Ghost World

a great comic book adaptation.

Ghost World is a brilliant film in my opinion. Why? Just look at the message board and the comments on this website. It's amazing how much people have taken from this movie, especially a relatively lesser known one.

When I first watched this movie, it was a revelation. It was just that good of a movie. The characters, the story, the location all of it was just perfect.

Many people have related to this movie because of its "coming-of-age" or "just out of high school" aspect, and they are true in describing this movie in those terms. But what I really thought was great was how this movie, to me, was about the search for something meaningful and more importantly for Enid, something "real", especially more so in our often contrived and plastic modern world.

Two very special friends.

Have an adult day.

That's where "Ghost World" comes in. It is described as so because if you look at the setting of the movie, you can not really tell where in the United States it takes place in. It could be virtually any one of the suburban areas that has sprung up in the past couple of decades. It's true that there is a great deal of comfort and leisure, but at the same time there is a lack of soul. Its not the big city, where they try to emulate its culture and activities, nor the small town, where they try to emulate its sense of tranquility and community, but rather a facade of both, ending up being none. No one is truly happy, yet everyone puts a smile on, and that is what really bothers Enid, I believe. Its a world where sterile hip-hop music is used to celebrate a high school graduation, authentic 50s diners are anything but, and a white "blues" band sing about picking cotton all day long for the man. All contrived, all far removed from its source, all as real as a slushie from the Sidewinder food store.

After all why is she attracted to Seymour? I don't think because he's the dorky record collector with a sour outlook on life, but because he is honest about it. He's not a stuffy collector who claims to know everything, but a guy with a passion for something, even if it isn't something "cool". Even with the Coon Chicken incident you can see that its sincerity that Enid is searching for. Enid is not a racist but she picks the Coon Chicken ad for her art project because it reflects how little society has have not changed, even if it whitewashed itself. Like Seymour said people still hate each other but they hide it better.

Waiting for that bus.

Catwoman!

Rebecca on the other hand seems to have accepted that society and life at large kinda sucks, so she "sells out" by working at the coffee shop, which is an obvious Starbuck's knock off. But in my opinion, she just realized that she can't change the world and how it is, so she goes on a different road from Enid's. A scene which highlights this is when she shows a liking for brightly colored glasses for her new apartment, while Enid gawks at her for being overtly excited for cups. But who's to say that Rebecca is wrong for liking those cups? How is it different from Seymour's fascination of 75s? Rebecca may have changed some throughout the movie, but at her core she remains to be the cynical and independent person that she is.

Finally, Enid goes away from it all, fulfilling her desire to one day to disappear from it all, because it seems that she can not rely on anyone, not even Norman the bus bench guy. Rebecca is working most of the time, her father is marrying the person she dreads (showing a disinterest or plain aloofness in Enid's life), her art teacher is a talentless hack who doesn't really care for her (or any of her students really, even though she pretends to) since she didn't fight for her after the art show debacle and Seymour disappointed her twice. First by dating a person whom he knows is not his type, yet he conforms to her (literally, just look at those tight jeans she bought him!) and secondly becoming overtly renewed in his relationship with Enid only after a night where Enid and Seymour took their relationship to bed(with a help of a bottle of champagne.

Regular people, regular jobs.

Love & Vinyl.

Did Enid commit suicide in the end? Personally I don't think so, it would be such a surrealistic end to a story that is steeped in realism, but that is another reason why Ghost World is such a great movie. There is such an open space for interpretation and such depth that one can talk about it for hours, discussing about it and getting more out it with every viewing of the movie. There's a whole lot more than what I just wrote about, but I don't want to bore you with my interpretation, and there are other things in the movie that other people see in it that I might have missed or disagree with.

But thats a mark of a good movie. Just look at the message board for yourself. 

Here's the movie trailer:

The Island

Is cloning right?

Michael Bay has directed some big budget action adventures that have an over-the-top feel. He tones it down a bit and, despite borrowing from a myriad of past films, his 2005 effort, The Island, is an intelligent, entertaining adventure with science fiction as its source material.

