Wids
Knight Champion
Dances-with-Otyughs
Posts: 394
|
Post by Wids on Aug 19, 2017 21:58:10 GMT -5
I may have to make dwarves mandatory now Fixed that for you.
|
|
Wids
Knight Champion
Dances-with-Otyughs
Posts: 394
|
Post by Wids on Nov 3, 2017 18:01:38 GMT -5
What can one man with some talent for drawing and animation — and with a deep appreciation for the Star Wars universe — do over the course of four years? You would be surprised. Usually, YouTube's Recommended Videos bar annoys me by bombarding me with horrid or disinteresting suggestions just because those videos are stupidly popular, or they're made by frickin' PewDiePie, or whatever. But then the Suggested Videos bar shows me a rare gem like this Star Wars: TIE Fighter short film and completely redeems itself. What impresses me is how this movie manages to tell a story which we can follow to a T, all without a single word of dialogue. Plus, it flies directly in the face of George Lucas' original law, "Never show the faces of the Imperial goons." The cutaway views of the three star TIE pilots and their faces inside those helmets lend a touch of much-needed humanity to the Galactic Empire and reminds us that those are people whom Luke Skywalker and Han Solo are mercilessly shooting off of catwalks or blasting out of the cosmos, not soulless, disposable robots nor spectres formed from pure evil. It makes the war between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance less black-versus-white and more a war between two shades of gray, as wars so often are. There's also a .pdf file about this short film and its characters, available for download here. While the three aces may have their own names, they'll always be Captain Moustache, Ensign Sideburns and Ensign Scarchick to me. So what do you think?
|
|
Wids
Knight Champion
Dances-with-Otyughs
Posts: 394
|
Post by Wids on Nov 28, 2017 16:02:47 GMT -5
Heck, why am I just showing you the trailer? You might as well take an hour or two and watch the whole movie here, right?
It's a pretty cool romp of a suspense/horror film, and it needs more love; for a low-budget film, it's very well done! Sure, you do kinda-sorta see the ending coming, even though the nifty Memento-style storytelling-through-flashback device does obscure things a bit, but it's still a pretty good "gut punch" moment when the curtain finally comes down. I mean, just check out the names! You weren't expecting three people with names like those to be an ordinary bunch of farmers, were you? Steven Weber and Kelly Hu really need more work. And after watching this movie, you will never look at a cheese grater the same way again. Even though Jamie Anne Allman could have given us a better performance than she did in that scene, the scene still sells itself. Oh, saints preserve us, that goddamned cheese grater scene....
|
|
Wids
Knight Champion
Dances-with-Otyughs
Posts: 394
|
Post by Wids on Dec 22, 2017 15:09:46 GMT -5
This floods my heart with joy on so many levels. Including the Bridge, the Transport level and Engineering.
|
|
Wids
Knight Champion
Dances-with-Otyughs
Posts: 394
|
Post by Wids on May 1, 2018 21:09:46 GMT -5
Wooey, you can find all kinds of famous actors in various episodes of The Outer Limits! The second series, at least...you know, the one which ran from the mid-90's to the mid-2000's, give or take. Let's see...being the owner of the "Time Travel and Infinity" Outer Limits collection on DVD, I found Meat Loaf (Eddie and Doctor Scott from The Rocky Horror Picture Show) in "Gettysburg" (Season 6, Episode 17)! On that same DVD, I also found Ronny Cox (Dick Jones from RoboCop) in "Deja Vu" (Season 5, Episode 16). ...as well as Amanda Plummer (...oh, gods, what hasn't she been in?) in "A Stitch in Time" (Season 2, Episode 1). Which was a pretty damned cool episode. How do you stop a serial killer who can travel through time, anyway? Later, on the internet, I found Robert Patrick (the T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgement Day) in "Quality of Mercy" (Season 1, Episode 14). Then I found Clancy Brown (Captain Byron Hadley from The Shawshank Redemption) in "Afterlife" (Season 2, Episode 15). Oh! I also found Michael Dorn (Lieutenant Worf from Star Trek: The Next Generation) in "The Voyage Home" (Season 1, Episode 16). Michael Dorn can't stay away from space travel, it seems. And speaking of Star Trek, have a dose of Leonard Nimoy (the inimitable Mister Spock) in "I, Robot" (Season 1, Episode 19)! So which big-name actors have you found on The Outer Limits?
