2 movie reviews and a bit of magic.

Saw 2 new movies this weekend. “Whatever Works” the new film from Woody Allen and “Moon” a debut by Duncan Jones(son of  David Bowie).

In Whatever WorksWoody Allen casts Larry David as the Woody Allen of his movie. Larry David “officially” plays Boris. Boris is crass, smart, egomanical and pessimist through and through. What’s interesting is that Larry David simply plays himself but with a limp and still comes off like every otehrrole Woody Allen has played himself over the years. The story starts with Boris being ambushed by Melody(Evan Rachel Wood). Melody tell Boris that she’s been living on the street for days and really needs some food. Of course this sends Boris on a tirade but Melody just pitifully begs Boris until he gives in. Things, happen, Boris cracks insults and a comedy becomes a romantic comedy before you know it.

And you know what? it works, the movie is funny and you learn to like the very thinly painted characters. Allen’s point of the picture is the in the fact the picture’s title. It’s repeated often and carries a twang of incite in every utterance. The film like Boris makes some asinine observations like “everyone who comes to NYC becomes a liberal artist/homosexual/polygamist”.  Despite those heavy messages the movie remains a nice example of simple comedic writing and good overall performances from some really talented actors. 

I admit I fell in love with Evan Rachel Wood as Melody. The last movie I saw her in was “the wrestler” and in that I was still enamored with her but her character was so broken and hurt by her relationship with her father that it made her happy go lucky performance her so memorable.

3 christian youths turned atheists out of 5.

Moon, has been a movie I’ve been waiting to see for a while. The movie stars Sam Rockwell who plays, “Sam Bell.” Sam is overseeing the mining of the element H3 on teh far side of the moon. It’s a lonely job considering it’s just him and his semi-AI capable computer Gerty(voiced by Kevin Spacey). You see Sam is about to finish a 3 year run of work and is two weeks away from heading home. As with any decent sci-fi thriller something goes wrong and while investigating a equipment breakdown Sam discovers himself unconscious. There is of course more to it but anything revealed past what’s in the trailer would spoil too much.

The film does suffer from some odd pacing. Very early on a time limit is set for the movie. a 30 hour countdown. During the countdown Sam investigates and investigates but really never seems in a hurry and even when the countdown draws close to it’s end Sam seems pretty cool and calm and just rolls with it. By not discussing spoilers I’m leaving out 80% of the movie believe me when I say it’s a solid Sci-fi thriller and offers plenty of good drama and performances.

4 china girls out of 5.

Sunday I got to play some MTG and test out my new Red/Green/White deck. It works decently but really requires a good draw of mana. That could be part of my construction or just luck. Either way I’m hesitant to rely on it come Tuesday’s casual play.

peace til tomorrow.

Muddy art

The subject of last night’s art appreciation class was Jackson Pollock. Pollock is regarded as one of the most original painters in the last 100 years and is even today still heavily criticised for his style and cerebral method of painting. Known to be a heavily flawed man but a genius artist he was the subject of the film “Pollock” starring Ed Harris. I had wanted to see the movie for sometime now and luckily the prof. decided to show it as the video feature on Pollock. We only got half way through the movie so far but Pollock’s story and art is very personal to me.

Personal in the sense that throughout school and especially while attending college I’ve tended to draw more than take notes. maybe their just doodles but learning how Pollock worked his own method of painting makes me feel some what vindicated that I see forms and movements in my doodles. I in no way hold my self any where in the light of proper art but I figured I’d post two examples of what I mean.

yeah the title is lame and I added afterwards(as in days).

and this shows the context of my “doodles”

 Again  I hold no claim to quality or technique but I wouldn’t be as unwilling to try doing this in my free time for fun.

 

MTG TNM CTOAA

For all the new people the title says, “Magic the Gathering Tuesday Night Magic Can’t Think Of Anotehr Acronym.

