Two Animated Short Films

Back in 2000 (or so) I went to see the Spike and Mike's Animation Festival, and one of the standouts (likely the only piece I do remember) was Don Hertzfeldt's Rejected. The premise of the piece is that Hertzfeldt is recruited to animate some promotional pieces for a television channel and then a manufacturing company, and in the end each of the animated promos were rejected. The animation seems at first crude, being stick figures and on a plain void, but the concept takes off as their world collapses on itself.

Hertzfeldt's work is a mix of hilarious, profound, simple and grotesque. Billy's Balloon was a student film that was entered in the Cannes Film Festival, was a finalist, and Don had to ask permission to miss class at UCSB to attend the ceremony. His professor gave him a B on the piece.

But the piece de resistance in the Hertzfeldt cannon (as of 2016) was World of Tomorrow. I've been meaning on spending some time writing a deep dive on this animated film, but I just haven't gotten to it. It's been called---separately---one of the best animated films ever and one of the best sci-fi films ever. It's combines beautifully the stick-figure design ethos with the profoundness and philosophical weight that considering happiness, cloning, time-travel, and the end of humanity on Earth demands. It also contains an all-timer line of dialogue: "Now is the envy of all of the dead." The character of Emily Prime is voiced by a legitimately un-coached four year old, to a give it a sense of reality that can't be faked. That's her on the poster below:

One reason that I haven't made time to write deeply about it may be that in the last ten years Hertzfeldt made two more, er, episodes. Each subsequent piece, Episode 2: The Burden of Other People's Thoughts, and Episode 3: The Absent Destinations of David Prime, have been equally hailed as masterpieces, and I've yet to purchase the Blu-Ray, as they're not available on YouTube like the first.

The second poster above is for the Portuguese Joao Gonzalez's Ice Merchants. I'm a sucker for hand-drawn animated projects, and this is a classic. It has heart and tension, a cliff-house and a cliff-diving-commute. It shows what you can do with backgrounds.

(I also kinda just wanted to get these links all in one place.)

While I was contemplating this post and other hand-drawn animation, I couldn'y help but think of those ubiquitous 'Red Bull gives you wings' ads. This is the studio that's been making those ads for two-and-a-half decades now, and while they're pretty corny, and it seems like they're universally panned online, I think the hand-drawn and traditionally animated work deserves a nod. And, holy hell, it's SO different that what the Red Bull Studios seem to be involved in.

Methyl Methacrylate Tank Crisis Update

So, crisis averted. Well, explosion averted. It turns out that the endless spray of water kept the temperature down just enough to 1) cause a crack in the tank that relieved pressure, which 2) in turn helped the methyl methacrylate cure and solidify.

Most of the fifty-thousand evacuees have been allowed to return home...well, 34,000 have been allowed to return, while around 16,000 remain on prolly-best-to-stay-away orders.

What got me thinking was when they said they don't know what caused the runaway temperature spike that caused the venting on Thursday that led to this wild crisis in the first place. They don't know, and that makes sense. If watching HBO's Chernobyl as often as I have (what can I say---I like bad-vibe programming) has taught me anything, it's that it takes some time to properly investigate these things once the fallout is finally mitigated.

What caused the crisis in the first place? 

A different conversation I had added to the tapestry within which I view these things nowadays. The other day I took both kids to swim, and I was talking to the mom of one of Cass's buddies and swim-classmates. She was relaying a conversation she had had with her mother. Her mom is a teacher in the nursing program at Cal State Dominguez Hills, and she was lamenting the fact that her students pretty much all relied on ChatGPT, or other large-language-models from other AI programmers, to get their work done. And with an exasperated, distance-staring glare she said with a sigh, "In a couple year's time...you may have to be concerned about your nurse in the ER or operating room." 

Articles are rampant about a growing crisis in higher education, where students have en masse moved away from doing their own work and use LLMs to write their papers, or organize their research at the very least. An AITA entry on Reddit a while back was from a girl who's law-school boyfriend would take every question from every assignment and put them into ChatGPT, then copy and paste the response without even reading it. 

Now...that's pretty bleak. 

While I don't think the crisis was caused by a person who had LLMs do their work for them and then got a job that they were unprepared for and who was actually watching reels on their phone instead of the temperature gauges---and I don't think that---it was a startling reminder that THAT BLEAK REALITY WILL HAPPEN SOMEDAY.

