The Princess Diaries (2001) [Special Edition – 2-Disc Collector’s Set] – DVD

August 13, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Romance, UK

*½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Sound B-
starring Anne Hathaway, Heather Matarazzo, Hector Elizondo, Mandy Moore
screenplay by Gina Wendkos, based on the novel by Meg Cabot
directed by Garry Marshall

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Mention the word "movies" and you're generally deluged with syrupy talk of "dreams" and "fantasy" and "adventure" and all that jazz, yet no matter how much you see this as the devalued coin of our entertainment-journalism realm, you have to admit that this image means an awful lot to an awful lot of people. The least a pop movie can do is live up to such reverence and be a holy object worthy of some worship, marshalling all the beauty and craft that has generally been Hollywood cinema's one redeeming virtue. But somehow, movies that dishonour this basic pact with the audience not only get made, but also ring the box-office bell to the tune of $108-million–that's how much The Princess Diaries managed to rake in during its 2001 theatrical run, despite the fact that it's as beautiful and dreamlike as a sheet of particle board. Once again, I am left with the dilemma: should I hate the filmmakers for generating this slop, or should I blame the audience for swilling it with pleasure?

Garden State (2004)

August 12, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance

*½/****
starring Zach Braff, Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Ian Holm
written and directed by Zach Braff

Gardenstateby Walter Chaw As disaffected turns of phrase go, New Jersey's nickname "The Garden State" is a pretty fair description of a vegetative state of mind. Zach Braff's hyphenate debut Garden State seizes on that wilful misreading, offering up a Girl, Interrupted for boys featuring a lead character fresh from The Bell Jar: an over-medicated, under-emoted man who just wants to feel something, damnit. It's what passes for groundbreaking independent cinema in the new millennium–drugs and depression as a stage for spastic trick shots (the great fallout from Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream). It demeans low-achieving minimum wagers with small-dreams and extols the virtues of true love without aspiration, but its scattershot glimpse of fad-fortunes vs. old money doesn't go very far in making the case for Garden State as either social exposé or romantic whimsy. If the picture's anything, it's just a worn rock skipping along a smooth, glassy surface.

Alien vs. Predator (2004) + Tom Dowd & the Language of Music (2004)

August 12, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Music, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

ALIEN VS. PREDATOR
½*/****
starring Sanaa Lathan, Raoul Bova, Lance Henriksen, Ewen Bremner
written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson

TOM DOWD & THE LANGUAGE OF MUSIC
***/****
directed by Mark Moormann

Avpby Walter Chaw Paul W.S. Anderson makes horrible movies from horrible ideas. He doesn't know how to shoot action scenes, he doesn't know how to shoot dialogue scenes, and he doesn't know how to craft a pleasurable B-movie. Early on in Alien Vs. Predator (a film trumped by not only every single other entry in the respective titular franchises, but also Freddy vs. Jason), someone's watching an old Universal horror film on television–I think it's House of Dracula–and it announces in a promisingly self-knowing way that the movie knows what its roots are and that it intends to honour them. As the story unfolds with the discovery of an ancient pyramid ("It's the first pyramid ever!") buried beneath two-thousand feet of Antarctic ice, visions of Howard Hawks's The Thing and Karl Freund's The Mummy dance happily in the head while the Queen Alien is awakened via Tesla Coil like James Whale's Bride. Unfortunately, all hopes for the picture are quickly dashed.

She Hate Me (2004)

August 12, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Directors: Spike Lee, Drama, Theatrical

*/****
starring Anthony Mackie, Kerry Washington, Ellen Barkin, Monica Bellucci
screenplay by Michael Genet and Spike Lee
directed by Spike Lee

Shehatemeby Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The crescendo to the opening credits of Spike Lee's ridiculous, desultory She Hate Me is a fluttering three-dollar bill with George W. Bush's face on it, an image as impotent as the poster for Fahrenheit 9/11 where Bush is clutching Michael Moore's hand through the miracle of Photoshop. (It's chatroom-prank as dogma.) Lee has a serious case of Moore envy, and it's reduced the long-time firebrand to making ad hominem attacks and casting too broad a net to accommodate fashionable targets like the current administration. While there's no such thing as a graceful segue in the majority of Lee's work as a hyphenate (two of his strongest films in the aftermath of Do the Right Thing have been adaptations of novels scripted by the novelists themselves, i.e., Clockers and the irreproachable 25th Hour), the polemics of She Hate Me–the cutesily ebonical title a tip-off that it's second-tier Lee, à la Mo' Better Blues and He Got Game–are traumatizingly digressive and/or unmoored to any overriding motif.

Thunderbirds International Rescue Edition – DVD

August 11, 2004Posted in1960s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi, UK

THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO (1966)
**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
screenplay by Gerry Anderson & Sylvia Anderson
directed by David Lane

THUNDERBIRD 6 (1968)
*/**** Image A- Sound A- (DD)/A (DTS) Extras B+
screenplay by Gerry Anderson & Sylvia Anderson
directed by David Lane

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Why is it that "Thunderbirds", the marionette sci-fi TV series of 1960s vintage, exerts such weird fascination? Narratively, it's nothing to get excited about–just the usual conservative guff involving stiff-necked operators of sci-fi machinery, all of whom are given one trait each and are as pure in heart as they are heavy on exposition. One wants to make an obvious joke about the delivery being as wooden as the puppets, except that to do so would be missing the point: the erotics of the series are powerful specifically because everything is made of wood. The figures themselves are as rigid and rock-solid as the meticulously-designed machinery, making the stylization of the series total and more convincing than if it were superimposed over the documentary image of mere human flesh. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the two lavish and colourful movies made under the "Thunderbirds" brand, which, despite their formulaic tendencies, manage to hold our attention with a rich and affective sense of necrophilia.