Slightly smaller turn out than last week at Games Plus last night. However an official judge did show up to play. I got some key situations confirmed or corrected to help me expand my knowledge of how certian cards work. He also brought his collection and I ended up buying a card and trading for some other ones.

As for gameplay, I came in 4th out of 6 players. Yes I’ve yet to rank but last night I returned to using my red/black deck. I had been neglecting it for a long time. Mostly due to the very straightforward nature of the deck. My shroud deck which has dominated my attention requires a lot of management and diecsions on what to do next with any given combo of cards. The red/black deck though is straight forward. If I can play a card, I use it and if I can’t, I do not. What was great about last night was that those cards just started really clicking. At the end of the day the simple but balanced deck is better than the overcomplicated and slightly unblanced deck. Yes I still lost half of my matches but there was far less stress and the multifacetness of my deck allowed me to be really creative on my moves and find all kinds of new combos built around these simple cards.

The guy running the event really flaked out last night. He neglected to organize anything and just kept playing D&D with his friends. So another regular had to step up and arrange the bracket and collect the money and ultimately buy the booster packs for the top 3 players. What also sucked is the offical guy running it left before we finished and took the promo cards with him. buy paying for the tourney everyone is garunteed a promo card. I intend on collecting next week but luckily the judge who was play obliged us and gave us some older promo cards for free. Class move on his part.

On a new topic I just started watching the british series, “peep show”. It’s a comedy show about two flatmates dealing with their lack of dreams and overall lack of romance skills. It has a twist where the entire show is shot through the POV of the charecters. It sounded real gimmicky at first but in execution it makes the show’s Office UK style of comedy even more awkward and depressing because everything is seen from every charecter’s eyes. Really funny first ep and I’m eager to watch all 5 seasons.

A weekend dominated by magic…the gathering

Friday night, I went out to chill with Stevie and my friend Joe at the “Fox and the Hound”. I didn’t eat or drink anything due to my lack of cash for the weekend.

Saturday, After stocking up on food to last til my next paycheck, I was invited to a family party at my friend Mike’s(his family not mine) house. There were two other soirees going on that night but I never left Mike’s because MTG was being played pretty regularly all night. I didn’t win a whole lot but I did win a 3 on 3 match. I don’t remeber every detail but here’s the basic scenario.

Steve and Robert were my oppoenents. We were all playing the same color decks, Red and Black. Early on my deck had gotten creatures out the fastest and I pretty much hit both opponents evenly for damage. before I could deliver a critical blow though, Steve played Blightning against me. It’s a spell that does 3 damage to me and forces me to discard two cards from my hand. I only had two cards in my hand so that left me relying on my drawn card for each turn. so the last three turns were key. I had been knocked down to 6 health, Steve had 6 health but was the most fortified creature wise and Robert was down to 5 with two creatures out. Robert had a chance to take me out and instead choose to do some last minute damage to Steve hoping that Steve would take me out before him. Robert’s attack intended to destroy two of Steve’s creatures but Steve played an instant which boosted his two blocking creatures and added trample which causes damage equal to the unblocked damage from Steve’s creatures to go to robert. So now robert was out and I only had 6 life and Steve could easily do lethal damage to me even if I put a creature out to block. SO I drew a card. And lucky day. I got Mudbutton torchrunner. He’s a little creature that costs 3 mana but is only a 1/1. The extra cost is due to this ability, “Anytime Mudbutton torchrunner is put into the graveyard from play deal 3 damage to target creature or player”. So I paid the 3 mana and put him out and asked Steve if he is going to counter the torchrunner. He said he couldn’t. I said well then you lose. I sacrificed my creature and put him into the graveyard dealing 3 damage to steve and winning the game for me.

It’s moments like that that can make you addicted to MTG.

Sunday I played some more of the MTG 360 game and hung out with Anthony and Chris. We watched the Blu-ray of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete. The movie has always been about eye candy, but for me the movie always suffered from serious pacing issues. The added meterial doesn’t help the pacing but it does give you a better picture of the plot story and charecters. It’s still a 3 star flick for me.

