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I saw Coraline. I know, SHOCKER, but I found out some cool stuff about it and I wanted to share. Whilst at the Final Cut Pro class, I happened upon a magazine called Post. It had an article all about how Coraline was made. First of all, I didn’t particularly like Coraline. It had brief moments of awesome-itude, but the story as a whole was lacking, in my opinion. This is a constant problem for me with fantasy and science fiction. Since you could make anything up, I feel the author has to work much, much harder to keep me involved. For example, Coraline has to find three sets of eyeballs so ghosts can be set free from eternal bonds. But she’s also really conveniently given a green triangular ring that when she looks through it, she can see where the eyes are. To me, that’s too easy. That problem was too easily solved by a random object invented by the author. Too simple. Something interesting about the film was that it was so distant for me and I was so not into whatever the characters were going through that things that would normally freak me out didn’t bother me at all. I am scared of little-kiddie-related stuff, like dolls and xylophone toys. There’s a ton of that in this film, as well as people with buttons for eyes having their faces stitched into permanent smiles, and I didn’t even flinch. However, there are moments of extreme beauty and exquisite design, and it’s worth it for that. Also, there’s a man upstairs with a jerboa circus. What’s a jerboa, you ask? It is a hopping kangaroo rat type thing. Lookit:

http://www.hawar-islands.com/blog/media/blogs/kuwait/Lesser-Jerboa.jpg

I desperately want a jerboa circus. Nay, I NEED a jerboa circus. But enough of that. I read a couple things in Post that were interesting. I will now quote:

In Coraline, the character’s replacement heads are molded in a computer-controlled 3D printer that allows for precise gradations and nuances of expressions. Mouths have teeth in them, and tongues, and more. …Computers also erased rigs used to support characters and erased the faint line that exists in a replacement head where the head’s lower half (which includes the mouth) meets the character’s upper head. …Back on The Nightmare Before Christmas, the lead character, Jack Skellington, had around 800 different sculpted facial expressions. As opposed to Jack Skellington, Coraline has over 205,000 different possible expressions.

B. had commented on how impressed he was that there was no dust on the set in the final film, and I’m now thinking that if there was dust, it was taken out later with computers. I would love to see an exhibit of the sets and models one day. Hopefully they’ll come out with a book on it soon.

I am weak. I am so easily creeped out I don’t watch the evening news. I watch a great many movies with my fingers smooched up against my eyes. Hell, I can’t watch most horror movie commercials on TV. As a child, I found certain portions of Sesame Street to be terrifying. It was with great trepidation that I saw the movie Fight Club. I ended up loving it and buying it and watching it numerous times (through my fingers). I recently saw my hands-down favorite film of the year Choke, by the same author as Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk. He’s one hell of an author, and his books translate well to the screen. I would love to tell you all about Choke, but I took a vow to maintain some semblance of tastefulness on this website, so I will do my best to describe the not-too-nawsty bits for you. Main character is a sex addict who works at a Ye Olde American Waye of Lyfe park. Think Williamsburg, churning butter and blacksmithing in authentic garb, that kind of thing. When he’s not getting his groove on with random strangers or describing his role in American history to disinterested schoolchildren, he’s doing one of two things: visiting his mother in a home (she is suffering from dementia) and making himself choke on food in restaurants so the patrons who save him will feel a connection to him and also possibly send him money. Heartwarming tale, isn’t it? Well, it would be totally awful if it wasn’t Sam Rockwell playing the lead. I don’t know how he does it, but Rockwell makes the character into something other than a big bag of pathos and lameness and greed and vile dreck. He’s funny and sweet at times, and you really feel for him. And even though whole pieces of plot are hard to believe (you could say they are “hard to swallow!” Haw! See what I did there?), I let it slide because Sam Rockwell is so great. This is going to become a big cult classic, I’ll bet.

