Movies: The House of the Devil, The Innkeepers, V/H/S, and World War Z (Trailer)

In October I watched a number of horror films, as I am a fan and I like to get into the spirit of Halloween. I meant to do a blog post. Almost one month later, here it is! I think the appropriate reaction is: "Slacker!"

The House of the Devil

Ti West is a thirty-something director who has a terrific sensibility for the horror genre. His The House of the Devil is both his love letter to late '70s, early '80s horror flicks (like those of John Carpenter), and a masterful slow-burn of a film, where "slow-burn" is defined as a deliberate, incremental build up of tension over time to an explosive conclusion. Some viewers don't like slow burn films, but when they're done as well as this film is, I can't get enough of them.

Samantha (nicely underplayed by Jocelin Donahue) is a young college student in the '80s. Mousy but pleasant, also a bit of a neat freak and sometimes a little high strung, she's found a room for rent so she can get away from her current dorm situation living with an inconsiderate slob of a roommate. The trouble is, she doesn't quite have the money to make the move, so she takes a babysitting job to make the deposit so she can move in the following week.

Soon enough, as is always the case in a horror movie, frightening, terrible things ensue.

Not only is the film set in the early '80s, but it is made to look as if it was filmed in the early '80s (it was released in 2009). The opening title sequence, set to a song that sounds like a darker, Carpenter rewritten instrumental version of The Cars "Moving In Stereo", is terrific, and spot-on period accurate.

Likeable characters behaving believably in situations spiralling out of their control: what more could you ask for in a horror movie?

Highly recommended.

- Spoiler Territory -

One of the sequences that I found most harrowing was when Samantha, alone in the large Victorian-style Ulman house, puts on her Walkman headphones and cranks The Fixx's "One Thing Leads To Another", while dancing around on the first floor to relieve boredom and overcome those unfounded alone-in-a-big-empty-house fears. Only we know that those fears are in this case actually reliable, and the situation is much worse than she could imagine (although even we don't know how much worse it is for her at this point in the film). On the soundtrack, the song is all you can hear, there's no ambient sound at all. I was squirming in my seat.

Anticipation, it's a killer.

The Innkeepers

While making The House of the Devil, Ti West stayed at an inn called The Yankee Pedlar. For The Innkeepers, West decided to film it there. It is, after all, a great location for a good old-fashioned ghost story.

Claire is an endearingly goofy slacker of a young woman (well acted by Sara Paxton) working at the Pedlar. She has a recurring asthmatic condition and a vivid imagination. Her supervisor is Luke (a terrific performance by Pat Healy), who is slightly too old for this kind of job, and is supplementing his meagre income by building and running a website about haunted locations and paranormal activities.

The Pedlar is in its final days of operation, with Claire and Luke operating as the skeleton crew. The Pedlar has some paranormal history of its own, supposedly, so to while away the hours in the mostly empty inn, Claire and Luke use his audio and video equipment to try and capture some spooky activity for the website.

After a setup that would play as a sweet, gentle comedy were this a different sort of film, frightening, terrible things ensue.

While not quite as sleek or strong as The House of the Devil, it shares that film's focus on character, and I'm recommending it as well.

- Spoiler Territory -

I've read negative criticism of The Innkeepers as being too much of a slow burn with no real payoff, and I think the problem for some is this: the story is presented in a such a way that it could be taken as either supernatural, or not supernatural at all. In fact, I think there's enough evidence in the movie to argue that all of the supernatural stuff is Claire's vivid imagination run wild, and none of it is actually happening. Even so, I have no problem with the story even if that's the case.

V/H/S

Meet Lily. "I like you." *Shudder*.

I had read about V/H/S prior to it's release, and was interested in it, as it was to be a collection of short stories made by directors and writers who were being touted in some circles as "the next great generation of horror filmmakers", including Ti West (who as you might have noticed I already thought was two for two in the recommended column).

The premise is this: a group of miscreants (who assault women in public and destroy property, make videos while doing so, and then upload those videos to the internet as a way of making money) are given a job to break into a house to steal a collection of videotapes. They find a corpse at the house, seated in front of a television, with a VCR and a number of VHS tapes. They watch five of the tapes, each labelled with only a date, and each of those tapes constitutes one of the stories. The sixth story is this framing premise.

There are two major problems this film has to overcome:

First, it's an anthology, and the stop-start nature of anthologies is tough to overcome. Truth is, I'm not sure I've seen a really good anthology movie, well...ever.

