More Backrooms

the original backroom image

I eat this stuff right up. My brain, during its formative years, was trained by comic books and Star Wars, the X-Files and Twin Peaks, Unsolved Mysteries and In Search Of... to consume lore and be enthused by the unknown, the weird, and the askew.  Watching Backrooms in theatres, cold, having no experience with the horror sub-subgenre or Kane Parsons work as Kane Pixels on youtube didn't matter in the slightest. Backrooms provides very little in the way of answers, and any answers it does provide are pretty much formed with question marks at the end. Speculation, not answers. 

What was clear about the cinematic Backrooms was that we, as an audience, may not have gotten satisfying answers as to what was going on, nor do any of the characters truly understand what's happening, but it's absolutely clear that Parsons himself knows precisely what is happening. And he's not telling, he's showing, but in pieces.

What I wasn't clear on while sitting in the movie theatre, thoroughly absorbed in Parson's uncomfortable alt-reality, was whether Backrooms was its own thing, a soft reboot of the work he did online, or if it was just a part of it. It the days since, consuming Parsons' Backrooms youtube videos, a few other videos from avid fans who obsess over the details of Parsons' Backrooms, and interview videos and podcasts with Parsons himself, it's clear it's definitely just one part of the whole. You don't need to have seen the web series, but if you want to know more, it will definitely tell you more.

Parsons' youtube series, which he started working on at 16, opens with a group of kids in 1990 making a horror movie with a camcorder, when the kid with the camera falls through a soft spot in reality and finds himself in the backrooms. It is then 9 minutes this "character" exploring digitally created spaces (using Blender, open source 3-D modelling software) through the camcorder lens, digital tracking fuzz laid over top of it all to really give that grainy and retro vibe.  It's effectiveness is at least 50% sound design, just the ominous buzz of fleurescent lighting, a pervasive humm (very Lynchian), the characters' shuffling footsteps, the haunting howls of *something* in the distance.  It's intense and captivating, and then the thing from the distance is right in front of you. It's completely channelling first-person shooter vibes, sans the action. If you turn the corner and something unreal is in front of you, there's no shooting, the only choice is to run away. It's something that will happen again and again in this series.

That might sound repetitive, but it's not the only trick up Parsons' sleeve.

While that first video was just a thing Parsons made adapting the ideations on backrooms on message boards into a video, the second video Parsons release is a sub-3-minute montage of images of all sorts of retro imagery of odd spaces and pre-90's technology and people using such technology (with their eyes or faces blacked out) and out of context bits of text...all once again seeming like it's being played on a grainy video, its haunting soundtrack warbling in and out.  The next video, once again playing like a worn-out video cassette tape features more imagery of blueprints as a creepy-as-hell digitized voice starts to explain about magnetic distortion experiments that revealed the backrooms and the plan was to use such spaces as ...storage. We then see the video from 1988 of the third test showing the opening of a portal.

Currently, there are 22 videos in the series and many of them are just short moody atmospheric pieces, showing imagery that is meant to expand and connect the lore of Parsons' Backrooms together, others are more FPS exploration videos, and still others are communications from Async, the in-world corporation that is trying to figure out how to monetize the backrooms while also studying them.

There is a multi-video narrative arc around the hazmat-suited teams that explore the spaces, and how one of them, Peter Tench, disappeared one day while exploring the backrooms. Given what the Async team already knew about the dangers of the backrooms, they presumed Tench dead, when in reality he had been pushed forward two months ahead in time. Tench found his way into an Async control room and triggered an alarm. But his reappearance led to other, more dramatic problems. And more questions.

The distortion of reality in the backrooms, it's reinforced in both the web series and the movies, has pretty disastrous effects on the mental state of people who find themselves alone in the space for any extended period of time. As we see multiple times through the web series, there are multiple (increasing) soft spots in reality that people (and birds) fall through, some of them with video cameras.

As a physical exploratory space, there isn't much logic to the backrooms, why they twist and wind and connect the way they do, but as you dive into the series you can begin to intuitively grasp what it is even if it's not easy to describe with any surety. The repetition of certain areas, or certain types of areas, intones that there's a reason for them. A sequence in the film finds the camera panning down from a room in reality to that same room layers and layers deep into the backrooms, the distortion of the reality of each room more and more evident the further down you go, almost like echoes, growing fainter the more it reverberates.  This is what makes the backrooms so compelling...that you can almost grasp what's going on, but just not quite.

There are multiple types of creatures in the backrooms, including weird mould/fungal monsters, distorted remnants of half-remembered people, and haunting creatures that are dark Ids made real.  Some of them wail, some of them mimic human speech, some of them do both.  While the backrooms are seemingly endless, it doesn't seem like you can exist within the space long without encountering one of these beings, and they're not docile, even if some of them are ...edible? The very first creature in Parsons' first video is pretty doofy, but each monster after that has been effectively creepy.

Parsons works not just in Blender, but multimedia. There are videos that feature real people in real environments, and real people in digital environments. Real images are manipulated into surreal images, and Parsons' use of electronic music, typically slow, eerie, haunting chords, contributes deeply to the atmosphere (at times the music will drown out the words spoken in the video, implying that mood is more important than what's being said, or, perhaps, toying with the audience by further burying information behind the sounds). Parsons uses voice actors throughout his productions to varying degrees of effectiveness, but he always nails the tone, so even mediocre vocal performances get a pass.

