Raging Boll – Hotdog
Hotdog is in a tiny gymnasium in Vancouver, dominated by a boxing ring and littered with punch bags, with Uwe Boll saunters in, kitted out in boxing gear. “Are there any press here?” he enquires, apparently without any trace of irony. It’s funny he should ask, because of the 20 or so people present, pretty much all of them are members of the press in one capacity or another, and there are five video cameras trained on him at that very moment – at least two different documentaries are being filmed about the bizarre publicity stunt that’s about to take place.
Over the last couple of years, Uwe Boll (pronounced “Oovah” Boll, for future reference) has been making something of a name for himself. In 2003, his movie adaptaion of Sega arcade game House of the Dead enraged fans of the game and of horror movies alike; by the time he’d followed up House with Alone in the Dark and BloodRayne, online petitions were drawn up to prevent him from “ruining” more games with his films. The merest mention of his name on a website’s message boards would be enough to clog them up with misspelled, caps-locked rants against him which inevitably seem to degenerate into threats of actual bodily harm. In less than two years, he’d gained an unenviable reputation for being one of the worst filmmakers of all time.
Boll decided he’d had enough and issued his now infamous challenge. He’d fly his five harshest critics to Vancouver to go three rounds in a boxing ring with him. “To be eligible,” the rules specified, “you must be a critic who has posted on the internet or written in magazines/newspapers at least two extremely negative articles in the year 2005.” The challenge was plastered all over various movie-related websites, and numerous posters bragged about having signed up – though sadly for Boll, none of the high-profile names he directly challenged (including Roger Avary and Quentin Tarantino) took up the gauntlet.
Boll beat the first challenger, writer Carlos Palencia, in Spin at the beginning of September; the other four are in the gym, two days before the real fights on Saturday night, to watch Uwe spar with director and outspoken Boll critic Brooke Burgess. They’re also being fitted with protective mouthpieces and getting a chance to work out a little, but they’re mostly here to be intimidated by the beat-down Boll administers to Burgess.
After a particularly vicious-looking moment where Boll backs Burgess into a corner and punches him back against the ropes, Burgess finally ducks out, claiming to the ref, “That’s fighting dirty!”
“This is boxing, not chess,” is the ref’s response, but Burgess isn’t having any of it, and leaves the ring. We don’t see him again for the rest of the weekend. In the uncomfortable moment that follows, everyone registers that Boll was once a semi-pro boxer, and doesn’t seem to have lost his edge. By comparison, one of the competitors has been boxing for six months; another has been in training for a month since hearing he’d been accepted for the challenge, and the other two have maybe half an hour’s preparation between them. In less than 48 hours, they might regret that.
The next day, Boll invited the four challengers to be extras in his new opus, Postal. Despite their alleged hatred of his movies, most of them take him up on it, and Hotdog gamely tags along, letting Boll’s wardrobe and makeup people transform us into “trailer trash.” The main scene being filmed involves the Postal Dude going appropriately mental, though the call sheet gets changed several times over the day; scenes are added and summarily abandoned until it’s too dark to film any more. Only occasionally do we glimpse the infamous director, always talking animately into his Blackberry. On his shirt is the legend “Say No To Uwe Boll”.
The uneasiness of the previous night returns when the liability release forms for the fighters turn up. Boll claims they’re standard forms, which may be the case, but nonetheless they require the critics to acknowledge that they may suffer various injuried – from concussion and broken bones to paralysis, AIDS, or even death – as a result of the fight.
Yet when Saturday evening rolls around, they seem remarkably unconcerned. Two of them get excited when they spot David “Arrested Development” Cross; meanwhile, at the ringside, one of the challengers bounds up to Hotdog to show off the baseball cap from event sponsor GoldenPalace.com he’s sporting. It feels like handing over a litter of puppies to be kicked repeatedly in the face by an angry German.
Immediately before the fight, the challengers are introduced to the audience and invited to give a short speech. The first, Lowtax from SomethingAwful.com, clowns around yelling that Canada is guilty of harbouring “a known terrorist, Uwe Boll!” Jeff Sneider from Ain’t It Cool News (standing in for Harry Knowles who, among other reasons for not showing up, would never have met the 140-190lb weight limit) challenges Boll to make a good movie or else donate his budgets to starving children in Africa; Chris Alexander of Rue Morgue magazine rolls off a thoroughly pre-prepared speech, whilst the final challenger, 17-year-old Chance Minter, merely thanks his friends and family for supporting him.
The bravado hardly falters; Lowtax repeatedly says he’s too stupid to be afraid, but the expression on his face when Boll’s fist first connects with his head suggests otherwise. The press seats are uncomfortably close to the ringside, and immediately behind Hotdog is a table full of Boll’s friends, including Kristanna Loken (star of BloodRayne), Zack Ward (Postal), Ralf Moeller, Andrew Jackson and Michael Pare from Seed, as well as several of Boll’s German lawyers. They’re baying for blood, and when Lowtax hits the mat, they all boo at him. Boll is soon declared winner by TKO in the first round, and the next critic, Sneider, steps up.
There are chants of “Harry Knowles! Harry Knowles!” from the audience, designed to spur Boll on since Knowles is one of the main targets for his rage; conversely, the table where the critics’ families, friends and van drivers are seated yell “Stay down!” every time Sneider is knocked down. This happens a lot. He makes it to a second round before the towel is thrown in. Once backstage, he vomits his guts up and spends an hour being attended to by a paramedic with an oxygen mask.
Next to face the Teutonic Thunderstorm is the only one of the contestants to actually meet Boll’s original criteria. Chris Alexander arrives wearing an elaborate costume of bat wings and a silver Mexican wrestling mask – all of which he promptly has to remove in order to get into the ring. His penchant for the dramatic doesn’t end there. Between rounds, he slips a sachet of fake blood into his cheek, and breaks it open the next time Boll punches him in the head. For a moment, Boll seems genuinely taken aback as Alexander snarls with a mouthful of crimson, and the ref is about to intercede before Alexander admits it’s fake. Boll isn’t pleased about being fooled, and the match doesn’t last much longer; a few more blows, and you can almost see the cartoon birdies circling Alexander’s head as he staggers around, determinedly fighting on despite the now-real blood on his face from a cut above his eye.
The final fighter has been touted as “The Best Contender.” Nelson “Chance” Minter, who’s been an amateur boxer for about six months, approaches the ring in a robe that makes him look freakily Palpatine-esque. He’s not a kid you’d want to encounter in a dark alley late at night. Minter is also an aspiring filmmaker, and has been ambitiously making the most of this opportunity to get on a real film set; he’s even managed to cajole Boll into promising him an internship on Far Cry next autumn. Considering his admiration for Boll, there’s something almost perverse about the fight. Boll is declared winner by TKO in the first round.
Bizarrely, the Boll fight isn’t the headline act of the night. The programmes as adorned with homoerotic pictures of kickboxers, and only maybe the bottom quarter mentions anything about a film director. The outdoor boxing arena contains around 600 people – God knows what they made of the Boll fight. From a spectator’s point of view, the critics didn’t put up enough of a fight for it to be fun, but there’s a constant buzz of cheering. This also might be due to the number of family, friends, and, of course, media present.
An after-party is being held at a local nightclub, but the abysmal music forces Hotdog to find somewhere else to toast Chris Alexander’s “success”. Jeff Sneider understandably opts to go home to bed instead, and since Chance is underage we have to leave him behind, too. Alexander’s eye looks like it’s preparing to come up in a spectacular bruise, but he’s in good spirits, eagerly watching taped footage of the bout.
As Alexander had predicted, he’s developed a twisted kind of respect for Boll, despite continued misgivings about his movies; in Hotdog’s encounters with Boll, he’s demonstrated a sense of humour and fun that’ll undoubtedly be ignored in other reports about the way he knocked out four puny internet critics. Although the boxing match has attracted the press attention he’s after, it isn’t going to change people’s opinions of his movies. If anything, it’ll probably make them hate him even more. All the glorified handbag display does is tie Dr Boll closer to his critics. But these people need each other: Boll wouldn’t exist as a public entite without the furore created by the internet, while his furious reaction acknowledges his pale-skinned nemeses, granting the online community – often dismissed by the industry and the press – a validity.
