TOYS IN THE ATTIC - GALLERIE 44

Thursday, March 22, 2012

TOYS IN THE ATTIC 12

Unimaginable Digital Art by Mike Campau from Michigan,USA

‘I m currently the Creative Director and lead artist at SeventhStreet Studio, and I have over 15 years experience in graphic design, art direction, CG (3d) and image design (retouching). I love 10 way strips, layer masks, polygons and creating something from nothing. I am always up for collaborations and personal projects, so feel free to hit me up on twitter or email if you are interested. — Mike Campau.

Visit Here for More Info : http://www.mikecampau.com/

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

MYSTICAL BRAIN

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

ALIEN vs PREDATOR - FINAL SHOWDOWN

CULTURE WARRIOR 45

For the first time in recent memory, I’m going into Oscar Sunday having no idea who is likely to take home many of the major awards. I’m sure there are entire websites out there devoted to an accurate prediction of who and what will take home the gold on Sunday, but there seems something a bit different about this year. Of the nine films nominated, I don’t have a clear sense of what would be the top five had AMPAS not changed the number of entries in the top category. While The Artist may clearly have more of a chance than, say,Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, there’s no grand battle between likely leads like there was between The King’s Speech and The Social Network last year. And I don’t think I’m alone in stating that this year’s uninspiring list of nominees seems to reflect a growing indifference against the ceremony itself.

Sure, on Sunday, like I have every year since I was eleven years old, I’ll watch the entire ceremony from beginning to end. And, like every year since I was twenty-one years old, I’ll make fun of the pompous and excessive self-congratulatory nature of the proceedings. But while in most years I have had some skin in the game, besides the two nominations afforded to the excellent Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and the presence of the transcendentally excellent Pina in the Best Documentary Feature category, this year I didn’t even get a sense that the Academy was awarding quality filmmaking, even if it’s of a quality that I don’t gravitate toward (had The King’s Speech not been an Oscar winner, it would have been a perfectly fine little film). While last year’s nominees were accompanied by loud advocates (specifically for those outside the “big two” like The Fighter, Winter’s Bone, The Kids Are All Right, and Inception), with the exception of the aw-shucks modesty ofMoneyball, no Best Picture nominee this year is without its fervent backlash.

It’s not that 2011 was a bad year. There was plenty of interesting and even great work that made it to theaters in the mainstream (Contagion, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, 50/50), in the arthouse (Meek’s Cutoff, Take Shelter, Weekend), in between (Drive), and the many great titles that emerged from the world of nonfiction(Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Bill Cunningham: New York), but you wouldn’t know it from the Oscars themselves. I’m not attempting here to resurrect the tired “snubs” conversation (as a friend of mine says, anytime someone says that a film or person was “snubbed,” they must identify which nominee they’d remove in turn), but simply stating what I’m sure the producers of the Oscars know all too well in their fledgling attempts to reconnect with an audience: the awards as of late, for the most part, reflect neither the interests of mainstream audiences nor the interests of cinephiles and critics.

In the face of sagging ratings, a recent history of awards hosts who irreverently put the silly excess of the ceremony front-and-center, and a growing sense that many Best Pictures of past and present haven’t and won’t age well (American Beauty, A Beautiful Mind, mandatory Crash mention), it’s easy to say that the Oscars simply don’t matter. But, for worse and for better, they do.

Why It Sucks That the Oscars Matter

The Academy Awards are an active project of canonization and history-making. And, as with any canon and historiography, they engage in a practice of selection. There comes a point in the life of a cinephile in which they look toward canons in order to broaden their knowledge of and exposure to film. One of the most authoritative resources the American filmgoer has in this regard is the list of Best Picture winners. Such a list indicates to someone interested in film that Lawrence of Arabia, Midnight Cowboy, Annie Hall, All About Eve, andThe Silence of the Lambs are films worth seeing. Now, perhaps this is giving the academy too much credit as these films are also canonized elsewhere, but the Academy Awards represent a forum that maintains a certain degree of authority.