Especially with the first-person-shooter (in this case the "shooter" is the video camera) videos that track through the backrooms, it's often too evident that it's a digital reality. This is no shade on Parsons who is very effectively working with the tools afforded to a teenager, but wow, is it ever a level-up to see these environments cast into reality on the big screen. And the realization of the backrooms from digital into actual sets is phenomenal. 

The film adds the next layer to the Backrooms mythos. While the youtube videos explores the mythology behind it all, the film explores characters and how they are affected by - and affecting - the backrooms. This idea, barely hinted at in the youtube videos, is the sole thrust of the movie. But, again, answers are actually shadows of answers. Satisfaction not guaranteed.

In interviews Parsons has said he would like Backrooms to continue as an anthology TV series, and that seems like the obvious direction for this to go. But given its thunderous success at the box office, it's more likely a second feature will happen before a TV series (let's get real, a streaming series) does. 

I am all-in on this ride. While I worry that maybe Parsons doesn't yet have the life experience or awareness to handle much outside this sphere of creepy, moody, atmospheric pieces, it's clear he's very assured and purposeful in his direction and that he has many talents when it comes to putting vibes and aesthetics together. He's cultivated a pretty substantial audience for a reason, so talent is not lacking. With this property, at least, he seems to know exactly where it's going, if maybe not entirely what it's saying.

KWIF: Masters of the Universe (+1)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. The "birthday week" now comes to a close, ending with my most anticipated movie of the year, but also accompanied by so much apprehension. I came here to review movies and eat cake, and I'm all out of cake.

This Week:
Masters of the Universe (2026, d. Travis Knight - in theatre)
Backrooms (2026, d. Kane Parsons - in theatre)    

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Masters of the Universe, the toy line, debuted in 1982. I was 6 years old. My introduction to He-Man and company was probably the TV commercials, but my obsession most likely started with issue 47 of DC Comics Presents in which Superman and He-Man teamed up against Skeletor on Eternia, the homeworld of the Masters of the Universe. I was immediately obsessed. I was as obsessed with "MOTU" (as it's known in the fan community) as I was with Star Wars and DC superheroes.

The toy line would receive more comics series from both DC and Marvel in the next few years, there would also be a fan magazine, and yes, billions of dollars in toy sales of ridiculously over-muscled broad-and-squat characters with ridiculous names like Stinkor (he stinks of patchouli), Extendar (his limbs extend), and Buzz-off (he's a wasp-man). There was an immensely popular cartoon that had two seasons with over 60 episodes each, as well as a holiday special and a spin-off series with He-Man's sister, She-Ra. 

In 1987, infamous schlock purveyors Cannon Films produced a Masters of the Universe live action movie, which, it's absolutely fair to say, was a disappointment to everyone at the time. Cannon sunk over $20 million into the film -- a sizable budget for them, but not nearly big enough to do the property justice -- and so most of the film takes place on Earth with a paltry few characters form MOTU's vast lore appearing, and the majority of the film focusing on Courtney Cox's teenage orphan and her boyfriend. It was a huge slap in every child's face that we had a He-Man movie that did not center on He-Man and felt nothing like what we knew about the property.  As well, the cartoon had ceased making new episodes almost two years prior, and public attention to the property was flagging something fierce. Toys were not selling like they used to. By 1988 the line was basically dead.

MOTU has been rebooted a bunch of times since, and the fan community is immensely supportive of the property, it's just not a huge community.  Likely in the tens of thousands, rather than millions like, say, Transformers or Star Wars.  Even the 1987 film has since become kind of a camp classic, and I personally enjoy it far more as an adult than I ever did as a kid. Still, I've always wished for a proper He-Man movie, and for the past 20 years (at least) there have been teases, over and over again, with false starts at nearly every major studio. It felt like it was never going to happen...and now it has... and... for the most part, it seemed to be what I had been waiting for, a big-budget ($200 million dollar) production that understands both how ridiculous the property is while also understanding why it's so beloved to the die hards.

Director Travis Knight came from the world of animation (as head of Laika and director of Kubo and the Two-Strings) and directed the best Transformers movie of the lot in Bumblebee, an impeccable 1980's-styled adventure in an Amblin pastiche. I had the utmost confidence that he could make a good He-Man movie. The ideal was that it would be as good as Bumblebee, or share the tone of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and that it would be a good introduction to MOTU to a whole new generation, and not just a movie for 50 year olds who can't let go of their childhood.

It genuinely pains me to say that Masters of the Universe is a highly flawed movie. It delivers on being a live-action He-Man movie in ways my inner man-child cannot deny... I had warm fuzzies in my belly often, and squealed in glee more than a few times throughout, but it's still not he MOTU movie of my dreams, and that makes me sad.

The film opens with operatic voices in harmony, "AH-AH"-ing to pulsating synths that made me think a vintage ABBA song was about to play... and the guitars kick in, and I got goosebumps. Composer Daniel Pemberton mixes in his score these elements of 70's Euro-disco with 80's guitar-rock and enlisted Queen's Brian May to provide the guitar riffs. It is most suitably epic and triumphant. If you reach back to the epic rock soundtracks of the 1980s - Queen's Highlander, Toto's Dune, Tangerine Dream's Legend - this is reaching, achieving, and in some cases surpassing those grandiose scores, while also paying homage to them (it borrows at least one track from Highlander - "Princes of the Universe"). It has a few needledrops, which are kind of on the nose in-the-moment, and yet also tone-perfect for the type of film this is, and The Darkness provides the title song "Masters of the Universe".  I was not expecting this acoustic assault, but it was so incredibly welcome, and helped elevate the film where it otherwise would fall a little further down.