In Pripyat at the Chernobyl plant it was arrogance mixed with hubris and ignorance. But they also had someone at the helm who had 25 years experience in nuclear facilities. That longterm experience may have added to the arrogance, but we're all pretty sure that Anatoly Dyatlov actually did lots of work in nuclear power plants, and didn't have AI do all his work for him.

Just another attack on intellectualism: the propensity to value the completion of the work to get the document over what you may learn from the substance of your studies. Once it becomes more about the document, it's easy to find ways around exerting the needed effort and just get the document at all costs. It becomes very easy to justify just doing the easy stuff and skipping challenges at every turn. Mike Judge's Idiocracy unfolding in real time.

At least in Orange County they still had some hard-working smarties up to the task of round-the-clock working to keep a tank from exploding and obliterating a suburban neighborhood in Garden Grove.

At some point, though? 

Dewey Decimal System Notes

So...being book people, we do book things. Like go to our local library, the Billie Jean King Main Library, a half mile away. It's pretty cool looking, plus all the cool activities, plus the playground in the back side. We try to make it each Saturday.

It was unexpectedly closed on a recent visit.

The other day, as the kids perused the sections they like---Cass in the graphic novel and middle school reader sections; Camille in the comics, young readers, and art book sections---I figured they should know about Dewey and his decimal system.

So I went to a computer and paused for a second, thinking of what to look up. I really wanted to pick a book that I could actually take home, that I would actually want to take home, and that they would most likely have.

I settled on a National Book Winner, the Non-fiction winner from 1978:

So, I showed the numbers to Camille (Cass was gone doing his thing) and I said, "Now we go look for them." We took off, looking at the sides of the shelves and followed the line down to the 900s. We did have to go to the second story, but still, it was a scavenger hunt that was just following numbers.

And here's the book, another masterpiece by Matthiessen:

But don't take my word for it; if you just Google the number, you can see that the Interwebs are properly schooled in Dewey's system:

Like Shadow Country before it, this book is incredible. At times, it reads as a deep and well informed meditation and interpretation on Buddhism. At other times, it reads as a travelogue of a 250+ mile hike into the Himalaya written by a New Yorker, an erudite and openminded New Yorker, but still. And at other times it's about a grieving husband and father, who's wife had passed less than a year before to cancer, and he left his nine-year old with some friends to take this hike.

The last half of the last sentence on the first day, September 28th (as each "chapter" is a day), is indicative of Matthiessen's style, the use of intricate wordplay and enormous words are mostly absent, and yet the lyricism with ideas persists: "...in one day's walk we are a century away."

You can see why Pynchon likes Matthiessen. The writer's writer, the only winner of the National Book Award for both Fiction and Nonfiction, and the founder of the Paris Review in the postwar years...but he was secretly working for the CIA and spying on his writerly pals. Matthiessen was also the writer who popularized the plight of Leonard Peltier, who was finally released in February of this year.

Anyway, the Dewey Decimal System is now part of our kids' onboarding software. Because it's so... important...? 

So this is happening...

I'm not a journalist by trade, and this could easily be a bizarre little post in due time, but there's a tank with between 6,000 and 7,000 gallons of methyl methacrylate in Garden Grove in "crisis mode" and overheating at the time of this post. Orange County Fire Authority Division Chief Craig Covey is quoted thusly: "This thing is going to fail, and we don't know when." One bad scenario is it bursts open, releasing a wave of toxic chemical onto the surrounding concrete and a plume of toxic gas into the air. They've been sandbagging the parking lot just in case, trying to halt possible runoff into the drains, creeks, and ocean.

A different, far worse possibility, would be the methyl methacrylate tank exploding instead of rupturing.

There has been a mandatory evacuation order set place, with residents being told to flee for their safety (!). They've been evacuating the area all day, closing schools, going door to door, setting up centers for the 40,000 or so residents to wait it out.

This is about 16 miles away, and I took the kids to their swim class at 3:30 just outside the evacuation order boundary.

Here's an NPR link if you'd like some ongoing updates.

Roundabout Way to Mokele-Mbembe

Oh jeeze, try to follow this stupefying line...