Chris Alexander interrupts Hotdog’s reverie. “C’mon,” he grins, “eat some nachos! Did I tell you Uwe’s taking me and Chance to brunch tomorrow…?”
PLAYER PROFILES
Player 1: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka
Position: Webmaster/CEO of Something Awful
Age: 30
Height: 6′1″
Weight: 155lb
Special moves: Pratfalling; extreme sarcasm
In his own words: “Honestly, I don’t have Boll, I really don’t care about him either way. I thought the trip to Vancouver, along with the sheer silliness of being involved in the event, would be fun.”
~
Player 2: Jeff Sneider
Position: Writer for Ain’t It Cool News
Age: 22
Height: 5′9″
Weight: 170lb
Special moves: Projectile vomiting
In his own words: “I have resigned myself to imminent failure. I am not training or taking any boxing lessons. I am there to be his personal punching bag, on the off change that I can get one good shot in.”
~
Player 3: Chris Alexander
Position: Writer for Rue Morgue; radio personality
Age: 30
Height: 5′11″
Weight: 180lb
Special moves: Spitting fake blood
In his own words: “You’ve heard of the Thriller in Manilla? The Rumble in the Jungle? Well, we’re calling this the Manoeuvre in Vancouver. My chances are slim… he’s a beast and I’m a slim-jim sub-amateur.”
~
Player 4: Nelson “Chance” Minter
Position: Amateur boxer, IMDb poster
Age: 17
Height: 5′7″
Weight: 155lb
Special moves: Quite possibly shooting Sith-style lightning from his fingertips.
In his own words: “I like to think I’m sticking up for the kids who were called out by Boll. Also, I feel he’s giving film critics a bad name since he can’t take negative criticism.”
Would banning popcorn make cinemas better? – Den of Geek
Quick answer: no, don’t be so ridiculous. Apparently some cinemagoers don’t agree… is popcorn really the problem, though?
The Observer recently ran a story claiming that our days of eating popcorn at the cinema may soon be over. Several owners of independent cinemas have reacted to complaints from their customers about the selling of popcorn at their venues by banning the snackfood – and the Picturehouse chain (which comprises 19 screens) has decided to hold one popcorn-free screening per week to test the butterless waters. Which, when you put it that way, doesn’t actually sound like cinema popcorn is quite the endangered species that The Observer initially tried to make out.
But let’s pretend for a moment that it is. What actual difference would it make? To the general cinema-going masses, I’m guessing the answer is “not very much.” To begin with, we’d probably be surprised, if we noticed at all, and then we’d get over it. Popcorn generally isn’t the only snack food served in cinemas – most chain cinemas also sell nachos, crisps, hotdogs, chocolate, sweets and drinks, and the more up-market cinemas cited in The Observer’s article admit to selling cheese, olives, and chocolates as alternatives. The argument being put forward here isn’t that it’s food, per se, that’s the problem in cinemas; it is specifically popcorn. So your theoretical average cinema punter, then, would just spend their dosh on something else to munch on through the movie.
The cinemas, on the other hand, would probably feel the difference much more keenly. Popcorn is very cheap to produce and is sold at ludicrous mark-ups – so by banning it, cinema owners could wave goodbye to that nice fat profit margin. On the other hand, popcorn can be rather messy, so cinema staff might find cleaning up at the end of the night less time-consuming – if we accept that running a vacuum cleaner along the floor is massively time-consuming, and also that the general public wouldn’t just drop crumbs from their cheese and crackers, stones from their olives, and stray chocolates. Cleaning up spilled popcorn actually sounds a lot more appealing than trying to scrape up melted cheese or chocolate, since it can just be swept up.
What other differences might there be? Well, cooking popcorn does smell, which I suppose people might find unpleasant. Depending on the type of popcorn machine used, cinemas might be able to cut down on labour costs, if their popcorn maker requires someone to actually stand and use it, which might also cut down on injuries (I still have the burn scars from my brief stint working at a cinema, back in my student days…), but the replacement snacks some cinemas are offering would need someone to prepare those, so that’s not really a saving of any kind. Um.
I’m struggling now to think of any way in which banning popcorn might actually make the cinema a nicer place. But maybe I’m in the minority, because apparently lots and lots of customers have been actually complaining to their cinema managers about the presence of popcorn. I can complain about things with the best of them, but I can’t imagine the sort of state of mind one would need to be in to go and complain about popcorn. Seriously? What is it actually doing to you, to make you that angry?
Long-term Den of Geek readers might remember a series of articles on this site about how to make cinemas better – and that one of those articles proposed banning nachos; I didn’t agree with that, either, because I love nachos, but the argument for banning nachos was at least a tiny bit more coherent than the argument for banning popcorn. Nachos are smellier and noisier to eat than popcorn, and thus more disruptive to other people in a cinema auditorium. Popcorn, though? It’s almost completely inoffensive!
Daniel Broch, quoted in the Observer’s article and owner of the Everyman cinema in Hampstead, said something that might just about explain it: “[Popcorn] has a disproportionate influence on the space in terms of its overwhelming smell, the cultural ideas of it and the operational problems created by the mess it produces. I’m not saying no popcorn is better than popcorn, but I am saying there is no way in which it fits with the culturally sophisticated brand I wish to sell.” And there we have it. It’s just about seeming culturally elite. Whether or not a venue serves popcorn is irrelevant on pretty much every count except perceived superiority; it’s about marking out those cinemas that don’t serve popcorn as better than those that do. The cultural idea of popcorn he’s referring to, I imagine, is that of the “popcorn movie” – light entertainment, then, of the low-brow kind that doesn’t mesh with the “culturally sophisticated brand” Bloch’s trying to sell. Popcorn itself is irrelevant; this is all about elitism. And, being an essentially contrary person, all it does is make me want to eat popcorn more than ever. My choice of snack food has sod all to do with my level of intelligence or indeed sophistication. Popcorn has no inherent morality.
Actually, I think that bears repeating: popcorn has no inherent morality. So let’s stop pretending it’s somehow ruining our appreciation of great films – it’s not. It’s just food.
This article was originally published at Den of Geek.
TITS OR GTFO! – 4Talent, Central England
Sarah Dobbs went along to a Women In Games panel as part of a film festival celebrating female filmmakers. But even with four women who work in games on the panel, she still felt it missed the point, and talked to some female gamers to see what the situation is really like…
Busting stereotypes
Despite Nintendo’s best efforts to convince us otherwise, the enduring stereotype of a “gamer” is of a male twenty-something slouched on the sofa in his underwear. Yet according to research by the Entertainment Software Association, 38% of all game players are women; it’s just that you won’t see them in online games, because up to 70% of female gamers choose male avatars in order to escape online harassment.
Well, that, and also because many games don’t offer female avatars to begin with. Twelve years after the first Tomb Raider game introduced us to Lara Croft, games with female protagonists are still few and far between.
Debate
The Women in Games panel, held as part of the Birds Eye View film festival, aimed to discuss the role of, well, women in games. “Women in Games” is a title that needs some unpacking, though, since it covers three main issues: women working in the games industry, women characters in games, and women who play games. To cover all of that in a two-hour panel discussion is a huge undertaking, which could be why it felt so superficial.
Chaired by Emma Westecott, a programmer and producer who worked on Starship Titanic with Douglas Adams, the panel comprised Katie Ellwood, writer for The Getaway franchise; Laura Kippax, a character artist for Cambridge-based Ninja Theory; Emily Newton-Dunn, ex-Bits presenter who now works on the Burnout and Harry Potter gaming franchises, and Helen Kennedy, a university lecturer who has published extensively on the subject of women in games, focusing on Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft and female Quake players.
Paneled
In her introduction, Kennedy quoted a recent newspaper article on the “tits or GTFO” culture of online gaming, in which female gamers are subjected to sexist abuse by fellow gamers who either don’t believe they’re female or want revealing pictures in exchange for “letting” them play. But after that, each of the other panelists stuck to discussing her own career history, steering clear of any controversy.
