Emo Moon

Tonight the man in the moon looked especially forlorn. His face nearly half shrouded in darkness, I realized I was looking at the emo moon. Luckily, it's just a phase.

From the Vault

Fork + Ham from micheal mccubbins on Vimeo.

Long ago and far away beyond the days of YouTube, Matt and I decided that our pointless banter was too amusing to be kept between us, and set out to record a chunk of it. Using the most powerful, state of the art animation tool at our disposal--Microsoft Paint--we were able to create an entire world in which a shitty drawing of a fork and a shittier drawing of a ham stand in a white room and talk without moving too much.

Due to the sophisticated nature of animating the dialogue, YouTube was an unacceptable solution to carry our vision. But now it seems technology has finally caught up with us, and you may now enjoy our idle musings as they were originally intended.

More to come:

Episode 2 - Fork Vs. Ham

Episode 3 - To Fork From Ham

Episode 4 - Forks Over My Hammy

Some Ideas for Sitcoms

Here's a few ideas I've had for TV sitcoms.

1. A brilliant but lonely genius with several degrees in robotics is disappointed by his intellectually inferior friends. He decides to use his knowledge of robotics to create a humanoid robot that will share his passion for the high and lofty. But, a freak accident creates EARL( Electronic Artificial Robot Lifeform) a hillbilly robot whose favorite pastimes include dog breeding and racism. This unlikely pair learn to live together, and our brilliant but lonely genius learns a thing or two about friendship.

TITLE: MAKING FRIENDS

2. Two best friends, fat Sam and skinny Bruce meet an early demise. When their monthly fishing trip goes awry Bruce and Sam's bones are picked clean by a school of hungry piranha. Strangely the two survive and come to live in a culturally diverse inner-city group home. Sam and bruce couldn't be any more different but their bone structures are identical. Hilarity ensues as the members of the group home mistake them for one another.

TITLE: SKELETWINS

3. Homicide detective Sean Simon's career is threatened when he is struck in the eye by a suspect's bullet. A chance encounter on a new assignment teaches sean that his injury has given him special psychic powers. Lifting his eye patch to expose his grizzly mangled eye hole, Sean witnesses the murder as if it were happening before his eye. Sean must now use his special ability to try and catch the cities killers before they can kill again. Sean can see with one bad eye what the rest of the force will never see with two.

TITLE: DEATH PERCEPTION

4. Two twin brothers separated at birth unwittingly become friends when they move down the street from one another.

Theme Song:

"Mama left them both to die when they were kids
Now they're all grown up, look what they did!
They started out in different cities, Somehow they both ended up in Cincinnati.
Now they're living on the very same street.
Who would really think that they would ever meet?
Brothers who see eachother every day
Now, lets hope they don't decide to be gay..........together
They're two of a kind,
they're there for eachother
they have the same mom,
but they don't know that they're brothers
Brothers Amigos they don't know that they're brothers

TITLE: BROTHERS AMIGOS

Excuses

No posts in many moons. I've been diverting many of my creative juices into a project forthcoming...


with its very own Blog.

also...ive done some tagging on this here blog and instituted a handy list on the bottom left there.

Movie Hunt

MYTH:

FACT:

Hukkle

I've been reading a lot of critics lists recently and feeling abit overwhelmed. I've spent much of the past ten years taking in foriegn films. I'd be confident in saying it's nearly half of what I've watched which is no small sum. Come to find out, according to most international critics, I've somehow missed nearly all the best foreign films of the decade. I've more or less decided to try and become aquainted with much of what I've missed, which include the entire careers of a girl named Claire Denis and a guy named Apichatpong Weerasethakul, by many critics measure the best it had to offer. The first of these favorited flicks I've been able to find is a beautiful Hungarian thing called Hukkle.

With an extremely slight narrative and hardly a word of dialogue, Hukkle comes off as more a poem than a drama. The filming takes place in a small hungarian farming town, and captures in many ways the sublime banality of its inhabitants and the local wild-life. The camera wanders from scene to scene through odd and suprising little vignettes, visual analogies, and unimportant coincidences. The closest comparison that comes to mind is Harmony Korine's Gummo. Both take a similar approach employing local non-professionals to go through familiar ritual as the camera catches as best in can its own unique perspective. In Gummo the community seems to be decaying, there seems to be something sinister in each dying tree. It's a distinctly American poem.

Hukkle on the other hand takes place in a far quianter setting. The little village seems as if it's been there for a thousand years and will stand a thousand more. Everything seems healthy and utopian in a way that only little european towns can. Except people are dying unnaturally. A(the) local police officer is trying hard to figure it out, but is left just as baffled and we are. Those few sentences pretty much make up the "plot" of the film.

Resting upon this slender frame are poetic moments of death and rebirth somehow given both the reverence of a nature documentary and sly elements of comedy. A cat which seems to be rolling about playfully in the grass is actually dying in fits. A pig with comically large testicles is walked across town to be bred with a sow, the owners looking on together fondly. A frog sneaking up on a creek side investigation is suddenly devoured by a catfish. And throughout it all an old man seems to have an extreme case of the hiccups.

You may follow along with the cop, the films only intellectual element, trying to solve the mystery at hand but the film doesn't cater to this impulse over any other. It's a relief to be offered such engaging audio/visual poems, and not be overburdened with the facts and the circumstances, or with one character's particular emotional point of view. The film knows how generous its being. In one interlude we observe an older woman watching a soap opera. The sounds of the program off camera fill the small room with melodramatic dialogue and a cheesy score. Your happy to be enjoying a film that leaves room for your own experiences and doesn't attempt to cheapen your emotions. In this way, it comes and goes with less form and ego having, like good poetry, said something less direct but more meaningful.