Posted in: Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh, Movies | Tagged: adi tantimedh, entertainment, film, lets play, machinima, youtube

Odds And Sods To Look Out For, Today – Look! It Moves! By Adi Tantimedh

Published Mon, 05 Jan 2015 11:30:28 -0600

by Rich Johnston

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Adi Tantimedh writes,

Slow period as 2015 begins, so I thought I'd tell you about some things you might not know about.

Freeman's Mind

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SQhfkpX9bc[/youtube]

In 2007, before Let's Play videos of video games became all the rage on Twitch and Youtube, Machinima animator Ross Scott was ahead of the curve with this series where he turned the classic Valve shooter game Half-Life into a Science Fiction comedy series. Where Gordon Freeman was voiceless in the original game so that the player can use him as their avatar and project themselves into him, Scott gives Freeman a voice where he muses, wisecracks, rants and raves his way through the worst day of his life, which is the entire game. Freeman here is a frustrated, put-upon, mentally-unstable megalomaniac who's overjoyed to find, for a snarky theoretical physicist working for a dodgy top secret science project, that he's really, really good at killing things, be they human or alien. The series was released in episodes of around 10 minutes each over the years.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBWZ8JNFM7g[/youtube]

Last week, on December 31^st, Scott released the 68^th and final episode of Freeman's Mind. Where several copycat series were launched in the wake of Scott's becoming an online cult hit, his is the only one that has stayed the course and actually took the game all the way through to the end. That's a remarkable achievement in the world of online video and games culture.

You can watch Freeman's Mind on Youtube or from Ross Scott's website.

Shirobako

One of the more interesting anime series of the winter season, Shirobako ("White Box") uses its cute moe girl cast to tell an insider's tale of how the anime industry works. The heroine and her high school friends, now in their early 20s, have moved to Tokyo after college to work in different parts of the industry. Despite the cutesy art style, the story is actually told naturalistically and gives an insider's look at how the anime business works, the stresses of trying to get a series made in time for TV broadcast, the temper tantrums, the fighting over resources and tensions between personnel. Then there are the in-jokes and easter eggs: the geeky junior staff member who acts like he's the hero fo the series playing in his head, the lazy, dysfunctional director, the artist resentful of CGI pushing traditional line drawing out of the industry, the older artist whose style may not fit current trends, the thinly-disguised cameos and homages to real-life directors.

The show is a love letter to the anime industry and a fairly overt primer for anyone who wants to enter it just as Bakuman was an insider's look and primer for breaking into and working in the manga industry. It amazes me that Japan's comics and animation industry are this transparent about their inner workings, more than other any country's.

Shirobako is now streaming on Crunchyroll.

R100

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhVpo5BbCMM[/youtube]

R100 is the new movie by Japanese comedian Hitoshi Matsumoto, whose last work was the comedy Big Man Japan which deconstructed and spoofed the kaiju genre years before the term became commonplace thanks to Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim. I don't want to tell you the plot. Just seeing the trailer is something of a spoiler. This is one of those movies that start out strange and then goes further. You might note that the star of this movie, Nao Omori, played the title character in Takeshi Miike's Ichi the Killer.

Somehow, it's fitting that this was the last movie I saw in 2014.

R100 will be released theatrically and on VOD on January 23rd.

The Taking of Tiger Mountain

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ix2hbUHigE[/youtube]

And finally, the first blockbuster action movie of 2015. Tsui Hark has been one of the world's greatest action directors and it's nice to see him getting a resurgence with a string of hits on the Chinese Mainland since 2010's Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame, which put him back on the map, and then with Flying Swords of Dragon Gate and Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon.

The Taking of Tiger Mountain is a barnstorming movie adaptation of a piece of Chinese communist propaganda classic (based on fact) about the People's Liberation Army's campaign against bandits who took over an old Japanese stronghold after the end of the Second World War. In Tsui Hark's hands, the story becomes an Indiana Jones-style pulp cliffhanger full of espionage, double-dealings, femme fatales, swarthy bad guys and edge-of-the-seat action you've never seen before. Just as he revived Wong Fei Hong in the 1990s with Once Upon A Time in China, Tsui Hark has now breathed new life into the Mainland Chinese military action movie by bringing Hong Kong genre tropes and pacing to China. It's not subtle, but there are minor shades of ambiguity here – the bad guys dress better and are more interesting than the good guys. Censorship rules may demand the bad guys pay at the end, but they have a lot more fun causing mayhem before they do, and by the end, there's even a deconstruction of the nature of stories tailored to be patriotic propaganda. Like Johnny To's Drug War, The Taking of Tiger Mountain is another instance of a Hong Kong filmmaker grappling with creating meaningful work within the Mainland Chinese system while retaining his own cultural sensibility and independence.

The Taking of Tiger Mountain opens in select cinemas across North America in January and will be released on DVD and Blu-Ray later in the year.

Starting the year with style at lookitmoves@gmail.com

Follow the official LOOK! IT MOVES! twitter feed at http://twitter.com/lookitmoves for thoughts and snark on media and pop culture, stuff for future columns and stuff I may never spend a whole column writing about.

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