When, for example, Kippax talked about her character design work on the PlayStation 3 title Heavenly Sword, she mentioned that part of the concept for Nariko was that she would be “sexy”. This, and the accompanying concept sketches, passed unremarked. But while featuring a female protagonist in a fighting game is still a bold move, and one that should be applauded, the debate failed to question why a female character still needs, above all, to be sexy – leaving a lot of assumptions about the games industry unchallenged.
Scary feminism
The apparently unwanted spectre of ‘feminism’ loomed over the whole event, with everyone seeming keen to avoid mentioning the word. The only time it came up was when a woman in the audience asked the panel whether they thought increasing the number of women working in the games industry would lead to games becoming boring and sterile. Rather than challenging the inherent misogyny of the question, Kennedy sidestepped it, saying she was afraid to seem like a “humourless feminist” when, in fact, she “enjoys hardcore porn.”
This desperation to avoid seeming militant – and to reassure everyone that no-one is trying to remove the sex appeal from games – emerged during discussion of the representation of women in games. Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball’s focus on bouncing breasts was deemed simply funny, while the equally lecherous treatment of women in more serious games was left unaddressed. But why such reluctance to criticise the games industry for its objectification of women – or even to acknowledge it?
Female gamers
Maybe the problem lies in the fact that none of the panellists seemed to do much online gaming, and were thus unaware of the genuine misogyny that exists in gaming communities under the guise of humour. After all, it’s easier to ignore the objectification of a character in a game if you’re not having to deal with the same objectification yourself.
A gamer known as “fraghag” told me that, while playing Call of Duty 4 online, she noticed fellow gamers treated her differently when she started using her own gamertag rather than her husband’s. “As soon as they knew I was a woman, they started chasing me around, trying to teabag me,” she recalls. Another female gamer, who didn’t want to be identified, recalled being told to “get back into the kitchen” when she used her microphone in a game of Halo. It’s starting to become clear why women pretend to be men online.
Skirting the issue
The games industry obviously can’t be held responsible for the actions of every single gamer. But increasing the number of women working in the games industry should help change things. It’ll be a slow process – all of the Women in Games panelists admitted that they were still very much in the minority at work, so while their achievements are worth celebrating, that’s not the end of the story.
The panel’s uncritical approach to gaming in general turned the event into little more than an opportunity for self-promotion. When asked by a non-gamer in the audience how the games industry could attract her to gaming, the panel told her she could already count herself a gamer if she played games on Facebook or her mobile phone. This, again, skirted the issue; it’s not that women aren’t interested in games. It’s that the ones who are, are being driven away.
This article was originally published on Channel 4’s 4Talent Central England website.
Hello. I’m A Really Annoying Personified Computer – Micro Mart
The plinky plonky music starts, and two familiar figures appear onscreen. “Hello, I’m a Mac” says one. “And I’m a PC,” the other one chips in. The new UK Apple adverts have started to appear everywhere, from London Underground platform billboards to cinema screens to newspapers; Mitchell and Webb’s smug faces peer out at you wherever you go. (Webb in this guise is particularly smug, even for him.)
The first time I spotted the posters on a Tube poster, it made me smile – it coincided, surely entirely by chance, with the launch of Windows Vista. At the time, there was very little fanfare for Vista (though that was remedied later with massive posters spelling out “Wow” at the end of Oxford Street, and video adverts at Tottenham Court Road station), so the sudden proliferation of Apple adverts stood out.
Also, I – along with a lot of other people – was still in the grip of Jobs-itis, since the iPhone had just been announced, and it seemed like Apple could do no wrong. But it didn’t take long before the adverts became really, really annoying…
Mitchell and Webb
In fairness, any ad campaign that showed up in as many places as this one did would get annoying. A quick quiz of friends around the country (and a query on the Micro Mart forum) showed that pretty much everyone has seen them, and most in a wide variety of locations. Seems it’s worse in London, but by no means confined to just London. And it’s just not possible to constantly be shown the same skits over and over and over without getting bored… and then increasingly irritated. However, the Apple adverts seem to have gotten up people’s noses for other reasons than just the fact that they’re plastered all over every bus-stop, shown in every cinema, and occupying all available space on MySpace’s home page.
Charlie Brooker wrote a blog entry over at The Guardian explaining why he hates Macs, starting off with a long rant about the Mitchell and Webb ads. He also pointed out, in a far more eloquent (and ranty) way than I could (and get away with) what’s wrong with the casting choices:
“They are a logical choice in one sense (everyone likes them), but a curious choice in another, since they are best known for the television series Peep Show – probably the best sitcom of the past five years – in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, “PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers.” In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign.”
So, there’s that. I know someone who can’t so much as look at David Mitchell without recoiling in horror, and Mitchell’s voice practically brings him out in hives. Personally, it’s Webb that freaks me out the most; I can’t look at him in the same way ever since he spent the entire running time of Confetti wandering around starkers.
But the casting choices aren’t the only things wrong with the Apple ads. There’s also the fact that they play a little, er, fast and loose with the truth. Setting aside the bus stop and newspaper ads for the moment, there are currently twelve Mitchell and Webb ads on the UK Apple site. (Every single one features Robert Webb being offensively smug.) Each of them seems to entail ‘PC’ sniping at ‘Mac’ out of jealousy at Mac’s superiority – which is funny, when you think about it, because really the adverts are a series of swipes at the PC over inadequacies it doesn’t even really have.
Talking Scribble
The first advert, for example, is titled Naughty Step. PC explains that the Naughty Step is for people who want to enjoy ‘fun stuff’, and he proceeds to tell Mac to sit on it. Because PCs are serious business, whereas Macs are for fun. This is a common theme, actually; Office At Home, Tentacle, and Pie Chart all make the same assertions.
But if you were a serious gamer, which would you choose? Hmm.
Other accusations levelled at Windows-running PCs are that they’re difficult to set up, and don’t just work straight out of the box; that they don’t connect easily to networks; that they have to be restarted all the time, unlike the allegedly super-stable Macs, and that PCs are terribly insecure, falling victim to all sorts of viruses and spyware on a daily basis.
Although I’ll have to concede that yes, with a PC you might have to connect up some wires – colour-coded wires, at that – to get everything set up before you can load up YouTube, and that wireless networks are terrible, fiddly, obnoxious things, most people who work with Macs will concede that sometimes they, too, need to reboot; while a PC with a half-decent firewall and anti-virus program will be quite secure and happy, thank you. Indeed, there were reports recently that Mac users should be more aware of security and not just buy into the myth that Macs are inherently secure and unassailable. As the platform grows, the hackers and malware creators will start to target them with more ferocity than they previously have done, and all the bleating about how there are more PC viruses in the world than grains of sand on a beach won’t do them any good.
Other adverts show PC getting excited about exchanging files with Mac, whereas Mac is just vaguely smug about the whole process; and another, entitled Court, sees PC dressing up as a judge and accusing Mac of lying about how easy it is to create a photobook. (I’m not sure why the adverts are so bizarrely preoccupied with the idea of making photobooks; they really don’t look all that great.) The point, it seems, is not only that using Macs is easier than you might think, but that using PCs is ridiculously hard, and should be stopped at once.
Except… Is it, really? Alright, occasionally PCs can be very fiddly, refusing to do as they’re asked for no discernable reason until you want to throw them out of a window. But mostly, they’ve become intuitive to use just because we’ve been doing it for so long. And if Microsoft had as much control over the hardware configurations people run Windows on as Apple do over Mac operating systems, then there probably wouldn’t be any problems there, either – except that Microsoft would be slapped with more antitrust cases than it could count.
False Accusations
Most of the time, the Mac just seems to be accusing PC of things that patently aren’t true. The ‘fun stuff’ Mac wants to do seems to consist mostly of taking photographs, surfing the Internet, blogging, making home movies, and listening to music. It probably won’t surprise you to know that YOU CAN DO ALL OF THESE THINGS ON A WINDOWS PC, TOO.
Plus you can play games.
