I went into this film expecting to be horribly grossed out and not at all amused. Turns out, I was about two-thirds right with that guess. The good news is, if you can survive the first ten minutes or so (blood, gore, and tremendous violence to the tune of Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”!), then you can manage the rest of the movie without much trouble. There’s still an icky compound fracture close-up, and the occasional spewing of blood and guts, but nothing gets any worse than those first few minutes.
And it wasn’t as horribly unamusing as I expected, either. It isn’t a, um, “realistic” zombie movie like 28 Days Later, which helps it be funny. No one worried about having enough to eat or enough ammuntion; there’s always a working vehicle and a safe place to sleep. Watching people struggle with issues like that isn’t really very laugh-inducing, so the filmmakers wisely avoided them.
What they don’t avoid is the gore. And the flesh-eating monsters. They went the disease route — there’s a zombie virus that makes you feverish, delirious, and so incredibly hungry that the person sitting next to you suddenly looks like a delicious meal. Interestingly, the zombies don’t seem to eat each other — maybe the virus makes people taste bad — so like 28 Days Later, there’s hope that humanity can survive while the flesh-eaters starve.
However, they’re too busy showing the light-hearted side of post-apocalyptic life to talk about such things directly. When Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) and Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg, The Village), meet, about the first thing Tallahassee wants to know is when was the last time Columbus got lucky. They have city names because those are the places they’re going — Tallahassee says it’s better not to get too attached by using real names and such. It’s fun to say Tallahassee, but it’s a pain to type.

Baseball, post-apocalypse style

When they meet two other survivors (Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin, My Sister’s Keeper), they get christened Wichita and Little Rock, respectively, though since they’re supposed to be sisters travelling together, they really should’ve ended up with the same name. But even with only four people left alive and coherent, that probably would’ve been too confusing. Anyway, the sisters have what Columbus calls “trust issues”, and that’s a glorious understatement. You’d think that 99% of the world turning into raving flesh-eaters would make it easier to trust those who aren’t trying to eat your brains, but apparently not.
But Wichita is a pretty young woman, and Columbus being a geeky young man, he’s ready to stick with her in spite of all the times she and little sis threaten to shoot him and Tallahassee. This motley group ends up tracking a (completely unfounded) rumor of a zombie-free area to a California amusement park, where the electricity is miraculously still working perfectly and being scared of clowns is no longer a silly phobia.
In between, there’s enough blood and guts to fill a slaughterhouse, and a few actual good laughs, which I really wasn’t expecting. They’re all typical survivor-movie types — the obnoxious little kid, the nerd scared of his own shadow, the tough girl the nerd pines for, and the crazy guy that kills zombies gleefully in his search for Twinkies. Okay, the Twinkies part isn’t usual, and that’s true of the characters, too. They fit certain patterns, but they don’t just fit those patterns. Tallahassee even cries. So it gets three idols. It’s good solid entertainment, for those who don’t have a weak stomach, and clearly everyone had fun making it, which is about all you can expect of a comedy.

Bruce Willis with hair! When’s the last time you saw that? We’re talking bleached-blond surfer-dude hair that flops over his forehead. And yet, after the first moment of shock, it doesn’t look all that silly, which is a pretty impressive achievement, I’d say.
But you want plot, I suppose. We’ve got some of that, too! It’s some unspecified time in the future, and technology has made great leaps in one area: a method of using only a person’s thoughts to control a human-like android. It’s only a shell, incapable of independent reasoning or movement, but when a person is linked to their surrogate (surrey is the cute little nickname), they can walk, talk, grocery shop, cliff dive, pick fights with really large angry guys, and take countless other risks without ever leaving the safety of their comfy chairs at home. They do look very comfy, but I hope technology has improved there as well, or the entire population has some really awful bedsores.
The idea is that these surrogates, which everyone uses (except for the obligatory weird little fringe group called Dreads, who think that life should be for the living), have all but eliminated crime. I find that hard to believe, personally. It seems to me that this setup would just make crime easier. Presumably the surreys don’t come with unique fingerprints, so I don’t see what’s stopping anyone who wants to from going house to house, robbing and/or murdering people while they’re lying in those comfy chairs. Maybe they have some techy way of stopping that, but if so, they don’t make it clear in the film. They mention a brand-new way of preventing such crimes, but who knows what they were doing before that. Probably crossing their fingers and hoping for the best.

New this year: FBI Ken and Barbie

Anyway, Bruce Willis has hair, or rather his surrey does, and also the same perfect, flawless, plasticky complexion that everyone else does. The makeup is really great in that respect — everyone looks like a Stepford Wife, as close to perfect as one can get in this world. He’s FBI agent Tom Greer (Ken), and he and his partner Agent Peters (aka Barbie, played by Radha Mitchell) have been called to the scene of a car accident where a bunch of surreys were smooshed and are now leaking green stuff everywhere. The FBI’s there because one of the, er, victims is unregistered — normally each one has a serial number that can be tracked to its owner. But not this one, and Ken and Barbie are puzzled.
They have a further shock in store when they track down the owner of one flattened surrey, a beautiful blonde woman, and discover a fat middle-aged man. (Okay, that’s not really a shock for them, but consider the implications. They say there are no real women on the internet, but now there are suddenly no real women anywhere.) No, the shock is that the owner is stone cold dead, killed by the same force that fried his surrey’s optic units.
Suddenly the ultimate way of being safe is kinda dangerous. It’s a public relations nightmare! Thank goodness we have our hero, Ken – except Ken’s broken, and suddenly he’s Tom again, walking around as a Meatbag, as the people hiding behind their surrogates like to call them. It’s like being a homeless person wandering around through an upscale neighborhood – you get stared at. A lot. But he’s on the job anyway, much to the horror of his wife Maggie (Rosamund Pike, of Fracture, and also Foyle’s War, an excellent BBC series), who never ever leaves the safety of her surrey, and thinks he’s insane for going after bad guys in his real body.
You can see the ending coming a mile away, but it’s still kind of fun getting there. This was really sort of a last-minute summer flick – it makes you think about the implications of that sort of a world, but not too hard. Mostly you can just sit back and enjoy the ride. A friend of mine mentioned reading a review that said Bruce Willis hadn’t been in a movie that was actually good for years, but I think that’s too harsh. I’m giving this one a respectable three idols – they went for action over thought, and this could have been a very thought-provoking movie; but that doesn’t mean they failed. They set out to entertain, and they did. Bruce with hair alone was worth the trip.

