New Room

Sent in to the FORCES HQ on the hottest day of the year.

...But What Happens When a Little Becomes a Lot?

It has been over a year since our last post and that sort of thing can really leave a sour taste in the mouth of a blog consumer, but we've got good things cookin' over here in the FORCES laboratory.  That's right, the FORCES artists decided to take a little unannounced break, (sorry, fans!!!) each for their own reasons.  Millie Cindzer had a toe removed, then hiked along the entirety of Highway I-40 just to prove to her sister that she wouldn't be "walking all wonky for the rest of her life."  Richard Tuggz spent the past year in Australia with his hand in an echidna puppet, acting as ersatz mother to a litter of baby echidnas (puggles).  Alana Ponui was in the woods up in Maine. Every day she would row around the nearby lake, Lake Hole. Toward the end of the year she could boast to the few others that lived in the area that she could whip around Lake Hole in under forty-seven minutes, and not even break a sweat.  Scott Rideout stood from a crouching position way too fast and slammed his head into a utility pipe and spent the year in a coma. "It was a good year," was all he had to say about it.  But now they are all back, and all pistons are firing, and the juices of time are flowing toward a bright and productive future!
For all you people trapped inside a cage of ice right now, here is an eery number.  It could be from any of the freezing corners of the world,  and you'd better hope it's not near you.  The first person to write in and guess which FORCES artist is responsible for this piece gets the honor of having their own portrait done by the FORCES artist of their choosing. What a gas, right?

A Bad Date, But Overall An Okay Night

Backdrop

Alana Ponui brings us this nightmarish vision.  A vacant place, seemingly harmless, but if this place were a person it would be committing unspeakable, violent acts on its lunch break.  At night when everyone is sleeping it would be bathing puppies in vitriol.  At the break of day it would be uttering words that curdle milk and set the drapes on fire.  You don't even want to know what its doing on its lunch break.  If while dreaming you find yourself in this place, wake up as fast as you can or you may never wake up at all.

The Powerful Male

The Powerful Male is constantly in motion, always dominating one sphere or another. He doesn't have time to sit down and eat. He doesn't have time to cut his food up into pieces small enough to fit into his mouth. He doesn't have time to chew. He has time for one thing and one thing only: dominating one sphere or another. That is why somebody somewhere is creating a fountain drink that looks, tastes, smells, and feels like Coca-cola. It even comes out of a fountain drink dispensary at a McDonalds! But this "Coke" is actually a highly concentrated food supplement that maintains the virility, strength, and swagger of any Powerful Male. The Powerful Male pictured here has just guzzled the stuffin's out of his food-drink.

22 B.A.E.

A soldier from some long forgotten war, or some war that has a long time yet to be forgotten, making his long way back home before he is forgotten...yet.

A Lesson in Dramatic Theory: The Fourth Act

Here is another cyber-collage from famed and tamed FORCES artist, Alana Ponui. She has unveiled to us a story in four parts. What we are dying to know is this: who out there knew how the story was going to end? Who among you, sallow-skinned and myopic, with squishy and gushy body, dared to guess that such a predictable conclusion would be drawn? Well, we give you kudos, a token of our very mild astonishment. We are giving out kudos either way, actually. You receive kudos just for participating. Those of you who didn't think one way or the other about it also receive kudos, but not the kudos that carry honor and praise, No! You, who wander through life without the ability to see what might come next, for you we are giving the type of kudos that are made of granola and chocolate, the type of kudos that come in the form of a bar that you get at the end of soccer practice. To receive these kudos please send FORCES Unltd. $3.46 via paypal along with your address and flavor preference.

GET OFF MY CONSARN'D LAWN!

He mows it.  He waters it. He needs it. He doesn't ask much of you.  Why do you keep treading on his freshly seeded?  In a world where nobody can be counted on, in a time when water isn't so cheap: just step off his lawn and let the blades breathe, people!  