The UK Apple ads are all fairly new, too, so there aren’t as many of them as there are American ads in the same format. In the US, the Mac is played by Justin Long, a young actor whose CV includes such classics as Jeepers Creepers and Dodgeball, whereas the PC is portrayed by John Hodgman, an author and ‘humourist’. (Which is apparently different from being just a ‘comedian’.) Again, there’s some ever-so-slightly questionable casting going on there, but again it’s the substance of the ads that’s more questionable.
‘Stuffed’ claims that PCs always come stuffed with trial software that no-one wants, whereas Macs only come with programs everyone wants. Right… another ad, ‘iLife’, touts the brilliance of Mac’s built-in software, which is something the UK ads have only copied in the bus stop ads in which PC is holding a sign that’s held together with parcel tape, claiming that PCs must hobble together inferior software in order to carry out tasks that Macs effortlessly complete straight out of the box. Several of the other ads have been remade, so I’ll skip over them here – except ‘Accident’ in which the fact that Mac power cables fall out easily is claimed as a feature.
Tell that to all the people who’ve Sellotaped them in out of annoyance, then.
Then we get to some adverts which are just nonsensical; where the metaphor of the two men pretending to be computers just falls apart and doesn’t make sense any more. In Gift Exchange, the Mac gives PC a present of a book full of photos of the two of them, whereas PC gives Mac the C++ GUI book he’d been eyeing for himself. Er…
In another, Angel PC and Devil PC turn up to advise PC on his course of action when faced with a photobook Mac has made and wants his opinion on. In ‘Counselor’, Mac compliments PC on the areas in which the PC reigns supreme, while PC is too embittered to return the gesture, and in yet another one, called Sabotage, PC wheels in a fake Mac guy to say that PCs are way better than Macs, only to be interrupted when the real Mac turns up. If anyone knows what these are supposed to be about, please let me know.
Wrongheaded
There just seems to be something wrongheaded about the way Apple markets its product. Instead of talking up the actual good points of Macs that must exist in the real world (else why would people keep buying them?) they constantly belittle PCs.
The fact that so much of the advertising is online might explain part of that. If the person watching the video is online, they presumably have a computer of some sort, and they might therefore need to be lured – or scared – away from their PCs and into Apple’s comforting embrace.
None of which is anything new, of course. It’s just that Apple’s campaign seems to lack any real joined-up thinking. Take their sidebar explaining why Windows Vista is evil; seven reasons are offered for why just getting a Mac would be better, all of them flawed in one way or another.
Number 1 is ‘no upgrade nightmares.’ Instead of upgrading your PC’s memory, hard disk and graphics card, Apple asks “Why go through all that hassle, when you can just get a Mac?” Well, I’m sure your bank could think of a reason. Also, if you’re going to ‘just get a Mac’, you could just as easily ‘just’ buy a new PC to run Vista on.
The second reason is that you can run Windows on a Mac. ‘Not that you’ll want to.’ Argh! So is being able to run Windows a good thing, or not? If you want to run Windows, and you already are running Windows, then why would you buy a Mac? Conversely, if you don’t want to run Windows, then you might as well use the Apple operating system. Nonsense.
Moving on, the third reason is that it’s simpler. There’s more than one version of Vista, you see, and you might get confused. Even though in point 2, having more choice was a good thing. But now it’s just too haaaaaarrrrd.
The fourth reason is that you won’t have to buy new stuff; your peripherals will work with a Mac. And probably with a non-Mac PC, too, since that’s currently what they’re working with. The fifth reasons that you’re probably running iTunes anyway (not that illogical assumption, judging by how many people have iPods) then you’ll already know your way around a Mac. Just like you already know your way around a PC.
Point 6 says that Macs run Microsoft Office. Do I even need to say anything about that? And point 7 says that you can run everything you’re currently running on a PC on a Mac, too, so you can take it with you.
Not the most convincing argument, I have to say. (In the interests of fairness and balance, I should say that Microsoft’s 100 reasons why you’d like Vista were equally rubbish; there were maybe ten actual reasons, just slightly rephrased over and over and over again.)
Vista seems to have triggered a big push from the Apple campaigners, playing on the fact that while people might normally be resistant to change, if they have to change anyway, they might jump off the Microsoft ship and join the Apple party. One of the American Mac ads ridicules Vista’s security, showing the PC unable to do anything without the permission of a scary bodyguard in a black suit and sunglasses – but, oh, yes, this is the same PC who’s supposedly virus-ridden and full of spyware, isn’t it?
All mocking aside, it really seems like Apple could have made a better ad campaign, which played to its strengths without resorting to petty name-calling. It could also benefit from researching its actors (and the associations the public makes with them) a little better, and maybe introducing some consistency to their message. The ads could also try to stay on message, rather than just spouting nonsense.
I’m just saying.
Watch the ads yourself: www.apple.com/getamac/ads and www.apple.com/uk/getamac.
This article was originally published in Micro Mart magazine in 2007.
Insurance Claims in Space – Cult Times
One of the niggling unanswered questions of science fiction – other than “where are the toilets on the Enterprise?” – is: who takes the blame when things go wrong? When parts of the ship inexplicably malfunction, or break down? There’s a certain amount of hassle involved in trying to prove that, actually, some terrifying space monkeys really did break in and wreck havoc, and that’s where the insurance companies step in. Here’s a run-down of the top 10 most common insurance claims in space:
10. Holo-disaster: The safety gets inadvertently turned off on the Holodeck.
Insured: Holodeck manufacturers.
Claimants: Affected crewmembers; families of any deceased.
Circumstances: If the safety option isn’t working, any scenarios created might as well be real. In practise, that tends to mean that any number of fictional or historical characters can run amok, attacking any crewmembers in the holodeck.
Decision: Provided it can be proven that the holodeck wasn’t tampered with, and that it was being used to manufacturers’ specifications, the manufacturer will be wholly liable for any consequences; otherwise, a degree of contributory negligence may be involved. If no one was seriously harmed, it may be difficult to claim for emotional distress, though a nominal sum may well be awarded.
9. Culinary Nightmare: The replicator malfunctions.
Insured: Replicator manufacturers.
Claimants: Crewmembers.
Circumstances: Replicator malfunctions range widely in severity: from ceasing to work entirely, causing a food shortage; to creating harmful food resulting in widespread food poisoning; to getting stuck on the Pot Noodle setting.
Decision: Again contributory negligence will have to be ruled out by investigating whether the machinery had been tampered with by any non-authorised personnel. The age and condition of the machine, as well as the dates of its last service, will play a part in determining how much compensation is warranted. It’s likely that in less severe cases, when perhaps only several hundred gallons of tomato soup were produced, there won’t be much of a payout.
8. Code Roswell: Some drunken cadets crash the spaceship.
Insured: Claim will be against the spaceship’s insurance policy.
Claimants: Ship’s owner/occupiers.
Circumstances: Newly-qualified space cadets can get reckless, and carelessness can lead to damage ranging from a mere prang, to a bump involving another ship, to flat-out writing-off the ship by crashing it into a planet.
Decision: Bang goes the no-claims bonus. A claims handler will probably need to inspect the damage to determine how much needs to be spent on repairs, and estimates from various dealers will need to be sought – but if the craft has been crashed on an unknown planet, things can get much more complicated, possibly requiring search and rescue operations.
7. Make a Jam: Inertial dampeners malfunction.
Insured: Product manufacturers/suppliers.
Claimants: Grieving families, ship’s owners.
Circumstances: Maintaining a reasonable atmosphere inside a spaceship is tricky – after air, gravity is probably one of the most important factors, and when you’re travelling at warp speeds, inertial dampeners are vital. Without them, your highly trained crew will be nothing but a soupy mess of organs, which is extremely inconvenient for all involved.
Decision: Provided that there have been no noticeable alterations made, and there’s no evidence of extraneous damage, there’s a pretty good case here against the manufacturers. Life insurance for the crew should also pay out, and it’ll be necessary to contract someone to retrieve the ship, as well as potentially very high cleaning bills.
6. Avast, ye landlubbers: The crew are attacked by space pirates.
Insured: Claims of this nature are usually covered by spaceship/contents insurance.
