Revelry and Review

Today I turned 33. Happy birthday to me! I've been absent for a few days so I thought that I would pick up where I left off and continue with pictoral exposition of my family life - then decided against it and just uploaded this image instead. This is a scaled version of a painting I did as a present for the wedding of one of my best friends: Barry Hoffman.

Barry and I are involved in making an MMO called "The Chronicles of Spellborn", and have been best friends ever since high school. He recently got married and this painting, which is actually 70 centimeters high, was my present to him. Just like me he is an avid fan of the fantasy genre, and he thinks wizards are cool, (when they're not sporting white beards - with the exception of Sir Ian) so it was a no brainer. Besides, Barry is a highly-skilled marketing genius, so the analogy is strangely fitting - though I've never actually seen Barry entering a meeting with distributors or publishers in that way. Usually it's the other way round.

As my colleagues over at Spellborn will tell you, I am a very lazy artist, so this piece took me a while, but I am satisfied with the end result and Barry was extremely happy with it. His new wife, the alluring Louise Witteman, was very nice and said that he could hang it up in the living room, but somehow I don't see that happening. It would just ruin the feng shui they've got going on in there and I would hate to be the cause of an ill-fated and short-lived marriage. All marriages I know in which the male collaborator put up a fantasy poster in the living room have ended in divorce. I think there is a connection there and a mysterious warning from forces beyond the veil.

Barry said that he wanted the wizard in the painting on his business cards. So if you're in the entertainment industry and someone hands you a card with a wizard on it; you might be in the presence of the illustrious Mr. Hoffman.

Hostel
I saw this movie a few days ago on DVD. Written and Directed by Eli Roth of Cabin Fever fame, this movie has some of the best gore I have seen in a movie in a long time. It is served straight-up, it's not played for laughs, and some of the scenes are quite terrifying. This movie belongs to the Takashi Miike school of ultra violent horror - and the grandmaster has a short cameo in the movie himself.

The first time when I watched it, I was kind of disappointed. I thought that it was just a mediocre movie storywise. The gore was very cool, the nudity in the movie was old-school cheese, (of the type that's supposed to contrast death with life - if you consider naked tits the representative icon for that) a plot element nonetheless, but I didn't understood what the movie was about until it was much too late. Besides that, Marianne gets all wriggly when we're watching a horror movie that's just all about violence and gore (she likes horror movies that are more cerebral and less visual), so then I don't feel comfortable as well. I watched the movie in a somewhat confused state. Marianne said, "This just plain sucked!" when we turned it off, and I kind of agreed with her.

I watched it alone a day later, basically because I noticed that there were four commentary tracks included on the DVD. I have a habit of always listening to these once, (especially with horror movies) even though I don't aspire to be a film maker (someone once told me that only aspiring film makers review the movie with the commentary track on). I just like the anecdotes and humor that good commentary tracks feature, and the insight they provide in the various ways the makers wanted to tell their story, and so on. Watching "Hostel" with commentaries by executive producers Scott Spiegel (Spiderman 2, Evil Dead 1+2) and Quentin Tarrantino and the director himself made the movie much more clearer to me and I actually enjoyed the story more. I took notice of little details I missed earlier and generally enjoyed the passion that Spiegel, Tarrantino and Roth displayed for the horror genre.

If you like your horror movies to be ultra-violent, then this is one to watch.