Thursday, December 17th, 2009
•
Horrorthon Posts
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DoWdHOtlrk&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
This is so amazing and wonderful! You just have to watch it. From the Associated Press (via Huffinton Post):
AP– SYDNEY—Australian scientists have discovered an octopus in Indonesia that collects coconut shells for shelter – unusually sophisticated behavior that the researchers believe is the first evidence of tool use in an invertebrate animal.
The scientists filmed the veined octopus, Amphioctopus marginatus, selecting halved coconut shells from the sea floor, emptying them out, carrying them under their bodies up to 65 feet (20 meters), and assembling two shells together to make a spherical hiding spot.
Julian Finn and Mark Norman of Museum Victoria in Melbourne observed the odd activity in four of the creatures during a series of dive trips to North Sulawesi and Bali in Indonesia between 1998 and 2008. Their findings were published Tuesday in the journal Current Biology.
“I was gobsmacked,” said Finn, a research biologist at the museum who specializes in cephalopods. “I mean, I’ve seen a lot of octopuses hiding in shells, but I’ve never seen one that grabs it up and jogs across the sea floor. I was trying hard not to laugh.”
Octopuses often use foreign objects as shelter. But the scientists found the veined octopus going a step further by preparing the shells, carrying them long distances and reassembling them as shelter elsewhere.
That’s an example of tool use, which has never been recorded in invertebrates before, Finn said.
“What makes it different from a hermit crab is this octopus collects shells for later use, so when it’s transporting it, it’s not getting any protection from it,” Finn said. “It’s that collecting it to use it later that is unusual.”
The researchers think the creatures probably once used shells in the same way. But once humans began cutting coconuts in half and discarding the shells into the ocean, the octopuses discovered an even better kind of shelter, Finn said.
The findings are significant, in that they reveal just how capable the creatures are of complex behavior, said Simon Robson, associate professor of tropical biology at James Cook University in Townsville.
“Octopuses have always stood out as appearing to be particularly intelligent invertebrates,” Robson said. “They have a fairly well-developed sense of vision and they have a fairly intelligent brain. So I think it shows the behavioral capabilities that these organisms have.”
There is always debate in the scientific community about how to define tool use in the animal kingdom, Robson said. The Australian researchers defined a tool as an object carried or maintained for future use. But other scientists could define it differently, which means it’s difficult to say for certain whether this is the first evidence of such behavior in invertebrates, Robson said.
Still, the findings are interesting, he said.
“It’s another example where we can think about how similar humans are to the rest of the world,” Robson said. “We are just a continuum of the entire planet.”
Little octopus…carrying discarded shells around…making a shelter on the seabed…I love it. What a planet!
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
•
Horrorthon Posts
When even those grouchy depressed snotty hipsters on Gawker publicly apologize for attacking Avatar (and sing its praises), it starts to look like ol’ James Cameron pulled it out. Apparently he aimed for the impossible sci-fi bullsye and hit it:
For months, the evidence mounted and mounted that James Cameron’s long awaited Titanic follow-up was going to be the biggest let down since Phantom Menace. No one wanted to believe that more than we did.
So imagine our horror, when last night we attended a screening of Avatar—and it was pretty spectacular.
[…]
It is going to become to film that everyone—nerds, families, grandparents—will have to see and it will rake in unbelievable amounts of loot; mountains of cash beyond the imagination.
So now it is time to point fingers—at ourselves. How in the heck did we get this so wrong? How did a movie manage to look so horrible and actually turn out to be great?
Well for starters, all the stuff that we ridiculed in the the trailers and publicity campaign—the laughable dialogue, the cartoonish good versus evil plotting, the clunky character names, the silly looking cougar noses—they are all in there, and they are all ridiculous. But what wasn’t clear from the trailers is how small a part of the film those laughable/clunky bits would be.
We were basing much of our dread on memories of Titanic—which we still hold was the worst film ever made; thinking that the sins of Titanic, as they reappeared in the Avatar campaign, meant that the same tedious nightmare awaited us, like an iceberg drifting through the dark Atlantic towards our ship of entertainment.
But in Avatar, Cameron managed to reverse the disastrous Titanic equation, letting him play from his strong suit. Whereas Titanic was a drama with bits of action, Avatar is basically an action/adventure movie with bits of drama stuck in. Yes, there is ridiculous clunky dialogue, eye-rolling Dances With Wolves-like worship of the Earth-loving (or Pandora-loving) native wilderness people, a plot that attempts to be a parable of US foreign adventures written with the subtlety of a 12-year-old.
Yes, the irony of making a film celebrating the sanctity of every living organism which revels in exquisitely slaughtering vast number of characters is completely lost on the filmmaker.
All that is there in Avatar and we were right to mock those elements.
But those pieces, amazingly are small and fairly unobtrusive in plot that is mostly a rollicking, visually spectacular adventure (even if it sags a bit in the middle). They provide guffaw-ready moments but unlike Titanic, where the love story went on hour after hideous hour, here it basically is handled in one fairly brief scene.
Trust us, this gives us no joy to write, but this time the tea leaves were off and we must hereby humbly resign our seat on the board of Avatar-Bashing Incorporated.