Claimants: Crewmembers.
Circumstances: Due to insufficient safety measures, or sometimes just plain bad luck, ships are often hijacked by opportunists. Occasionally, the crew will be massacred and the ship itself stolen, but just as often the thieves will just take whatever is onboard that strikes their fancy.
Decision: As long as the terms of the policy were adhered to, any stolen goods should be replaced (assuming provenance and value can be accounted for). In more extreme cases, settling the case can be more problematic and there is a litigation risk; it’s unlikely this can be settled out of court.
5. Lost in Translation: The universal translator fails.
Insured: Translator manufacturers.
Claimants: Crewmembers/fleet; potential for a class action suit.
Circumstances: Peace negotiations are often very tense, requiring a great deal of tact and sophistication. If the translators fail, things can do dramatically wrong, with possible results including immediate damage being done to the ship, crewmembers being killed or injured, and, in the long-term, some areas of space becoming off-limits, damaging trade relations and generally making life more difficult.
Decision: Claims of this nature have the potential to become high profile and highly expensive. Payouts vary, depending on the degree of damage done to intergalactic relations as well as more physical losses, but pure economic loss can be complicated to prove.
4. Scrambled Legs: The teleporter breaks down, mangling crewmember data.
Insured: Teleporter manufacturer.
Claimants: Grieving families; remaining crewmembers.
Circumstances: If there’s a teleporter malfunction mid-transporting, a scrambling of the data can occur, meaning crewmembers don’t come back again – or at least, not in one recognisable piece. Data is occasionally completely lost, but more often becomes corrupt; either way, this can result in messy death.
Decision: As always, condition, age, and extraneous damage to the machinery need to be taken into account, but if a teleporter randomly redesigns human anatomy, there’ll be someone to blame – usually, the programmers. Replacement or repair of the product will be necessary, and probably some kind of payment to placate those unlucky enough to have to witness/clear up the mess.
3. Lost in Space: The compression coil blows, leaving the engine inoperable and crew stranded.
Insured: Ship retailer; parts manufacturer.
Claimants: Crewmembers.
Circumstances: Spaceships don’t just run on goodwill and fresh air: they need power, whether that’s beryllium spheres, dilithium crystals, or any other such unpronounceable necessity. If one tiny-yet-essential part goes wrong, it can have disastrous consequences, especially if there’s no back-up life support.
Decision: Quantum will vary based on the age and provenance of the part in question. Usually, a payout will be merited for replacement of the part, and possibly for general damages. Medical supplies, food, and anyone kept in suspended animation may also have been affected by the lack of power and compensation should be issued accordingly.
2. The Time Warp: The crew get stuck in a time-loop.
Insured: Claim will likely be against the spaceship’s insurance policy.
Claimants: Crewmembers.
Circumstances: A temporal anomaly forces crewmembers to re-live the same day over and over again; as a result, excessive amounts of food and fuel are used in the course of one day, and some mental and emotional distress may be suffered.
Decision: This is essentially an employers’ liability claim, for failing to provide a safe and suitable place of work. However, claims of this sort are open to abuse, as it is often impossible to conclusively prove any of the details. Actual physical loss will probably be small, and only a nominal payment should be considered in respect of psychological distress.
1. Codename HAL: The AI goes mad and kills the crew.
Insured: The AI manufacturers/programmers.
Claimants: Grieving families, mostly.
Circumstances: A lack of sufficient built-in safety measures, and the inability of artificial intelligence to successfully replicate human values, results in the entirely logical extermination of the entire crew.
Decision: Meddling with the AI’s programming (or offering it chocolate) may result in some degree of contributory negligence, and the ship’s records should be scrutinised. Otherwise, the manufacturer or programmer will be held liable, and a product recall may have to be issued to prevent this from becoming a class-action suit. (Undoubtedly, it will be better to pay over the odds to settle out of court in this case, as it has the potential to become extremely high profile.)
This article was originally written for Cult Times magazine.
Dr Horrible’s Sing Along Blog: why Penny matters – Den of Geek
Joss Whedon’s work tends to attract a certain kind of desperately loyal fandom. I’ll admit that Buffy the Vampire Slayer changed my life; I was addicted to the show from the first episode until the last. I watched all of Angel, and then fell head over heels for Firefly, too – along with pretty much everyone else in the known universe. It’s great that he writes genre fiction with trope-subverting ass-kicking women characters who don’t have to wear skimpy skin-tight costumes to be awesome.
But. And there’s always a but. Despite the fact that Whedon identifies as a feminist, and despite the fact that there are lots of fantastic things about his work, it’s not perfect. He’s fallible, like everyone else, and somehow the fact that he’s done so much that’s great makes the not-so-great things much more disappointing.
On Saturday, the final episode of Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog was published. I watched it first thing in the morning and then rushed to get a review up because I knew I wouldn’t get near a computer all weekend, which meant that that review was very much my initial visceral reaction. I’ve since had a chance to watch Act III a few more times, and although I haven’t changed my mind about it, I’ve just been thinking and thinking and thinking about it and reading other people’s reactions and, mostly, wondering what the hell happened.
See, I fully expected that we’d find out Penny was actually a lot more kickass than she appeared. I was suspicious that she just happened to be around when Dr Horrible was pulling off the Wonderflonium heist, and when Captain Hammer announced that he was going to give her a tour of his command centre, I thought for sure it would turn out that she was secretly in the Evil League of Evil (or at least trying to be). That she seemed so sweet and optimistic and lovely could just be a cunning ruse designed to throw people off the scent. So the conclusion of Act III floored me. Instead of getting to demonstrate any kind of strength (and I don’t just mean physical – intellectual or emotional strength would be great!) she just… demonstrates a teeny, tiny bit of agency, a little doubt about whether Captain Hammer is really as great as everyone says, and then she gets accidentally killed.
The real kick in the teeth is the fact that her dying words are “Captain Hammer will save us.” So that moment where she storms off in disgust at his horrible speech is completely meaningless, ultimately, because she didn’t see through him at all. As much as I would have loved for her to turn out to be a villain, I don’t have a problem with her being just as idealistic as she looked; endlessly perky and unable to see anything but the good in everyone. That’s pretty much Kaylee from Firefly, and she’s brilliant. It’s just that there’s no self-awareness, no sense of irony. Penny’s death doesn’t matter, because she was only ever there for the boys to fight over. Neither of them is actually interested in her as much more than a trophy they can lord over the other one; Captain Hammer brags at one point that “I’m going to give Penny the night of her life. Just because you want her. And I get what you want.” We don’t even really get to feel her death as a tragic thing in itself, for her own sake – it’s just another element in Dr Horrible’s journey to the dark side. She dies in order to affect him; like I said in my first review, she just gets stuffed in the fridge.
But is it as simple as that? I mean, Joss Whedon isn’t stupid, and he’s fully aware of all the conventions of the genre; he knows comic books, he knows this happens all the time, so… is he maybe trying to send up the convention of killing off women merely to hurt men? Are we supposed to feel how wrong it is that the only good person in the whole series, the only one who’s actually working to effect social change for the better and not just for purely egotistical reasons, is the one who dies?
The series of newspaper headlines about her death, all of which focus on her relationship to Captain Hammer, demonstrate some kind of winking at the audience, but somehow it’s just not enough. The point isn’t made clearly enough. I know, it’s an extremely short series without much room to fully flesh everyone out, but rather than a subversion of the trope, it just seems like yet another example of it.
And it’s not like Whedon isn’t capable of making his points very explicitly. Look at Dr Horrible’s song, right after he zaps Captain Hammer with the freeze ray – in that moment, we stop seeing him through his eyes and start seeing him as he appears to the general public. In his own mind, he’s just this shy and slightly incompetent guy who has a rather sweet crush on a girl he’s too afraid to talk to. But from the point of view of, well, anyone else, he’s a dangerous psychopath. All the slightly creepy things he’s been doing, which seemed forgivable and even sort of endearing, suddenly come sharply into focus. He’s not a nice guy, he’s a lunatic. He doesn’t love Penny, he’s obsessed with her – and stalking her. There’s no happy ending for him because he’s made bad decisions: he’s chosen to be evil, to try to steal and bully his way into power, rather than just acting like a responsible grownup.