Second, it's a found footage film. There are slightly more good found-footage films than there are anthology films, which is to say slightly more than none. I wrote a post about them.

Suffice to say that I found V/H/S to be a disappointment for the most part (unfortunately including West's segment called Second Honeymoon), save for one story element that really works. The first story is called Amateur Night, where three college age jerks go out barhopping to pick up drunk girls. The nerdiest of the jerks is given a pair of glasses that have a video camera hidden in them (found footage!), and the story is played out from his viewpoint.

While at one bar, they get very drunk and meet a bunch of drunk girls. They also meet Lily. That's her in the picture above (played in the film's best performance by Hannah Fierman, whose eyes are disconcertingly large for her face and used to full advantage). You see her on the fringes initially, in the background, always staring unblinking at the camera. Eventually she approaches and says the only thing she ever says when she speaks: "I like you".

A bunch of them go back to the jerks hotel room, Lily in tow. Frightening. Terrible. Things. Ensue.

Considering the majority of the characters in all of the segments are too thinly drawn, or unrepentent assholes, or both, I can't recommend seeing V/H/S (and therefore, no spoilers necessary).

World War Z (Trailer)

That's one crazy mess of ants, er, zombies.

The book World War Z by Max Brooks is a terrific read. It concerns the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse, as told by a U.N. representative in a tell-all report chronicling the spread of the outbreak and key events in the resulting war and its eventual outcome. The report consists of interviews with individuals from across the world, each telling their story of survival. China, the U.S., Japan, Canada, and India are some of the key locales. Go get a copy and read it right now.

So I see this trailer for the movie World War Z and...

Say you have a movie trailer. The trailer shows you all of these mouth-watering shots of pizza, some truly delicious looking pizza. Then the title for the movie comes up and it's called "Spaghetti". "Wait", you say. "I know spaghetti, I enjoy spaghetti, and that sure isn't spaghetti. Why did they call it spaghetti?" Then some folks on the Interwebs say "that looks delicious, who cares if it's called Spaghetti, spaghetti isn't all that anyway, they're both Italian foods so what does it matter, quit your complaining".

So there's my strange analogy about my opinion of the trailer. Looks cool, but I sure don't see the book in there.

Read the book.

Did I mention you should read the book?

Movies: Looper

A taut science fiction thriller with terrific performances and confident direction by Rian Johnson, I highly recommend Looper.

The story takes place Kansas in the year 2044. Thirty years from that date, time travel has become a reality, but is immediately outlawed due to the devastation it could cause. It becomes an underground procedure that organized crime uses to dispose of people they want to disappear without a trace: pop them back to 2044, and have recruited assassins murder them upon their arrival. These assassins are called Loopers.

When the mob wants zero evidence, they eventually send back the Loopers themselves for termination, "closing the loop".

The film concerns Joe (expertly played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who has phenomenal taste in film projects), a Looper himself, and what happens when his last target is Old Joe (Bruce Willis, in an equally well acted performance). Across the board the acting is strong, including Jeff Daniels and Emily Blunt in key roles.

Spoiler territory after the following screen shot, so you should stop reading here if you haven't yet seen it. Images are all from the trailer, which you should also avoid. I've pretty much stopped watching trailers for films altogether, and I've been happy with the results so far. It's nice to be surprised by a movie you're watching.

Go see it, be pleasantly surprised.

- Spoiler Territory -

One nice surprise about Looper is that not only is it a well-constructed time travel science fiction story, but as it progresses it actually incorporates many other science fiction conceits: dystopian class warfare, future drug culture, and, grandly, mutant telekinesis. This last conceit usually pulls me out of a story (the idea is too magical or cheesy-superheroic for my tastes), but here it's weaved in a seamless and initially understated manner.

One aspect I especially liked in retrospect is that all of the characters in the story are potential deadly threats to the other characters. Yes, even this guy. Off hand I can't think of another story where this is the case.

In a nod to a now-classic time travel movie, Old Joe at one story turn essentially becomes The Terminator, looking to assassinate specific children to prevent what they become in the future. The difference is that Old Joe is a human being with a heart and a conscience, so it plays out much differently.

Looper has a terrific ending, with a wonderful closing line. When I manage to find the exact quote, I'll amend this post -- the foggy paraphrased version of it floating around in my head doesn't do it justice, and in the context of the film it's powerful stuff.

One of my favourite films of the year.

