Just another round of congratulations for a job well done by the Short Pants crew.  Special congratulations go out to our own Josh, who painstakingly painted wax on a plastic skull for hours and hours only to have it blown off by a kerosine jet engine in 45 minutes.  It was truly a spectacular effect and I am definitely looking forward to compositing it this week.

“Monolith”, our most ambitious short to date as far as effects, should drop like a hot mess of wax late this week or early next.  We expect it to earn us great fame and fortune so if you are a soon-to-be fan or our soon-to-be publisher, prepare to give us your undying love and monies, respectively.

Again, great work to everyone involved.  If you want to see some pictures of the shoot, Jana was nice enough to snap a few while on set and post them to facebook, so if you are a friend of TCM, check ‘em out, and if you aren’t.  Become one.  In the meantime I’ll work on getting some posted here.

Admin out.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and while it’s probably enough to already have a million projects going on at once like we do now, it would be supremely badass to consider making Short Pants DVDs. We could give them away or sell them for $5 or a combination of both. There could be a trailers/commercials section, and a behind the scenes section with The Making Of Possibly record mini-commentaries for some of them. Here are the shorts I think would be good enough to immortalize on disc, or good enough with some minor fixes:

Inside Out
Shitty Day
Street Burrito
Best Friends (maybe?)
Time Machine (needs tweaking)
Roommate Test (slight tweaking, one shot added)
Game Night
Forcefield
You Say
The Making Of 2 (possibly shortened?)
The Making Of (definitely shortened)
Shooter Pistolletto
Original Shooter Trailer
PCC
Marlboro County
Marlboro County 2 (music added, slight tweaking)
Nickname Battle (possibly dubbed with improved nicknames?)
Softer Side (possibly refilmed? without the guy making the “Suck It” gesture in the background?)
Doritos Commercial
John Smith Trailer

Special Edition: David Cronenberg Quadruple Feature

The Dead Zone: Of all of Cronenberg’s films, this one from 1983 features probably the least amount of shocking violence and special effects. Adapted from the Stephen King novel, the film is the story of a teacher who is left in a coma after a collision with a truck. When he awakes, five years later, he finds that his fiance has moved on and started a family with another man, and that he can see into a person’s future by touching them.  Christopher Walken turns in one of his greatest serious performances as a man struggling to choose between ignoring his terrible abilities or using his premonitions for the benefit of others. I read that Walken performed every scene at least five different ways, and that Cronenberg promised Walken that he would assemble one consistent performance in the editing room. It’s a solid movie, but forgettable. It’s greatest weaknesses are the elements that are the most Stephen King-ish.

A History of Violence: Whether you consider it to be a small-town mafia movie or a modern western, this graphic novel adaptation from 2005 (the last major Hollywood film to ever be released on VHS, and the first major Hollywood film to show a man and woman *ahem* “69-ing”), A History of Violence is one of Cronenberg’s most focused, mature works. Viggo Mortensen, great and method as always, is an Indiana diner owner (who may or may not have a violent mob-based past) who comes under scrutiny from his family and friends when he quells a potentially lethal disturbance in his diner. Fantastically paced, Cronenberg slowly twists the screw deeper and deeper into Tom Stall’s past and forces a plaid rural community onto a collision course with the silk-suited mob world. Not a ton of violence, but when it happens, it happens fast and hard and it’s pretty shocking, which is the best kind, right?

The Fly: This 1986 remake of the 1958 classic is perhaps Cronenberg’s most well-known work. Jeff Goldblum, in probably his finest role ever, stars as the tortured and tragic scientist Seth Brundle, who becomes the unfortunate victim of his life’s work. After a small mishap occurs when he is testing his unbelievable teleportation units, Brundle discovers that his DNA has been fused with that of a common housefly, and that everything human about him is gradually being phased out by the superior insect genetics. As great as Goldblum is, the real star of the show is Chris Walas’ transformative makeup effects. As “The Brundle Museum of Natural History” (a collection of ears, teeth, and other unnecessary body parts) grows in size, Goldblum becomes less and less human. Some of the effects were achieved simply, by stuffing Goldblum’s clothes with foam, while others required cable-controlled and rod-operated puppets. The result is a fully immersive film whose effects, while dated, never detract from the quality of the narrative.