In the not too distant future, there is a segregated world of men and women who function with a limited view and knowledge of their antiseptic world. Their only way of life is that they must work, follow the rules and dream of being selected in the lottery to go to The Island, the ultimate destination of happiness and fulfillment. One of the populace is a male, Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor), who begins to question his existence and role in the world even as he develops a friendship with a female, Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson). He also experiences nightmares about an outside world and expresses doubts about the validity of his surroundings including the lottery. He relates these concerns to a friendly doctor, Merrick (Sean Bean) and later to an outsider, McCord (Steve Buscemi), a computer geek. As he explores the floors above him, he stumbles onto another level where he discovers a terrible truth and lie. Realizing that their world is only part of something much more, Lincoln and Jordan make a break to the outside with McCord's help and find themselves pursued by bounty hunters led by Albert Laurent (Djimon Hounsou). It seems that Merrick works for a cloning corporation dependent on enormous outside funds, and it is involved in secretly cloning humans for individual sponsors. The problem is that the corporation has gone too far in its experiments with tragic consequences. Searching for answers, Lincoln and Jordan eventually find themselves face to face with Lincoln's sponsor whereupon they decide to stop Merrick's evil plans and expose his horrifying activities to the world even as Laurent closes in. 

Something's fishy.

The lottery reading.

This film is engaging from the very start with its interesting premise, and it does a good job of maintaining a steadily building mystery until the startling revelation which spins our protagonists in another direction. And if it seems the storyline is derivative of a multitude of other film plot lines, it's because concepts such as duplicate humans, memory loss, corporate societies, and the pursuit of individual freedom and identity in a futuristic setting have been visited before. There are strong echoes of Coma, Logan's Run, Minority Report, Total Recall, and especially George Lucas' early THX 1138 and John Frankenheimer's Seconds. And savvy viewers may recall an older made-for-television movie along the same lines called The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler. Yet by liberally borrowing from these stories, The Island reinterprets familiar themes into a reasonably entertaining story unto its own with a nod to science fiction author Philip Dick.

Adapted from his own story by Caspian Tredwell-Owen and Alias alums Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, the narrative takes a deliberate path, and its exciting action scenes, particularly the numerous chases on foot and by car, are in service of the plot. Michael Bay has been notorious for filming elaborate, 'shoot 'em up' and 'blow 'em up' set pieces that resemble a massive video game. Here, he holds back a little and concentrates more on staying true to his storyline. 'The play's the thing' and events move so rapidly, you don't notice the credibility gaps that strain logic at times. 

The evil doctor.

Clones.

Sean Bean (who is making himself quite the first choice in movie villainy as in Goldeneye) is quite good as the sinister Merrick, and Djimon Hounsou (Gladiator) registers in a role that could have been one dimensional and without heart. Ethan Phillips (late of Star Trek: Voyager) lends able support as a resident of the clone world. And let us not forget the wonderful Steve Buscemi (Reservoir Dogs) who gets some of the best lines and exits much too soon. The leads, McGregor (Star Wars) and Johansson (Lost in Translation) are quite photogenic and work together quite well. One wishes they have future screen pairings.

The special effects are effective and especially impressive when Lincoln meets his dead on double. Those scenes are so good, they are seamless. The world of the near future is realistic in its depiction in much the way Blade Runner integrated futuristic vehicles and technology with older, existing buildings and settings. The pace is well edited, and the film never feels slow and boring.

You don't wanna mess with my weaponry lady...

...That is a massive cock!

Again, there are a couple of scenes which really strain credulity, but they come and go so quickly that you are on to the next scene. One obvious complaint is the product placement that becomes a bit self conscious and annoying after the third or fourth product logo is conspicuously shown. You'll see what I mean. It's also hard not to have a slight feeling that the film's main theme has controversial, political implications with the debate over cloning, stem cell research and the abortion fight in recent headlines.

Although it is ironically a clone of other film plots, The Island delivers legitimate action and thrills without sacrificing its linear storytelling. Let yourself go and don't pay too much attention to the occasional plot lapses, and you'll find this a reasonably diverting adventure. 

Here's the movie trailer:

 

Did You Play Polybius at the Arcade Center?

The apparently official game cabinet.

Polybius is an urban legend about a rare arcade game released in 1981. The game was created by a mysterious company called Sinneslöschen (German for "Sense Deletion") and was a puzzle/shoot-'em-up somewhat like Tempest. It was only released in a few suburbs of Portland, Oregon. 

It was supposedly very popular, with people forming long lines to play it. However, players reported strange things about the game, such as hearing a woman crying and seeing grotesque faces out of the corner of their eyes. Players would also have nightmares, experienced nausea, headaches, blackouts or even develop amnesia. Some even committed suicide. Others stopped playing video games altogether and at least one became an anti-video game activist. According to one owner of an arcade, men wearing black suits would often come to collect "records" from the game. 

They did not take any money, simply data on gameplay. Because of this, the leading theory is that it was some sort of government experiment using subliminal messages. The game remains in obscurity as around one month after its release, all of the cabinets suddenly disappeared. One cabinet reappeared in an arcade 1998, but quickly disappeared again. While some have tried to recreate the game, no one has ever found the original ROM.

Title screen.