The film has an extended prologue, where we meet Adam, Prince of Eternia, as a child. He's forced by his father to partake in battle training, but he's not much of a fighter. The other children in training pick on him, and Duncan (Idris Elba, Luther), the king's Man-At-Arms, is a heavy-handed trainer, though he does find ways to encourage and inspire the hapless young prince. The King, however, wants toughness, strength and determination out of his son, and is willing to traumatically embarrass him to do so. It's a tough prologue when so much of it talks about "being a man" and what that entails, and all of it has to do with strength and being a fighter. This had me perplexed as to what the messaging of the film was to be...(Pemberton plays a piano riff of "Boys Don't Cry" over one scene). It almost seemed to be promoting toxic masculinity.  

The palace is attacked by the forces of Skeletor (Jared Leto, The Little Things) and Adam is sent through a portal off to Earth, his mother's homeworld, alone, with only the fabled "Sword of Power" (there's an even earlier prologue attempting to explain just what power this sword has) to accompany him, which he promptly loses. We smash cut to 15 years later and Adam (Nicholas Galatzine, The Sheep Detectives) is an awkward, soft-spoken dork who works in HR, and has been obsessed with his past life on Eternia. He knows the Sword is his way back, and has been searching for it for a long time. When he finally finds it, it alerts his home world and a literal Beast-Man comes after him, but so too does his old friend Teela (Camila Mendes, Riverdale)

These two stretches of film account for about 40 minutes at the top of the film, and while both are called back to and play a part later in the film, they are each waaay too long. The stretch on Earth feels particularly tedious, especially as there's a nonsensical gym sequence where Adam has a nonsensical conversation with another guy working out who just happens to be Dolph Lundgren, the portrayer of He-Man in 1987. I'm not against fan-service. I'm a fan, I like to be serviced, but subtly. This scene stops the movie dead in its tracks for about 2 minutes, as Lundgren gives the young man advice, which ONLY makes sense in a Meta context, and then what little weight was had in the delivery is undercut by a dumb joke.

And that's a major flaw of this film, it's incessant need to undercut itself with dumb jokes. It's the "Marvel-model" of filmmaking that had played itself out by the time the pandemic hit, so there's no excuse as to why the script is resurrecting it here. Cut out half of these moments where the script undercuts itself with humour and you have a much better, tighter film.

This is, of course, the product of multiple screenwriters contributing to many, many drafts over the years. Four screenwriters are credited here, and it's hard not to blame all the film's weaknesses on the script.  Because, Knight's direction is pretty rock solid. The action sequences all play out quite well, with the super-powers of these characters, or the fighting skills of others all being utilized in really fun ways and not feeling super generic, or, in that sometimes Marvel way of it just being CGI characters blasting each other with laser beams. 

The film really starts moving when Beast-Man and Teela show up. The energy just starts to crackle and these characters are really well translated from toy/animation/comics-to-screen. Mendes' reveal on screen is particularly captivating, as she exudes strength, confidence and charm that I never would have expected from her CW background. She looks and feels like a movie star, and I hadn't expected that from her or this film. 

Teela brings Adam back to Eternia, but not one he remembers. It's been under Skeletor's thrall for 15 years and things have not gone well. Adam's return with the Sword has exposed the Eternian resistance and Skeletor's forces attack, but in the process, Adam turns into He-Man and a new hope for the people of the land raises... except that even with all that power, Adam is still Adam, and his first avenue is hope and optimism and looking for the best in people... but the lesson he needs is that sometimes fighting is necessary to protect the people you care for. Diplomacy is always Adam's first choice (he was always pretty good at human resources) but now he has the power (and, honestly, "the power" basically represents confidence here) to stand up and fight, and to get back up when knocked down.

Knight's path to becoming an accomplished director was not a hard one. His dad is Phil Knight, the billionaire founder of Nike. The animation studio Travis heads was bought for him by his father. But to his credit, Knight worked at his craft, and clearly has both an aptitude and a talent for directing and storytelling. One can look at him as being perfect for telling the story of Adam, of a young man (of privilege) who doesn't necessarily live up to his father's (or anyone's) expectations, and feels lost, only to find his true calling and, while not without its hurdles, excel at it.  It's not fully the story we need, but Knight found a way to make this story personal to him, and it does elevate it slightly.

It keeps coming back to the script, though. It fumbles its exploration of masculinity pretty badly. It takes a shot at it, but it doesn't just miss the target, it doesn't even know where the target is. With all the writers involved, it's like nobody thought to consult an expert, to get it right.  

But what it does get right... and it's so weird to say this... is Skeletor. Jared Leto, buried under a blue-skinned body suit, and a CGI skull with beady-red lazer-pointer eyes, is mercifully unrecognizable, and nails the assignment. Leto as a performer is sometimes insufferable, and allegations made about his off-screen behaviour makes one like him even less, but this... he got this. Skeletor is an evil, cackling villain of no redeeming virtue, and unapologetic about it. He's also freaking funny, as funny as he is intimidating, which serves to simultaneously make him more and less intimidating if that makes any sense. It's a camp performance, but one that works perfectly for both the character and the film. Alison Brie (Freelance), who plays Evil-Lyn, Skeletor's mistress and aide, and shares the most screentime with him, is a gifted comedic actress, but even she has a difficult time keeping up with Leto. It's clear she's attempting to match his tone, but only is able to get there half the time.