EDIT 11/14/2012

I posted the following on a movie website's forum back at the end of September, and wanted to include it here, slightly tweaked:

I think that any time-travel stories that have the time-travelling characters altering their timeline are inherently illogical, so you either accept the impossibility of the conceit to begin with, or you don't.

Timecrimes, The Terminator, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban are films where the timeline isn't altered. Instead, the audience sees how the travel fits into those events that already occurred, but in a way that they weren't initially privy to. Both the travellers and the audience see the previous events from this new perspective.

Terminator 2 alters the timeline, and creates that paradoxical loop of altering it in such a way that prevents it from having been altered in the first place. If the T-800 prevents Skynet from existing, he prevents his own existence, and thus can never come back to prevent Skynet, which in turn allows his existence, which allows him to then come back and prevent Skynet...it's a real 'loop', a little pocket that is like a never-ending binary switch between two outcomes.

Looper's internal rules seem to be that when a timeline is altered you're in a new universe entirely, except that scenario should make it so that base-timeline Old Joe is unaffected by whatever happens to Joe in this new timeline when changes occur. Joe killing himself in the new timeline should have no effect on Old Joe.

But, that's not what happens. Instead we get a strange combination of that and the Terminator 2 paradox: Old Joe could never have come back if he never existed, but if he never comes back he doesn't create the circumstances for Joe to kill himself, so Old Joe exists, and then comes back...creating another never-ending binary switch loop.

Either the time travel actually works like a shift of the travelling character into another universe (which strictly speaking isn't really time travel any more, and is the conceit of Source Code), or it doesn't.

What does it say then that, as is the case with Terminator 2, I cared not at all about this "lapse" in logic, and think that Looper is one of the best films I've seen all year?

Only that I buy into the conceit, illogical as it is, especially with how well the film is made.

The T-800 gives Looper a burning, molten thumbs up.

Movies: Cloud Atlas (TIFF 2012)

Neo Seoul, circa 20??.

Cloud Atlas is ambitious and mostly entertaining, but it is overlong, and unfortunately not as groundbreaking or fresh as it wants to be (or perhaps assumes it is).

I haven't read the novel, but I have read that it was acclaimed in part due to its ability to weave six separate stories together seamlessly. I don't think that the film has pulled off the same feat. Often, the film's transitions between each narrative feel arbitrary. Sometimes, it's clunky.

The most impressive thing about the film is its makeup artistry (save for one notable exception, which in the context of the film is acceptable, and I discuss in Spoiler Territory). The actors involved play multiple parts with wildly differing appearances, including age, race, and gender. During the closing credits, you get to see exactly who played who in a nice little montage. The audience I was in attendance with gasped a few times during this credit reveal, and spontaneously applauded at the end of it.

The film doesn't open until October 26th, so if you wish to remain spoiler-free before seeing it, skip the section below (all the images in this post are from the trailer, so you'll want to skip that, too).

- Spoiler Territory -

The dog gets it, circa 1975.

The weakest section of the film for me is the story that takes place in 1975 California, which is a thriller with a journalist investigating a potential cover-up at a nuclear facility (one of several roles played by Halle Berry). It starts well enough, but unfortunately climaxes in a poorly choreographed shootout-slash-foot-chase that lacks tension and could've easily been tightened and trimmed. The climactic chase does have a crowd-pleasing punchline, the setup of same is shown in the gunshot picture, above.

The 1975 based story also has a pre-teen character who delivers terrible meta-aware lines like (and I'm slightly paraphrasing here as obviously I wasn't taking notes) "in any decent mystery story, that's exactly what someone would say before they turned up dead!". There are other lines like it. Ugh.

Aside from that, it is nice to see Keith David in a movie again.

The critic gets it, circa 2012.

The section of the film set in 2012 London, dealing with a book editor who gets involved with the wrong sort of client, is where most of the film's humour comes from, as it is intentionally farce. If the over-the-top accent that Tom Hanks sports doesn't clue you in, Hugo Weaving as a female nurse certainly does (aforementioned excusably unrealistic makeup alert!). Jim Broadbent is terrific as this story's central character.

Potty mouth, circa 2012.

The section of the film that takes place in Neo Seoul (in what I want to say is the year 2046, but that can't be right, can it?) has a solid emotional core and is well acted (especially Doona Bae as the main character Somni-451). The science fiction elements of it were, visually and thematically, surprisingly conventional, echoing films like Blade Runner, The Fifth Element, Logan's Run, Tron: Legacy, and, of course, The Matrix.

Meet Somni-451, circa 20??.

