MSTING: Sin City, Comic Book Directors, Digital Madness!
Richmond
group is always clogged with trolls bemoaning SW and its effect on cinema,
this manifesto was so out-there and such a cry for help...that I thought
Mike and the Bots should have a crack at it.
>Alright, I am sick of it.
SERVO: Yeah!
MIKE: Sick of what?
CROW: Whattaya got?
>Digital this and digital that.
SERVO: Digital shoes
MIKE: Digital carrots
CROW: Digital lawns
>Went to film school
>some years ago and actualy loved cutting film, sitting alone in a cold
>editing closet,
MIKE: Telling us about sitting alone in a closet is always a good way to get
us on your side.
>piecing it together, white-gloved hands lovingly creating a
>motion picture narrative. Watching the actors evolve into character, the
>performances into lives on celluloid.
CROW: Like the performances in Catalina Caper?
SERVO: Shouldn't the actors have already been in character during the
filming?
>Like writing and painting with light,
>it was an art, not a craft anyone can learn reading a software manual.
CROW: Yeah, not like sex!
MIKE: Um...
>Madness!
ALL: WAAAH!
>These punks from MTV and TV commercial houses -
MIKE: Punks, I tell ya!
CROW: Don't forget to shake your fist, Mike.
>mere advertisers -
>assembling ten thousand dollar "digital packages" and doing nothing with it
>but the same ol' same ol'
SERVO:Wait, if this is a new problem, how can it be same ol same ol?
>: dreck, pablum,
SERVO:Hooey!
MIKE: Kerfuffle!
CROW: Foofaraw!
SERVO: Skylarkings!
MIKE: Chief!
CROW: McCloud!
>nauseatingly bad ripoffs of
>already cliched stories for immature boys.
MIKE: Yeah, those boys and their Girl With A Pearl Earring.
SERVO: I have the Girl With A Pearl Earring Xbox Game.
CROW: I have the sequel, GWAPE2
> And this is what these directors
>of the new big budget "digital cinema" (contradiction in terms, of course,
>collision of art and mere mechanics) manufacture in their private studios
>and garage labs
MIKE: Hey, I wonder if he's gonna work in any subtle racism?
>, despite the fact that many started "old school" (by the
>way, don't you love the gangster inheritance, the way American culture
>sucks
>up references from gutter/ghetto culture, or is there any difference):
ALL: DINGDINGDINGDINGDING!
>Rodriguez, Kerry Conran and especially "old man" Lucas, whose last two Star
>Wars movies were two of the best examples of digital dreck.
SERVO: Well, if you're going to be an example of digital dreck, you might as
well be the BEST example of digital dreck.
CROW: So does that mean the Original Trilogy was analog dreck?
MIKE: Analog dreck has a warmer sound.
>It makes things
>"easier," they say, it allows for "amazing special effects," it saves
>money,
>it "liberates" them from Hollywood, etc etc. So many excuses for pure crap.
CROW: This guy is very "intelligent"
MIKE: He makes a lot of "good" points.
>Each digital frame a purely prosaic mechanical reference to something else,
>every bit/byte an agonizing electronic infant's squeal to get mama's
>attention.
SERVO: We're straying into some weird psychosexual territory here, guys.
> Will these boys ever grow up? Will they stop nursing at the
>computer teat long enough to ask themselves if Welles and Kurosawa and
>Eisenstein wasted their hard-fought time and effort,
CROW: Yes, Welles, with his hard-fought effort making Transformers: The
Movie.
if Allen and Scorsese
>and Bunuel were idiots?!
MIKE: Have you SEEN any Woody Allen movies lately?
>Worst of all, these moviemaking babies, these brats
>of the Avid machine,
SERVO: Ah, a Final Cut Pro user.
>produce nothing but frat boy/fanboy fantasies of sexist
>drivel, real human emotion replaced by simplistic comic book panels, real
>story displaced by fractured video images out of a schizophrenic's brain.
