriff, and extremely tight pants, but what’s that orange thing? It doesn’t hold anything up. It offers no protection that I can ascertain. It seems well suited to ride up into Milla’s butt crack and lady parts, but I’ve been told that women are ambivalent about that. If it’s supposed to be attractive, somehow, well, there are articles of clothing that are uncomfortable to wear, not very useful, and extremely sexy, but this ain’t one of them.

I may have needed to read the plaques to recognize the Dude or Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood, but the ones on the north side of the lobby, I knew all those right away:

That’s Commander Adama, Rachael, another replicant, and Seven of Nine. No, I can’t name the other replicant without looking it up.

Next time, some of the short films.

Light Sabers Make No Sense

If you can use the Force to guide your laser sword, you can use it with your pistol. And make something less clumsy and random, while you're at it.

Still, light sabers work in the Star Wars universe. The light saber duel at the end of Empire was the high point of the movie. Vader and Obi Wan crossing swords again, after all those years, made the original feel like it really was part of a bigger story. For all the bitching and moaning about the prequel movies, every time the light sabers come out, the movies work.

Last night, at the Grand Illusion, I saw Space Battleship Yamato. We saw the mid-20th century battleship - one of the best two or three ever built - refitted as a space ship and sent into space.

Launch Yamato!

The movie is a live action remake of a 1974 Japanese cartoon, imported to America as Star Blazers in the late 1970s - and it was tremendously fun! It had a real 1980s Star Wars feel to it. They left a lot out, especially remaking the Gamalons into a less personal enemy.

Our heroes launched the Black Tiger squadron and fought their way through Gamilon ships. Captain Avatar (with his actual Japanese name) got too sick to lead and passed the mantle to our hero. They fought their way to the dying world of Iskandar, fought through the Gamilon ground forces, and got the CosmoDNA (called something else in this version), then hauled ass back to earth.

The movie includes everything from the show, but it didn't feel like they were checking off boxes (I'm looking at you, Pacific Rim).

The characters did their things and could have, but didn't, ruin the movie, but the star of the show was the Yamato, raised from the dried ocean bed to save all mankind. They pulled out the wave motion cannon early on - so we wouldn't be waiting for it - and later we saw the big guns cut loose, holding off the Gamilons long enough to jump to safety.

You can probably guess that I watched the Americanized version, back in the day. I watched many things, back in the day, but they are forgotten, even by me. Star Blazers had something of worth to offer.

Launch Yamato!

Your Honor

Finishing up Heroes and Villains month, we have a cowboy movie, with a stoic hero, a wacky sidekick, and an oily villain.

But let’s start with the women folk.

There are three female characters in Decision at Sundown. We meet Lucy on her wedding day, at the chapel, getting ready to marry our oily villain. Her gown isn’t white, but its an awfully pale blue, so let’s round her up to virgin.

Ruby is the other woman we hear from - the oily villain’s mistress. She’s taking his wedding in stride, mostly. She knew he wasn’t going to marry her and doesn’t want to make any trouble - but she does plan to go to the wedding. Oily Villain agrees - since he can’t really stop her without making more of a stink about - but he insists she not make a spectacle of herself by sitting up front.

Enter our hero, the cowboy, Bart.

The cowboy is an American hero - at least, we've laid claim to him for the last century. From the Virginian on down, we know the story. A feller leaves the east behind for the wide open spaces of the west. Out there, there isn't so much law, but cowboys live by a code of honor, so they don't need as much law.

And Bart tells us, more than once, how a man should act like a man and how that means he has to kill the villain, no matter what. As a cowboy, you see, he even has to warn the villain, give him a fair shot - so to speak - to defend himself.

This kind of cowboy embodies an honor society. In an honor society, men establish and maintain honor through feats of bravery and women do so by defending their chastity. Bart needs to avenge his dishonor - since Mary, his wife, killed herself after taking up with the villain.

It turns out, though, that Mary fell down on the second count. While Bart was a war, she took up with more than one man. The villain was just the last before she killed herself. When Bart realized that his beloved wife was a tramp, killing the villain became optional.

And Ruby put a stop to it by shooting the villain in the arm, so he couldn’t hold a pistol.

It’s not like Bart could shoot an unarmed man.

The Rise of Darth Guffin

The McGuffin is a term Hitchcock coined for an object that didn’t have anything to do with the movie, but that moved the plot along. There was that weird statue that showed up at the end of North by Northwest, full of microfilm, or gefilte fish, or something. The stolen money at the beginning of Psycho was a McGuffin - what, you don’t remember the money at the beginning of Psycho? That’s because it had nothing to do with the story of the movie - it just moved the characters around.

Lots of filmmakers use McGuffins. In The Maltese Falcon, the titular falcon statue had nothing, really, to do with the story. The letters of transit in Casablanca make no sense, but they keep things moving. And that suitcase in Pulp Fiction has McGuffin written on it in letters so large you make them out from the International Space Station.

The director for the next Star Wars movie has been named - J. J. Abrams - and I’ve been a fan since Alias. There’s a lot of good stuff to say about him as a choice, especially in light of the two movie franchises he participated in - Mission Impossible and Star Trek.

Both great movies that I enjoyed.

But he McGuffinized both stories.

In Mission Impossible 3, everybody is after an identified weapon of mass destruction. The characters don’t even try to figure out what it is, they just run after it.

And in Star Trek, the romulans use Red Matter to travel through time and blow up planets.

So, I am worried that I’ll be sitting in the theater in a couple of years saying, “Ah, the Vorpnolian Compression. Of course! How will they ever wrest that from Darth Guffin?”

Let's Blame Zorro

Episode 4 of Zorro's Fighting Legion in a sprint:

Zorro pulls the fuse out of the gunpowder in time to save the mine and is blamed for attacking the mine in the council the next day. Don del Oro decides to capture a shipment of weapons for the Yaqui by sending a note to the council that the shipment has been delayed, diverting all the solders to search for Zorro and the Titular Legion. Zorro follows clues to discover this plot at a local armory. The forces of Don del Oro pursue him to a suspension bridge and cut the ropes, making him fall . . .

Don del Oro is . . .