While it’s my sincere hope that the wondrous Coilhouse Gushfest: Getting to Know You continues unabated, I can’t keep sitting on my hands with this one. Grace Jones has just released a new video for “Corporate Cannibal”, the first single off her forthcoming album, Hurricane (which features collaboration with Tricky, Brian Eno, and others). May Day is more heart-stoppingly badass than ever before:
Rawr. As previously mentioned on CH, Ms. Jones is my choice for It Girl of the 80s. Hell, let’s make her It Girl for ’08, as well. She’s sixty, she’s sexy, she’s scary as hell, and we should all bow before her fabulousness.
The volume was already tattered by the time it made its way to me, passed almost reverently between the awkward 8th graders who usually spent most of their ride on the packed schoolbus (“Cattlecar 47” we named it, after students started sitting on the floor) staring out the window.
The book was Tears of an Angel, the second volume of Battle Angel Alita, Viz graphics’ translation of Yukito Kishiro’s Gunnm.
This was 1996 and in our part of the world, at least, manga was all but unknown. Inside we found a world like nothing we’d seen. An oppressive city hung in the sky over a massive scrapyard where no birds (or anything else) could fly. Bodies were replaced constantly with rugged, mad machinery. Blood flowed like water. In the midst of it all, the characters tried, desperately, to carve out their own peace. We were enraptured.
Not all youthful inspirations stand the test of time. But re-reading “Alita” recently, with a James Cameron-directed (urgh) movie on the way, I was pleased to find that it did. Even today, few visions of a mechanistic dystopia are as relentless, ballsy and downright heartbreaking as this.
What happens when you bring together the leading actress from Audition, the FX artist behind The Machine Girl as a first-time director, the screenwriter of Uzumaki and the action star of Versus as fight choreographer? You have a cinematic supergroup that makes the geysers of blood you’ve come to expect from violent Asian films look like minuscule popping zits. Behold, the 5-minute trailer for the upcoming J-splatter film Tokyo Gore Police:
The trailer starts off kinda slow, but gets better and better as it goes along. Gore and body horror await: exploding heads, sliced-off faces, penises instead of noses, borg-like facial implants and a mermaid-from-hell with a chomping crocodile head instead of legs. There are also some hyper-detailed fetish costumes by the latex designer duo Kariwanz.
One of the mutants looks like she escaped from Kurôzu-cho
The plot: future Tokyo is plagued by bio-mechanical a virus. People who contract the virus turn into “Engineers,” named so for their ability to assemble weapons out of their infected flesh wounds. A special privatized police force (the gore police, also known as “Engineer Hunters”) exists to wipe out these beings, but if they’re wounded by one of the engineers, they quickly join their ranks, horrific implements of death quickly spawning from their own flesh. The protagonist is Ruka, one of the strongest members of the police force. Ruka appears to be the archetypal cute Japanese girl with a sword, but one thing I found interesting about her character is that according to one review, she’s a cutter. There are not many films that I’m aware of in which a main character suffers from self-mutilation, other than the French film Dans ma Pau, or In My Skin (definitely not a ‘feel-good movie’… and since we already got the ball rolling on the horrors of the flesh, here you go)
The main storyline of the film is peppered with faux commercials, reminding me of the faketrailersinGrindhouse. As reviewer Mike Skurko describes it:
We flash back and forth to some extremely demented and hilarious public service announcements as T.V. commercials throughout the film. My personal favorite being three cute school girls singing “Let’s go stylish with wrist cutting!” Just enough “Engrish” charm and realism to make this scene as cute as Hello Kitty while they morbidly introduce a new design that is “rounded for a cleaner cutting edge that school girls love!” Oh, this can’t be beat. More great T.V. ads: “Remote Control Exterminate!!” is a demented Wii that lets the viewer slice and dice a tormented player. Complete with all the spraying blood we’ve come to expect from just about everything with the Tokyo Shock label.
If you’re in New York or San Francisco this weekend, you are among the lucky few who can catch this film’s on-screen North American debut. It will premiere this Saturday at the New York Asian Film Festival. In San Francisco, you’ll be able to see it this Sunday at the Brava Theater as part of the Another Hole In The Head film festival, which looks like a lot of fun. A little bit later on, this film will also be premiering in Montreal.
This summer South African runner Oscar Pistorius, after much controversy, will have a shot at competing in the Olympics. Why the controversy? Pistorius, known as “blade runner” (a name he rejects as “boring stuff”) was born without fibula. He has not had flesh, blood and bone below his knees since he was 11 months old.
In January, the International Association of Athletic Federations ruled that his state of the art prosthetics were superior to human legs, and would thus give him an unfair advantage. Last month, that judgement was overturned. If he can cut his best times down by less than a second, Olympic competition will see its first cyborg. The future has arrived.
In the bleak, bleak future, gas prices have become so insane that no one can afford to drive. Crusading inventor Archie Andrews, a vegan schoolteacher, labors tirelessly to change all this by building a car engine that will run on plentiful, clean wheatgrass. But one night he makes a discovery — wheatgrass won’t power an engine, but human blood will. He gets seduced by a girl named Denise who loves cars. The government gets involved — and everything just goes to hell from there.