Videodrome: This 1983 film has been sitting in the front of my brain since the first time I saw it, about a month ago, and it’s been threatening to boot Fight Club from my #1 Favorite Movie spot, although I would never make a claim like that without sitting on it in my head for a good 6 months. This flick, nearly 26 years old, prophecied The Matrix, the internet, and interactive digital immersion from the analog-and-betamax world of the early eighties.  Max Renn (James Woods), a sleazy UHF cable tv station president, discovers a shocking snuff program while looking for new programs to pirate and broadcast, which sends him on a hallucinatory quest to reveal the secrets behind Videodrome. By viewing this movie, you are agreeing to witness scenes that include but are not limited to:
-a man making out with a veiny, pulsating television.
-Debbie Harry (from Blondie) putting a cigarette our on her breast.
-a vaginal slit suddenly appears on a man’s stomach. It can hold a handgun and a Beta cassette.
-a handgun fuses itself to a human hand with metal rods.
-a man is shot by a television.
-a man is shot and explodes in tumors.
-a man’s hand is swallowed by the previously-mentioned stomach/vag.
-a man whips a television, S&M style.
-a man named Professor Brian O’blivion, who only appears on television.
Beware the cathode ray tube. Death to Videodrome. Long live the new flesh. Watch this movie NOW.

This is regarding the shoe throwing at President Bush, known on the internet as hilariousandawesome@reality.iraq. Hear me out:

Ironically, even though I hate George Bush and consider him to be the most powerful impetus behind the murder of tens of thousands of people, I wouldn’t want him to die for his crimes or be assassinated. I don’t believe in the death penalty.

And even though he authorized torture on detainees at guantanamo bay, some of whom could be innocent for all we know, I still don’t think Georgie Boy should strapped to the rack or fixed with a pair of thumb screws. Cruel and unusual punishment is kinda outlawed in the Constitution, I’m pretty sure.

But I wish, wish, wish, wish, wish, that at least one of those shoes would’ve hit that motherf*ckin p*ece *f shi* in his g*dd*mn, ugl*, f*ckin f*ace! I mean, c’mon. Just one shoe, just a black eye, wing him with the wingtip, something! so that when our smug, smarmy male-Sarah Palin president looks in the mirror he remembers that the whole world, except for a morbidly idiotic 20% of americans, hates his guts, hates all his organs in fact.

AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!! I’m so filled with hate!

And I just wish a shoelace could have hit him in the eye or gave him a blood blister on his cheek or something.

So, I know I’m probably the only person on this site who cares about what I’m about to say, but whatevs I’ve got a log-in and I’m licensed to use it.

So, what with the current wave of crises–economic, energyonomic, mortgageonomic, ergonomic, and all the other onomics that are causing trouble–its time to take a good long look at every thing we do here in the 21st century and decide if we do it because its the best way or if it’s just the way we’ve ended up doing it over time. Now, there are a lot of things to look at (hint, hint to you other posters out there) but what I’m mainly concerned with in this post is our food production.

Currently, because of massive farms, it’s economically cheaper for New York restaurants to ship produce in from California than buy it from the garden state next door. In a great article for the NYTimes, Michael Pollan makes a great case for the redesign of our nation’s food production. Policies like flying tomatoes halfway across the world, or catching salmon in alaska, filleting them in China, and then serving them in Manhattan restaurants are responsible, by Pollan’s estimate, for up to 19 percent of green house gas emissions.

Pollan suggests that we start to aggressively develop regional agriculture, take the American farm back from huge corporations and re-people it with a new breed of American farmer, use gov’t policies to support farmer’s markets, quit using fertilizer, and return to crop rotation mixed with animal husbandry that naturally renews the soil–this is maybe the most important ecologically and morally, get rid of industrialized meat and poultry production. The separation of farm animals from the farm takes an elegant natural cycle (cows eat grass, grass becomes poop, poop fertilizes grass, ad infinitum) and creates two problems: getting rid of animal feces, fertilizing fields. Those problems are currently solved by pumping the waste into landfills and buying nitrogen-rich fertilizers–a perfect illustration of how modern food production has evolved into a monstrously inefficient system.