First off is a giant drone piece (at about 18 minutes) for all of you out there looking for long pads for placing under things.
Tranquility Base
Next up, deep texture:
Mind Scrape
And finally – a piece where I was playing around with a new sample set “Evolve” from Heavyocity. After a few hours of playing with the giant percussion – I ended up with a piece that sounded like a Blue Man Group performance piece. Way too much like them, actually – I was a little scared that I had inadvertently covered one of their pieces… I did some research, and checked with my local experts. It is not a Blue Man piece. (whew!)
Neo Western
Cheers, all!

It looks like I forgot the rest of the title, doesn’t it? Released on 9/9/09, showing at my local theatre in auditorium 9, and it cost me $9.00 to get in, because my local theatres aren’t showing matinees anymore. Okay, technically they are, but at times that are so inconvenient for me they might as well not be. They did sell me a largish box of SweetTarts for only a dollar, but still.
Anyway, this is only a 79 minute movie, which seems weird. When you remember, though, that it’s basically a 79-minute-long special effect, you get some glimmering of how long and complicated the making of this film might have been — it took between three to four years. And it is based on an 11-minute-long short film, so it’s already been expanded quite a bit.
It’s the future, or maybe the present; but either way, it isn’t the world you’d recognize. Somewhere around 1934, technology took a weird science sort of turn, and a war broke out between man and the very machines meant to help him. (But what can you expect when people build “machines of peace” that are mostly just giant walking guns?)
Like in Terminator, things don’t go so well for the humans. So when 9 (voiced by Elijah Wood of Lord of the Rings fame), the tiny rag doll of the title, finally wakes up, he finds a desolate world that he doesn’t understand at all. Luckily for him, he meets 2 (Martin Landau, from Sleepy Hollow and at least 157 other things), a rag doll gadgeteer who reinvents things like lanterns in micro-size. After encountering a freaky mostly-machine thing called simply The Beast, 2 is carried off and a wounded 9 wakes up again to find himself in a cathedral, hiding place for others like him.
There’s 1 (Christopher Plummer, of Up and at least 175 other things), the fussy, cautious leader; 5 (John C. Reilly, The Aviator, but that wasn’t his fault), 2’s assistant; 8 (Fred Tatasciore, apparently a popular voice actor), the muscle of the group, who must be at least a whopping five inches tall; and of course 6 (Crispin Glover, who also voiced Grendel in Beowulf), the crazy one who nobody likes to talk about, or to.
Whew! And I haven’t even mentioned Jennifer Connelly as the voice of 7, the ninja of the bunch; or the twins, 3 and 4, who don’t talk but read up a storm. Since the humans died, it’s only been them and The Beast, and though it’s only the size of a housecat, when you’re maybe three inches tall, that’s huge. Plus it’s very freaky looking. Did I mention that? It’s got half a real skull in its metal head, and it’s disconcerting. Anyway, 1 encourages a healthy fear of The Beast, and no one dares to disobey.
Then 9 comes along and screws everything up.
When a friend of mine, new to roleplaying, was learning the GURPS system, she thought it would be fun to take the disadvantages Curious and Impulsive. Yes, they’re just what they sound like. As you might imagine, it didn’t take long before she touched the wrong thing, set off a trap, and killed more than half the group — not including herself. Well, 9 has Curious and Impulsive, too, and that’s what sets off the second part of the movie — and believe me, the second part is a huge, awful mess. And no matter how many times the others ask him what he was thinking, 9 never gives any real answer. It’s like climbing Mount Everest because it’s there, I guess.

If you find yourself facing an evil AI that’s at least ten times your size, armed only with a flashlight, then you, too, probably have both Curious and Impulsive.

It’s a fascinating movie to watch, even though it lacks any real plot. The look of it is amazing, with all the details that go into the characters — the texture of the fabric, the different fasteners each of them have, even the individual little stitches holding them together. The machines are scary. They’re all dark and spooky, ranging from the size of largish spiders that swarm everywhere; to giant bird-things that are basically just a lot of very sharp metal objects attached to black wings; to the Machine itself, the one that started it all.
But it really is just one long special effect. It raises some metaphysical questions at the end, so even if you don’t think it’s too scary for the under-thirteens (it is, though, trust me), don’t bring them if you don’t want to have to answer a lot of questions about souls and whether or not little walking, talking dolls go to heaven.
So it gets three idols. I hate to go higher — once the technology progress and the novelty wears off, this will be a cute, quaint little film at best — but it was entertaining, so I hate to go lower. It will probably lose something on the small screen, though, so best to catch it in the theatre unless you have a really giant screen TV. And that right there is probably the most telling argument for not going any higher than three idols.

25 new pieces of music in one zip file