More at this link: An Apology: Avatar, Amazingly, Does Not Suck
Sunday, December 13th, 2009
•
Horrorthon Posts / Horrorthon Reviews
(1987) **
Horrorthon ’09 is “officially” over (and I’ve already done my summation), so I don’t feel compelled to do a particularly circumspect job on this flick. I wasn’t even going to review it, except I’m a little bit irritated because I feel like every time I turn around these days I’m dealing with James Cameron, and damned if my experience with this vampire movie doesn’t fall right into that category.
I’ve been hearing about Near Dark since it came out (in the late ‘80s), always in glowing terms, with everyone insisting that I see it. As far as I can tell it’s a beloved, favorite example of the genre. But what I wasn’t quite picking up on was the telltale detail that it was directed by Kathryn Bigelow. And this turns out to be a real dealbreaker, not only because she’s terrible (take a look at Blue Steel or Strange Days if you don’t believe me) but because she’s a pure Cameron minion, who was making movies under his ham-handed, super-obvious, egomaniacal tutelage for several years (while being married to him). Everybody made a big deal about how she’s female and therefore it’s “interesting” that she directed the execrable Blue Steel (in which cop Jamie Lee Curtis has to shoot psycho lover Ron Silver) and especially “interesting” that she directed Point Break (“100% pure adrenaline!”) which I have not seen, but which I’m not exactly optimistic about. But it’s just not that interesting; it’s merely an excuse to give her credit for only half-knowing how to do anything. (I’m not saying female directors are inept, obviously; I’m saying that Bigelow is an inept director who gets undue credit simply because it’s unusual for a woman to be directing action movies.) It’s more of Cameron’s ridiculous “feminist” posturing.
Earlier this year my friend Alex tried to induce me to go with him to see Hurt Locker, which, like the rest of Bigelow’s oeuvre, is supposed to be so brilliant, but once I saw her name as the director the jig was up and I demurred. He reported back that the movie was “well-intentioned but strangely disappointing,” which is exactly how I feel about Near Dark; after all the buildup it’s just an ineptly-told vampire story, with the same kind of leaden plotting and scenery-chewing acting as Strange Days (a truly horrible movie), and with what seems like most of the cast of husband-to-be Cameron’s Aliens (Lance Henrickson, Bill Paxton, Jeanette “Vasquez” Goldstein) reproducing their signature schtick. There’s even a theater playing Aliens in the background of one shot, just in case you miss the point.
The premise is suggestive, but the premise is always at least “suggestive” in Kathryn Bigelow movies. The concept of a group of vampires operating like an outlaw biker gang, moving around the American Southwest in search of their prey, is kind of cool, and their power structure and methodology is intriguing. But they’re pretty lame vampires; they don’t obey the standard vampire rules (since Bigelow doesn’t have the directing chops to create sequences where they’d be bats or flip sideways and disappear or suddenly have fangs, and she and her co-writer don’t care anyway) and they don’t seem supernatural at all. The actors who aren’t from Aliens (Adrian Pasdar as Caleb, the reluctant new recruit, and Jenny Wright as Mae, his undead tutor) are colorless and lame. The second act builds, not to a suspenseful or exciting sequence, but to a Cameron-style ridiculously-overblown shoot-out (with big vehicles colliding); some of the shots are in slow motion, Peckinpah style, but none of it has the balletic grace that Cameron himself can always supply. (There are ten-minute stretches of Terminator 2 Judgment Day and Aliens that are sheer kinetic perfection; Bigelow has no idea how to construct anything nearly so sublime.) Then the plot takes a truly ridiculous hard left turn, violating vampire principles nearly beyond recognition before climaxing with more truck collisions and gasoline fireballs and cowboy bullshit, and a final ending that (like all Cameron-esque stories) gets lost between macho nihilism and cornpone sentimentality.
I shouldn’t be so irritated by Near Dark except that I feel ripped off, and, worse, I feel ripped off by James Cameron, which is a sensation I’m just awfully tired of. Of course his lame girlfriend director has the same problems as he does (super-obviousness, pretentiousness, a nerd’s unquenchable desire to be “badass,” and a bizarre faith in Jeanette Goldstein’s acting ability). Of course there are legions of fanboys and fangirls going bananas over what turns out to be an artlessly violent comic strip of a movie. (I’ve got nothing against comic strips or movie violence, obviously, but there’s no other way to put it.) Bigelow is the kind of filmmaker who wants it both ways—who wants to be given credit for “playing with the boys” (in both senses, in Bigelow’s case) but simultaneously expects to be given special dispensation for inability to cover the bases, on the grounds that this “unconventional” approach is somehow preferable. It’s like Tim Burton sneering “I’m not interested in ‘what a great shot.’” (Convenient!) According to fans on IMDB, I’m supposed to be “impressed” that Near Dark has no effects shots, exactly the way I’m supposed to be “impressed” that M. Night Shyamalan disdains all optical/digital/visual trickery, since it would somehow compromise his “pure-film” vision. Sorry, no sale.
ADDENDUM: P. S. It’s not scary.
