My Favourite Villain From 'The Tick'

The Tick was the title of a comic and TV series. The parts I am now posting are from the 1994 animated series episode 'The Tick vs. The Uncommon Cold'. As viewers of the show may well know, this was a comic turn on the superhero concept, practically by inventing a big-muscle-small-brain superhero who has to face all enemies that the creators of the likes of Superman or Spider Man never dared to imagine. In this particular episode, Thrakkorzog, evil ruler of dimension 14B, who rents an apartment in the neighbourhood of the Tick, plans on world domination by creating an army of Tick clones. However, he only manages to obtain a tissue sample in the form of a used tissue...

Thrakkorzog is an especially crazy villain... He and his speaking tongue plan on a brain eating mayhem with the manners and language of a fine gentleman. Table manners also seem to belong to his strong points, which is normally unusual from a slime based organism. But the thing I like best is the brutal reality that even an interdimensional space crawler and would be conqueror of Earth will have to submit to an even more universal and ruthless force: the written and unwritten laws of apartment renting...

Ligeia

I have just found a short video I pasted together years ago. It is worth posting since it is made up of many things I liked that time, and even today. It is from "The Tomb of Ligeia", part of the Roger Corman series of low budget Gothic horrors featuring Vincent Price. I have already posted earlier a stage like Poe adaptation featuring Price, one of the iconic actors of the genre. He would probably have preferred that over the Corman series, but nevertheless, there aren't that many Poe adaptations, and the latter series definitely has that particular "Price appeal" that made him such a popular performer. Then, of course there is Poe himself. His short stories are rarely more than a few narrated scenes, but it is the dense atmosphere he is able to create in them that makes him enchanting, and at the same time his stories so hard to adapt to the medium of film. I mean it is not impossible (e.g. the aforementioned stage film), but in terms of the plot requirements of a more "standard" movie, they needed expansion, even risking the integrity of the original atmosphere of a Poe story. From this respect, the Corman series performs better than most other popular Poe adaptations I can now think of. Finally, the music... Divano from Era. Perhaps the overall atmosphere of the song is not that of a story as Ligeia, but I also remember that when the idea occurred to me to make this clip, I had in mind only the first part of the song, which is somehow slower and darker. I still like the whole song tho, and many others from Era. After all, the idea behind editing is to get parts of different things we like for one reason or the other, and paste them together into a new whole to reflect something of our own inner view on the world...

Haunted By The Past...

This is a patched up version of a chat conversation I had recently with a friend that I made into a standalone text. I like allegoric things, but I have not yet done too much which would put this tendency into some purely fictional context. So my best chance to show something of this is to take one such episode, improve it a bit, so that it would be more independent of the specific situation, and post it here as a sort of self expression... Well, here it goes:

"Midway upon the journey of our life…

Haunted by spirits of the past I find myself facing a house without a door, whose grandeur promises safe haven, and yet its strong walls forbid entry. There are other houses around, but still I want to find a way to get into this one. Yet this does not stop me form sneaking in whenever a neighbor forgets to close the window. By the fire it's easier to forget that yet another spirit from the past has tracked me down… I spend a little time there until someone notices that there is a draft and decides to close his window. Then I have to leave too… mostly back to the house with no doors… because for some reason I cannot get it through my head that I cannot get in, and expect that maybe out of a thousand I will be the one who will manage to dig a hole into a stone wall with my bare hands.

The past haunts me… call it dramatic, if you wish. It is as dramatic as waiting for Godot. A kind of human-paced drama, without gigantic heroes and the cathartic experience that goes along with it. That is unless you create yourself a world in which you can be the dramatic hero… but this world will be the one in which we are really left alone, because here "everybody" is just a marionette figure who does nothing but our will…

Yet I don't want you to give the feeling that there is no happiness in life. It would have been long over if not so. But the stone wall of that certain house still attracts me, maybe for the very reason that it is nearly impossible to get through, or at least not the way I have tried so far. Yet it calls me still, as at the bottom of my soul I think, I know, I feel that there still is a way… it even teases me by saying it's not that it's impossible to get in, it's just that I am unable to learn how... and it annoys me that in reality this translates to the fact that this is almost the third decade of my life when this stone wall still throws me back whenever I try pushing it… Don't laugh! I'd rather not push… I'll just stay there and watch hoping that I discover a crack on it, because there has to be one! But at the same time I am afraid, because after three decades, I feel I am somehow late. My joy comes from sneaking in to neighboring houses or strangely from the fact that while I am sitting by this wall I do sometimes think that for a moment I did see something shining through the wall from that light that I hope to find inside. These moments, the little things are those that still matter, and these are the things that keep me trust in being as much as making me want to continue…"

A Funeral And A Poet

Films are often thought of as belonging to the dramatic genre, like theatre, with an emphasis on dialogue and the resulting confrontation of characters leading to a final catharsis. However, the medium of film is quite capable of expressing more poetic or narrative features as well. In this scene from Doctor Zhivago, the young poet attends his mother's funeral. What may take a few pages to describe in a novel, the way he feels, is done here by silent acting and visual poetry. Things that would be clumsy if they were told in a dialogue, and probably less effective via simple narration. A way to describe a sensitive person in film is to guide the camera to see what he perceives from what is going around him. The fall of the leaves and the blow of the wind, the slow but powerful accumulation of gentle feelings interrupted by the disturbing reality of the sight of someone whom one had seen living, walking, breathing... enclosed motionless in a box and buried underground. Meanderings of a perception quite easily attracted by the subtle ways reality is wrapped around us, among which death is only one; one, perhaps not fully understood at the first encounter, one that may not even seem more important than others, yet stubborn and unalterable. A poet's way to introduce a poet...