The bizarre rumors about this game are that it was supposedly developed by some kind of weird military tech offshoot group, used some kind of proprietary behavior modification algorithms developed for the CIA or something, kids who played it woke up at night screaming, having horrible nightmares. 

According to an operator who ran an arcade with one of these games, guys in black coats would come to collect "records" from the machines. They're not interested in quarters or anything, they just collected information about how the game was played. 

The game was weird looking, kind of abstract, fast action with some puzzle elements, the kids who played it stopped playing games entirely, one of them became a big anti video game crusader or something. We've contacted one person who met him, and he claims the machines disappeared after a month or so and no one ever heard about them again. 

Until the apparently original ROM showed up. 

Here's what we've found so far:

• Found English strings "insert coin" and "press 1 player start" and "only" - looks like a 1 or 2 player game. 
• Text in the game says "(C) 1981 Sinneslöschen" Maybe a German company?

Even The Simpsons parodied the game.

If these game consoles were ever actually in Oregon, they must have gone somewhere. Many owners of rare and classic arcade games are members of the Vintage Arcade Preservation Society, which lists exactly one person as the owner of an original Polybius: Robb Sherwin, who lives in Colorado, and owns a dozen or so classic video games. However, Robb's listing there is really just a placeholder for his website, Jolt Country with the Polybius Home Page. He lists most of what seems to be known about the urban legend, including a few photos of unknown origin, and a joke YouTube video he made where they find a Polybius game in a garage, turn it on, and — well, you can guess the rest.

But the bottom line is that there is nobody in the vintage arcade community who openly claims to have, or to have ever seen, an actual Polybius. All the issues of Electronic Games magazine from 1981 through 1984 are available online, and contain not a single mention of the game. In fact, I could find no print references to the game at all prior to 2003, when the urban legend was described in GamePro magazine. This essentially nails the lid on the coffin on the suggestion that Polybius ever actually existed. It did not.

However, saying that is one thing, and concluding that it's therefore just an Internet hoax is another. It turns out that the story of Polybius may indeed have an eerily similar basis in fact.

We do know that at least two people fell sick from playing arcade games in Portland, Oregon in 1981. The Eugene Register newspaper reported on November 29, 1981 that 12-year-old Brian Mauro played Asteroids for more than 28 hours, trying to break the record, as local television crews watched. He finally bowed out with stomach discomfort, attributed to anxiety and all the Coke he drank. Researcher Catherine DeSpira, writing in a 2012 edition of online vintage gaming publication Retrocade, discovered that a Michael Lopez developed a migraine headache while playing Tempest on the same day and in the same arcade where Brian Mauro was going for his record. Lopez was reported to the police when he collapsed in pain on someone's lawn. Two players knocked out in the same arcade on the same day. Stories spread like wildfire in the local middle schools: video games were freaking kids out, possibly even trying to take over their minds.

Anyone looking for corroborating evidence would have found even more frightening facts. Throughout the early 1980s, at least nine cases were reported of epileptic seizures being triggered by video games in the United States. It's called photosensitive epilepsy. It's rare and unpredictable, but very real.

Not only that, but there were, in fact, government agents poking around Portland area video arcades at that very same time. Just ten days after Mauro and Lopez crashed, state, local, and federal agents raided video arcades throughout the region. It turned out that some arcade operators illegally used their video games for gambling, by modifying them with counters that allowed owners to pay out cash to players based on how many points they made in their game, and thus increasing business. In preparation for this raid, FBI agents had been going around to arcades and taking photographs of player initials on high-score screens, hoping to identify potential witnesses. And officers had gone into every business in the city that had video games, and poked and prodded around the back of the machine, looking for these illegal counters.

Arcades had also become a popular place for the sale of stolen goods and drugs, and as a hangout for truants. In fact authorities even set up at least one fake arcade in Portland and filled the game consoles with hidden cameras, similar to today's automated teller machines, hoping to catch criminals in the act.

How much more raw material was needed for teenagers to see a pattern? Games were physically harming players, giving them headaches and nausea; and government agents actually were lurking in every arcade shadow. The Polybius urban legend was hardly fiction; it was nearly a docudrama. 

And there's even more evidence that bolsters its validity. The US government did (and still does) use versions of commercial video games. Battlezone, a tank simulator game considered to be the first first-person virtual reality game, was modified with controls that mimicked those of an M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle in 1980, and sold to the military as The Bradley Trainer. It was intended to train Bradley gunners. One still survives in a private collection.

Most famously, in 1996 the US Marines ordered a modified version of the first-person shooter game Doom II and used it to train ground troops on specific missions. The version has since been made available to the public for download. Today the distinction between games sold to the public and games used by the military has been blurred into virtual non-existence...