A Weekend With Joss "The Boss" Whedon: Alana Ponui reviews "The Avengers" and "The Cabin in the Woods"

There are a couple modes of being that this web log likes to hang on to, each post is written by the moderator, by no means in the first person, and each post in some way or another hones in on one of the FORCES, Ultd. artist's work. Well, I don't care about that. In fact, this post is all about coming out into the open, coming clean. This post will be my cyber-ablution. My name is Alana Ponui, and I have signed in--against the moderator's will--to write a godammed blog post.

Usually when I have to do some traveling in order to get to a conference I like to hop in and then get out of Dodge s quick as possible. I had to be in Boulder, CO for a Final Cut Pro X conference. This time I decided it might be nice to get there a bit early and absorb some heady popular culture. After landing in Denver, some half-hearted haggling over a rental car, and eating a terrible/awful/delicious/unremarkable footlong subway sandwich, I skipped the "dropping my bags off at 'The Hotel'" step and found myself at the Century Theater, right there in the middle of it all. Let me tell you true, the place looks like a state prison that you would find in the middle of a desert, but there is a PEET's coffee, Whole Foods, Office Max, etc. within arms reach. I found it to be chilling, yet comforting, like drinking a mixed drink that your own son or daughter has prepared. So I walked from the real world through the threshold to the land of make-believe. The satellite of Tinsel Town! The movie I chose to see? You guessed it from reading the title of this post, I'm sure: The Avengers, written and directed by Joss Whedon. Full disclosure: I am a fan of Joss Whedon's previous work, not all of it, but most of it.

For those of you getting tired of this prattle, lets see if I can succinctly sum up how I felt about this movie. If it was a cow that I had to buy I would eat all of the good meat on it, sell the rest of it on ebay, and remember the guy who sold it to me, but not the cow itself, or the town I bought it in. This movie showcased Whedon's (IMHO classic) writing talent. He is funny, and he knows when to draw your emotions toward a character. Really, what more could you want?

Well, I left the theater wanting a few things, yes I did. Most of this had to do with the direct interaction between actor and camera. Accents: 1.Thor (played by Chris Hemsworth) and Loki (played by Tom Hiddleston) are Norse gods. Why are they speaking in vaguely British accents? Are they actually British in real life? I don't know, but it's no excuse. B. The Black Widow (played by ScarJo) actually says that she is Russian, yet sounds like she is having an acid flashback to her days on the set of Ghost World. And another thing! I know this isn't Joss's fault, (mainly because I refuse to blame him for anything except the casting of Eliza Dushku) but Samuel L. Jackson is not Nick Fury! Don't get me wrong I am a lady who has enjoyed him in some roles, (Snakes on a Plain, and that other movie) I have nothing against him personally, but Jackson just does not have what it takes to walk in Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD's shoes. Let me take part of that back and say that sometimes he has too much of what it takes, he goes a little too wild demonstrating emotion at times. Nick Fury is a relentless badass. He cares about his team, he cares about his country, and he cares about getting the job done. Not pouting about his higher-ups! Maybe Denzel or Clooney could have pulled it off. Hell, I think Jimmy Stuart could have done a better job.

But enough griping, I was actually quite charmed by the movie. Whedon knows enough about what he is doing to not send me completely over the edge of the rage cliff. Because I am so familiar with his work I tend to hear his voice permeating the well established characters of the movie, like God's voice speaking through the monks of some ascetic temple. And it works. Somehow it works. There is a smooth transition between say, The Hulk (played by Mark Ruffalo) jumping around smashing an entire city, and the fast-paced comic book action. Put Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 4 in a mating cell with The West Wing, The Avengers mythology, the previous movies leading up to The Avengers, and piles of money: The Avengers would be its baby.

Lets move on. After the movie I went to my room at the Briar Rose Bed & Breakfast (don't ask) and spent the evening doing nothing. BUUUUUUUUT the next day I went back to the Century Theater to see The Cabin in the Woods, written by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard(who previously worked on Buffy and Angel) and directed by Goddard. This movie was a valentine to the horror genre. These guys wear this genre like a glove and dance around on the table performing tricks of darkest magiks and knocking our beer steins over. All we can do is look at their glove and how well they wear it. Then they turn their glove inside out and we start flipping our collective wig double-time.