At Free Comic Book Day, I picked up this for nostalgia reasons:

Remember the show? I do. Cass asked me, What's this? And I said, besides a very cool David Mack cover, it looks like a comic based on a television show from the '80s that I remember fondly. I tried describing the show to him: a regular guy is given a super-suit by aliens and has difficulties controlling the powers as he navigates his new responsibilities. A super-hero show a bit ahead of its time.

But, it turns out, William Katt, the actor who played Ralph Hanley (originally Hinkley, but changed after the Reagan shooter, er, de-popularized the name), got involved in the production of this upcoming series. His face is so ably painted by David Mack right there. 

I went and looked up some info on Katt, and was reminded about a movie where he played Sean Young's husband, and she was a biologist and explorer on the hunt for a monster in the African hinterlands. 

Oh, yeah, I thought when I saw the name on Katt's filmography, I remember that movie. I was very fond of it, and was trying to describe a scene to Cass later: "So, there's an African dude, a local who's all sick, and they ask him what's wrong and he motions to his stomach, and then they ask him what he ate, and in the dirt he sketches it, his food---and it's a brontosaurus!"

Nevermind that Cass was like, "What?" and I remembered that we use terms like sauropod now instead of the recently abandoned 'brontosaurus,' but eventually he got the idea.

Sean Young plays an American researcher in search of mokele-mbembe in the movie titled "Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend." She and Katt end deep in the central African rainforest saving a baby sauropod, while the father is killed by a national military and the mother is caught.

It's silly and mostly forgotten today. But when I was looking up info on the movie, the name mokele-mbembe was hyperlinked to its own background, which was extensive.

Apparently, mokele-mbembe is similar to Bigfoot, the Yeti, or the Loch Ness monster, in that it's a cryptid, that is, a legendary animal that's unverified by current evidence. Instead of a hominid, it was described variously as larger than a hippo but smaller than an elephant, or half-elephant/half-dragon, or four-legged with a very long pointy-thing on it's face. That last one I think was translated by someone else as 'four-legged with a very long neck.'

It turns out that a few very serious expeditions to search for evidence of a living mokele-mbembe have been outfitted in the recent past, all with the thinking that the animal is a sauropod relative. And you may think: Okay...that's kind of...interesting.

But, it needs to be said: These expeditions were outfitted and funded by recent-Earth creationists, an apparently well-heeled group of very religious christians, either incidentally or purposefully ignorant to the realities of geology and deep time, who were trying to prove---by way of finding a living sauropod---that the Earth was only 5 or 6 thousand years old.

They were, um, unsuccessful in their expeditions.

Most historians of linguistics and the area think the legends that form the basis of mokele-mbembe are based on the black rhino, an animal that hasn't lived in the jungle areas where the stories come from since before written history. That at least passes the sniff test: big animal, once did share the space with humans, left before stories were written down so those stories had to pass by word of mouth and oral tradition...those dots are easier to follow.

Anyway, seems like a roundabout way to get to "once again irritated by purposefully ignorant religious people," but here we are. Maybe I'll show the kids the Baby movie, or the Greatest American Hero show, but both of those are only available on streamers like Tubi or Pluto.

So, there's that.

Yeah.

Had to Join the Fun

 Happy Birthday Homer!

That's, er, 70 years old today. Wow.

I was Bart's age when the show first aired, and now I'm older than Homer is regularly shown to be, depending on the season, 36 or 38 years old.

And, I have a son a few months younger than Bart is. Hard to wrap my brain around that stat, by the by.

Crazy how time flies when...your favorite show is on television for...36+ years?

Mission Impossible Notes

While visiting Solvang one of the past trips, likely the most recent Thanksgiving, Cass and Uncle Val were perusing the menu on their enormous television. Cass probably said, "Whoa! What's that?" and Uncle Val surely said, "Aw, Cass! That's Tom Cruise and he's awesome. This is a Mission Impossible movie!" and he hit play. I came in later and the 7th film in the series was playing, Dead Reckoning is its subtitle.

I caught most of it, and knew about some of the scenes (like the motorcycle off the cliff), and can say I enjoyed it, mostly. It doesn't really have a conclusion as much as it ends, and the credits roll, and we get ready for the second half, the 8th film in the franchise with the ominous subtitle The Final Reckoning.