Daft Punk - Interstella 5555

Daft Punk - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger von Darksith47

Interstella 5555 is an animated film for the album Discovery of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, better known as Daft Punk. It is a bitter-sweet story of some alien musicians who are abducted from their home planet to be brought to Earth and form a band here. The animation was supervised by Leiji Matsumoto, a veteran of animated space sagas. I have chosen two tracks to post here. "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger", which I often hear when I work to give me the feeling that my work is great and important... :) The other is "Aerodynamics", which simply just communicates something exciting to me... like my electric nerve impulses were part of the music, and somebody was able to play something nice using them...


Daft Punk - Aerodynamic von EMI_Music

Columbo And The Case Of Intelligence, Talent And Genius

The above video is from the Columbo episode "The Bye Bye Sky High IQ Murder Case", which actually made me think about this question of intelligence, talent and genius. In fact, there is some difference between these terms, tho they overlap, as people often seem to freely exchange them. There is this notion of intelligent people as being the great puzzle solvers or others that can tell you the square root of a 40 digit number up to 10 decimal places... Intelligence has to do something with the ability to give some proper reaction to situations. If we look at it like that, puzzle solving may indeed have something to do with it, and yet I don't think it is just that simple. Not everything can be included in a puzzle, and I would even venture that some very intelligent people would have hard time with them. We are different... Also being able to deal with large numbers, is what I would rather call a gift, a talent, it does not necessarily mean intelligent behaviour otherwise. And if they asked me which is a genius, who can deal with large numbers or who, while not being able to do so, invents the pocket calculator, I would tend to pick the latter. Tho, "genius" is perhaps the hardest of all. Talent is perhaps the easiest to realise. Intelligence may take a while to see and could come in many forms... But genius... is more like being able to do something unique with either or both of these. The genius must create to make himself known, otherwise he has buried his talent. He may not be successful tho. Success depends on politics at least as much as on whether you are genial or not. I do think that there are quite some intelligent and talented people who cannot get along well, whom we know nothing about, because they cannot handle people. And then there are those who adapt in some way... And this is the story and method of Columbo, a disguised intelligence, who anticipates people looking down on him, even annoys them with it... The video below is from the very first Columbo, "Prescription: Murder" in which he is analysed by a wife murdering psychiatrist.

Misery

Misery is originally a novel written by Stephen King, about a writer who suffers an accident and is rescued by a fan. The writer soon has to realize that he is actually a captive, and forced to correct his mistake of killing off his heroine... The film version here was made in 1990, and is usually remembered for the award winning performance of Kathy Bates as the obsessive fan, Annie Wilkes. About what I have read of Stephen King, I often felt the urge to describe his work as "the horror of stereotypes". A sort of small town environment, with people and situations intensified to a grotesque and often supernatural level, which still remains recognisable. Sometimes they are so well written that it hurts me to read, because the fact that people can live following and make others follow a mindless pattern, as often they do, though they have the ability to do better, just annoys me. In this case, however, there is no supernatural, just plain obsession. The book was planned to be one that King wrote under the pen name Richard Bachman, which he used for these less supernatural, and more explicit writings, until the identity of Bachman was revealed. The horror is based on the entrapment of writer Paul Sheldon in a hopeless situation. In his isolation and helplessness, he must find a way to break free. King builds up new and new hopes to achieve this goal, and breaks them one after the other followed by some not too pleasant retaliation from the captor. This builds up tension and hatred up to the point where there is no choice left for either of the characters, and hell breaks loose... I find the story interesting for many reasons. First, because of the way Wilkes "loves". I think this is a far more common way people think of love as it may seem at first sight. People often love what they imagine another person to be, and not what he is. They are not afraid to cause pain in the interest of the "beloved", so that he could become the image they love. There cannot be love without the possibility of change, and perhaps loss. Misery is a nightmare of being a helpless victim to such a love. On the other hand, if anybody ever tried to create something, they will know that sometimes it goes only if one has no choice. With choice come other things to do. Of course what one creates may or may not be what he wanted or what he likes... but high impact events tend to open up new ways. There is some difference between the film and the book how the experiece influences the creative artist, and also the amount of violent love the nurse is willing to give... but still, I think has more than enough to make the point... If I had to pick a Stephen King film at this very moment, Misery would be my choice.