There are many characters from the toys and cartoons and lore that pop up in this film, and it's a bevvy of delights. It tickles me to see Fisto, Ram-Man, Mekanek, Spikor, Tri-Clops, Trap-Jaw. Roboto, Battle Cat, and so many more, alongside vehicles like the Sky-Sled, Roton, Talon Fighter and more in this picture, not to mention playsets like Castle Greyskull and Snake Mountain. What a damn treat. I was giddy in seeing it all and only wanted more. 

As there were delights, there were also let-downs, but Nicholas Galatzine was not one of them. His squeaky-voiced Adam, with posture seemingly learned from studying Christopher Reeve's Clark Kent, does exactly the job it needs to do, and when he transforms into He-Man, he still effectively conveys being Adam inside a muscle-bound barbarian's body, but also shows the character levelling up emotionally. Really, really solid job.

I could go on about the ups and downs of this movie and the wild roller-coaster of emotions I went on watching it. In the end, it's fine, but sadly, fine isn't what the property needed if it were going to be resuscitated for a new generation.  That was my greatest hope for it, that this would a super strong movie enjoyable by kids and adults alike and so exciting and entertaining and undeniable that there would be millions of children clamouring for action figures instead of phone screens. I guess we'll have to wait for Toy Story 5 to do that.

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Kane Parsons' 9-minute Backrooms (sometimes The Backrooms) short film from 2022 currently sits with an astonishing 83 million views on Youtube. Backrooms is not just a single short, but a series of shorts made in the past few years , but none of the follow-up twenty or so videos come close to hitting that number of views (most of them have between 3 and 18 million views, which is still quite impressive). What's not so astonishing is that a studio was willing to gamble on a modestly-budgeted feature derived from the Backrooms series given the impressive numbers it's pulled...no, the astonishing thing is that the studio, in this case A24, was willing to take a chance on the feature with Parsons at the helm.

The video series itself was not the original invention of Parsons, but a product of message board groupthink in the creepypasta horror subgenre, and the idea of "backrooms" itself became its own sub-subgenre.

I wasn't familiar with any of this until very recently. But, to watch Parsons' original short, which is somewhat recreated in the prologue to the film, it owes as much to first-person shooter video games as it does to whatever developed out of message board forum. It's visceralness comes from being in an unfamiliar, relatively barren indoor space that is just an expanse of seemingly limitless corridors. There are objects in the corridors that could best be described as "random", while the hallways themselves lack any sense of logic, as the attaching corridors might be through a crevice or a hole in the floor, or a tunnel in the wall accessible only by ladder, or a doorway in the ceiling.  And the lighting is spotty, with most corridors being difficult to see fully... you never know what awaits you as you pass through a doorway, or turn a corner, or step into the shadows. (The fantastic TV series Severance was partially inspired by the conceit of "backrooms", and the spinoff sub-subgenre of "liminal spaces" inspired the video game and subsequent film Exit 8 which I reviewed last week.)

The Blair Witch style shaky cam intro to the film is as effective as it is discombobulating.  I never have a good physiological reaction to this kind of footage, so mercifully it was an in-universe video cassette of camcorder footage being watched by someone, and didn't last past the first 10 minutes.

Following this sequence we meet Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor, Serentity). He is a failed architect who now runs a failing furniture store and is seeing a therapist, Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve, The Worst Person in the World) following his separation from his wife. What is clear from their sessions is that Clark is full of entitlement and rage, and isn't very interested in truly exploring the source of his emotional discontent.

Clark has been living in his sparsely-stocked furniture store since the separation and experiencing eerie and strange issues with the electricity in the store. The lights will flicker and blink, turning off or on all on their own, while the television will shut off or randomly show video from inside the backrooms that we saw in the opening sequence.  When checking the breaker panel one night, Clark discovers a soft spot in fabric of reality... he touches the wall and his hand passes through. He steps into the wall and comes out in a dingy yellow carpeted and wallpapered environment that seemingly doesn't end. He later describes to Mary this reality as being like a drawing of a dog, but as if someone who had never seen a dog were told what a dog looks like, and then drew their conceptualization of a dog. Everything is off.

Clark spends days exploring the space, even though there seem to be dangers present. Perhaps because he's a (failed) architect, or perhaps because there are things familiar to him in this space, he is quite obsessed with this topsy turvy alt-reality that defies any logic.  He recruits his young assistant manager (Lukita Maxwell, Shrinking) and her videographer boyfriend (Finn Bennett, True Detective: Night Country) to help him with research, and, naturally things go awry.

Outside of it all, Clark has triggered a video camera within the space, and it's being monitored by Phil (Mark Duplass, Safety Not Guaranteed) who wonders who the hell this guy is. Clark's description of this space triggers memories, traumas and nightmares in Mary of her childhood. Are they connected?

Backrooms is a horror movie, but it's also a science fiction and pscyhological thriller. It's not always scary, but it is tonally pretty intense. What is most effective about the film, and baked into the "backrooms" and "liminal spaces" sub-subgenre, is the surreal perversion of reality. Things that look almost familiar, almost like something we should recognize, but aren't quite accurate. Exploring a space like this is like venturing through a nightmare, there's nothing grounding this experience and it could take you literally anywhere one's mind can conceive.

Eventually the film reaches a point where it starts offering some answers, and the worst thing you can do in horror is demystify the threat, to explain it all away. It's frustrating not having answers, but it's less scary when you do.  Backrooms' answers, well, they aren't truly answers. There's more going one than what we know at first, but as one veil is pulled back, there are only more questions.

