After spending the last month at home in Ashland, I’m back in Portland and having to get used to the idea of having classes to go to. Since I haven’t written anything here, this is going to be a big conglomeration of things that don’t really warrant individual posts, but I still feel like talking about.
Snakes on a Plane. It’s a movie. It’s a phenomenon. It’s a paradox. It’s a lifestyle. What’s it about? you ask. Well, let me try to explain. There are snakes. There is a plane. The plane is in the air. The snakes are on the plane. Presumably, chaos ensues. End of story. Oh, and it stars Samuel L. Jackson.
I remember reading about Snakes on a Plane when the entry on Josh Friedman’s site had first been posted but I had no idea just how much of an online flurry there had been over the film until I rediscovered it the other night. This is an attempt to round up the many amusing gems that have been created.
There is, of course, the original blog entry that’s pretty much responsible for all of the hype this film’s received online.
Next, and probably he second most influential piece of SoaP cannon, if you will, is this interview with Samuel L. Jackson that serves to assure the public that the film’s title will not be changed from Snakes on a Plane if he has anything to do with it.
The comments on the IMDB entry contain over 200 possible titles for sequels, ranging from the clever to the terribly moronic.
It’s been added to Wikipedia and urban dictionary. and spawned a livejournal blog devoted to news and information about the film. Two t-shirts have entered production, and last, but probably best of all, there’s a humorous audio trailer and trailer script. In more traditional online pre-movie hype, there are actual photos from the set, but that’s boring compared to the rest of it.
After she saw it as part of the New York Musical Theatre Festival, Talia sent me a link to the website of Gutenberg: The Musical. Ever since I downloaded and listened to the music, some part of it has been stuck in my head constantly.
The show is an amusing, though wildly and proudly historically incorrect, show that centers around Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. With witty lyrics set to incredibly catchy tunes, and a total running time of only 22 minutes, I highly reccomend that everyone download and listen to this little gem of a show.
The plot centers around Johan Gutenberg (of course), Helvetica Guminstipple, the illiterate grape juice stomper that loves him, and an evil monk that wants the press destroyed so that he can maintain the fact that “the bible sez whatever I sez it sez”. It’s beautiful.
Wednesday night, Diana and I went to see The Lion King touring show at the Keller Auditorium. Upon entering the lobby, there was no doubt whatsoever that this was a big production put on by a company that truly understands the power of a captive audience. The lobby was dotted with merchandise booths in which the least expensive item was a $10 infant shirt emblazened with “My First Musical.” Truth be told, the markup wasn’t as rediculous as I’ve seen it other places. The original cast recording, on sale for $20, is available on amazon new for $13.49. Considering that shipping isn’t included in the Amazon price, $6.50 is a reasonable price to pay for the convienence and the thrill of having something to take away from the show.
I’d heard that the opening number was one of the high points of the show and it did not disappoint. Shortly after the house lights dimmed the aisles and stage were filled with a fanciful procession of animals (in puppet form, of course). Among the highlights were giraffes that were controlled by people wearing stilts for both their feet and hands and a close to life size elephant.
All of the puppets were outstanding, but I think my personal favorite was a cheetah. It was operated by a woman who stood behind it, and controlled the two front legs with poles. The thing that made it really stand out was that the puppet’s head was connected to the operator’s head with monofilamnet. This allowed for an almost invisible connection between puppeteer and puppet that added a huge amount of expressiveness to the creature.
The performance was a fantastic spectacle overall, as you can read many, many other places. I really enjoyed it, but I’m not going to go into detail scene-by-scene. Some of the musical material that was added wasn’t quite up to same level as the original material, but Shadow Land at the opening of act two was really beautiful. I Just Can’t Wait To Be King in act one was a bit of a disappointment to me because it strayed rather far from the look of the rest of the show, bringing in garishly colored puppets that looked more circusy and less savannahy (the spell checker will let me get away with circusy, but it doesn’t believe savannahy). This was mainly because this song was covering up for the massive scene change into the elephant graveyard that would be used for the next few scenes, but it still bothered me.
Okay, I’m going to get a bit techieish now:
From what I could tell from my seat, glancing over at the booth that had been erected in the back of the auditorium, they were using an Obsession II to control their conventional fixtures and a separate console for the intelligent fixtures. Four LCD displays for lighting, two for sound. There were four of what looked like VL7s hanging from the second balcony. I tried to notice a time during the show that they were being used, but I never did. A lot of extra cabling had to be run to handle all of the fixtures that they had installed on the balcony and it snaked in large black bundles up from both sides of the stage and from the booth.
When the curtain lifted, the first thing I noticed were the legs. On either side of the stage were three legs which looked like they were hollow rectangular columns of white cloth which were lit from within. They also could have been L shaped and backlit. Either way, the end result was that their color could be easily changed, usually to extend the cyc color, to work with the scene. The bottoms of them were printed with a rough grassy pattern which stood out as a great contrast to the rest of the column.
The central rock set piece entered and rotated as actors climbed the stairs in the opposite direction as the rotation. This both distracted from the rock’s entrance and lengthened the climb while keeping the actors center stage. In addition to the tracks for set piece movement, the stage floor was fitted with hydraulics that raised the rear 2/3 of the stage at about a 30° angle to the rest of the floor. This was used in large crowd scenes to increase visibility and later to create the effect of a hill. One interesting thing about it is that the central circle of the stage could either remain flat or be included in the rise. One of the most visibly stunning moments in the show came at the start of the second act where a large circular piece of silver cloth was spread out on this incline and smoothly pulled through a hole in the stage floor from its center. The scene was accentuating the devastation of the savannah and the combination of this effect with stark white cyc lighting got the point across very well.
Another truly amazing piece of scene design was the stampede in the canyon. The legs are masked with black slip covers and huge L-shaped units come in from the side, converging to form a canyon. There are four rows of these, in decreasing size, creating perspective. At the top of the furthest unit, a solid wall representing the back of the canyon, was a cutout silhouette of wildebeest. When the stampede begins, this silhouette is removed and a projection of wildebeest running down the canyon wall begins. It is followed by the appearance of a marvelous contraption of wildebeest puppets on a series of wheels that rises from between the next two canyon sections. Finally, actors portraying wildebeest appear on the lower levels to complete the filling of the canyon. Truly spectacular, though my 2:44 am description writing might not be sufficient to express this.
It’s not as if this Serenity needs any more people blogging about it, but let’s pretend for a moment that it does. However, for the sake of the world at large, I’ll try to keep this fairly short. If you haven’t seen the movie, however, you should stop reading now because I’ll probably talk about things that happen in it.
Having watched all of Firefly recently and having high expectations for the film, I will say that it did not disappoint. Fans of the series looking for a continuation and/or semi-conclusion will definitely find what they’re looking for. The concern that I had when I first heard about the project was whether it could manage to stand apart from the series and appeal to the general moviegoing public. In this regard, I have mixed feelings. The movie does a good job of quickly reviewing necessary backstory and introducing the core characters, but it fails in creating the amount of emotional attachment that fans of the series will bring with them. There’s a big difference between a character dying when we’ve seen them for maybe ten minutes of the film and that same character dying with an entire series of character depth behind them. I fear that those unfamiliar with the universe will not understand the power and sadness of parts of the film, as they don’t know the characters well enough to emphasize with them.
I’ve discovered the wonders of the Multnomah County Library’s DVD collection. It’s a fairly eclectic mix, and much larger than I had expected. Anyway, the first of my many reserves have come in and I’m enjoying them greatly.