The elevation of Comic Con from a niche event for super dorks into a stage for the launch of national products and films, has had one unintended consequence: cosplaying, a staple of all conventions, has become extremely competitive. Costumes for everything from Comic Con to Halloween have become fantastic.

(Images via unrealitymag, wackyowl, nerdblerp)

Turning superheroes into zombie versions of themselves has become more popular in recent years. Above, one can see a Superman who has had better days, and the horrifying visage of Iron Man, whose protective suit clearly wasn’t enough to keep him from being bitten. The same goes for Spider-Man, who you would expect could escape the zombie hordes.

(Images via kidsntheknow, nexgadget, filmschoolrejects)

Iron Man is one of the Marvel favorites, and as such he holds a special place in the heart of costumers. Above, we have examples of a steampunk Iron Man with a more vintage look, followed by a stunningly creative vision of Iron Man as a modern Tin Man, an amazing hybrid with the character from the Wizard of Oz. Lastly, a more traditional Iron Man that would still blow away most costume competitors.

(Images via sanfrancisco, starwarsblog, flavorwire)

Star Wars has now been around long enough to force people to be really creative to stand out from the crowd. Showing disdain for Jar Jar Binks from Episodes 1-3 of the franchise is one way to get a lot of cheers. A female Chewbacca adds an interesting twist to a character who is usually only attempted by extremely tall and large male fans. A troll face stormtrooper is a hilarious mix of meme and traditional fandom.

(Images via laughingsquid, costumediscounters, flavorwire)

The Batman franchise has been reinvigorated with the release of the newest trilogy, and an upsurge of Batman costumes has followed. Above we have an awesome female version of Two-Face, a traditional and very well done Batman and Poison Ivy, and Darth Batman, a hilarious mix between Vader and Batman.

(Images via techrepublic, kidsntheknow)

Disney films may not be as niche as a lot of fan favorites, but the costumes are still incredibly popular. The film Brave already has cosplayers taking on the role of Princess Merida and an incredibly accurate Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.

(Images via geekologie, tankedpodcast, ign, geekologie)

A surprising number of girls like to strut their stuff at comic conventions, turning every conceivable character into something that can show off a little cleavage. Above we have a loose interpretation of the Pikachu Pokemon character, a female Boba Fett from the Star Wars films, a vixen side character from Venture Bros, and a lady version of Kratos from the God of War videogame series.

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July 21st 2012

菊豆 /Ju Dou (1990) by Zhang Yimou

Titling a film by the name of a central character usually means we'll be deeply invested in their psychology and livelihoods, constantly sitting on their shoulders or in their minds throughout the majority of the film. In Zhang Yimou's third feature film, Ju Dou is the third wife of fabric dyer Master Yang, bought as a possession in the 20th century rural China pretext of the story. Already some foreign audiences may be struck by such stark realities and horrified at such backwater conditions, and although such conditions are far from ideal, such underlying cultural traditions are to be cautiously examined by the camera, not polemically attacked.

Zhang Yimou does a fine job as director in illuminating without slipping too far into outright critic, although it's understandably hard to avoid with such content. The long ban imposed on the film in China notwithstanding, Ju Dou is powerful because it brings such a rural universe - abstract even to many Chinese city-dwellers and citizens themselves - closer to us as viewers to experience. The obsession with tradition is omnipresent and all important, especially when gossip among neighbors dictates the social dynamic and maintaining the family line means everything. Such information allows us to see why Master Yang bought multiple wives: his previous two couldn't produce a son for him, and he's counting on Ju Dou to deliver. Maybe he never learned that physical abuse and sexual mistreatment are not ideal circumstances for pregnancy, but he forked out the money for her and thus reigns unchallenged. The Yang household and its fabric dyeing trade only include one another member, the Master's nephew Tianqing. He's diligent and loyal, prompting many in the town to remark that he's "like a son to Yang", only to have the elder man express disappointment at the absence of a true heir and return to beating his wife at night.

Naturally Tianqing is both enchanted and disturbed by the newest member of the household, and as his aunt's audible suffering fills the Yang compound late at night, the young adopted male is seen scurrying through various chambers and diving through haystacks. In the repressed social settings of the rural universe, sexual tension lingers at every turn, and the beginnings of Zhang Yimou's signature cinematographic style clearly start developing in Ju Dou (and certainly build off of his 1987 debut film Red Sorghum). The technicolor properties of the camera allow for great color saturation, and given that Yang's trade the great pools of rich dye colors, drying racks, and wooden apparatus are both subtle and stunning. Not reluctant to rely on visual symbolism, Zhang Yimou does well to pair strong emotional outbursts with the appropriate scenery, effectively using his camera to reinforce passion, energy, and reckless abandon.