But I just wanted you to think about that. The real issue for me is Read the rest of this entry »

Its time for a discussion; one of those discussions that may change the course of history, or at least the history of this site.  It is in this administrator’s opinion that the crew of Monday Night Short Pants need their own site.  The purpose of this discussion should be to answer a few of the following questions: what should that site look like?  should it be grungy or clean?  what features should it have?  how many pages should it be?  what should happen to TCM?  what do we do about this here blog?  should there even be a new site at all?

So.  There are lots of questions here.  Lets try to answer some of them so we can get moving on the next thing (whatever that may be) over the holidays.  DISCUSS!

-admin�

We’ve done super hero characters, and comic book villains, its time to forget the personalities that make those characters great and concentrate on the powers these characters have that make them super (sorry Batman fans, being super rich doesn’t count). This can be interpreted as either the super powers you would most want to have or the most interesting powers for plot development. I tried to keep both in mind:

10. Super agility
9. Telekinesis
8. Power negation
7. Shadow manipulation
6. Invisibility
5. Invulnerability
4. Teleportation
3. Intangibility
2. Shape shifting
1. Reactive adaptation

This should be pretty interesting and revealing (especially to all those graphics sluts who care more about how grass looks than how fun a game is). In no particular order:

Custom character leveling up - You all know how rewarding it is when you finally have enough experience points to use that big spell you’ve had your eye on for days now, so fun and super cool to have an individualized character based on how you want to play the game.

Saving your progress - One of the best features about Tecmo Super Bowl was the savable season and tracking your stats against the field.

Moving and aiming independently - Requires 2 directional pads and opened the possibilities of total game immersion.

Sandbox modes - Driver, need I say more?

First person perspective - This was the next step in total game immersion, and of course made FPSs possible.

Character editor - think Tiger Woods (xbox 360) or WWF: No Mercy (N64), one of the things that makes these games great is that you can make your character look like you.

Smart NPC AI - Remember the zig-zag move on Tecmo, or beating bosses on MegaMan, just find the pattern and exploit. Try doing that on Halo 3, or Madden ‘08.

Coupled campaign and multi-player game modes - I’m not sure how this became something of a standard, but I sure am glad it did.

Map editor - Whether its Halo’s Forge, or AoE’s campaign editor, or Tony Hawk’s skate park editor, making maps is fun.

Four player split screen multi-player - As the regulars know, this is a huge sticking point for me, and I think a defining quality of any great shooter. When you have 4 friends sitting together in a room working as a team, and you win a close game and you can actually stand up, cheer, and hive five your teammates, nothing can beat that kind of camaraderie. It just adds a great party feel to gaming.

The Incredible Hulk- I really liked this movie. I loved the way it married the original source material and the classic TV show. The fugitive/on-the-run portrayal Bruce Banner from the tv series really works as a device that both moves the story and sells the character. And I REALLY love how this isn’t another freaking origin story. You get five minutes of set-up during the opening credits and after that you’re thrust into a world that has been going on without you for who knows how long. And it works. Frenchy Louis Leterrier, who you know from the flashy ultra-stylized Transporter series, does a nice job directing here. There are only a handful of overtly stylized shots, and the movie is better for it. There is a timeless quality to this movie, and maybe part of it is the use of dated technology instead of whatever new product placement cell phone garbage you would have normally seen in a Hollywood summer movie. The computers remind me of the ones in Aliens or The Thing, and this character near the end has a bank of computer equipment that already looks 20 years old, which I think will really help down the road in making this a film that ages well. I was hoping that the Hulk would be the “villain” of the upcoming Avengers movie (2011), but the end of this movie made me think that the character would be moving in a different direction. We’ll see. Avengers will be in theaters before Hulk 2.