Kahlooooooo, Mrs. Frida!

I neglected to recap my art appreciation class this week because it mostly covered the works of Frida Kahlo. Frida Kahlo is probably Mexico’s most famous surrealist artist and that’s why I hesitated to explain who she was here. Then I remembered so few people I know have actually seen anything regaring her much less the Selma Hayek movie about her.

a unique beauty

Frida was a surrealist but all her art was about herself and what she felt on the inside.

She was embraced by the elite surrealists like Salvador Dali but Frida never accepted the title because she never painted anything but herself or her most private feelings. The large majority of her work were self portraits.

this was made as a statement about how she viewed her trueself and how she made herself look for her husband Deigo Rivera.

Early in her life Frida was nearly killed in a trolley accident. She broker back and foot and was impaled by a guard rail. All her life she dealt the injuries and what she called a "dying body, always dying".

As you can see she shares styles similar to the surrealist movement but she only uses the style to visualize things that aren’t intepretations, rather they are things she is personally conveying. Her obssession with her husband Deigo Rivera is also a big part of what made her life troublesome yet rich. Deigo was an acclaimed mural painter who despite be flat ugly was very much a womanizer. Frida fell in love with him and his art. They went through numerous stages of love and hate but ultimately Frida was dominated by the man. Despite her having dozens of relationships with many famous people and even practicing lesbianism all her past lovers admitted that Deigo was always on her mind. Deigo showed a similar respect to her later in his life but he was unable to remain faithful.

I did like the Salma Heyek backed movie about Frida, it was well composed and had some great eprformances(specifically from Alfred Molina playing Deigo). This is a much older film about Frida that I have not seen but it also highly regarded.

MTG gets 360′d

I was finally able to download this at 10:15PM last night. The code generator for the free promo card was still broken but the game itself was up and running. I started the main campaign mode. Right off the game made casually playing magic a lot of fun and quite easy. Almost everything you want to do is one button press away. The offline mode handles turn progression quite well. In tourney play you have quite a bit of time to sit and think about your moves. In the game you constantly have about ten seconds to act unless it’s your turn and need to act for the turn to progress. In online mode each turn has a 20 sec time limit.

 

-Graphics are about as good as you’d want a magic game to have. Card art is in HD and is as detailed as the cards. The loading screens also feature some really terrific HD scans of prominent art from the latest release of cards. Each action is given an animation the attacking animations amount to clawing or biting animations being overlaid on the cards. It sounds lame but is actually accurate and dependent on what type of creature is attacking and defending.

 

-Sound- the game uses most of the front speakers for combat and with the rear ones providing extra ambient sounds and music. The music is standard fantasy fair, epic and melodic and I never found it annoying.

 

-Gameplay well summing up magic the gathering gameplay can be quite a task. The latest rule changes spanned 27 pages themselves. Basically though main 1 vs 1 gameplay consists of you dealing an opening hand of 7 cards to yourself, you can keep the hand or deal a new hand minus 1 card to yourself, you can do this over and over until you can’t draw any cards. But the idea is to have a balance of strong cards and at least 3 land cards. Since land cards cost nothing to play and you can play one per your own turn. You want at least three available at some point since you need land to play creatures and other spells and actually I’ll leave it to the tutorial for the rest but ultimately the game is very in depth. I didn’t do the tutorial since I currently play in tourneys but the game also makes sure you can follow the basics as they come up in play. When a card comes out with an ability you haven’t encountered before a hint pops up to inform you and you can either disable the hint or let it pop up the next time the ability is triggered by gameplay.

 

-ganeplay for veterans. It only took a minute to acquaint myself with the controls and overall they rarely gave me a problem. It made me postpone victory for a couple turns in one match where I could’ve dealt a leathal blow, unfortunately my thumb was resting on Y which will skip the attacking phase whereas A selects creatures you wish to attack with. The game uses the new set of magic 2010 rules. Which means no mana burn and no damage from the stack. Unfortunately maybe due to time the game doesn’t handle multiple blocking creatures quite right. Instead of allowing the attacking player to choose where this power is dealt first the game just automatically assigns it evenly across defending creatures. That does indeed affect gameplay from a very strategic point. Hopefully that gets patched at some point.