This movie is about five college students that take a weekend vacation to a cabin...in the woods and find that they are beset by undead puritans with a dismemberment fixation. But there is another storyline going on that turns the movie on its head, whilst balancing it quite nicely. There is a constant three-way tension between 1. post-post-modern nod to genre 2. cerebral genre busting 3. classic horror thrills and chills. The basic equation is this: (JW+DG)*((Thrills+Chills)/Bills)='Me Getting My Fills.'

I would like to give my shout out to the whole cast as well. HOLLER to Connolly, Hemsworth, Kranz, Hutchison, and Williams. The characters undergo a not so subtle metamorphosis during the movie that took a subtle finesse to pull off. Each roll was filled out very nicely and I was totally satiated by each performance. Cabin even shared a cast member with Avengers, Chris Hemsworth. As you may recall I had issues with his performance as the character Thor. In Cabin, he plays "the Jock" quite nicely, leaving nothing to be desired.

Around each corner lies a new pleasure. Near the end--don't worry, no spoilers--at a particularly climactic moment, I thought for a brief moment that I was going to find a hefty lump of disappointment staring me down around that next corner. I was wrong! Dead Wrong! It was a hefty lump of pleasure batting its eyelashes at me. You will be pleased by this movie, or you will never be pleased at all in this life.

Allow me to tell you the four things that these two movies have in common. They both employ Chris Hemsworth. They both have cameos by two of my favorite actors that previously starred in Alien, (loved it.) They both left me feeling wary of authority. The kind of feeling where you might wander around staring at security cameras and being bummed out by the FBI. And lastly, they are both about friendship. Each grouping of heroes could not have gotten as far as they did without their buddies to fall back on. This is a common Joss theme. Hey, if you don't have friends, what the hell do you have?

And here I sit, without a friend, at the Denver airport, flying back home from one of the most boring conferences I have ever attended. When I get home I am going to a birthday party, where I will appreciate my friends through the blue lens of The Avengers and the red lens of The Cabin in the Woods. 3D glasses to don that I might find a new dimension in my social life. Or not. On a laptop, using wireless internet, I'm Alana Ponui, and you are hearing my real voice.

Waltzing Back In

We know. It will never happen again, and that is a hard, reliable and 100% guaranteed PROMISE. It has been over a month since our last post and that is a source of regret, shame and pain. Moving forward, you will see below this a glimpse into the world of a professional narcissist. No, we are not talking about Scott! This man has let his obsessive love for himself spiral out of control. The admiration he so craved has mutated into a hideous serpentine monster which has sallied forth into the third dimension leaving a void in his psyche that needs an occupant. Would you like to move in? The rent is cheap, and there is a backyard. You pay for garbage pick-up and cable/DSL/food/mistakes. It should be mentioned that this a project Alana Ponui has been working on, using the draftsman skills of Richard Tuggz. She made the story clear, but the format remains in the shadows. ("Leave it to Alana," is what her friends all say about her.) It could be a still from a short animation, an illustration for a video game cartridge, a wall projection, a letter to the pope...anything, knowing her. What a card, eh?

FREE THE IRON SHEIK

Another winner by Alana Ponui. Practice your prayers, mouth your mantras twice as many times, and maybe he will be released from his prison of pure energy.

Power is something that everybody wants or has, or has but still wants. The key to finding power in our current reality is not held in objects, but in the mind and it's memorable physical progeny. However, it is very clear that in the peripheral realities that reveal themselves in glimpses--or not at all--power IS contained in objects and if you can find those objects, you have a varying degree of power over your surroundings. Power to do as you please whether it be good, evil, or neutral. If you find yourself requiring a powerful object, and you exist in our current reality, fear not! Objects of power really do exist.