And then there’s Captain Hammer, the essence of obnoxious hyper-masculinity. Nathan Fillion is probably going to be haunted for the rest of his life by the “the hammer is my penis” line, but – that’s not exactly subtle, is it? So perhaps it’s not coincidence that Penny is killed by phallic-shaped debris from an exploding gun. Caught in the crossfire of Dr Horrible and Captain Hammer’s pissing contest, she’s the one who gets hurt. There’s something there, but the point is just not made clearly enough. As it stands, her death just plays as another of Dr Horrible’s failures. And it should have been handled better.
The itch to write a better ending is affecting much of the fan community already – personally, I would’ve liked to see an ending where Dr Horrible managed to kill Captain Hammer, but then got zapped by Penny with the freeze ray and carted off to prison. That would’ve been in keeping with the characters as drawn. Alternatively, she could have just showed some goddamn agency and entered into the fray – she could have talked Dr Horrible down, or stopped Captain Hammer from pulling the trigger (let’s not forget, he’s actually the one who kills her). Or, she could have been injured, but not killed, and lived to reject both Hammer and Horrible and get on with her life in her own way.
There are lots and lots of alternate endings that could have subverted the woman-as-love-interest and woman-as-victim-to-drive-hero-onwards tropes. Instead, she’s left unexplored and undeveloped, constantly ignored and pushed aside, literally and figuratively – Captain Hammer “saves” her by throwing her into a stack of bin bags! The show doesn’t treat her much better than the characters; she’s constantly being drowned out by the two guys. Her higher-pitched, quieter voice gets lost in the mix. (Check out how much harder you have to listen to hear what she’s singing immediately after the heist; Captain Hammer booms over her, and though Dr Horrible’s asides are audible enough, making out what she’s singing is much more difficult. It took me several goes.)
And since she doesn’t even get a decent solo to make up for it, we never really engage with her. Dr Horrible, as the star of the show, gets plenty of opportunity to monologue in verse, and Captain Hammer gets a really, really, really long song all to himself at the opening of the homeless shelter, but Penny? She gets a timid six lines when she’s asking people to sign her petition, and her longest stretch of uninterrupted singing comes in the laundromat, when she’s trying to cheer Billy up. There’s the merest glimmering of character, there, as she reveals that she isn’t actually as cheerful as she seems, that her life hasn’t been all sunshine and puppies, but it’s swiftly stubbed out by Hammer and Horrible’s bickering.
It’s just so frustrating. Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is great in many ways: it’s well-produced, well-acted, with great songs and comedy, and yet it could have been so much better if it had only realised that just because the hero and villain both fancy the same girl, that doesn’t stop her from being a person.
This article was originally published at Den of Geek.
Should The Dark Knight really have been a 12A? – Den of Geek
The Dark Knight is being hailed as a new kind of superhero movie – one with no trace of camp or playfulness whatsoever but, instead, an ultra-realistic depiction of a world gone bad and one man, dressed as a bat, dedicated to making things better. At its centre are three men trying to make things better in their own way – Harvey Dent by politics and a squeaky-clean version of the legal system; Commissioner Gordon by hard work and second chances; and Batman by expensive gadgets, ultra-intrusive surveillance, and hubris. All of them are thwarted by chaos and a psychopath who “just wants to watch the world burn.” Its political message isn’t entirely coherent, since it says that giving into terrorists, trying to sink to their level, is dangerous and can corrupt even the best of men, but also that if you’re in a position of power, lying to someone for their own good is all fine and dandy, but make no mistake – this is a Batman film for grown-ups.
And as such, it contains rather a lot of violence. Most of it is off-screen, or shot carefully enough that you don’t actually see any blood, but jamming a pencil into someone’s skull (presumably through the eyeball?) is pretty grim anyway. I covered my eyes every time the Joker inserted a razor blade into someone’s mouth, anticipating a cheek-slicing that never quite arrived.
Then there’s Harvey Dent’s half-burned-off face. It’s totally gross. Unfortunately, Dent’s crispy face, with its exposed jaw and gaping eye, looks quite a lot like the barrel zombie from Return of the Living Dead, which means it looked rather more comical than I suspect anyone intended. I’m also not convinced that it would move in the way it does (particularly his half a lip) but that’s beside the point. We’re told that Dent is in chronic pain and – well, it looks like it. The make-up is tipped ever so slightly in the direction of the ridiculous, possibly deliberately in order to make it less scary – or is that because I’m an adult? I remember being terrified, as a child, by films that look totally goofy to my grown-up eyes, so I’m not sure how a 12-year-old (or under!) would take it.
Because according to the BBFC, this film is suitable for anyone over the age of 12, and anyone under the age of 12 if accompanied by an adult. The idea of a 12A rated movie is that the responsible adult would see the movie ahead of time and judge for themselves whether or not it’s suitable for their child, but given the price of cinema tickets nowadays, how many people actually do that? Instead, I’d imagine most people rely on the BBFC’s recommendations to gauge how suitable a movie is. So let’s see what they said about The Dark Knight:
THE DARK KNIGHT tells the story of Batman’s continuing war on crime and in particular his personal battle with the psychotic Joker. It was passed ‘12A’ for moderate violence and sustained threat.
The BBFC Guidelines at ‘12A’ state that ‘violence must not dwell on detail’ and that ‘there should be no emphasis on injuries or blood’ and whilst THE DARK KNIGHT does contain a good deal of violence, all of it fits within that definition. For example, in one of the stronger scenes, Batman repeatedly beats the Joker during an interrogation. The blows however are all masked from the camera and despite both their weight and force; the Joker shows no sign of injury. There are also scenes in which the Joker threatens first a man and then a woman with a knife and whilst these do have a significant degree of menace, without any actual violence shown they were also acceptably placed at ‘12A’. In the final analysis, THE DARK KNIGHT is a superhero movie and the violence it contains exists within that context, with both Batman and the Joker apparently indestructible no matter what is thrown at them.
THE DARK KNIGHT also contains some special make up effects that whilst clearly not real, have the potential to be moderately frightening.
Does something seem slightly … off about that summary, to you? Like, say, the lack of mention of the scene where we see Harvey’s face engulfed by flames? (And the accompanying horror that Rachel is being entirely burned alive at the same time?) Or how about the scene where Harvey threatens a schizophrenic with a gun – doesn’t that could as sustained threat? Or when Harvey-as-Two-Face menaces the Gordon family, specifically a young boy, with a gun, for a really long time?
Maybe those are covered by the line where it says that The Dark Knight “does contain a good deal of violence”, but mentioning the Joker threatening people with a knife seems a bit strange if you’re not going to mention that there’s also a lot of threatening that goes on using guns. The final line about special make up effects presumably covers both the Joker’s scars and Two-Face’s crispy features, but it’s odd that the BBFC never mention anything other than the Joker fighting Batman.
I looked up the full details of what classifies as a 12A, and I’m still not convinced The Dark Knight falls into this category. There’s no swearing in the film, no drug-taking and no sex scenes, so the guidance in those areas doesn’t apply; the BBFC contends that “mature themes are acceptable, but their treatment must be suitable for young teenagers”, which is arguable; but it’s the bit about violence and horror that’s most interesting. For a 12A, “violence must not dwell on detail. There should be no emphasis on injuries or blood”. The Dark Knight passes with flying colours there, then. “Dangerous techniques (e.g. Combat, hanging, suicide and self-harming) should not dwell on imitable detail or appear pain or harm free. Easily accessible weapons should not be glamorised.” But in the actual rating for The Dark Knight, the fact that Batman and the Joker seem indestructible despite taking heavy blows is mentioned as a positive thing. And how about that little speech the Joker gave about how cheap it is to set fire to things? (Obviously, it’s part of the film’s positioning of the Joker as Batman’s opposite; where Batman has all the gadgets money can buy, the Joker needs only a container of petrol to wreak havoc… but I digress.)