 

This game while very fun and enjoyable for magic vets is designed primarily to suck in new players and get old players back into the game. Because of that deck building is extremely limited. You start out with access to only 2 single color decks. With each win you unlock new decks(up to 8) and up to 17 new cards per deck. Which means you can only add or switch out 17 cards per deck.  The devs said this was to keep to game balanced and considering the limited amount of cards compared to all the standard legal cards in circulation I can see their point but it also means online gameplay will be fairly repetitive after a while, though expansions may help that. This move is also blatantly a choice to not impact the comprehensive Magic: online PC game which offers full deck building and a card store to buy online cards straight from Wizards of the coast.

 Overall, great game to rediscover magic and also discover it for the first time. All in all I’d say the actual game is still more fun but this is not a bad replacement for when you lack physical players in your area.

An old high school vid that remains one of the best things I’ve done.

I have another one to post but youtube disabled the audio because I used the xmen cartoon theme song in it. So either I’ll post it on another video site or some how put different music in it. Look for that later.

Just when I get it, they change everything.

OK MTG rd.4

Now my shroud deck has progressed over the past month and last night it was formiddable but still not enough to come close to placing. Just too many strong combos that acted very quickly(something the guys who run MTG have been pushing for recently). Even so I did have a shining moment where my shroud deck seemed to be the unbeatable behemoth that I wanted it to be. I was facing this guys regeneration deck. the key moment was this. I was down to 6 life, he had about 40. He had cards out that would take life from me and grant him life for the rest of the game pretty much. Even though I could prevent most of his creatures from attacking me. By the next turn I was dead.

1. My turn starts
2. I draw a card
3. it’s “platinum angel” 4/4 with flying and while it’s in play I can’t lose and my opponent can’t win
4. It costs 7 and I have 8 mana, the perfect play would to be to cast it and then immediatly cast shroud on it so he can’t directly destroy the angel.
5. I play platinum angel and wait to see if he can keep it from entering play.
6. HE CAN’T!
7. his turn starts, and he brings me to negative life and he immediatly is looking for a way to make me block with the angel and kill it. As long as the angel lives I can’t lose.
8. my turn starts and I spend two mana to equip the “whispersilk cloak” on my angel granting shroud and making it unblockable.
9. the reset of the game inolves him using spells to constantly sift trhough his deck trying to find some way to kill the artifact protecting the angel and then killing the angel itself.
10. 10 turns later he’s reached the bottom of the deck. Per MTG rules once you’re out of cards you lose. I win the round.

Now he immediatly used his sideboard to change up his deck. In magic when playing tournmenrts you can use what’s called a side board. This side board is a collection of at least 15 cards that you can trade into your deck to make it more viable and hopefully still win 2 of 3 rounds. Ultimately his restructuring made his deck too fast for mine to handle and I never saw my platinum angel come into my hand again last night.

My win loss record for last night was only 3-6. I wasn’t last but I had hoped for better. Sadly come july 11th I also can’t use the platinum angel anymore since the new magic 2010 set releases and 3 old releases get banned from standard play. Oh well I can still use my deck while playing with my friends. Next week I intend on using my new control deck. Which will also take a big hit from the new release banning some slightly older cards but again oh well the game evolves and again I can still use the deck casually. The MTG game for the 360 releases today(or is supposed to, xbox live was down for maintance yesterday and the game wasn’t posted as of this morning nor was the Rock band DLC tracks). If you buy the game you also get a free planeswalker card to use in the actual game. So 10 bucks for a game and a planeswalker is a pretty awesome deal.

