Great Scott! Babbling About BTTF

For some reason I feel as if I've been writing these blog posts as if they've been assignments for school. A few of them seem really dry and stale to me, and I'm sure that I could explain myself better if I just kind of... well, relax. I shouldn't be focusing on whether or not the writing's good. I mean, this blog is supposed to be for myself (but then again I'm my own worst critic).

That said, I just found out that Telltale is making a new Back To The Future video game, and I must let out my emotions in my own special way:

OH MY GOD ARE YOU FOR REALS YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS THIS IS GOING TO BE SO SUPER KILLER AWESOME AND CHRISTOPHER LLOYD IS IN IT AND SOME OTHER DUDE IS IN IT PRETENDING TO BE MARTY AND HE ACTUALLY SOUNDS LIKE MARTY AND OH GOD WE'RE GOING TO GO BACK IN TIME AND BACK TO THE FUTURE SIX MONTHS AFTER THE THIRD MOVIE I MEAN I JUST I HOPE THAT CLARA IS NOT IN IT SHE ANNOYS ME TO NO END BUT ANYWAY BACK TO THE FUTURE GAME ARRRRRRGH THIS IS GREAT I AM ECSTATIC!!!

Ahem.

As if you couldn't tell, Back To The Future is one of my all-time favorite movies. It completely encapsulates the feelings I get when I think about my childhood, particularly the scene in the first movie where Marty and Doc first test out the time travel DeLorean at Twin Pines/Lone Pine Mall (minus the whole Doc getting chased and gunned down by terrorists bit). Although, and I don't know if I'm the only one who thinks this way, out of all three of the BTTF movies, my favorite is the second. I love seeing how the future and the past are changed throughout the first film (and how, every time I see the movie, I find a tiny detail about these changes that I missed the first time around) but the second one is just filled with so many more. And I'm kicking myself now because I completely forgot to bring the movie with me to Chicago (but I have the first and third ones, what's up with that?!) and I wanted to make some screencaps and list some of the things that I absolutely love about the film.

Luckily, this is the Internet. And on the Internet, you can get anything.

Well, the first thing that I can say is that... oh Lord, I actually used to hate this movie with a passion. I hated it just as much as I did the third movie. But the thing was, I had never seen it in it's entirety: I had just seen the first half hour or so when Doc, Marty, and Jennifer go into the future. After seeing the film entirely, the segment is still pretty corny what with all of it's wild assumptions about what 2015 will be like (example: I cried pained tears when the 3D Jaws tried to eat Marty and he flipped out... how could that look real to anyone with working vision?) and Michael J. Fox playing fifty billion copies of himself (one in drag, even, pahahaha) but it has to be there because 1) it was already set up at the end of the first movie, and 2) it sets up the rest of the awesome, awesome plot...

MARTY'S HORRIFYING ALTERNATE UNIVERSE!

"Bikers everywhere, Strickland has a gun, and I don't have a room anymore?! AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!"

Personally, I would think that ruining the possibility of my existence would be less scary than actually having to exist in a horrifying world where my mother is married to Biff Tannen. Even worse would be finding out that Biff murdered my dad and that my best friend was committed to a mental institution and that I had just left my sleeping girlfriend on some stranger's porch in a dangerous neighborhood (but I always find it hilarious that this is actually one of the least of Marty's worries... oh that McFly). When Marty gets hit with the realization that his future is all screwed up (not knowing how it could have happened), it's the darkest part of the entire trilogy and leads up to one of my favorite scenes.

Everything's bleak, everything's dreary... from what I remember, it's raining outside, and Doc and Marty (and Einstein if he can even comprehend what's going on) are the only two people in this specific timeline— the entire world —to realize that things are not going as they should be. The worst part is that they don't even know why it's happening. Well, Marty doesn't understand why, at least. It's a hopeless situation where your throat just plummets into your stomach and any way to resolve what has happened is just thrown out the window. This isn't a matter of getting your parents back together by having them kiss at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance... this is a matter of having to go back through the entire fabric of time and figure out just what the hell happened.

But luckily, Doc is not only a scientist, but a master detective, and is gonna learn ol' Marty a thing or two.

Doc explains everything that's going on to Marty... summarized, Marty messed everything up and has to fix it. Future Biff took Marty's sports almanac, stole the DeLorean, gave it to his younger self in the past, and used it to win millions, which led to everyone Marty loves in 1985 suddenly leading terrible existences and/or being dead. Marty's got to go have a showdown with Biff and find out if he still has it so he and Doc can go back AGAIN in time and stop Biff from giving Biff's almanac to Biff.

It makes total sense.

So our hero confronts the villain cowboy-style (both a symbol of his perceived advantage over Biff and foreshadowing to what will happen in BTTF III see this is why this trilogy is great so much foreshadowing and clues hey I'm starting to nerd out here ehehehehehe) . Marty is obviously pretty cocky on arrival, but of course, once he's alone with Biff in his office...

Meep.

Oh, how the tables have turned! Marty's bigger-than-the-entire-frame stance is now substituted for a now tiny, tiny presence. McFly obviously does not know how he's going to get out of this one.

Eventually Biff flips out, having revealed the secret of his riches, and tries to kill Marty the same way he killed Crispi— I mean, George. There's a short chase up to the rooftop where they finally have a short altercation before Marty fakes Biff out and jumps off of his stepdad's casino...

...only to appear a short time later on the DeLorean, once again looming triumphant above Biff. He smashes Biff's face in with the DeLorean door for good measure, and proceeds to zip off with Doc to 1955.