Sorta looks like something out of Mystery Men, circa 20??.

There are sections that also take place in the 1850's, the 1930's, and a time so far in the future it is labelled "150 years after The Fall" (where everyone speaks a version of English similar to that spoken by those darn kids in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome). Hugh Grant as a non-speaking post-apocalyptic cannibal warrior? Sold!

All of the sections, and the film itself, mainly have problems building towards their climaxes. Jumping from section to section as they each build doesn't amplify the dramatic tension as you think it might -- instead it feels either numbing or redundant.

The overall message is a little saccharine, which might be off-putting to some. Love is timeless. Also, be nice to one another! Ooo-kay.

In short? Recommended with reservations. Wanted to be blown away, but wasn't.

Bring on Looper!

Movies: Beasts of the Southern Wild, Indie Game: The Movie & Safety Not Guaranteed

I often read how there are no good films being made, which to me is simply a lazy observation, in addition to being untrue. I use the term "lazy" because to find films that are worthwhile you have to put in effort (this is actually true of anything worthwhile in life).

Here are three films released thus far in 2012 that I think are among the best of the year.

I'm not going to say too much about any of them. I've come to a point where if a film interests me prior to me seeing it, I tend to shut out any information about it (trailers, articles, reviews, etc.), so that when I do see it I see it fresh, like I used to in the pre-internet days. I find it makes for a better experience at the movies. I'm providing you the same courtesy.

Presented here in no particular order...

- Safety Not Guaranteed -

"There's no sense in nonsense. Especially when the heat gets hot."

A magazine writer and two interns head out on an assignment to find and interview someone who placed a classified ad which reads: "Wanted: Someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You'll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. I have only done this once before. Safety not guaranteed". There's your high-concept, but the film isn't a one-joke exercise. Instead it's a terrific comic character study and bittersweet romance.

Aubrey Plaza does a nice turn in the lead as the intern Darius, imbuing her usual onscreen sardonic persona with a layer of sadness that fits quite nicely.

- Beasts of the Southern Wild -

Likely the best child performance I've ever seen, by Quvenzhané Wallis -- at the time 6-years old and a non-actor, playing Hushpuppy. Completely real. I like that the film didn't condescend to the emotions expressed by Hushpuppy, in particular when she's angry (and she has much to be angry about). The film never presents her anger in an "awww, cute" fashion. Her high pitched scream might seem contradictory, but her facial expressions and posture when she delivers it show it to be entirely appropriate as the vocal weapon her tiny body can muster.

- Indie Game: The Movie -

Are video games art? Is it healthy to define yourself through your work? Can a couple of unknowns make an entertaining, heartfelt documentary film via a Kickstarter campaign that ends up being one of the best films of the year?

For the lazy, this film provides almost no barrier to viewing it. You must be on an internet-connected computer if you're reading this, so I'm providing you with the link to buy and download the film. Click this link, lazybones! You'll be glad you did.

Watch all three of these movies, and then tell me again how there are no good films being made, hypothetical naysayer. I dare you.

Movies: Prometheus

The "pilot room" sequence in Prometheus.

- Spoiler Territory -

Things I liked:

• Visually and technically, it's stunning. This is the best use of stereoscopic 3D that I've seen since Avatar (I should note that I have not yet seen Hugo, however).
• Noomi Rapace's, Charlize Theron's, and Michael Fassbender's performances (Theron and Fassbender have a scene together that had a dark, twisted undercurrent that I think the film could have used more of, actually). Idris Elba and Guy Pearce were fine too.
• The whole "auto-surgery" sequence.
• The whole "Engineer's pilot room" sequence. I thought it was a neat choice to have the soaring orchestral soundtrack abruptly cut to complete silence when the holographic replay unexpectedly stopped.
• The whole prologue/opening-title sequence. It did a pretty good job of saying to the audience: "this isn't Alien, exactly, just so you know".
• The holographic "ghosts" (though as a practical bit of alien technology in the film, I'm not sure they make a lick of sense).
• The geological survey devices, "POPS" I think they were called, which are little flying spheres that shoot out red lasers in all directions as they fly to map out the surfaces of structures. Their ideation and use in the film allows for some nifty visuals as they zip around and we're shown the resulting three-dimensional map they create of the structure they're surveying. These scenes tie in nicely with the use of stereoscopic 3D.