That titles like Cave of Forgotten Dreams or performances like Michael Shannon’s in Take Shelter have been overlooked does carry with it certain consequences. I’m not talking about snubs, but about the reality of selection: certain films and people are automatically preserved by the authority of the nomination (and the win), while others are not. This provides a distinct advantage or disadvantage for the subsequent lives of certain films. I don’t mean the pragmatics of preservation, like that these rather accessible films will go out of print otherwise, but canonization preserves films discursively. Yes, some films do maintain their toehold in the zeitgeist otherwise, but an Academy Award nomination does preserve a powerful index for historical importance that outlives its moment. This isn’t a new or particularly revelatory point by any means, but it does contradict the increasingly accepted idea that the Oscars don’t matter.

Then there’s the other side of the debate – the gold-plated lining.

OVER/UNDER 30

I was only eight in 1989, but from what I remember it was pretty much the year of Batman and Driving Miss Daisy; two movies that my 8-year-old self was less than impressed by. Perhaps we’ll talk about Batman at a later date, but today I want to talk about Miss Daisy, a movie that won so many awards and got so much critical praise that it made even those of us who had yet to sprout pubes aware of who Jessica Tandy was. The hype on this thing must have been huge to get me to tear my attention away from G.I. Joe and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles long enough to watch a film about a couple of old people driving around, but it did.

The other movie I want to look at is from 2008. It’s Clint Eastwood’s acting swan song, Gran Torino. This one was well-liked, from what I can tell, but it didn’t get the hype or attention that I imagined it would once awards season rolled around, and consequently I don’t think as many people saw it as should have. I mean, with this one’s racial themes and its focus on old people you’d think it was a shoo-in for baiting the Oscars into giving it recognition. Perhaps it had too many racial slurs and too much gunplay to get embraced by the intellectual bourgeoisie that make up the Academy though. Give something a little color and suddenly it can’t be viewed as “serious material.”

What do they have in common?

They’re both about prickly old codgers who have grown accustomed to their ways and who use a generally grumpy demeanor to push people away. In Driving Miss Daisy, we get Jessica Tandy’s Daisy growling at her new chauffeur because she doesn’t want to admit that she can’t drive herself around anymore. In Gran Torino we get Clint Eastwood’s Walt, who growls at pretty much everyone because he doesn’t want to accept that his neighborhood is changing both demographically and in its values. There’s a lot of race stuff going on in both as well. Daisy is learning to live in a world where her black employees are quickly becoming her only company, and Walt is struggling to understand his Hmong neighbors, who won’t stop trying to talk to him and giving him presents. And these are great movies when it comes to car porn. In Driving Miss Daisy we get plenty of long looks at a gleaming ’48 Hudson Commodore, and in Gran Torino it’s the same thing with a ’72 Ford Gran Torino.

**Why is Driving Miss Daisy overrated?**

This movie is nice. It’s slow and pleasant, not unlike a weekend drive through the countryside might be. But important? A watershed moment when it comes to art about race? No, I don’t buy that. This movie is much too nice for that. Half of the characters we meet are Jewish, the other half black, and generally everyone is tolerant, wise, and a joy to be around. Sure, the relationship between Daisy and Hoke (Morgan Freeman) is strained at first, but there aren’t any characters in this movie that are bigots, any that even have real prejudices. For a film that eventually invokes footage from a famous Martin Luther King speech, that seems pretty safe. Were the writers afraid that we wouldn’t like Tandy’s character if she was legitimately mean or racist in the beginning? No risk, no reward. If none of the characters get painted in a negative light, then nobody here has anything important to learn, and the journeys that the characters take end up feeling insignificant.