After that, it's fun and laughs in the 50s, revisiting the dance and snagging the almanac back from Biff. But, honestly, it should have ended right then and there. What's so good about the second movie is that, instead of constructing an entirely new setting/time period for Doc and Marty to travel to, as an audience we get to relive our favorite parts from the first movie and revisit all of the characters. In the third movie, we have all sorts of new characters thrown at us and, while they are descendants of Marty and Biff... honestly, why should we as an audience care about them? There's already a pre-constructed universe that our heroes live in, and if you've already spent the second movie building upon the first, why would you just ditch that and go into a completely alien world with people that the audience doesn't relate to (example: Doc was never described/hinted to being lonely or wanting to fall in love, nor do I think anyone cared to explore that, so what in the world was the purpose of Clara?)? I'm not completely knocking the film, because there are some really good parts (a time-traveling train isn't nearly as cool as a DeLorean, but it still works out fine) but BTTF II, as a sequel, worked a whole lot better.

And after typing ALL of that out and nerding out to the point where now I'm kind of embarrassed to post this, I can say that... this is exactly why I'm so excited about the video game. Hopefully it isn't exactly like the third movie where new worlds are completely created that we can't become familiar with. If the entire plot is expertly wound together where everything can be linked together in a way where a player can actually feel the character's fear/excitement/despair/whatever... it should definitely be successful. And I'll be so super stoked.

Hannibal Dinner Scene Part 1

Hannibal Lecter is one of my all-time favorite movie/book characters, so naturally Hannibal is one of my favorite films. Of course, there are small bits here and there that I dislike (namely Clarice not being Jodie Foster and that the ending of the film got dramatically changed) but that's alright. It's still a pretty great film. And one of the greatest scenes in said film is the penultimate dinner party between Hannibal, Paul Krendler, and Agent Starling.

Oh, also, obvious spoilers ahead in this simple scene composition dissection (haha, you see what I did there?). And if you have a very weak stomach... proceed with caution. It gets a little gory.

"Oh, hello, Clarice. I was just making some delicious snacks with my good buddy, Paul! Come and nosh with us, dear!"

During the beginning of the scene there're a lot of jittery, swoopy camera moves following Clarice (no doubt because she's just been knocked out with a generous dosage of morphine and is just starting to get out of her drug-induced stupor). We, along with Clarice, don't exactly know what's going on with Paul and Hannibal eating dinner together, so as the camera gets less loopy, we start getting a little bit more grounded, trying to regain a clear sense of thought as we begin to scrutinize the scene displayed before us.

Hannibal is on the far left, towering over Paul who is in the far right bottom corner. What does this communicate to us? Hannibal's obviously got the upper hand here and is lording his power over Paul, now childlike and helpless in his extremely drugged-up state.

Framing! Clarice and Paul are equally set up in each of these cuts through the use of candles, the lamp (in Paul's case) and the edge of the doorway (in Clarice's case). It's a lot easier to focus on the two of them during the scene with a sort of imaginary box surrounding their bodies. Plus, with each cut, and if we laid the two pictures over each other, they're facing each other as in a conversation: Paul on the left, Clarice on the right.

There's a diamond pattern going on here in this scene, between Paul and Clarice who are both pretty much helpless against Hannibal at the moment, whose head is at the top of the diamond, and right now he's the one who is in charge of this scene. At the bottom point of the diamond is the snowglobe, Clarice's weapon of choice when she first tried to defend herself against Hannibal. Of course, that didn't work out as planned, so this is, in a sense, visually telling us that weapons aren't going to be much use at the moment. Clarice is stuck for now, and we're trapped as well, about to witness what horrible, unimaginable thing Hannibal has done now.

...hahaha, I just love Paul's face here.

More of Hannibal asserting himself as the dominant villain here...

...and ta da! The moment of truth! I can only imagine what's going on in Clarice's mind at that moment, and of course... well, this whole time we've been projecting ourselves onto Clarice. We don't need to completely see what's going on on her face to realize that she's horrified. I mean, we're horrified! As Hannibal frames Clarice's/our face as he lifts off the top portion of Paul's skull...

...things get dark. VERY dark. Our entire attention is focused on that delicious looking brain of Krendler's. Hannibal is still towering over him, his face light and illuminated (albeit somewhat shadowy under his brow), but look at Paul: his face is pretty dark and the light is just being reflected on where the top of his brain is and makes it the center of attention even more so.

And finally, we get to see Clarice's reaction. Her skin is SUPER pale now, shadowy and low lit, nothing behind her. Empty. And of course, I'm sure she feels completely empty inside, too. No matter how much of a jerk Paul was, she doesn't believe for a moment he deserves it (and depending on your feelings, you may feel the same exact way towards his character). But, again, the shot reinforces the emotion.

I'll stop here for now, and hopefully I can get through the rest of the scene later. I'll leave you pining for some scrumptious Paul-brains until next time.

Alien and Aliens Composition

Compositions from various still frames taken from Alien and Aliens. I have an extremely crappy version of Alien, but I (and I guess you, if you're interested) can still get a sense of placement and color from the film regardless of quality.

I really don't have that much to say about each one, but they're all equally interesting. The color in these is just awesome, which actually kind of makes me want to do a color study of the entire movie. If I get a chance in the future, I might pick a scene and just go over the entire thing (and of course there are a couple that just scream to be studied and nitpicked over).