Things I didn't like:

• The Geologist and The Biologist characters, which I describe here by job title, as they don't leave any impression as actual characters, besides perhaps 'the angry one' and 'the incredibly stupid one', respectively. The Biologist in particular does something so incredibly stupid that it was beyond belief, beyond any semblence of human behaviour. I'll ask you: if you are frightened and trapped on an alien world in an alien structure littered with alien corpses, and you are confronted by a weird penis-eel animal that's being outwardly aggressive, is your first thought to reach out and touch it, while talking to it as though it's a cat you're trying to coax out of hiding? The Biologist's behaviour in that sequence felt like pure plot-device manipulation. All the more frustrating because it could've easily been handled so much better, with the same plot result (dead Biologist).
• "Daddy issues". Vickers' "...Father." line felt like it was there for the really dense people in the audience who hadn't figured that plot point out on their own, earlier in the scene, based on the terrific, subtle acting and filmmaking cues on display. It's a pet peeve of mine: never elbow the audience in the ribs and say "Get it?!" during a scene, they'll hate you for it, rightly so.
• The old age makeup for Guy Pearce. It wasn't terribly done, but it did look weird. Though I like Pearce as an actor, I think there was a missed opportunity to cast an actor of a beliveable age for the part (though not the part's "actual" age, as I think the idea was that Weyland had, using his vast financial resources, medically extended his life long past any natural point).
• Logan Marshall-Green is not great as Holloway. Competent to be sure, but Holloway as a character has the potential for all kinds of layers that Marshall-Green doesn't access in his performance at all. As acted, Holloway's vaguely excited, and then vaguely depressed, and his ultimate self-sacrifice had only a vague resonance. Relative to my previous point, they should've cast Guy Pearce in this role, instead.
• I thought the faith-versus-science, creationism-versus-evolution themes were clumsily handled (this is a criticism of the script more than anything).
• Total waste of Vickers character in the end (assuming from all the evidence supplied that she's dead). Charlize is a huge asset, you don't want her along for the sequel? Seriously?

Things I'm still unclear about:

• What was the ultimate point of David contaminating Holloway? I'm not sure how it plays into David's motivations: is it simply a matter of coldly wanting to play out "let's see what this does"? Otherwise I don't see how it fits into Weyland's plan at all.

The Verdict?

My feelings on this one are complicated. I've mentioned in an earlier post that Alien is a particular favourite of mine that I saw when I was much younger, but I don't feel that Prometheus has, as the crass internet meme goes, "raped my childhood". Strangely, I find it easy to disconnect it from Alien, in that it seems more like a remix or jazz-improvisation of that film and the visual motifs in it, rather than a continuation of it, if that makes any sense. Additionally, the fact that Prometheus deliberately does not dovetail neatly into Alien helps.

As I left the theatre, my main thought was "it's too bad that everyone involved didn't put forth all that talent and effort toward an original film, rather than an Alien prequel".

That said, I do think it should be seen, and should be seen in a theatre in 3D. Despite any critcisms I have, there is still a lot to be valued in Prometheus. Though it didn't meet my admittedly high expectations, it's certainly not from lack of trying on the part of the filmmakers.

TV: Luther (Series 1)

Click THIS to see the kickass title sequence.

I finally got around to watching the first series of the BBC crime-drama Luther. Just for clarification, a British TV "series" is the equivalent of a North American "season" -- so basically I'm talking about "season 1", which is six hour-long episodes. I like the show but it is pretty gruesome, as Luther investigates fairly heinous crimes that the show doesn't shy away from displaying in graphic detail, and I must admit as I get older I get more squeamish about onscreen violence (I think it's called "maturing"). It's all very pulpy. Often it sacrifices believability for entertainment (which pretty much all narrative fiction does to one extent or another), and sometimes it gets histrionic and overripe ("why are these two characters screaming at each other for this entire scene?"), but as a whole it's compelling. In the title role, Idris Elba is a charismatic actor, and as Alice, Ruth Wilson plays the brilliant-psychotic-Hannibal-Lecter-surrogate quite nicely (and she's much prettier than Anthony Hopkins or Brian Cox anyway).

If there's one thing that I truly dig about the show, though, it's how the DPs are framing the shots. It really doesn't look like any other TV show. They like to cram characters down into the lower part of the frame, and further to really hang them out in the corners. Here are two angles from an interview sequence in the third episode:

I've taken those two shots and modified them to show how I think a "typical" show would frame them, where the light blue area would be cropped away:

I much prefer the tension that the original framing adds, as it is in keeping with the threatening, off-kilter ambience of the show. When the horrible things horrible people are doing are slowly revealed, it should be as much of a tension-filled experience for the audience as possible.