Chronofluffle

That’s the title of my short film still in pre-production. It’s a scifi comedy about a series of paradoxes caused by time travel. Tackling time travel in your first film short is pretty aggresive but I took a nice twist that should alleviate a lot of the pitfalls time travel cause in a plotline.

Yeah...no where near as complicated as this.

Ultimately it’s a simple row between roommates which is presented in a sci-fi and comical way. With a lot of the sci-fi elements in the background or just outside the viewers perspective, there isn’t much need for special effects. Except for one of the later shots which is going to be a panning collage of changes to their enviroment. So ultimately a shot like this requires a motion control system.

Motion control systems allow you to do a precise camera move over and over in near perfect alignment with the last take. This is a requried tool and practice for nearly all non-practical special effects today. The highest end systems can perform thousands of camera moves and not only recreate them but also record the exact camera position so later on CG animators can insert models seamlessly and in perfect sync with the camera.

For my needs all I need is a panning shot from left to right. Sounds simple right? the only major thing the camera needs is precisely the same speed of movement as each take. Something a simple motor can do. But mounting a camera to a motor is somehow a bit more tricky than I planned. I found one solution online that is only 110 dollars but it only has 180 degrees of movement whereas I’d perfer at least 270(a full 360 being optimum).

I did consider using a phonograph turntable but even at it’s lowest speed it may be too fast for my needs. 2-4 rpms seems close to what would be required. I’m pretty mechanically capable but even so the shear amout of options is still deterring me from choosing a method.

I’m sure comething can be worked out, if anything the pan shot may have to be turned into a series of locked down shots with the effects added that way. I also know there’s some post editing tricks that can be done for even handheld shots but that’s still outside my current editing expertise.

All in all there’s very little stopping me from shooting this film soon. I just hope I can work this out before it really deters me from starting.

A weekend of relaxtion and anticipation

I only hung out with Chris a bit. Otehr than that it was pretty much nothing but rock band, prototype and UFC: Undisputed. It honestly was pretty relaxing. I also have a complete lack of anxiety over my current class, “intro to art appreciation”. In my history class I’d worry about remembering key events and such and in astrnomy I’d worry about remembering the circumfrence of Jupiter. In “art appreciation” it’s pretty much just being able to describe what I’m seeing a feeling while viewing art. The lack of homework helps too.

My otehr productive thing this weekend was rebuilding my magic deacks. My shroud deck is complete…I think. My red/black deck is now faster and more powerful and I made a new deck that utilizes control cards as well as cards that benefit from the control spells I’m using in teh deck. For those not in teh knwow control cards allow you to do things with the rules and structure of the game that aren’t allowed unless you have these cards. Somthing as simple as drawing an extra card can greatly give you an edge. So I have my best and most efficent control cards in place ot allow for my power cards to punch through and really damage my opponent. Though like last week I’m awaiting an order of specific cards to finsih teh deck. in it’s current form it has some holes which need to be filled.

So thanks to having 3 available decks, I now am unsure on which to play in the magic tourney tomorrow. My shroud deck has teh most potential but it like all 3 is untested and my red/black is structurally sound but not cle4ver emnough for some of the high end decks I’m facing. I think I’m definatly using the shroud deck but I’m pretty nervous.

Then there’s the MTG: duel of the planeswalkers game which hits Xbox Live this Wednesday. at 10 dollars you get 8 complete starter decks along with what I assume will be hundreds of unlockable cards to customize each deck with. I have no doubt there will be expansions with new cards but I find this a much better deal that the other magic the gatheirng videogame: Magic the gathering:online, in which you have to buy digital versions of cards indvividually. Neither game gives me credit for the real life cards I already purchased but hey maybe Wizards of the coast can work something out eventually. Like buy a Fat pack of a new release and get a code to get the new digital expansion for free. Anyways the game hits on Wednesday and features full single player and online play. I suspect early quitters will be a problem as in all online games but hey there’s ways around that.

Tomorrow I think I may finally describe my current film project in words here. I’ve hit a coupel walls with it and voicing it here could help.