MIKE: That actually sounds kinda cool.
SERVO: Reminding you once again, used to sit in a cold closet and fetishize
film stock, ladies and gentlemen.
>There is no search for truth here, only a brief glance into the shallow
>facade of an amusement park exhibit. No depth. No humanism whatsoever.
SERVO: Whereas "Holiday Inn" was a fantasia on Man's Quest For Identity In A
World On The Brink Of War.
>George should have known better,
ALL: (singing) Geooooooooorge, shoulda known better with a girl like you.
>perhaps,
SERVO: Perhaps not.
>his era of the seventies the last
>without such "technical marvels," until he invented them with Star Wars.
>But
>then, we should have know better to trust these frat boys of the cinema
>schools.
MIKE: Hey, didn't you JUST give props to Scorcese?
SERVO: Shh, he's on a roll now.
>Didn't he make THX-1138, a postcard to our present, where all
>humans are merely numbers, drugged-out zombies dressed all alike shambling
>through a post-industrial America. His past is our present.
SERVO: Yesterday's Tomorrow, Today!
CROW: Drugged-out zombies...of the future!
MIKE: Hey, guys, we've already had the subtle racism, what do you suppose
the odds are he's gonna mention Nazis?
>The warning was
>always there. If he could imagine such a thing, then he could create it.
>The
>Nazi's
ALL: DINGDINGDINGDINGDING!
> painted grand schemes of technical and architectural triumph,
CROW: Wow, they sound like a great bunch of fellas.
>there
>are books and books filled with them, but in the end they just massacred
>millions of innocent people, the Olympic stadium long forgotten. We stand
>blindly by while "visionaries" do their thing, while technopolists craft
>and
>run society.
SERVO: Film editor, or Unabomber? You decide!
>Movies are mostly mirror images of what we crave.
CROW: Having seen "Blood Waters Of Dr. Z," I resent that.
MIKE: I don't know, "The Wild World Of Batwoman" comes pretty close.
>Why should we
>be surprised that machines are now making "art?"
CROW: Well, *you're* apparently surprised.
SERVO: Crow, have you made art lately?
CROW: Well, after lunch I made a--
MIKE: Okay, that's enough.
>That minds filled with
>gears and wheels produce our entertainment? You can claim that from the
>beginning, the silent era, film was always about technology.
ALL: I claim that from the beginning, the silent era, film was always about
technology.
>Yet think about
>it, once we could not hear the actors speak,
SERVO: Then came Eddie Deezen!
ALL: NOOOOO!
>nor see a night scene, and the
>music was live, played right in front of you,
CROW: Yeah, who needs the London Symphony Orchestra, when you've got Earl
Scheinberg on the Wurlitzer!
>and the stories were based on
>classic novels or plays,
CROW: Like that film of two cats in a boxing ring?
SERVO: Based on a play by Lillian Hellman.
>and that was real sunlight exposed on real film.
>Now it is a commodity parade of breakfast cereal/
MIKE: Alien Vs. Count Chocula!
CROW: Abbott and Costello Meet Quisp!
SERVO: Star Wars Episode 2: Attack Of The Clones: The Cereal: The Movie!
>video game/comic
>books/saturday morning cartoons,
all comsumerism made one in the digital
>age.
SERVO: Tell us more, Professor Kaczynski.
MIKE: One more time, cold closet, alone.
>Ubik is here.
SERVO: Did someone order some Ubik?
CROW: Yeah, I had the Ubik with a side of buffalo wings.
>Thank Robert Rodriguez and James Cameron for their
>plastic tales of pixilated "life," eat and enjoy,
CROW: No thanks, I'm full from all the Ubik.
>it's all you are going to
>get from now on. Plug in and sit back for the electronic ride. In the end,
>we are all animatronics. We are all Disneyland.
MIKE (getting up and carrying Servo out of the theater): So it IS a small
world after all.
CROW (following Mike out of the theater): Hurry baa-ack.