Just the Ticket #46: Columbus Circle-Jerk
I haven't posted much lately on account of resuming work on my Kyo Kusanagi character for MUGEN. He's about as done as I want to get him right now. The rest is just bells and whistles I think. Anyone who wants to test him out can download him here. Just unzip him into the mugen/chars folder and add his name (Kyo-AS) to the mugen/data/select.def file and he's ready to play.
As I'm writing this, I'm getting messages from one of my testers saying to update his sounds so it feels more like a King Of Fighters XIII-style Kyo. Will do, if I can find all the sounds I need. Until then, like I said, he's done.
On to today's edition of Just the Ticket, where I'll finally review a film that has me using the term "Circle-Jerk" in the most endearing sense possible: Columbus Circle, starring Selma Blair (Hellboy, reviewed here), Amy Smart (Crank), Jason Lee (My Name Is Earl), Giovanni Ribisi (Flight Of the Phoenix, reviewed here), Kevin Pollak (The Whole Ten Yards, reviewed here), and Beau Bridges (The Descendants).
A woman (Blair) suffering from agoraphobia is trying to purchase the apartment across the hall from her where an elderly woman was recently murdered. But a new couple (Lee and Smart) move in to the apartment, not only putting a hitch in her plans for a quieter existence, but testing the limits of her phobia as periodic glances through her peephole reveal the couple's dark history of domestic violence, forcing her to intervene on several occasions.
In summary, it sounds like a low-budget, short-distance take on Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. But on such a small budget, Columbus Circle takes the crippled-snoop-with-a-cause premise to another level, giving even the most tokenized characters (Pollak's apartment concierge, Ribisi's detective--who is credited on wikipedia as merely "a detective"--and Bridges' doctor-to-the-stars) sufficient justification for being included in this small Circle of friends and foes, and wrapping it up so smartly and tightly that for all of Columbus Circle's little intricacies and coincidences, I didn't feel like I missed anything, unlike some of the Lifetime Original Mindfuckeries I have sat through this past week.
It did seem like the token characters were just simple levers to make the plot move forward, but the plot holes (if there were any, I don't recall them) were so masterfully plugged and said levers were used with such intelligence for a production of this scale that it didn't really matter who mattered.
B
A new week in movies starts tomorrow, hopefully including a review of Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows. Stay tuned. Your readership matters.
As I'm writing this, I'm getting messages from one of my testers saying to update his sounds so it feels more like a King Of Fighters XIII-style Kyo. Will do, if I can find all the sounds I need. Until then, like I said, he's done.
A woman (Blair) suffering from agoraphobia is trying to purchase the apartment across the hall from her where an elderly woman was recently murdered. But a new couple (Lee and Smart) move in to the apartment, not only putting a hitch in her plans for a quieter existence, but testing the limits of her phobia as periodic glances through her peephole reveal the couple's dark history of domestic violence, forcing her to intervene on several occasions.
In summary, it sounds like a low-budget, short-distance take on Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. But on such a small budget, Columbus Circle takes the crippled-snoop-with-a-cause premise to another level, giving even the most tokenized characters (Pollak's apartment concierge, Ribisi's detective--who is credited on wikipedia as merely "a detective"--and Bridges' doctor-to-the-stars) sufficient justification for being included in this small Circle of friends and foes, and wrapping it up so smartly and tightly that for all of Columbus Circle's little intricacies and coincidences, I didn't feel like I missed anything, unlike some of the Lifetime Original Mindfuckeries I have sat through this past week.
It did seem like the token characters were just simple levers to make the plot move forward, but the plot holes (if there were any, I don't recall them) were so masterfully plugged and said levers were used with such intelligence for a production of this scale that it didn't really matter who mattered.
B
A new week in movies starts tomorrow, hopefully including a review of Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows. Stay tuned. Your readership matters.
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