The audience is left to find their own answers in the information provided to them, and the information is as much there to confound as it is to illuminate. My take is that this endless reality is subconscious memory made manifest, but not of any individual. The more time you spend within, the more the realm taps into your subconscious memory, particularly the darkness you trap away, your fears, anxieties, regrets and repressed impulses. It's a theory, anyway.

I liked this movie a whole damn lot, and it's part of this year's horror explosion of fresh talent that is redefining the box office and what audiences want, what excites them, what they're looking to escape to. Twisted reflections of reality, apparently. Parsons, a teenager when he created Backrooms, is now 20 and has directed one of the biggest movies of the year, and capably so. He'd been refining this idea for four years, so it's no wonder he was so capable and assured in shooting this, but time will tell if he has the capacity for telling any stories beyond Backrooms.  I'm keen to find out.

I Saw This!! What I Watched Pt. ii

I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our feature wherein Graig or David attempt to write about a bunch of stuff they watched some time ago and meant to write about but just never got around to doing so. But we can't not write cuz that would be bad, very bad.  Miss a Next Big Thing bad.

Part i here.

Stan Lee's Lucky Man S1, 2016, Sky 1 -- download

I didn't have enough to watch (hah hah) so I went fishing for more. The other side of the pond provided me with a crime procedural cum fantasy come superhero (Stan Lee's....). But no, not a superhero story in the least; they should have paid the man to strip his name off the top. Basically a London cop ends up with a bracelet letting him manipulate chance in his favour. But with consequences.

I loved  this show, but I admit having more than a passing fondness for British procedurals, while also needing a break from the abundance of really dark ones. Given this has a genre element, it was a that much above the rest. James Nesbitt (who we most recently saw as a hobbit with a funny hat) is DI Harry Clayton, a gambling addict cop but a good man at heart -- that's a key point. Sienna Guillory, doing a much much better acting job than in Resident Evil: Apocalypse, slaps a magic bracelet on him, in a bid to have it go to someone who won't ruin other people's lives for their own good fortune. And Harry gets dragged into a conspiracy that wants to own and control fate.

Con Man S1, 2015, Vimeo -- download

OK, Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk in a web comedy about a star of a short lived scifi TV series (*ahem*) who has fallen so far, as to only do the con(vention) circuit. Yeah, its a thinly veiled reference, semi-autobiographical of the guy who didn't do anything after his cult TV show was cancelled. Not Alan Tudyk, of course, as he has kept on acting and acting, most recently the voice of K-2SO in Rogue One. But really, its him. But is not.

These are web bits, 15 minutes or so for each episode with a TON of cameos and appearances by his friends and fellow genre actors. Most of it is odd ball and gimmicky, but there is a "season arc" there, as he tries to reconnect with the fantabulously successful star of the series (Nathan Fillion), and find real work.

What makes this series work is that it is both a mockery of fans and actors in cult scifi, and also a very real ode to them. Personally, I never had much patience for the con crowd, the great unwashed of obsessed fandom. Yeah yeah, a little bit of over-generalizing but you know what I mean. Felicia Day stars as an extreme example of them, a seriously deranged fan (has an ability to always be dressed exactly like Wray Nerely [Tudyk]) full of poop jokes. But really, the worst of the worst are the talent, from Nerely's weird agent Bobbie, Sean Astin (as himself) who has no issue taking his fans for all their worth, Nolan North (video game voice actor) as The MoCap King, and so on...

The season works for the most part, though a few bits strain to escape from sketch copy realms. Of course, Tudyk, as a not completely likeable but at least understandable Hollywood actor, is great.

Web2Movie: BSG & Halo 4

I have an odd relationship with webisodes. I appreciate them as a medium but have not really explored them as a viable outlet. I may have been tainted by some early attempts at web TV when people were producing low(er) budget specfic TV in short bursts in the early 2000s. These pioneers were seeing what you could do with a small budget, limited locale supported by a lot of CGI and PC generated backgrounds. But the plots were scant and oh so focused on introspection. They did do one thing though --- set the precedent of micro-length episodes, usually less than 10 minutes.

As supporting material, perhaps additional content for an existing show, they worked, but for new stories they were less successful. How do you keep an ongoing narrative alive if it keeps on pausing every 10 minutes... and waiting a week? And then there was the required shooting style, assuming that people will most often watch on small screens, from PC monitors to laptop screens all the way down to mobile devices. The change of focus was both the interesting choice and the detractor.  Early attempts were distracting at best?

The smaller format must influence a director or perhaps I should say should ? We can only see so much on a smaller screen, and much in the way TV is done differently than cinema, I hope a different tactic is chosen. So far, other than in those early weak attempts where the episodes were dominated by closeups of faces and very clean, empty wide shots, I have not seen it exhibited. Perhaps widescreen TVs as portals for web content has become ubiquitous? I doubt such. As we have seen, wide release (promoted) webisodes are shot like TV if perhaps with a bit more CGI but since a lot of specfic TV already makes use of that, we cannot tell much of a difference.

So, to followup Battlestar Galactica, the re-envisioned series that ended a few years ago, we got Blood & Chrome.  Technically we got Caprica as the followup but that was a straight-up TV series, where we are told the origin story of the cylons themselves, from advanced service robot to self-aware sentient.  We are also introduced to a young Bill Adama and his connection with events. In Blood & Chrome we are given the Cylon War and Adama is brought back as the cocky viper pilot, again caught up in more than he should.