The mighty U-men

Live underground.

The U-Men was an American post-punk band, formed in Seattle, Washington in 1981 and active until 1989. They toured extensively across the United States and even had a song by the Butthole Surfers named in their honor. Their musically "dirty" sound was a forerunner for the later grunge bands to come out of Seattle.

History

Fronted by the enigmatic vocalist John Bigley, the U-Men (whose members also included Tom Price, Charlie "Chaz" Ryan, Robin Buchan, Jim Tillman, Tom Hazelmyer and later Tony "Tone Deaf" Ransom) pioneered their own unique brand of alternative rock which could best be described as "swamp-o'-billy". Together with Northwest contemporaries Girl Trouble, the U-Men emerged to fill the void left some 16 years previous with the disappearance of Northwest garage rock legends The Sonics, The Wailers, and The Ventures. They updated this traditional Northwest sound with more modern punk rock and post-punk influences most notably The Cramps and Nick Cave's original group The Birthday Party.

You can't go more underground than this.

The U-Men quickly acquired through word of mouth a dedicated cult following and well-deserved reputation for mayhem, both on and off the stage. Perhaps their most legendary antic was when Bigley set the front of the Seattle Center Mural Amphitheater stage on fire during a Bumbershoot festival performance, and the band played on.

The U-Men were managed at different times by Susan Silver (who later went on to marry Chris Cornell and manage Soundgarden, Screaming Trees and Alice in Chains), Bruce Pavitt (co-owner of Bombshelter Records, pre-dating his Sub Pop Records foray into vinyl), and Seattle's legendary punk art gallery tastemaker, Larry Reid.

Through it all, the U-Men managed to survive largely intact (the exception being bass players) until early 1989 when the core of the group (John, Charlie, and Tom) decided that the experiment had run its course.

Punk Rock riffs.

Tom Price moved on to form Gas Huffer, and also play in supergroup The Monkeywrench, while John and Charlie would co-found The Crows. Jim Tillman, whose work with the band included the self-titled e.p. "The U-Men" (1984), the indie classic "Stop Spinning" (1985), and the Deep Six compilation (1986) track "They" resurfaced to play bass for various other local bands most notably Love Battery. Tom Hazelmyer who had briefly considered the idea of relocating to Seattle join the band in Tillman's absence, chose instead to remain in his hometown of Minneapolis (performing live just once with the band when they opened for Big Black at the Showbox Theater in March 1987) to promote his record company (Amphetamine Reptile Records) and band, Halo of Flies. The last member of the group, 19-year-old Tony "Tone Deaf" Ransom, who in his short stint with the band managed to appear on the single "Freezebomb"/"That's Wild About Jack" (1987), the album "Step On A Bug" (1988), and the "Dope,Guns,and Fucking In The Streets Vol. 1" compilation track "Bad Little Woman" (1988), would disappear from the local music scene entirely, relocating to (as speculation would have it) Anchorage, Alaska.

Shredding the mic.

Band members

• John Bigley - vocals
• Tom Price - guitar
• Robin Buchan - bass (1981–1982)
• Charlie Ryan - drums
• Jim Tillman - bass (1982–1986)
• Tom Hazelmyer - bass (1987)
• Tony Ransom - bass (July 1987 – 1989)

Discography

Albums

• Step on a Bug (Black Label Records, 1988)

Singles/EPs

• U-Men EP (Bomb Shelter Records, 1984)
• Stop Spinning EP (Homestead Records, 1985)
• "Solid Action" b/w "Dig It A Hole" (Black Label Records, 1987)
• "Freezebomb" b/w "That's Wild About Jack" (Amphetamine Reptile, 1988)
• "Sugar Daddy Live Series (Split with Melvins)" (Amphetamine Reptile, 2012)

Compilation

• Solid Action (Chuckie-Boy Records, 2000)

The U-Men.

Compilation/Soundtrack contributions

• "They" on the Deep Six compilation (C/Z Records, 1986)
• "Shoot 'Em Down (live)" on the Woodshock '85 compilation (El Jefe Records, 1986)
• "Gila" on the Sub Pop 100 compilation (Sub Pop Records, 1986)
• "Bad Little Woman" on the Dope-Guns-'N-Fucking In The Streets, Vol. 1 compilation (Amphetamine Reptile, 1988)
• "Bad Little Woman" on the Dope-Guns-'N-Fucking In The Streets, Vols. 1-3 compilation (Amphetamine Reptile, 1989)
• "Dig It a Hole" and "Solid Action" on the Hype! soundtrack (Sub Pop Records, 1996)