Hellboy 2: The Golden Army- Don’t get me wrong, I love the first Hellboy flick. It’s a great, subversive, counter-culture answer to the superhero movie. But this. This movie. Oh my God. Anybody want to buy my DVD of the first Hellboy? Because I don’t think I can ever watch it again after seeing this.
Everything that was GREAT about the first one is ten times better. And it feels like there are HALF as many CGI shots (that isn’t true, but the amount of practical effects going on in this movie is INSANE). Oh and the lame Meyers character that was supposed to be the audiences window into the world of the B.P.R.D. freaks? He’s totally gone. They mention him in one sentence very early on, and the rest of the movie belongs to the freaks. Hellboy, as always, is perfect, Ron Perlman is Hellboy so that’s no surprise. Abe Sapien is even cooler here than he was in the last one, although David Hyde Pierce’s voice is gone and Doug Jones(who plays Abe behind all that make-up, and he also plays the uber-creepy Angel of Death near the end) does the voice work. Liz has more to do, but still isn’t that interesting. The star of the show, I must say, is the ectoplasmic entity Johann Krauss. He is a disembodied ghost who is contained in an old-timey SCUBA-type suit. Seth MacFarlane (creator of Family Guy) voices the German, by-the-book B.P.R.D. agent without ever hamming it up or going for a cheap joke (although his pronunciation of “focused” is hilarious). Director Guillermo del Toro, who I have admired for many years, is at the top of his game. Here is a guy who is in the rare position to actually beat Peter Jackson at his own game by directing the two upcoming Hobbit films, and his direction never wavers in Hellboy 2. There is more imagination and ingenuity in the Troll Market sequence than in a dozen Dark Knights.

That’s it. Just 2 movies this time. Sorry to disappoint. See you next week.

Scanners- Have you seen this movie? Seriously has anybody seen this movie? It’s so great, and not just because scanners can make people’s heads explode with their mind, or because they can control your actions or read your thoughts. The fact that this movie has a GREAT satirical narrative full of sharp social commentary (still relevant almost 30 years later) which is kind of disguised as an 80s mystery/thriller is what really makes it worth watching. The scanner battle at the end where the guys make each others’ veins bulge out and the one guy starts tearing his face off and then he catches on fire and his eyeballs explode out of his head is just icing on the cake. This was directed by David Cronenberg, who went on to make The Fly with Jeff Goldblum, which is another excellent “science gone wrong” satire, and widely considered to be his masterpiece, but I think I personally prefer Scanners. Go watch that guy’s head explode and tell me I’m wrong. I dare you.

Hostel 1 & 2- Eli Roth came on the scene with a little movie called Cabin Fever, starring Sean from Boy Meets World and the coolest flesh-eating virus ever depicted on film. It was brilliant and original even though it was stupid and cliche. He followed this up with a movie called Hostel that borrowed heavily from the works of Japanese film-maker (and the inventor of the genre known as “torture porn”) Takashi Miike. It made all kinds of money and generated a sequel, Hostel 2. Of the two, Hostel 2 is the superior film. The characters, while 2-dimensional and cartoonish, are a little more fleshed out and “real” than the first Hostel, the body count is larger, and I like that we get to see a couple of guys on the “other” side of things, the guys who are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to travel to the other side of the world and murder a stranger. However, those looking for more (and better) nudity would be wise to choose the first Hostel over the second. But your best option is to skip both Hostels and just watch Cabin Fever, although it too has considerably less nudity.

Casino Royale- I wanted to see this again and have it fresh in my head when I go see Quantum of Solace (which will have the new Watchmen trailer attached, by the way). So I tried to watch it three times and fell asleep every time before the first hand of cards is even played. Fail. So I wised up and started the movie 45 minutes into it and was capable of making it through with no problem. I really really liked this movie when it was in theaters and kind of forgot about it, but I enjoyed it a lot more watching it again. I still think the “fourth act” feels tacked-on and doesn’t receive as much attention as it deserves, but it felt more natural seeing it again. I’m calling it how I see it: Daniel Craig is going to be remembered as the best Bond ever. Right now he is not, but if he maintains the same level of intensity and gives us a few more layers, then whatever movie comes after Quantum will make it Official. Connery/Brosnan/Moore/Dalton/Lazenby loyalists may feel free to direct their hate mail to the comments section below.