The first thing I noticed is the high quality of the CGI and backgrounds, but given the backing behind this series and the already available source material, its not that surprising. Again there is a wide variety of familiar Canadian actors including my favourite stand-by, Ty Olsson, which is amusing unto itself considering he had a recurring role as a different character on the main series. But there is weight here, a momentum that carries the short choppy episodes forward.  Skilled people do help things.

The story is one long establishing scene for the milieu that is BSG, answering questions such as what was the first war like? What did the first Cylon centurions look like in the re-imagined world?  What made Adama so famous before he even became a battlestar commander? As well, we get the fan service of seeing old style vipers and raiders in the new CGI supported combat. Its all a nice re-visit to a familiar world. And, as expected, we get a few more blanks filled in about how the Cylons went from awakened robots to the humanoid bodies that like to seduce men.  Its a decent story, gritty and compelling but really just a nod and a wink for fans.

Speaking of nodding & winking, that is all that Forward Unto Dawn is. As the milieu that establishes the Halo world is almost entirely focused on Master Chief, any expansion of the story has to be separated from him but eventually connected. So, instead of his back story or anything that could be milked officially in the actual games, we get a predecessor to the whole Covenant war.  Please note, forgive me any inaccuracies because, while I have played most of the games I am not all that steeped in the world that is Master Chief's. This one is set just before the true war begins, on a training planet, a place where cadets are being taught to fight in a war against a rebellious group of human insurrectionists.  There are no aliens in their world... yet.

This is also from the production valued people that did the above, the group of specfic actors and production people in Vancouver that produce so much of the "Canadian style" of speculative fiction TV. In fact, Ty Olsson is back in a cameo as the older version of our main character Lasky. Lasky is the odd duck among a squad of capable cadets, he brings them down with his attitude and refusal to follow standard orders, believing in his own capability more than his learning. He is mostly wrong but events teach him. The story carries the cadets through training and personal interaction until the planet is attacked by Covenant forces. Its a bit Starship Troopers and a bit Ender's Game.

The story really shines in its production values, using well design sets, interiors and makes use of the familiar forests of BC. But it really gets to be enjoyable when the invasion happens, changing from annoying CW squabbling teenagers to a true life and death situation. There is one scene, where something important is destroyed and the dead fall, that is utterly chilling and really cements that what is happening to the cadets is real.  Then Master Chief shows up and saves the remaining cadets.

There is no spin off show here, no attempt to bring Halo to the small screen. This is a small story set somewhere between a proper TV series and a stand alone web series. It works as a small budget movie and really only would appeal to someone with a passing knowledge of the game. The nod & wink is required. Still, it did lay the ground work for actually exploring the universe of Halo in a proper series. It established it could be done even if the cinema released film died in its infancy.

What I [Graig] Am Watching: Mockingbird Lane/Hemlock Grove/Black Dynamite/TableTop/NHL Playoffs

Having shied away from news and rumours sites for the better part of two years, I was completely unaware that Brian Fuller was retooling the Munsters for a modern era.  The Pilot for Mockingbird Lane hit television sets just before Halloween in 2012, though NBC had already passed on taking it to series. which is too bad.  It wasn't a ratings phenom, but it did well, and it was well received.  I missed it, of course, but in the digital age, the only way you can miss something is by not looking for it.

Fuller's morbid sense of humour, which was used sparingly in Dead Like Me and took a rather twee spin in Pushing Daisies here is as broad and lively as can be.  The pilot is occasionally surprising and just as occasionally clever in its use of humour, and sometimes it's just outright cheeky, shamelessly so.  Even the tired riffs on monster cliches (not all that dissimilar to Hotel Transylvania) are so earnestly projected that they come off as charming rather than groan-inducing.   There's very little of the gothic sensibilities of The Addams Family, instead it applies a modern spin on a retro-'60's aesthetic, and Fuller's usual bright and glossy production values keep the show cheery and playful.

The cast is remarkably solid.  Jerry O'Connell made for a solid father figure as Herman, more of a normal-looking patchwork man (assembled of various parts) than a Boris Karloff Frankenstein.  Portia di Rossi as Lili gets vamp it up and look absolutely amazing doing so.  As a vampire she looks ageless, and her wardrobe is incredible.  Mason Cook is incredibly natural as Eddie, who, in the pilot, is unaware that he's the warewolf that terrorized his scout troop.  British actress Charity Wakefield plays the "oddball" of the Munsters, since she's, by all appearances and attitudes, normal.  Finally there's Eddie Izzard made up to look like Paul Williams as Grandpa, a centuries old vampire who doesn't feel that he should have to hide his true nature from anyone.  

It's a great ensemble with good chemisty, and it's unfortunate that this pilot is all we will see of them in these roles (I wonder if NBC would consider annual Halloween or seasonal TV movies? Networks don't do TV movies anymore).  But if I had to choose between Mockingbird Lane and Fuller's latest show, I'm glad Hannibal went to series. But I also have to wonder why more pilots don't make the light of day like this... surely the networks could fill their dead zone (say Friday @ 10:00 with a weekly "Pilot series" showing nothing but pilot episodes they bought but elected not to take to series.

In a just world, we would have seen 13 episodes of Mockingbird Lane on something like Netflix (13 episodes would have been a satisfying amount) but instead we get Hemlock Grove, which is not all that dissimilar to Mockingbird Lane (both even open with werewolf attacks, but this one opts for cliche and gore instead of originality), except it takes itself far, far too seriously. Hemlock Grove is like a Bizarro World/cracked-mirror version of Mockingbird Lane, where instead of being a comedy it's trying to be... I dunno, dramatic maybe?  A mystery?  Scary?  Odd?  Whatever it's trying to be it's just, frankly, painful.  It's garbage television, except it isn't television, it's a Netflix original (in the structure and style of television).