This movie can be pretty boring, too. Some of the back and forth is clever enough to cause a smirk or two, but until the third act rolls around nothing at all happens. Daisy goes to the store, she plays mahjong, she goes to a birthday party… this really is just time spent driving an old lady around to do boring old lady things. The big conflict of the second act is whether or not Hoke stole a can of salmon, and it gets wrapped up in about five minutes. Am I watching a movie that has something to say or is this a training video for being a chauffeur? Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.

And for a movie that only had an hour and thirty-nine minute runtime, this one felt like it was well over two hours. We’re an hour in before Daisy’s housekeeper dies and her and Hoke really have to start spending time alone. That felt like it should have been the establishing conflict that set things into motion, but instead it came around when we were already approaching the home stretch. And what is Dan Aykroyd doing in this movie? We keep going back to his character, but his story arch ends up having very little impact on the Tandy and Freeman bonding story that makes up the heart of the film. Why not just have the son character be a small part and really dig into the relationship this script was primarily concerned with? The gray powder that’s eventually in Aykroyd’s hair was pretty much my only indication that years had been passing though, so maybe hiring a recognizable actor whose aging we would notice was the point of him getting so much screen time. I mean, really, how big of a timespan are we covering here? Nothing happens! Or, maybe things happen, but they’re subtle. Too subtle. By the end of the film Daisy is taking an interest in the civil rights movement, but she still won’t even admit she likes Hoke. They get no big bonding moment before she starts to lose her mind, and maybe that’s bittersweet and appropriate to the era, but for a movie about little other than two people coming together, it feels like an empty experience.

**Why is Gran Torino underpraised?**

This movie has a real edge to it, especially for something directed by Clint Eastwood. His character is a real bastard; scowling, growling, and tossing racial slurs at everybody. During the first act you don’t like him at all, and you’re not even sure if he’s going to be worth redeeming. But they pull it off, and since he starts out so abrasive, the feat looks all the more impressive. That applies to a lot of the other characters as well. The first glimpses we get of the neighbors see them chopping the head off of a chicken in a weird backyard ceremony and having douchebag gang members as relatives. Nobody here seems like anyone you’d want to spend time with at first, but once you learn more about them they start to charm with their idiosyncrasies. It pretty effectively recreates the experience of becoming adjusted to another culture.

The aggression and hate that this movie taps into is more visceral than I was expecting as well. There’s some real tension that gets built as people keep trying to interact with Walt. You don’t know if somebody is going to get shot, if Walt is going to get increasingly racist to the point where it becomes unacceptable, or what; but clearly it’s all leading to shit going down, and watching is a nail biting experience. The hate we get out of all the kids is very unpleasant to watch. There’s so much senseless aggression and hate among the pockets of today’s youth that don’t have any good work to do, and tragically it often explodes into violence. In fact, the kids in this movie get so intimidating and violent that I can’t imagine any other aged actor who could have stood up to them and made it believable; but Eastwood gives great, grizzled, action movie swagger, and more than proves he still has it. Nobody growls, “Get off my lawn,” quite like he does.

This movie just goes deeper than something like Driving Miss Daisy. It shows how nice it can be when people from different backgrounds come together, sure, but it doesn’t stop there. This one asks the hard questions too. It explores the dark side of people, it asks what should be done when people are too broken and willfully ignorant to be anything but a hindrance to everyone around them. It shows the heartbreak and despair that a closed off heart leads to. Those that are unwilling to accept others for who they are, or that try to force the world into their idea of what’s acceptable inevitably cause pain and suffering. Gran Torino gets bleak. Violent acts go down, people are seriously hurt. This one answers the easy questions that Driving Miss Daisy does in its first half, but then it moves on to more complicated material.

Evening the odds.

Say what you will about which of these movies you think is better than the other, but Tandy got an Oscar for her performance and Eastwood didn’t get shit; even with the awesome song in the end credits that he co-wrote and sings a few lines of. You don’t hear Tandy doing any crooning in her movies. Eastwood is the working man’s actor. Somebody should give him a variety show.