|
|
Wids
Knight Champion
Dances-with-Otyughs
Posts: 394
|
Post by Wids on May 2, 2018 0:45:49 GMT -5
Oh, yeah! The voice of "Ship" (the spaceship's Artificial Intelligence) in "The Human Operators" (Season 5, Episode 7) was none other than Malcolm McDowell (Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange, among fifty-billion other roles). And how can I forget Michael Rooker (Merle Dixon from The Walking Dead) in "Patient Zero" (Season 7, Episode 2)? Catherine O'Hara has been in a million movies and TV shows (including Kevin McCallister's Mom in Home Alone). So has Steven Weber (who also starred as Samael in that Farmhouse movie I was talking about a few posts back). And they're both in "The Revelations of Becka Paulson" (Season 3, Episode 15). And it turns out that "Quality of Mercy" back there had a sequel episode, "The Light Brigade" (Season 2, Episode 18). Naturally, Robert Patrick made a second appearance, though not in the way you might expect! Same with "A Stitch in Time"; Amanda Plummer comes back as the same character (Dr. Theresa Givens), who's on trial in the year 2076 for supposedly using her time travel machine and making a mess of the space-time continuum. Time travel tends to do that sometimes. "Final Appeal" (Season 6, Episodes 21 and 22) is a big, long, two-hour two-parter, in which the events of "Deja Vu" and "Tribunal" (Season 5, Episode 12, also on my DVD) are tied in as well. Kelly McGillis (Charlie in Top Gun) and Charlton Heston (yes, the Charlton Heston) are in there too. The real star of The Outer Limits, however, is Kevin Conway, the narrator/Control Voice throughout the entire series. I love his voice! He kicks off every episode with that sweet, spine-pinching "We are now controlling the transmission..." intro (the animation of which improved later; out with the mannequins falling down the time hole, in with the naked woman getting up off the slab and walking into an apple...), he opens every episode with some cryptic words of insight or wisdom ("Perhaps we should ask ourselves, 'Will the next leap of science be a step into the future, or a plunge into the abyss?'" — "Double Helix" (Season 3, Episode 12)), and he closes every episode with some equally insightful intonation that typically ties the episode together (ie. "The true measure of a hero is when a man lays down his life with the knowledge that those he saves will never know." — "The Voyage Home"). Long live Kevin Conway. (I still get misty-eyed when I watch the ending of "The Voyage Home," with that photo floating through the void. The episode's special effects get a bit cheesy here and there (smudgy alien transformations and ballooning heads, ahoy!), but the story's good. Same with the ending for "Deja Vu"; a fate worse than death is pretty heavy stuff, even if it does happen to the bad guy. Kevin Conway's narration makes everything more better good, as usual.) Too bad The Outer Limits' movie never did materialize, isn't it?
|
|
Wids
Knight Champion
Dances-with-Otyughs
Posts: 394
|
Post by Wids on May 2, 2018 1:27:30 GMT -5
Speaking of recurring characters in The Outer Limits, there's also the time traveller Nicholas Prentice. He's the faux photographer in "Gettysburg," and he also appears in two more episodes in my "Time Travel and Infinity" collection: "Tribunal" and "Time to Time". And speaking of the cool, twisty-turny climaxes in The Outer Limits (...okay, so I didn't mention them yet, so I'll just do it now...), that "Tribunal" episode provokes the thought-provoking question: If you travel back through time only to be deliberately killed by a younger version of yourself, is it murder or is it suicide? Discuss. Okay, I'm getting off my Outer Limits kick now. Stay tuned for my Tales from the Crypt kick, coming next! ...okay, okay, just kidding. ...or am I?
|
|
Wids
Knight Champion
Dances-with-Otyughs
Posts: 394
|
Post by Wids on May 12, 2018 17:34:46 GMT -5
This song makes me happy. Anna Kendrick makes an adorable Cinderella. I really need to watch Into the Woods one of these days. The characters from Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel and Jack and the Beanstalk all coming together in one story? This should be good. (Apparently the involved fairy tales are closer to their original versions from the days of yore, stepmother-mutilating-the-stepsisters'-feet-so-they'll-fit-Cinderella's-lost-slipper parts included.)
|
|
Wids
Knight Champion
Dances-with-Otyughs
Posts: 394
|
Post by Wids on May 23, 2018 1:30:05 GMT -5
Disney songs (as filtered through the YouTube sensation Jonathan Young), ahoy!
(I actually spent a few minutes today memorizing the Latin lyrics in "The Bells of Notre Dame;" hence, why this song wasn't far from my thoughts. The memorization wasn't too hard. I'm glad that my Roman Catholic upbringing wasn't a complete waste. )
But enough "Hunchback of Notre Dame"! Now that we're done with the appetizers, have some "Beauty and the Beast" for the main course...
...a second course with "Tangled" and a side of "Hercules"...
...and "Moana" for desert!
Have a Disney day!
|
|