It's trash.  But if people in droves watch terrible programming like the Kardashians or horror shows starring Adam Levine then they will surely eat this crap up. It's so poorly made: terribly structured, awfully acted, shoddily visualized and it's sold as some new landmark of serialized horror (primarily by treading heavily producer Eli Roth's name) but then it doesn't have much to compete with (American Horror Story... ugh) ... except Hannibal which makes it look downright shameful.  (You getting the sense that I like Hannibal.  Because I do.  Like Hannibal.)

The first episode of Hemlock Grove opens up with a sexual rendez-vous in a sporty little car, complete with topless nudity, indicating that it will be "that kind of show", you know, the "adult" kind, except there's nothing mature about the show.  It's hammy at the best of times, with Famke Jansson finding the top within seconds and hurdling well above it.  She seems to be in her own world, turning in a performance that seems to be largely for her own amusement.  Dougray Scott, on the other hand, couldn't appear more bored with his role, the ever present look of "what am I doing here?" in his eyes.

I can't even begin to attempt to explain what the story is, since the show does a lousy job of doing so itself in its first two episodes.  The creators don't present a world for the viewer to invest in easily, they don't set out any rules and they don't provide any clarity on just exactly what type of supernatural is happening in this show and who in this cruddy town actually knows about it.  That would be all well and good if it were a mystery worth revealing, but we're thrust into the fray like we should know what it's all about, and they give us very little reason to care.  Gypsys and mutants and werewolves, and probably some other supernatural crap... and here it's really treated as crap.

I'm trying to decide if it's so bad it's entertaining, or if it's just bad.  I'm leaning far more towards the latter, but I'm certain most who become fans of the show will delight in it in the former.  I'm curious who will enjoy this in earnest, because it's a bewildering possibility.

From TV downloads to Netflix to Android/iPod apps, there's a multitude of ways to get one's entertainment than from the television itself, even though television would be my preferred method of delivery.  The unfortunate thing about television, though, its you can't always get what you want when you wanted.  It is becoming more flexible, but not flexible enough for my liking.  What's more, distribution rights and regional restrictions frequently make it very difficult to watch the things you otherwise only hear about.

The 2009 motion picture Black Dynamite is, perhaps, my favourite movie of the past dozen years.  It's an on-point homage to Blaxploitation films, satirizing their low production values and sometimes less than professional acting, while at the same time embracing the extreme zaniness that low-budget action films frequently diverged into.  Most of all, it's incredibly funny, conceptually and in execution, in script, in action and in performance.  Everything clicks, everyone involved is in sync and seem to know what is being achieved.  It was an instant underground success, transcending cult, instead becoming pop-cult.  That it branched out into comics, weird web vignettes and animation oddly seemed natural, but I worried that the film was lightning in a bottle, unable to be recaptured twice.

The Adult Swim animated cartoon was announced shortly after the film was released and over the subsequent years I would see the odd article in a magazine or on-line about it's progress, occasionally seeing some test footage, and finally a preview prior to its release on Cartoon Network in 2012.  But, here, in Canada, we don't get the Cartoon Network, which means we don't get Adult Swim, which means we don't get some of the edgiest and wildest television comedy being made.  We have channels here that filter some of it in... Eaglehart, NTSF:SD:SUV::, Delocated, Superjail and the like have made it here, though definitely not at the same time as their airing in the US and definitely not repeated with the same frequency.  And no Black Dynamite as of yet.

But there is an app for that.  A very flaky Adult Swim app which has only five "pages" to look at which are switched out weekly, offering clips and "premium" videos (for US cable subscribers) and on occasion "5 FULL EPISODES" of some of their series like Children's Hospital or Loiter Squad. It's all welcome, but it was when Black Dynamite showed on the App that I did a little happy dance.  The happy dance was short lived though, as the (as mentioned) flaky app for some reason couldn't make it past the commercial that preceded the episode it was trying to show.   Finally, 6 days later, a Saturday if I recall, it was working, if only sporadically (it would crash every so often).  I managed to watch 2 full episodes and 2/3 of two other episodes before the App switched out its offerings later that day, and it was glorious.

The animated series is its own beast, treading in Blacksploitation tropes once more, but going well beyond that into ridiculous high-adventure, ala The Venture Brothers.  It's beautifully animated, perhaps the best going right now, capturing it's day-glo 1970's atmosphere with wondrous effect, and it's damn funny.  A handful of characters from the film are back and they're so on-model with their cinematic portrayal (with the actors reprising their roles), that it's a reminder of just how cartoony and silly the characters were to begin with.  The animated Black Dynamite takes its actions to the extreme, is rife with sexuality, drug use, swearing, and all those things those warnings before TV shows always promise you but rarely deliver.  It's also rife with pop-culture, the first episode I watched hinged around Black Dynamite taking out Mr. T who's still fighting a one-man-war in Viet Nam a few years after the war ended.  Another had Black Dynamite being chased by the IRS for not paying his taxes, and taking a security detail job protecting Richard Pryor.  It's everything I wanted from the Black Dynamite and so much more... all I could ask for is more of it (second season is coming, but that's not what I mean... where's the DVDs?)

And finally, there's YouTube original programming, by way of their partner channels, all of which seems to be the anti-television.  The only obvious restriction for YouTube seems to be overt nudity and pornographic sex.  It's a different beast to create quality programming for YouTube due to budget limitations, so programmers get creative and they get very niche.  Often YouTube channels come out of the "cult of personality" model, where one prominent celebrity (or ce-web-rity) anchors the entire lineup, and the other shows hope for spillover.

