Blessed by the Potato

I had a chance to look at another Star Wars fan movie today. This one is about an hour long, and isn’t totally focused on lightsaber combat (while well-done, their colouring wasn’t very consistent, especially in the outdoor scenes). They don’t say in the movie exactly when or where it takes place, but I believe it takes place before the days of the old republic, when the Sith had legions of lightsaber-wielding goons, and the Jedi were on the verge of extinction (and before they got real picky about that one master one apprentice and no love interests rule). It’s about 60 minutes long, and I thought the acting was actually rather good (the pacing was a bit slow in places, but for Star Wars fanflicks, that’s a bit of a relief, actually).

I give you: Reign of the Fallen.

*** SPOILER WARNING ***

So what happens is that a city is protected from the Sith army pretty much only by virtue of being in the middle of nowhere and having a giant planetary shield generator. Haunted by dreams that destruction is heading their way, one of the apprentices leaves into the wastelands to try and find a legendary weapon to save their people. The other one, who views himself as the stronger one, is jealous that he has been passed over on the job of leading the people (at this time it looks like the Jedi were more than advisors, as well). So, he falls to the dark side and has a nasty surprise waiting for the other apprentice when he returns.

Now, heed that spoiler warning if this will bother you… so it had some elements of lightsaber fighting that I really wanted to include in the story I was working on for Netbug, namely using more of a flickering blade technique (here it was used to get past a parry where the blades were locked together), and moreover, having a Sith fight a Jedi who was clearly an inferior swordsman, but being defeated by his mastery of the Force. They even included my idea for stopping a swing with the Force instead of parrying it! Neat-o!

Anyhow I hope you enjoy it, too.

Holy Jedi Jesus this is cool! I’m sure it’ll be on Bug’s blog soon enough (since he sent it to me in the first place), but it belongs here too. They may not have dressed the part, but the actions and effects were awesome (or at least they were more incredible than the streaming video was able to deliver).

Edit: Found a higher-res version of Ryan vs. Dorkman.

I went to see Sidekick this weekend. It’s an indie film done here in Toronto, and currently the only watchable film print is on tour around the country along with the filmmakers.

Briefly, I thought it was pretty good. Nobody’s going to win an award for acting, and the camera work looked like it was done by film students from York, but it was watchable (which is more than I can say for some big budget movies lately). The effects were of low-end TV quality, but the fact that a film on that budget has any effects at all is impressive. I wasn’t expecting it to be much more than a decent student feature, and I enjoyed it for that.

Some of the people I was with didn’t care for it though, which is a little odd. Before I get into it in more detail, let me put in a

*** SPOILER WARNING ***

There, you’ve been duly warned.

Now, the movie had what I consider to be a neat, unique story (at least, I haven’t heard the idea before): a guy is found to have super powers, and a comic book geek notices and trains him to focus and use his power effectively, hoping he’ll become a crime-fighting superhero right from the comics (taking the place of his sidekick during the training). Unfortunately, the power goes to his head, and instead he becomes a supervillain who must be stopped. I thought it was a pretty neat plot twist.

Some of the people I was with didn’t, and said it was “so predictable” or “lame”. I’ve got to wonder at that: I don’t recall seeing a story like this before (though the opposite happens in Unbreakable), so it’s not like it was a cliched ending. So was it just the fact that there was a ton of foreshadowing (sometimes rather heavy-handed) that made it so predictable? If so, then what’s wrong with foreshadowing?

Eh, I just have this to say: being able to turn your brain off is a huge advantage when watching movies. It’s really, really hard to have a movie that is 100% effective at drawing you in, so being able to suspend disbelief really helps me to enjoy movies more, and also ignoring a lot of foreshadowing makes plot twists more dramatic. It’s why I like the M. Night Shyamalan movies so much: 6th Sense’s twist caught me completely by surprise. I was ready for Unbreakable, but still found it really enjoyable (and since my brain was half-off, I didn’t see it until way after most other people did). The Village was a little easier to spot, but I liked the characters so much I didn’t care (and once again, I didn’t spot it until way after the others). And if you saw it coming sooner, then good for you, you picked up on the foreshadowing (or have a good mind for the plot). But did seeing it coming really ruin the movie for you?