That’s the premise for the Blood Car, a brutal, brilliant and damned laugh-out-loud funny flick from Atlanta director Alex Orr. Working on a shoestring (the special effects budget was $200 and the Blood Car got towed), Orr managed to create the best kind of fringe movie — scathingly satirical, ludicrously bloody and eminently quotable — with an ending that actually manages to shock. [kml_flashembed movie="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=324612271480827511" width="400" height="326" wmode="transparent" /]
I was fortunate enough to stumble on it while recruiting for Asheville’s film festival last year and it still remains the most fun I’ve had at the movies in a long time. It’s out on DVD now and still winding its way through the festival circuit. If you’re fortunate enough to be where it’s playing, absolutely do not miss it — this is one film made to be experienced en masse.
Thanks to the wisdom imparted by this movie, I now believe that, exo-skeletons be damned, tarantulas — deadly tarantulas — in vending machines are the future.
This is the Environment Transformer, an appliance created in 1968 by Austrian art/architecture collective Haus-Rucker-Co. I find myself incredibly drawn to this image because it reminds me of the sci-fi tech I saw in Soviet movies as I was growing up. The device is part of a series called Splendid Blend, which also included the Mind Expander, the Ideal Museum, and many other conceptual projects that demonstrate the group’s utopian outlook on living space and technology. I want one!
Although the Haus-Rucker establishment is long gone, an elegant website exists to catalogue all their creations that never got built, and some that did.
As its final scene, featuring the recently departed Charlton “from my cold dead hands” Heston, has become iconic, the rest of Soylent Green is frequently forgotten. That’s a shame, as there’s a damn good dystopian tale in the rest of this oft-referenced 1973 classic too. I, like so many others, had heard about, but never seen, the full movie. Until now.
Observe then, the entire film, loyal readers, for your viewing pleasure. Observe how you’ll know the rich by their bitchin’ ’70s decor and access to hot water. Witness an astonishingly effective combination of whodunit crime tale and dystopian nightmare! See riot cops in football helmets! Thrill to the scarf-wearing sweaty wonder that is Heston in his stilted prime! Wonder how dated-yet-oddly-relevant our own visions of the future may look in 35 years!
Still on mini-hiatus but I couldn’t resist sharing this moment of techno-zen with you. From Gizmodo:
“For the low price of $1000 a month, you could overcome your physical limitations with a HAL exoskeleton from Cyberdyne. While HAL prototypes have been around for a few years now, Cyberdyne has just begun building a lab that will mass produce 400-500 of the suits per year starting this October.
Using sensors attached to the skin, the suit supposedly moves effortlessly with your muscles and it has the capability of increasing your strength up to 10 times the norm. It also has a continuous operating time of about 2 hours and 40 minutes. As mentioned, the monthly rental fee has been set at $1000 which includes $300 for maintenance and upgrades. No word on whether or not they plan on selling these things outright, but I would be perfectly happy renting one and going all Hulk on my enemies for a month or so.”
Despite HAL’s lack of lasers and other such minor shortcomings I think I know what I’ll be doing for my next birthday. Can it fly?
This was one hell of a day, mm? Many thanks to our guest posters for providing crunchy brain sustenance for all! And now, as you loosen your bootlaces in preparation for the evening, it’s time to take a moment and appreciate these elegant anime robots.
I’ve been hearing about Ergo Proxy for ages but didn’t start watching until last week. Just 4 episodes in so far, I’m admiring the perpetually dusky post-ecodisaster utopia and identifying with the heroine’s utilitarian fashion sense. Of special interest to me, however, are the Entourage AutoReivs – as their name implies they are robotic companions to each citizen and help with everything from shopping to driving to occasional protection.
More stylized in appearance than the humanoid Companion models also present in the world of Ergo Proxy, some autoreivs vaguely resemble bearded men, and others have the shape of a statuesque female, hair pulled back into a strict bun. Despite the appeal of an autoreiv’s services one should remember that they store all of their owners’ data and monitor their actions. Could Big Brother be near? And beware Cogito, the self-awareness virus – it seems to be spreading across Romdo Dome City and all autoreivs are subject to infection…
I’ve recently come across the flickr stream of Hairport – an aptly-named hair salong in Lisbon, Portugal. Since then I’ve wondered, daily, why more people don’t look like this. It’s 2008! The proverbial Future. Why are there not more artistically shorn heads in the world? One thing I notice about these photos is that not everyone’s a teenager – many Hairport clients and employees are established artists, designers and writers in their 30s. We all know it will grow back should we hate it, yes? Why not embrace the endless possibilities instead of the usual trims, streaks and loose layers! Looking at these pictures makes me downright giddy as I envision a world where one couldn’t be hindered by their hairstyle choices, no matter their profession. Perhaps a trip to Lisbon is in order.