TableTop comes from Felicia Day's Geek and Sundry channel, created by Day (who made her name with the impeccable gamer comedy The Guild, the preeminent web-serial success story) and Wil Wheaton (ex of Star Trek The Next Generation, having rebuilt his name as geek icon over the past decade or so), taking the form of "celebrity game show" in a manner of speaking but instead of having one game to play, Wheaton and his guests play a different board game each week.

It's a show for anyone at all into board games, even if you haven't heard of the game in question.  Wheaton and his production crew do a remarkable job of explaining the game mechanics as well as booking a group of players (pulling notable personalities from comedy, acting, web, and gaming circles) who are enticed participants (if not keen gamers themselves).  I frequently use the show as shorthand for understanding the rules to a new game when playing with friends (I'm a terrible reader so instructional web videos are very helpful) and it works well in most cases.  Every episode isn't always great, sometimes the game doesn't interest me, or the guests don't gel together in the spirit of gameplay, but it bats about 90% winning ratio and Wheaton is a fun, competitive, but also helpful host, out to win but also to ensure everyone has a good time.  The only thing better would be playing one's self.

The latest episode sees Felicia Day and three other actresses back (for a 3rd time I think?), playing Resistance (a spy game in which two of the 5 players are anonymously trying to stymie the others), and it winds up being a rollicking good time.  It's in many ways like watching poker, only with the people involved far more lively and engaging one another with an eye towards being entertaining for the viewer.  While it may seem that one or two players have the spies in their midst all figured out, and that the spies have tells that are giving them away, by the end nobody is sure of anything.  This is easily the most enjoyable episode of TableTop, but I might be biased towards "Team Ginger" (I want a T-shirt!)



Oh, and I'm watching NHL Playoffs... without getting too deep, let's go with predictions:

EAST
Pittsburgh Penguins - New York Islanders => Pens in 4
Montreal Canadiens - Ottawa Senators => Sens in 7
Washington Capitals - New York Rangers => Caps in 6
Boston Bruins - Toronto Maple Leafs => Bruins in 6

WEST
Chicago Blackhawks - Minnesota Wild => Hawks in 5
Anaheim Ducks - Detroit Red Wings => Ducks in 7
Vancouver Canucks - San Jose Sharks => Canucks in 7
St. Louis Blues - LA Kings => Blues in 5

3 shrt pgrphs: Burning Love

2012 - Yahoo! Screen

It amuses me to think that there might be, somewhere, a group of people who mistake this easy, yet hilarious riff on The Bachelor and its ilk as, well, earnest somehow.  Of course it's satire status should be evident to most when Ben Stiller appears early in the first episode.  Reality TV is such an easy target to mock, because it is, at its core, absurd in its "reality".

For a TV show or movie or comic book or web series to ape reality TV for laughs or a quick premise threatens to be overplayed, but there's still room for fun, if not exactly fresh parodies to break through. Featuring a who's who (and "who's that!") of B-list celebrities, (but A-list comedic actors) like Michael Ian Black, Janet Varney, Natasha Leggaro, Malin Akerman, Ken Marino, Carla Gallo, Ken Jeong, Kristen Bell, and many many more, Burning Love could easily coast on its easy set-up and gifted improvisational actors, but it replicates the Bachelor so faithfully that it manages to continuously be funny by underplaying the absurdity of reality-TV dating as much as it overplays it.

Each episode is a tightly packed 8 minutes, across  14 episodes, which makes you think that if the Bachelor were equally condensed into a movie run-time and smartly edited it would be just as funny, though unintentionally so.  The series is breezy, not overstaying its welcome, with comedy always being center focus.  Every actor brings it, reigning in their performances and playing it as straight as possible in spite of their broad and ridiculous personalities.  It's a quick, fun ride which fans of comedy will enjoy but actual viewers of reality TV may get even more out of it.

3 short paragraphs: Backwash

2010, Danny Leiner - Netflix

It's quite remarkable the amount of original product there is available on the web, and not just shit youtube videos of teenagers practicing their backyard wrestling moves, or 50-year-old casino owners trying their hand at rap videos, but honest to god talented individuals putting a lot of time and effort into creative endeavours for very little money. From Crackle comes Backwash, the brainchild of actor/Aaron Sorkin regular Josh Malina, and directed by Harold and Kumar's Danny Leiner.

It's a 13-part series (currently available on youtube in piecemeal (for Americans only) or on Netflix (for Canadians) as a 90-minute feature that attempts to revive post-Vaudevillian the Marx Brother's style of verbal witticism (and its cadence) alongside the Three Stooges-style of physical comedy. Malina is the Groucho stand-in, Michael Panes taking on the dull-witted, clumsy Curly-type, and Michael Ian Black rounding out the trio with a knowingly over-the-top flamboyance. The three are on the lamb after they perpetrate an accidental bank robbery, so it's a total road trip scenario. Loaded with absurdity and fast, wry patter it's generally amusing, but it's perpetrating a style of comedy I've never taken to.

Each of the thirteen acts is bookended by a minor celebrity intro/outro, Masterpiece Theatre style. John Hamm, Sara Silverman, John Cho, Michael Vartan, amongst others, actually provide the highlight for the series, generally acting as if they're cashing in a favour and subverting the series itself. Though generally entertaining, like a most web series (or most TV shows in general) it's forgettable.