Continuing in this Palahniuk vein, a blog I read called FourFour (I referenced FourFour when describing the cat show) talked about another CP book, called Haunted. If you’d like to read Rich’s entry, here’s the link:

http://fourfour.typepad.com/fourfour/2008/12/threshold-reached.html

If you want a quick summary, here’s the best part: Palahniuk wrote a short story called Guts. It makes people faint. No, really. From Wikipedia:

While on his 2003 tour to promote his novel Diary, Palahniuk read to his audiences a short story titled “Guts” … which appears in his book Haunted. It was reported that to that point, 40 people had fainted while listening to the readings. Playboy magazine would later publish the story in their March 2004 issue; Palahniuk offered to let them publish another story along with it, but the publishers found the second work too disturbing. On his tour to promote Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories in the summer of 2004, he read the story to audiences again, bringing the total number of fainters up to 53, and later up to 60, while on tour to promote the softcover edition of Diary. In the fall of that year, he began promoting “Haunted”, and continued to read “Guts”. At his October 4, 2004 reading in Boulder, Colorado, Palahniuk noted that, after that day, his number of fainters was up to 68. The last fainting occurred on May 28, 2007, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, where 5 people fainted, one of which occurred when a man was trying to leave the auditorium, which resulted in him falling and hitting his head on the door. Palahniuk is apparently not bothered by these incidents, which have not stopped fans from reading “Guts” or his other works. Audio recordings of his readings of the story have since circulated on the Internet. In the afterword of the latest edition of “Haunted”, Palahniuk reports that “Guts” is now responsible for 73 faintings.

Now, when Rich on FourFour described the story, I thought it sounded familiar. See how above it says they published it in Playboy? Cricket has a subscription to Playboy and guess what? When the story first came out in 2004, I READ IT. I READ THE WHOLE STORY. I did not pass out. I did not throw up. It made me walk and sit funny for about a week, but other than that, I made it where others failed. Whoo hoo! I am one tough cookie. Please turn on the night light before you leave.

Here are some links if you want to learn more:

1. I finally saw No Country For Old Men. I consider myself relatively smart and cultured, and I would like to say I do not get this movie and I do not understand why it won a bunch of Oscars. The main character (a man named Llewelyn played by Josh Brolin) is out a-huntin’ and comes across a bunch of trucks with dead people and their dead pit bulls in the middle of the desert. It’s a drug deal gone awry. Llewelyn finds two million dollars and takes it. We are supposed to feel a connection with this Llewelyn character. I had a great deal of difficulty doing this because, and stick with me here, if I find a festive pile of human and animal corpses all shot to hell with piles of drugs on a truck and a suitcase of money, I don’t care if the damn holy grail is in one of those trucks, I’m vacating the premises and I’m not taking any tokens of the experience. Nothing. Just leaving slowly, backing out of there and sprinting to sign up for witness protection. OF COURSE an angry and insane man (Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem, being his awesomely sexy self) comes looking for his money. It’s two million dollars. You think he would write it off as a contribution to the greater good of society? Come now, Coen Brothers, I expect better of you. And then the movie continues with Llewelyn hiding the money and Anton coming looking for it and killing people en route as angry and insane drug kingpins tend to do. And then, two hours of this later, the movie ends. It just ends. I like some kind of resolution in my films. I want someone to die or kill someone or have an epiphany or get the girl or something, anything. And I get naught. So I do not like No Country For Old Men. I think it should be called “No Country For Dumbasses Who Come Across Dead Guys And Loads Of Money And Think They Can Just Take Said Money And Everything Will Be Fine.” That would be more applicable.

2. Last night I went to a premiere showing of The Duchess with Ralph Fiennes and Kiera Knightley. If you like movies like Mrs. Brown and Dangerous Liaisons, then you’re gonna LOVE this film. Kiera changes outfits in every scene. Really. No two outfits or hairstyles are on screen for more than five minutes. Since the film hasn’t even come out, I don’t really want to delve too deep into the plot, but perhaps I will talk about it more in the future. And it’s based on a true story, which is always interesting. It’s like learning history without even trying.