Although there are brief optimistic moments, Ju Dou remains a tragic story about the Master's third wife. Zhang Yimou paces his work well to illustrate that husbands come and go and son's are born and grow up, but her suffering and misfortune remain irrevocable. Fate has the final say in everything, and parallels and binary opposites appear frequently to emphasize how a familiar wooden platform or stone table can harbor both love and consummation, and grim suffering several years later. Tianqing both openly celebrates in his uncle's face when discovering Ju Dou's son is his own, then is plunged into depression when the child refuses to call him father. In turn Master Yang openly enjoys this ironic turn of events and basks in his sudden position of power, yet his days of manipulating such social circumstances are numbered when he is killed in his own household. 

Try as they might, the lovers hide and reveal and hide their secret many times, until the one ugly truth gives way and becomes something else entirely. An example of this strange evolution is when Ju Dou and Tianqing are hesitant to unveil the past to their son, only to have this matter replaced by withholding the secret of a casual fling on the mountain side that happens to be spotted by a fellow villager. Their son grows old enough to wield a knife and frighten any sensitive onlooker, and his incessantly blank expression and muteness intensify his discomforting determination and the tragedy as a whole. Uncle and nephew - like father and son, despite never being of one bloodline - end up in a remarkably similar place, and whether Ju Dou lives or dies is less of a certainty than her continued suffering. 

Not many rural livelihoods anywhere are easy and especially so in mainland China. Cultural traditions remain steadfast because village dynamics rarely come into contact with anything else. In the thematic and visual outburst of Ju Dou's final scene, the sound of singing children can be heard. For a central core of the story that dominates and mobilizes much of the events and tragedy and suffering, there is a noticeable absence of children on screen during the film's ninety-plus-minute length. Ju Dou and Tianqing's son remains our only dependable representative, and the absolute lack of depth that Zhang Yimou hands to us is no accident. Left with no words, but bearing witness to the results of his symbolic and physical destruction, we as viewers of Ju Dou can at best only guess what this says about the Chinese family at the turn of the 21st century, when rigid tradition and open modernization converge.

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I tell the truth

No one likes that…

I’m a bad dog.

Trained to the truth

Sniffing out deception

I’m a bad dog.

Don’t mess with me

I’m junkyard bad

Full of love.

Your ideas are wrong

That’s why I love you

And show my teeth.

Payphones appear to be following the Pony Express down the well-worn path of obsolete technologies and their ubiquitous appearance in urban landscapes rings hollow in the face of today’s cell phone society. Rusting in place for at least a little while longer, the abused carcasses of abandoned payphones echo with lost conversations from a very different time.

Riff Raff Beats UnderDog

(images via: Payphone News)

When you name your company UnderDog Communications, you probably have a good idea of the odds stacked against you. When your business is payphones, you’re probably certain of it. Even so, the Verizon Wireless ad slapped up just above this ungracefully decomposing payphone seems like a slap in the face to someone already down on their luck. Sorry decrepit payphone, not even Underdog can save you now.

Parking Lost

(image via: KenobiwanX)

Give ‘em credit, payphone operators didn’t go down without a fight. Take this “Phone From Car” payphone from Grand Haven, Michigan, situated in a… parking lot, of course. Perhaps inspired by the proliferation of drive-thru fast-food outlets, the concept was doomed by inclement weather and the host tenant packing it in. No cars, no calls, no service.

Caged Heat

(images via: Payphone News)

Hang around on 21st Street in Long Island City, New York long enough and you’ll look a little rough around the edges too. Still, this beleaguered beauty is more than showing its age – that’s a rough 19 if there ever was.

(image via: Payphone News)

Caging this payphone in steel mesh didn’t keep the animals out and it couldn’t have been much a noise shield with the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge just a stone’s throw away. Surely its only a matter of time before scrap metal scavengers abscond with the flimsy shield – not that we’re suggesting any such thing.

I’ve Bean Calling You

(images via: Lindsay Palmer)

A payphone revival? In my city? It’s more likely than you think, especially if you’re city is Austin, Texas. The Pay Phone Revival Project focuses on six abandoned payphone booths on the east side of Austin. Artists were asked to re-purpose, re-imagine and re-work the decaying payphones and their associated infrastructure in a creative manner. Lindsay Palmer‘s concept involved building a chicken-wire bean teepee around the phone as a method of “envision(ing) a world in which we as humans have had to return to an agrarian society, and must do so amongst the ruins of our current world.” Gotta nice ring to it, hmm?

San Jose Can You See?