I came across some think pieces about the badassery of Tom Cruise in the ridiculous stunts throughout both this franchise as well as other Cruise-related films, and felt compelled to go back and rewatch this series.

But "rewatch" isn't accurate, since I hadn't ever scene any of the Mission Impossible movies. I did watch the 1988 reboot series, with Stefano's son Tony DiMera in the rubber-mask-on-face role and Peter Graves as the boss-man, and enjoyed the espionage content as much as any ten-ish year old.

But by 1996, when Mission Impossible the First was released, I was deep into my classic-movie rabbit-hole and had a Tom Cruise-shaped middle-finger blotting out projects he starred in. Even Corrie saw it and, against type for her, remembered a fair amount of it.

It was after the think pieces about action set pieces that I perused the Web...could I find a box set of DVDs reasonably priced...where were they streaming...and then last month, Corrie and Cass announced: Mission Impossibles, 1 through 5, leaving Netflix on April 30th.

Since we only watch the television in earnest on weekends, after 3pm, let's say we had some intense Tom Cruise afternoon/evenings. Brian dePalma, John Woo, Joss Whedon...directors from all over the "action" world come in and do their thing. Jon Voit, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg (playing the Ving Rhames role), Alec Baldwin(?), Jeremy Renner(??), even Angela Bassett and Henry Cavill and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Emilio Estevez?

The flow of women isn't quite James Bondian, but it's a thing, and you hope they develop someone beyond "hot for Ethan Hunt" or "someone for Ethan to be hot for." Is his wife (Michele Monaghan) someone who fits that bill? Nah...I guess the best foil would be Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson). Maybe Agent Carter from the last two...?

Anyway, after four or five of these movies, while talking with Corrie, I realized that I didn't have a favorite. None of them were, for me, like, this is the one I'd watch again for pleasure, or, this is the one that hits all the right story beats.

That changed, though, for me. I do have a favorite now, and I'll give the reasons, similar to my bullet-point thesis about why Rogue One is the best Star Wars movie.

Mission Impossible: Fallout is the best Mission Impossible movie. It's number 6, so there's a ton of history built up, but watching them in order in close time to each other helped with the characters.

• It has Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg and nobody else on the team burning up time---no Jeremy Renner, no extra helpers beyond perpetually wobbly Alec Baldwin;
• It has two ladies for Ethan Hunt (Cruise, if you didn't know by now) to be complicated with, both his ex-wife (Michele Monaghan) and a MI6 British counterpart Ilsa, who both have complicated feelings for him, and he can't have either, nor does he really want either;
• The bad-guy group again has a stupid collective name (the Apostles)
• The bad-guy brains-of-the-op is smug and revenge hungry, but doesn't give me anxiety like the late, great Hoffman;
• The bad-guy muscles-of-the-op is awesome and menacing;
• Cruise ready to go with the CIA op team in the catacomb is peak "Ethan Hunt is still, actually, the good-est good-guy" moment.
• It has dual simultaneous nuclear bomb-disarming teams working against the clock (naturally) while Ethan chases down the other badguy in a helicopter. It's a helicopter chase scene.

I don't think I've ever wanted one helicopter to ram another helicopter as bad as when I watched this scene. There have been a few times in my life when I've wanted to holler and cheer while watching a scene. This helicopter scene as as close as it's been in a while. (In the first Expendables, when Sly dumps the fuel on the badguys on their fly-by and then blasts it just to ignites it? That was one...)

The Burj-Kalifa excursion; the motorcycle off the cliff to parachute to the train; the bar is set pretty high, and while the helicopter chase from "Fallout" isn't the same as these two scenes, it's part of a satisfying whole. Which led me to:

• Fallout is the 6th film, meaning you know the goodguy team will win---those stakes are pretty nonexistent. I mean, "They're gonna nuke the food supply for two-billion people!" is a pretty good pickle to have to solve, but you never think they won't, and I'm fine with that. It's in witnessing the execution that the fun happens.

To recap: two complicated love-interests with no actual romance happening; no extra people on the team; awesome badguy boss that doesn't give me anxiety like PSH; helicopter chase scene while everyone else is diffusing nukes; Angela Bassett.

Maybe Final Reckoning will be the bestest best. I reserve the right to change my opinion, but it's a tall ask for this viewer to be better than Fallout.