Here's another couple of shots from the same episode where Luther is confronting a serial killer who exsanguinates his victims (ick.) in said killer's shop:

...and here's the initial crime scene (note that one character is in the lower third of the frame!):

Finally, just another day at the office:

This is obviously not a framing aesthetic that should be used for every show, and even in this show they don't use it for every shot, but when they do use it, it definitely works for me. Anything that gets away from the soap-opera look of full-screen facial close-ups that much of TV succumbs to is a good thing.

I recommend Luther, if you can stomach it. Now I have to get Series 2, though I've heard it's even more gruesome than Series 1, so we'll see if I can stomach that. Also, get off my lawn!

P.S. Here's the link to the Luther Title Sequence again in case you missed it in the caption of the image at the top. It's nifty.

Movies: The Hunger Games

Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games.

I actually saw this back at the end of March, but am only getting around to writing about it now.

Back when the Harry Potter novels were finishing up, there was much discussion in the press about what contemporary young-adult series could potentially step up and fill that vacuum. That's when I first heard about The Hunger Games.

Later, when plans for a film series based on the book trilogy were announced, I thought I should give the books a try. "Let's see what the kids are reading these days!". I started and finished off The Hunger Games the week before the film opened (I've since finished Catching Fire and have just started Mockingjay).

I like the books so far. I like the film. Solid acting, writing, and direction. It's also got some emotional heft to it, which I'll get into more in Spoiler Territory.

I should mention, however, that I'm not sure if I like the film more because I had read and enjoyed the book beforehand. Others who have seen the film and not read the book have said that they enjoyed it, and that it zipped along, so perhaps having previously read the book is a non-issue.

- Spoiler Territory -

As is usually the case, there are some changes from the book:

• Here, Katniss gets the mockingjay pin (the one that adorns the film's poster) back from her younger sister Prim (after trading for it in The Hob and giving it to Prim), rather than as a gift from her sort-of-friend Madge, the daughter of the Mayor of District 12. It gives it more dramatic weight, and relieves the film of having to introduce yet another character. The sequel will have to deal with this, however, as certain key plot points take place in the Mayor's house (although Madge, so far in two books, hasn't really been more than a minor mention -- I imagine they'll just introduce the Mayor in the sequel and forego Madge entirely).
  
• Rue's death and Katniss' reactions to it are well realized in the film, which also adds scenes showing the ensuing riots that happen in Rue's district as a result, foreshadowing events to come in the sequel, and enhancing the sympathetic impact of the whole sequence.
  
• There are no Avoxes (Avoces?) in the film. A lot to explain in a film that's already 2½ hours, so it's understandable that they've been eliminated here. Perhaps they'll be in the sequel.
  
• I thought the "booby-trap" sequence was somewhat clumsily executed in the film, compared to the book. Having two characters come on screen and say "there's a booby-trap! will they figure it out?" didn't work for me, at all.
  
• The end of the film felt rushed, but I like how the film played out to that point, so I'm not sure what you would cut so that you could expand the ending. So, I can't really fault the film-makers there.
  

Worth a watch (and also, a read). I think that for the sequel, they'll need to spend a little more cash (and I say that realizing that it's weird to say that a production budget of $70 million USD is considered "low-budget" for an event film like this, but it is).

Doodles! Part Four

Let's end March with another doodle dump. Mostly done with Bics somewhere in the 2008-2010 range I think (they're all from the same notepad). The multi-colour ones are done with one of my favourite pens, the Bic 4-Colour. I hadn't used them since I was a kid, but an office manager at a previous employer had a fondness for them as well, and ordered a bunch. I was happy to doodle with the 4-Colour again.

I think some of these are ripe for updating digitally, like I did with Spacebaby.

See also:

Doodles! Part One
Doodles! Part Two
Doodles! Part Three

Spacebaby

Here's today's brand-new digital blip (below right) based on a tiny, in-the-margins doodle I scrawled sometime last year (below left). Foolishly, I did the new one as a raster graphic when it really should have been vector. Other than layers, all those shapes are permanent! Ah, well. Sometimes when the mood strikes, you just charge full steam ahead.

What's a Spacebaby? A baby hurtling through space, naturally. Aren't we really all just Spacebabies?

Doodles! Part Three

More weirdo stuff, mostly Bic, from between 2009-2011 (but mostly 2011).

See also:

Doodles! Part One
Doodles! Part Two