Very quick post, mostly homework-fleeing. [stunt

I haven't seen Watchmen yet. (I'm still only half-finished with the comic; seeing the movie feels like cheating.) Nor have I seen Coraline. (I'd like to, at some point, but I also have the sneaking suspicion that "Neil Gaiman movie" + "3-D glasses" = "something horrible, loud, and maggotty leaping out of the screen at me" and as such am not as eager as I could be. I KNOW YOUR TREACHERIES BY NOW, GAIMAN. *shifty eyes*)

Thus, until

morgeil pointed this trailer out to me, I'd heard nothing about 9. (Watch the trailer in High-Quality, by the way. It's lovely.)

I am very, very intrigued. I've also watched it far more than I should have, mostly because a) I really, really like the trailer music and b) listening to the full version of the song in the trailer (Coheed and Cambria's "Welcome Home") was a disappointment, since despite the epic guitars it's got an incredibly dissonant and whiny vocal track, so I have to stick with the trailer version.

Anyway. Music aside, my curiosity is well piqued, since the art direction of the movie, if nothing else, looks very appealing, with exactly the sort of gears-and-leather quasi-organic machinery that I love and adorable little burlap-sack-people to boot.

And hey, John C. Reilly is in a movie I actually want to see! Crispin Glover and Martin Landau are in movies, period! Christopher Plummer possibly not playing a villain this time! Nice changes all. (Also, I've decided that my favorite character in the trailers is 6 - Crispin Glover's character. For starters, he's Crispin Glover; also, I'd bet actual money he plays the loopy, childlike prophet/savant who ends up saving everyone. I just get that feeling.)

That music though. Man. I wish I liked the whole song, because that first guitar riff they play in the trailer makes me want to write something epic. Actually what it really makes me want to do is write about the Engine and some grand confrontation between it and the protagonists of whichever story it's inhabiting now, but you don't want to hear me ramble about that.

Back to work. By "work" I mean "reading", but there's still a lot of it. My room being really cold doesn't help.

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No, nothing maggoty is involved! The 3D isn't used for tricks/things leaping out of the screen...it just gives the movie a fantastic depth and realism.

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Oh, good. I'm sort of inherently suspicious of 3D, and Gaiman can be a very scary man when he wants to be, so it's good to know it was used for actual effect here. Thanks!

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gorengal said, the 3D effect is actually quite subtle in the film. Instead of simply being a handful of cheap tricks, it really adds to the feel of the entire movie.

Good to know; I didn't think the 3D would be gimmicky,so if there was a 'jump' moment it'd at least be a good one, but now I'm a bit more curious about the movie. Thank you!

My daughter went to see Coraline and ran out in fear because she has a phobia of buttons.

Of buttons? Huh. Don't mean to be rude, but I've never seen anyone with that particular phobia before.

But yeah, a movie about a child's alternate universe (which is what Coraline's about, so far as I can tell) is going to have a lot of dolls with a lot of buttons for eyes. Not a good movie for the button-phobic.

Coraline isn't maggotty, promise. It was cute. I thought it was more visually interesting than storywise so, but it was cute and pretty and set in a town that I went to for spring break a couple years back and really liked. =D

Thanks for the recommendation! I'm glad to hear that there's nothing decomposing and horrid in it, as that was my main worry. I'll probably go see it when I get the chance.

Thank you for linking to this trailer! I've never heard of it before, but it does indeed look incredibly shiny! I also agree about the trailer music--AWESOME. Too bad about the rest of the song, though.

Actually what it really makes me want to do is write about the Engine and some grand confrontation between it and the protagonists of whichever story it's inhabiting now, but you don't want to hear me ramble about that.

Actually, I do! ;-)

Apparently (and I didn't know this when I posted the link) it's based on a short film by Shane Acker of the same name (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IQcMeNh7Hc), featuring the same curious sack-people and, from the looks of it, the same basic premise. I'm not sure if or how it's going to be related to the movie, but it's an interesting little film.

I actually started thinking of where the plot would go if I really did start incorporating the Engine into several unrelated Who genfics, until eventually all ten (eleven? thirteen?) Doctors had to face it in whatever extra-temporal pocket it was hiding in; I'm not sure how the plots led up to this, but they'd decided it had to be stopped. Except, you know, it's still only ten Time Lords against a huge formless machine and for a while the machine was definitely winning and it started screwing with their heads in an effort to get them to leave it alone. And there was lots of bizarre imagery involving spindly mechanical arms and facsimiles of the companions made of clockwork with camera lenses for eyes.

Of course, once I calmed down a bit, I started thinking of just one Doctor trying to converse with the Engine, figure out what its purpose was and what it was trying to do when it literally couldn't communicate. It eventually used one of its arm-tools to write its answers in the floor, and I thought it would be really neat if earlier in whatever adventure the Doctor and his companions had come across this half-conversation engraved in the floor without knowing what it was - because they were in the area after the Engine had left, and had to go back to the past to find it...

I may be on a little bit of crack.

Yeah, I found the short film myself a while ago and it was well worthy of the Oscar it earned back in '05. I think the movie is basically taking that short scenario and blowing it up into Epic territory. (And making it a little less lonely sad, what with there being other sack people alive and well in addition to 9).

Whatever crack you're on, I like it! You could easily spin that concept into a series of interwoven short stories--like standalone "chapters" compiled into a larger novel about the Engine, with each Doctor dealing with it in interesting mindscrew, timey-wimey ways. DOOOOO EEEEEET.

I hope some of them are still alive at the end. One of the things that the short made me realize is that there's a distinct possibility the movie will end the same way. I mean, it probably won't, given that it's a wide-release movie, but the possibility is there. And I'm already a bit sad about the prospect of saying goodbye to the wee sack people. :( They're just so cute!

Oooh, that's an idea. That way I could write stories specifically designed for the Engine without writing it in where it doesn't fit (of course, that leaves the problem of how to extricate it from the plot of stories I'm writing where it doesn't fit), write stories that take advantage of the non-linear possibilities, and have a big epic culmination!

Now I just need to start planning stories instead of collections of creepy images, heh.

stunt_muppet

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July