As far as horror goes for a 12A rating, “sustained moderate threat and menace are permitted.” Compare that with the 15 rating: “strong threat and menace are permitted.” There’s an argument to be had, perhaps, about the difference between strong and moderate threat; perhaps the argument would be little more than academic if The Dark Knight was rated at a solid 12, but the 12A rating is even milder than that. I guess I just think it’s odd that the BBFC’s justification didn’t seem to take into account any of Harvey’s threats – which were, to me, a lot more disturbing than the Joker’s. Possibly because he was the hero, the White Knight, and then morphed into a monster you could entirely believe was capable of blowing a young child’s head off.
Ultimately, I’m not a parent, and I realise that children all mature at different rates, so it’s entirely possible that some 10 year olds would enjoy this immensely and there wouldn’t be a problem at all. Except… there is just one more little thing to consider when taking a child – or anyone, really! – to see The Dark Knight.
It’s 152 minutes long. You might want to reconsider that extra large Diet Coke.
Interview: Zack Ward – Penny Blood
You play the lead in Postal; tell us a bit about the story and your character.
My character is the Postal Dude; everyone’s like, “hey, what’s up Dude” so that’s my character’s name, although I don’t have any real name. I’m the guy whose life is like completely fucked over. He lives in a trailer, he got fired from his job, and his wife is cheating on him with EVERYBODY and she weighs like 480lb. Basically, the Postal Dude is at the end of his rope, trying to figure out what he’s going to do with his life. He ends up turning to his Uncle Dave for money, because Uncle Dave is wealthy and has his own cult.
But what my character doesn’t know is that the cult now owes the government back taxes for over a million dollars and so they’ve got to find a way to get some cash fast. Uncle Dave has this idea to steal the Krotchy dolls and sell them on the black market, because they’re like Tickle Me Elmo: they stopped producing them because there was some sort of child labour law embargo, so there’s only like ten thousand of them and there’re pre-orders for two million. So they’re selling for like $5,000 apiece. The problem is, the Taliban are after them too, because the Krotchy dolls are each filled with this avian bird flu that the Taliban want to use on America.
We’d heard it was pretty controversial, but we didn’t know quite to what extent…
Oh, man, we make fun of, like, Osama bin Laden, we make fun of him a lot, and George Bush, and also black people, and Jewish people, and Chinese people, and redheads, and German people, and trailer park trash, and we shoot a lot of kids. There’s nothing better than shooting a child. And then it ends with George Bush and bin Laden skipping through a field holding hands.
Uwe Boll’s a pretty controversial guy in his own right, too.
I think his latest three films, Dungeon Siege, Seed, and Postal, are going to be a whole new level for him. I think that the style that he’s developed as a director and the relationship he has with his crew is flawless. He’s getting to a point where he, and his actors, and his crew work pretty much empathically. And I found the process of working with Uwe one where I would get a lot of freedom. There’s no-one there holding your hand, and you need to bring what it is you do to the table. Which I think is a benefit, because with Postal, there’s no really big names. Dave Foley and Verne Troyer are the largest names, but there’s no superstar names and because of that there were no egos competing, and because of that everybody took a step up.
For me, it’s my first time I’ve ever starred in a $20 million movie. I’ve never starred in a movie this big and it’s an incredible amount of responsibility. It’s a real organic process with the other actors and I feel honoured to be working with these people. Even all the smaller supporting characters, like the guys who played Cooter and Mohammed, they’re really good actors who’re doing everything they can, I mean, it’s not like with the big actors who’re making so much money they like to pretend like they don’t care, and they hide behind false bravado because they know where their next money is coming from. I think with a movie like Postal, we’re kind of all the benchwarmers, the b-squad. I’m not Tom Cruise, I’m never going to be Tom Cruise, I’m a character actor. I’m quirky, I’m interesting, I’m kinda good-looking…
That’s very modest!
Well, I know what I’m like! I have to sell myself all the time. I do comedy well, I do violence well, but when it comes to a role like this, you have to be 100% committed to the process. I guide my career like, what’s that guy who did Inspector Clouseau? Peter Sellers. Yeah, his last film before he died was The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu. Before that, he did Being There, which was a genius film. And he also did Dr Strangelove, and The Pink Panther, and he did so many different parts, but the one he did right before he died was The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu. And it’s a crappy movie, not because of Peter Sellers, it’s just a crappy movie. But I grew up watching him and when he suddenly got snuffed out, I mean he just poof! Went. There was no expectation, nothing, and it made me realise that what you’re doing right now is the most important thing, because it’s how you’ll be remembered. I don’t go on set and complain about being up early, or being tired, that doesn’t bother me! The only thing that matters to me is what lands on that 35mm film, which then becomes a piece of art that can be watched forever. Like, I did A Christmas Story when I was 13 years old and that’s become an American classic. I didn’t know that! But it’s been a perfect example for me of how you can’t go half-assed on film. Because everybody sees it and everybody know you’re half-assed, and that’s all they see, you’re half-assed. I won’t do that, and I think Uwe is giving people an opportunity to get above their station. He gave me that.
This interview was originally conducted in 2006 for Penny Blood magazine.
Going Postal – Penny Blood
Uwe Boll is not a man who shies away from controversy. The German director’s 2003 movie about the Columbine shooting, Heart of America, raised eyebrows (as well as protests) over its treatment of a scene in which a mentally handicapped girl is raped; his string of video game adaptations have caused gamers everywhere to froth at the mouth in outrage. Recently, his response to internet criticism of his movies was to call out the critics, bring them to Vancouver, and get into a boxing ring with them – Boll, a former semi-pro boxer, defeated them all easily.
So perhaps it’s not surprising that his latest film, Postal, is so geared towards causing offence. The game on which Boll’s movie is based was banned in ten countries and blacklisted in the US for being so violent; a lawsuit was brought against it (though it was eventually dropped) by the United States Postal Service for copyright infringement. It seems that controversy is a large part of what drew Boll to making the movie; of this decision, he says “I loved the game, but I loved also the opportunity to make a political incorrect comedy. I think it’s more interesting to go far over the top, but like, even with the violence, we go so over the top that it’s funny.” It’s the first of Boll’s movies for a while to eschew fantasy elements and instead just be a straight shoot-‘em-up; it’s also his first English-language comedy, so it’s difficult to know quite what to expect.
On set, everything seems to be somewhat larger than life. The set, almost an hour’s drive from downtown Vancouver, is an almost entirely custom-built trailer park, complete with authentic piles of garbage everywhere, broken-down electrical appliances and car-parts littering the front gardens, and one terrifying window filled with mannequin heads advertising cheap haircuts. The background extras for the day (including several journalists and internet film critics here for the “Raging Boll” boxing match) are transformed into bona fide trailer trash by the liberal application of caked-on gaudy makeup for the girls, and dirt, rat-tails and wife-beater shirts for the guys. While they’re being readied, a scene is being filmed just around the corner in which a man gets gunned down at a payphone, and the entire make-up tent has to be moved back ten feet partway through to avoid being in shot. While the cameras are rolling, traffic in either direction has to be stopped; but real life takes precedence over film when an elderly woman on a motorised scooter-type contraption needs to get through the alleyway to her home. Several bits of set dressing have to be shifted out of her way and filming paused while she passes; it’s impossible to fathom what she must have made of the set.
While his assistant directors and various other crewmembers handle the background work, Uwe Boll wanders around, talking animatedly into his BlackBerry. He’s wearing a shirt that reads “Say no to drugs, say no to alcohol, say no to tomacco” (a reference to The Simpsons) on the front, and “Say no to Uwe Boll” on the back; he’s clearly not a man that could be accused of taking himself too seriously. The main scene of the day sees the Postal Dude, played by Zack Ward, returning to his trailer only to find it rocking wildly as – presumably – his wife/girlfriend/female acquaintance of one sort or another has wild sex within, which sparks the Dude into a rage that sends him on a killing spree. Or so it seems – no one on set quite seems to have a grasp on what the plot of Postal is going to be, though the party line is “It’s like South Park, if it were a movie.” (At least three different crewmembers are overheard saying this; none of them seem willing to acknowledge that there really already is a South Park movie.)