(images via: Lost San Jose)

A relatively newly abandoned payphone outside a recently abandoned supermarket in San Jose, California, hasn’t suffered much from the vagaries of vagrants, vandals and vermin but it’s clear time is not on its side. The image itself presents a studied contrast in colors and tones, imbuing the composition as a whole with life though the scene itself is anything but lively.

Mellow Yellow

(image via: The Upstairs Room)

Gutted of its payphone and its purpose, a pleasant yellow payphone enclosure commiserates with the dandelions outside a closed gas station in Columbus, Ohio. The jaunty designer enclosure echoes the innocence of the Sixties and smiling round Happy Face buttons, dating it firmly in the realm of nostalgia. Reality roughly intrudes on the scene as rusting metal improvised bollards have bent but not broken their vow to protect this forgotten communications outpost.

Book Booth

(images via: LA FWD, Future Studio and 90042)

Highland Park is said to be an L.A. neighborhood beloved by hipsters so when Highland Park resident and artist Amy Inouye of Future Studio Design set out to revitalize an abandoned payphone, she looked back past the telephone itself. Book Booth, located at the Figueroa entrance to La Arca de Noe restaurant (5570 N. Figueroa), has been re-stocked several times. Got extra books? Get your smug on and bring ‘em to the Book Booth, you can probably pick up a case of PBR on the way back.

SNETsterday’s Technology

(image via: 06880)

Remember SNET? Southern New England Telephone dated back to 1878 and issued the world’s first telephone book. The company was bought by SBC Communications (“new” AT&T) in 1998 and was folded into their Ameritech brand in 2006. None of this matters to the lonely, de-phoned payphone booth slowly succumbing to rust in Westport, Connecticut. The scene looks so depressing and miserable even graffiti artists avoid it like the plague.

Parakeet Pair o’Phones

(images via: Pay Phone Revival)

Austin’s Payphone Revival Project strikes again! If you’ve ever been at or around the Urban Market at 1905 E 12th Street, then you’ve likely experienced the sight & sound of urban-adapted but non-native Monk Parakeets. Artist K.A. Sheehan sought to invoke “nature’s ongoing adaption to an increasingly man-made and mediated landscape” by beautifying a pair of abandoned payphones with wheat paste, screen printing and gold leaf with a Monk Parakeet theme.

Praise the Lord & Pass Me a Quarter

(image via: The Post-Pessimist Association)

The vaguely disturbing image above depicts the abandoned Midtown Church of Christ (Charles Spence Jr., Evangelist) in Atlanta, Georgia. The stylish (for 1963) structure seems to anchor a surrealistic world of leaning power poles and swaying signs as mutant green vegetation grabs an uncontested foothold on the parking lot. As for the curious placement of the payphone right in front of the building’s front doors, well, it poses questions we’re reluctant to even consider answering… and that goes double for the phone itself.

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July 22nd 2012

Heroism is steadily becoming an overrated profession these days. No one gives you the respect warranted by your deeds and accomplishments. For our protagonist Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) and his alternative identity as Batman, the people of Gotham City have moved forward eight years since the crime-infected days of The Dark Knight - since the city's white knight Harvey Dent was killed.

Director Nolan's final film of the successful Batman franchise does well to home in on the significance of public memory, remembrance, and the image of hope. For the truth of Dent's murder is only known to a precious few, and none of them feel it is time to rewrite what exists for Gotham. As a result Batman has been the scapegoat for all this time, forcing Wayne to slip into retirement and disappear from both his public profession as part of the city's lavish elite, and from his role as protector. It is this reluctance that Wayne's lovable servant Alfred (Michael Cain) picks up on, noting the psychological damage it is causing to the last member of the family. This complex emotion becomes key to the rise of the plot's antagonist Bane and his formidable plan to watch Gotham burn by exploiting this weakness.

We get two notable newcomers: the capable junior police officier Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), frustrated with the refusal of his team and superiors in believing that there is something beyond what they have been told about Batman. Knowing Wayne to be the man behind the mask, Blake puts forth fresh determination into how true heroism should be defined and re-evaluated. Then there is the theiving Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) working with Bane to pursue 'a clean slate'. To Batman she is trapped by her past and thus contains more than subservience to the villain, which brings our hero to his knees and direct confrontation with the biggest challenger: himself.

Some of the film's best scenes take place when Wayne is pushed to the limit, forced under Bane's clutches to physically and spirtually starve. He learns a great deal about the depravity of hope and the true nature of despair, and it is a relief to see Nolan do a fine job handling the Sisyphean symbolism of the film's mid-section. Any mistakes in pacing could have deteriorated into heavy-handed preaching, but instead we see Wayne discover the roots of his failure and unlock the answer to his rise, bringing him much closer to his adversary than he could have otherwise imagined.