It seems like sometimes people just want to be caught completely by surprise in a movie, no matter how much they try to outthink it. But I don’t think that’s a good way to go. For starters, if you were completely sideswiped then you’d think it was just a stupid plot mechanism (such as the one in Ocean’s 12 where they just simply didn’t show us anything until the revelation).

Anyhow, I’m rambling in a more incoherent way than usual. My point is that Sidekick was a Canadian movie shot on $36k, and it looks it. However, if you can get past that there’s a decent story hidden in there, and I think it was well worth my $5. If they ever get a DVD release deal, you might want to check it out.

Plus the popcorn was really good there.

You’d think we were in the States, with a minister who doesn’t know their portfolio (specifically, a Minister for the Environment who’s afraid of hurting a tree by collecting sap for maple syrup — you will need quicktime for the video). Then I remembered that the Conservatives were in power, so we’re almost in the States after all.

Props, as usual, to boing boing for being there first.

Well, for a change I’ve got some good news: I won an OGS!

For those who don’t know, an OGS is a provincial scholarship worth $15,000 and is rather prestigious. Of course, I don’t actually get $15,000 more than I would have otherwise… it simply means that my supervisor doesn’t have to pay for a good portion of my pay, and I fill out a different box on my tax return (though I do take home about $1000 more than I would otherwise, which is exciting).

It was a big surprise when the letter came in the mail, since usually the rumour mill puts in some good predictions as to who made the short list, and I wasn’t there. I did win one last year, but lost it due to the delay in graduating with my master’s (it was only applicable to my PhD), which made it doubly surprising that I won this year, since they just took one away from me. It’s a real confidence booster at this point, and also some extra motivation to not fuck up in my PhD.

Aside from that, not too much has been going on. I bathed the kitty today, which was heartbreaking and painful. She makes the saddest little kitten noises when I bathe her, so there’s no mistaking that I’m a horrible horrible monster torturing the poor thing. Unfortunately, she’s been itcy lately, so it had to be done. She’s really crazy when she gets itchy, often running around the apartment at full tilt, as though she were trying to outrun the itches (this is to a much greater degree than the usual “kitty beans” daily tear across the apartment). I felt sad for her when she was itchy, and I felt sad for her in the bath, but at the end of it all I had a good laugh, because she’s less than half her usual size when she’s wet. She looks like a little squirrel. A wet squirrel.

I ran across Jamie’s website recently, and holy crap has a lot happened to him! He got married, moved to Japan, and took a bunch of pictures! It made me think of all the people I knew from physics, and all the good times we had back then. I figured that we’d keep in touch after we graduated, but I don’t think I’ve kept up with any of them. Sure, we all went through some very traumatic things in physics, and meeting up afterwards would inevitably remind us of some of that (such as drinking jolt and eating cheese like it was a job), and we did kind of disperse to the far corners of the globe, but that’s not really why I lost touch with all of them. You see, it’s because I’m a horrible, horrible person. Right now, as I write this, I could be back in Toronto playing poker with my friends. Instead, I’m here simply because I gave the cat a bath and after she scratched me all to ratshit, I was shaking pretty badly from the adrenaline and just didn’t feel like driving for two hours. And my friend Dan, who I’ve known since grade 1 moved out to Dancouver. Despite keeping in pretty close contact after I moved out here, I’ve barely spoken to him a half dozen times for the year he’s been out there, and I don’t think I’ve talked to him at all since New Year’s (not even via a much reviled instant messenger!)

Anyhow, I’ve got to stop leaving comments that are longer than the original post on other people’s blogs. That’s why I have my own website.