Not that the plot matters overly much – Postal is, more than anything, an exercise in offending everyone in the world. Boll explains, “I think Postal is a movie where the right of free speech gets out there, I think this is very good that a movie like this gets made.” A quick glance through the script confirms that, yup, Postal manages to get in digs at almost every minority group you can think of – and a couple of majorities, too. Boll continues, “a lot of movies are actually, in a way, pussying out, because they keep one side straight and easy, and they give only shit to one side, and I think Postal gives shit to everybody. Every nation, every religion, every political party.” The trailer park scene seems mostly to be getting at impoverished Americans – Boll has background extras beating their wives, opening scratching their genitals, rooting through rubbish for beer bottles, and barbecuing roadkill, none of which seems particularly controversial – but the script reveals a scene in which a Muslim threatens someone with flying a plane into their mother if they’re not careful, and, possibly more contentiously, a character named Mohammed. It wasn’t too long ago that there was a furore over a Danish newspaper printing some cartoons that featured caricatures of the prophet Mohammed – is Boll not concerned about causing that much trouble? It seems not: “It’s only a guy whose name is Mohammed,” he insists, “I mean, like, whatever, every Arab number five is Mohammed. I know so many Mohammeds, so this is the thing, why a man should not have the name Mohammed in a movie; it’s not the prophet. It’s only Mohammed.” Well, fair enough.
As the unseasonably hot day continues, the shooting is apparently well ahead of schedule (and the guys pushing the trailer are noticeably flagging, while if Zack Ward has to yell “Oh, come on!” one more time he’ll probably destroy his vocal cords for good) so a crewmember announces that they’re moving on to another scene, one that wasn’t originally on the call sheet. In this new scene, the Dude and his female accomplice hurtle screechingly into the trailer park in a van, followed by some Mafia guys. The trailer trash background extras will retreat into their trailers only to re-emerge with guns, nervously bounty-hunting the Dude – posters announcing a reward for his capture have been hastily stapled up all over the place, listing amongst his crimes “killing a baby” and “wearing a brown belt with black shoes, and wearing white after Labor Day.” The print is probably too small to show up on screen, so cinema-going audiences might never catch that detail, but it’s the little touches that count.
Or it would be, if the scene could get off the ground. Several different crewmembers are giving the background extras conflicting direction, and everyone seems to have forgotten that most of these guys aren’t actors of any calibre; they’re journalists, and tired ones at that, who have no idea what they’re supposed to be doing. After one take that seems to go disastrously wrong, Boll steps in to tell everyone how unhappy he is with the scene – except unfortunately that still doesn’t seem to fix things. It’s debatable whether anyone other than Boll himself knows what he wants, and so there are a couple further doomed takes before panic grips the set: one of the guns that was handed out to the extras has gone missing. Which shouldn’t be that much of an issue, were it not for the fact that this isn’t a prop gun – it’s the real thing. Shooting grinds to a halt until the gun is retrieved, and the scene is eventually abandoned.
While the ADs work on getting some close-ups on the Dude, Boll sits behind a monitor and laughs uproariously at some of the rushes in which a racist policeman shoots an elderly Chinese driver in the head. (Perhaps the scene will play better in context?) The sun is now starting to set, so everyone starts packing up. An AD apologises profusely to the background extras for shouting at them and acknowledges it wasn’t their fault that no-one told them what to do, which is generous of him, though it still won’t make up for not having managed to film the scene.
As much insanity as there is in Postal, there’s something missing which only those following Boll’s career obsessively closely are likely to notice: Canadian actor Will Sanderson, who’s been in every Uwe Boll movie since 2002’s Blackwoods, isn’t going to be in Postal. Judging by Sanderson’s gentle mockery of Boll on the House of the Dead commentary, and Boll’s admission that he’d sold Sanderson a broken down computer during filming Alone in the Dark, they’d seemed to be pretty good friends – so why isn’t Will in Postal? Boll explains, “it’s too bad. Because he goes for immigration in US – he is married to an American woman – so he cannot leave Texas.” But wasn’t he originally attached to the project? “In Postal, there was only the idea that he kills me because I ruined his career, and now we switched that to Vince Desiderio, who wants to try me to kill because, let’s say, bad directing of the video games movies.” That settles that one, then. Again, Boll demonstrates an ability to laugh at himself and, more importantly, his critics; he talks about his projects with so much enthusiasm that it’s almost impossible not to get caught up in it and root for him in spite of everything. It’s difficult to imagine what he’ll do next, after offending everyone in the world and creating a minor frenzy in the media over the critic-boxing event; whatever it is, though, it’s bound to be interesting.
This article was originally written in 2006 for Penny Blood magazine.
Got Gear? – 4Talent, Central England
Let’s get it started
Setting up your own production outfit can sometimes seem like an impossible dream. But while getting your stuff onto any of the main channels won’t necessarily be easy, don’t be put off by the technical side. Christian Lett, managing director of Midlands-based production company Big and Clever Films Inc, reckons the march of progress is making TV-production more accessible to the aspiring TV bod. With just a few provisos…
“Technology has advanced so far over the last couple of years that high quality video equipment is within the grasp of almost everyone,” Christian begins promisingly, but adds, “you’re looking at thousands of pounds – not tens of thousands, just thousands – to get into low-end television work.” Better get that overdraft sorted now then.
Hi-Def rise
Big and Clever Films has been involved in shooting everything from corporate videos to a sitcom pilot, to music videos – and, as a professional production company, their camera of choice is the JVC HD-111. “If you look at the industry, the standard-def production is declining rapidly, because high-def is growing now. The HD111 is the low end of HD and used by many professionals.”
One of those will set you back around four grand, but “as technology advances, prices will come down and it’s all digital now: Sony’s pushing its XDCAM range, which is tapeless, and at the lower end, the cameras all use solid state memory. Which makes it a lot easier to move the footage onto a computer.”
Ok computer
“It’s vital to have a computer,” Christian says, “and for about £1000 – 2000, you’d get a very powerful machine, which would see you right to edit TV, and for a while to come, too.” Big and Clever Films use Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects to edit their footage, software packages that themselves cost between £700 and £1000.
But if you’re looking mournfully at your bank statement right now, don’t worry, hope is not yet lost. As far as editing software goes, Pinnacle Studio 11 is only about £30, but if even that sounds a bit pricey, check out VirtualDub online (see links), which is free, open source software that’ll get the job done.
Secondhand life
Free cameras aren’t as easy to come by, so Christian recommends scouting out second-hand equipment – “there’s plenty of it about” – and confides that his sitcom pilot was shot on a second-hand, standard-definition camera, without adverse effects: “A lot of people get hung up on that film look, when they should really be worrying more about the content.”
Similarly, to create a showreel for yourself, you don’t need anything overly fancy. “It’s more about having the attitude of the person who takes real pride in what they’re doing, and do it better than everyone else.” Christian says.
If the price is right
Though he heartily endorses his own camera, the JVC HD 111, Christian also reels off a list of cheaper-though-still-quite-pricey cameras favoured by industry types. Pick up one of these secondhand, and you’ll be well away.
“The Canon XL-1S and XL-2; Sony’s PD150 and PD170 are well-built cameras, and look very professional; for high-def cameras, there’s the Sony FX1 and Z1; the Z1 has more professional features.”
The top tips
Many people’s budgets won’t initially stretch that far, so I asked for Christian’s top three tips on what you should be looking for when you’re buying equipment, whether it’s high-def, standard-def or secondhand.
1. Control
“You want as much control over the picture as possible. It’s a sad state of affairs, but most low-to-middle range cameras have got fixed lenses – that means you can’t remove them – and don’t offer proper manual focusing. Ideally, you want a manual lens.”
2. Prosumer
“Avoid cameras marked for the consumer market – they’ll just be simple, point-and-shoot affairs. Look for something aimed more at the pro-sumer market.”
3. Sound quality
“You can get a Rode microphone for a couple of hundred quid, and it’ll be a worthwhile investment, because a lot of the work out there, the sound quality is awful, it’s like talking down a phone line.”
This article was originally published on Channel 4’s 4Talent Central England website.