In just under three hours (165 minutes), The Dark Knight Rises is not a short film and responsibly uses the time frame. Nonetheless the story attempts to cover a lot of ground, from the meaning of heroism and psychological discovery, corruption and the 1%, the ascent of criminal decadence to replace order with anarchy, childhood nostalgia for a pure protector, and reconciliation with the past and the fulfillment of a familial legend. Then there are consistencies with the original graphic novels that, to my knowledge from loyal fans, carry through quite well for the most part. For the ambitious finale of a trilogy The Dark Knight Rises is a stellar piece of filmmaking and storytelling, and we can certainly forgive Nolan for dubious moments with nukes and science.

Gotham coming under seige and left abandoned by its main hero must be an unimaginable feeling for its people. The rug underneath them has been pulled, leaving them out in the rain with the cold truth about protection and miracles. For Wayne it has always been about being anonymous, so that Batman could be "anyone in Gotham City" rather than another possession of his household that has many enemies. The Dark Knight Rises delivers as much about Batman's past as it does for his future, and for the city and people of Gotham, Nolan tells us an important thing about heroes: they don't need a mask and high-tech equipment, but a spirit able to return from collapse and choose the many over the few.

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A heavyweight crowd gathered last October for a banquet in Beijing’s tallest skyscraper. The son of Mao Zedong’s immediate successor was there, as was the daughter of the country’s No. 2 military official for nearly three decades, along with the half sister of China’s president-in-waiting, and many more…

Most surprising, though, was the reason for the meeting. A small coterie of children of China’s founding elites who favor deeper political and economic change had come to debate the need for a new direction under the next generation of Communist Party leaders… Many had met the previous August, and would meet again in February.

The private gatherings are a telling indicator of how even some in the elite are worried about the course the Communist Party is charting for China’s future. And to advocates of political change, they offer hope that influential party members support the idea that tomorrow’s China should give citizens more power to choose their leaders and seek redress for grievances, two longtime complaints about the current system.

But the problem is that even as the tiny band of political reformers is attracting more influential adherents, it is splintered into factions that cannot agree on what “reform” would be, much less how to achieve it. The fundamental shifts that are crucial to their demands — a legal system beyond Communist Party control as well as elections with real rules and real choices among candidates — are seen even among the most radical as distant dreams, at best part of a second phase of reform.

Bo Xilai

In addition, the political winds are not blowing in their favor. The spectacular fall this spring of Bo Xilai, the Politburo member who openly espoused a populist philosophy at odds with elite leaders, offered an object lesson in the dangers of challenging the status quo…

Zhang Lifan

“Compare now to 1989; in ’89, the reformers had the upper hand,” said Zhang Lifan, a historian formerly associated with the government’s Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, referring to the pro-democracy student protests that enjoyed the support of a number of important party leaders but were crushed in Tiananmen Square. “Twenty years later, the reformers have grown weaker. Now there are so many vested interests that they’ll be taken out if they touch anyone else’s interests.”…

“Neither the rulers nor the ruled are happy with the current situation,” said Mr. Zhang, the historian. “The prevailing belief is that change is coming soon, but the question is how. Change is either going to come from the top leadership, or from the grass-roots level.”…

If peaceful change is to occur, Zhou Zhixing, a media executive and former official at a Communist Party research organization, and many others say, it must begin inside the Communist Party; the lesson of Tiananmen Square is that the leadership will not tolerate threats to its control. Many speak of a transformation along the lines of that in Taiwan, where authoritarian rulers peacefully gave way to direct elections in 1996, and helped spawn today’s robust democracy…

Populists want to remake the party to reflect Mao’s early vision, redistributing billions in government riches to the people… But Mao-style populism is disdained by most current leaders…

A second Communist camp wants to open the party to internal competition, abandoning the leadership’s facade of unity and letting rival factions take their ideas to the wider party for approval. Over the long run, they say, transparency will spawn competing parties under a Communist umbrella — a sort of one-party democracy. But in a China where stability is the leadership’s obsessive concern, the notion of baring divisions at the pinnacle of power seems almost farcical…

But the sheer scope of the discord leads some who call for change to wonder whether they are less a movement than a debating society — intellectuals trading theories over plates of noodles in their apartments, the second red generation trading theories over lavish hotel banquets.

“Mao used to say that ‘revolution is not a dinner party,’ ” Mr. Yang, the editor at Yanhuang Chunqiu, said sardonically. “But right now, revolution is precisely a dinner party.”

See what's new in the 4th edition of What You Need to Know

Hi, all.  Just thought you might like to know that I’m guest-posting over on The Mad Reviewer today on Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books.  Check it out!