Shocker headline: Garfield made funny!
Some people have discovered a method for doing what has been thought to be impossible fordecades: making Garfield funny. It involves an ingenious, apparently foolproof method of simply removing all of Garfield’s thought balloons.
It’s kind of amazing how well this works. It takes a strip that has always been flat, tasteless and embarrassing and fills it with tension, sadness and mordant humor. It’s easy, fun and much less time-consuming than placing the panels in a random order.
Okay, God, let’s have it out. You and me.
I gotta say, you’ve done some pretty weird shit in your life, but there are limits, okay? Katrina, I can’t figure that one out — what was the point of that? And then the Southern California wildfires. And the tsunami. And the droughts.
I get it, I get it — you work in mysterious ways. I’ve been paying attention, I get it.
But, please, give me a clue. Help me understand. Why on Earth, in the course of five billion years of our planet’s existence, would you possibly need to take Karlheinz Stockhausen, Ike Turner and — gasp — Dan Fogelberg all in the same week?
Let me try to parse this latest act of bizarreness. You’re up in Heaven, and you say “Hey, you know what we need up here? Some dense, impenetrable German avant-garde music!” So you call Karlheinz and he shows up and you hear the kind of stuff he does and you say “Okay, okay, it’s good, but you know what it needs? It needs a beat, you can’t dance to this stuff, who really knows how to turn a beat down there?” And so you grab Ike Turner and you put these two sounds together. It sounds like it would be super-ugly to me, but what do I know, maybe the clash of high German weirdness and deep American grooves sounded great, but the only thing I can think is that it sounded a little, you know, heavy, what with the postwar anomie and the wife-beating and all that.
That’s the only justification I can see for adding wimpy folk-rocker Dan Freaking Fogelberg to the mix. Have you even heard this guy before? Can you even begin to imagine the world of pain your ears are in for, trying to weld together Stockhausen, Turner and Fogelberg?
And who’s going to be next? Christ, who’s going to have to show up to this jam session to meld together all these sounds? Bassist from Ratt? Yma Sumac? Ornette Coleman?
Star Wars Episode VII
Produced, written and directed by Sam Alcott (6). Edited by Todd Alcott. Performers: Sam Alcott and Todd Alcott.
This movie was created under the strict supervision of Sam. The shot list, scene order and camera placement were all his (with occasional input from me). When you hear me say a line of dialog, I am saying only and exactly what Sam has directed me to say. (In certain cases we had to do several takes of a scene because my voice was not right or I improvised too much with Sam’s dialog.) It was shot entirely on a Sony Cybershot, a digital camera designed to take still photos and short movies.
Sam has picked up the lingo of moviemakingvery quickly. He will ask if we’re rolling and understands the commands “Action,” “Cut” and “Pull back,” and soon I’m sure will be saying things like “Okay, now I want a steady tracking shot along this way, then push in close to here, then we’ll cut to a close-up of the girl’s face reacting.” He has an innate, if incomplete, understanding of cutting techniques and carries the whole movie inside his head. On occasions when I left out a scene I thought was confusing or dragged the narrative, he would see the gap immediately and instruct me to put it back in. As a result, I felt it would be best to insert some titles to help explain the action, which might not be immediately apparent to non-aficionados.
PLOT SYNOPSIS: General Grievous is planning some kind of attack on Kashyyyk. The Clone Army arrive and foil his plans. Grievous sends his troops to fight the clones but they fail (these scenes were not shot). Grievous then attacks the Jedi himself, killing several of them. The Clones then receive “Order 66” from Darth Sidious, which causes them to attack the Jedi. Yoda and Obi-Wan fight the Clones, and Obi-Wan kills General Grievous and wipes out the remainder of his forces. Then, for reasons that elude me, the ending of Episode III is recapitulated.
(I am being disingenuous — I know why the ending of Episode III is recapitulated — it’s Sam’s favorite part of the whole Star Wars saga, specifically the fight between Obi-Wan and Anakin on Mustafar. The mining apparatus and volcanic surface of Mustafar are here represented by a credenza, a chair and a Disney Princess scooter (belonging to Sam’s little sister).
Sam was disappointed with the final cut only because he hadn’t thought his hands would be so visible in the shot. In his mind, the characters moved and acted the way they do in the movies. He instructed me to digitally remove his hands and body from the shots. When I explained that that is possible but cost-prohibitive, he said “But we could scan the movie into Photoshop and erase all the parts we don’t want.” When I told him that that would involve working on literally thousands of individual still frames, he relented. But I think the boy has a future.