The Girl Next Door (2004) [Unrated Version] – DVD

August 8, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Emile Hirsch, Elisha Cuthbert, Timothy Olyphant, James Remar
 screenplay by Stuart Blumberg and David T. Wagner & Brent Goldberg
directed by Luke Greenfield

Girlnextdoorcap

by Walter Chaw Though it reminds a great deal of Paul Brickman's Risky Business, The Girl Next Door reminds all the more that there's really only one Paul Brickman, and while this picture sustains the sleazy wish-fulfillment of Risky Business for a good long run, it can't replicate the same kind of insouciant rebellion. The exercise feels forced in a way that Risky Business doesn't, the earlier film's ease owing mostly to Brickman but also to another of Tangerine Dream's definitive Eighties scores and, perhaps, the bestial liquid chemistry between Tom Cruise and Rebecca De Mornay–a chemistry that's never quite replicated by a very fine Emile Hirsch and the very fine Elisha Cuthbert. Without the reckless air of youth on the verge, The Girl Next Door starts to feel like calculated imitation, becoming affected and, eventually, what a teenage sex comedy can't be: restrained. Its bark is worse than its bite, and in the end, only its premise is subversive.

Burden of Dreams: FFC Interviews Tadanobu Asano

August 8, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, Japan

TasanointerviewtitleTadanobu Asano, the pride of Japanese cult cinema, on his latest performances

August 8, 2004|A lot of people are calling Tadanobu Asano Japan's Brad Pitt; I'm more comfortable comparing him to Johnny Depp. He's a beautiful guy, no question, but he's also fond of quirky film choices that work against his matinee-idol good looks. If he couldn't act, it'd be career suicide, but in the course of a little over ten years, Asano has fashioned a body of work that alternates between disturbed and disturbing. It says a lot about the Japanese audience that he has found fame and fortune playing sociopathic murderers and suicidal urban manqué.

Collateral (2004)

August 5, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Michael Mann, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx, Jada Pinkett Smith, Mark Ruffalo
screenplay by Stuart Beattie
directed by Michael Mann

Collateralby Walter Chaw To hear Michael Mann tell it, you'd think he'd found a new way to film Los Angeles, the most-filmed city in the world. To watch Collateral is to discover that he has. I wish that there were some meat to Collateral, because even without it, it's hands-down this year's most gorgeously-directed film. If there was ever any question to Michael Mann's genius after Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans, or Heat, it must be laid to rest now–he's pushing Spielberg in terms of visual gift, trumping him in terms of maturity (and courage, of course), and he's moving into an upper echelon of cinematic directors (Stanley Kubrick, for example) who, when they're on, produce tapestries so pure that you feel as though if you tapped them they'd ring like crystal.

Wizards (1977) – DVD

August 4, 2004Posted in1970s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Fantasy, Sci-Fi

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
written and directed by Ralph Bakshi

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I like Ralph Bakshi movies. I wish I didn’t, because they’re shrill and vulgar and slightly immature, and not even examples of brilliant cartooning. But they’ve got a working-class desperation to them that most American movies are too posh and moneyed to accurately capture. Hollywood filmmakers typically see poverty as an occasion for condescension from above; Bakshi sees it at ground level–consider the generations of failure that littered American Pop, or the chaotic skid-row scramble that defined Heavy Traffic. Thus I find myself in the unenviable position of guardedly praising his 1977 Wizards, which in the hands of any other director would have been merely a sleazy Tolkien-meets-Heavy-Metal fantasy riff. This is not to say that it isn’t a sleazy Tolkien-meets-Heavy-Metal fantasy riff, but it’s one with moments that resonate beyond simplistic sex and violence and wipe the goofy grin off of the normally flighty and gossamer-draped genre.

Johnson Family Vacation (2004) – DVD

August 3, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Road Movie

½*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Cedric the Entertainer, Bow Wow, Vanessa Williams, Shannon Elizabeth
screenplay by Todd R. Jones & Earl Richey Jones
directed by Christopher Erskin

by Bill Chambers Big fan of National Lampoon's Vacation that I am, I was actually intrigued by the prospect of its central characters undergoing a racial inversion. On their trip to a mecca of family fun known as Wally World, the Caucasian Griswolds left their suburban cocoon only to discover how socially ill-equipped they were for the rest of an increasingly stratified America–an apologue in the vein of The Wizard of Oz that's more than un-PC: it's anthropological; a black retread hewed to its line has the potential to be far more applicable to the African-American experience than, say, The Wiz. Unfortunately, while National Lampoon's Vacation was scripted by John Hughes, the Reagan era's premier commentator on class relations, the creators of something called "C-Bear and Jamal" wrote Johnson Family Vacation. Maybe their lack of pedigree is irrelevant, but so is the film, which we can only generously call a pale imitation of National Lampoon's Vacation. After the opening credits, I wished the movie had had the wit to rib its derivative genesis with a parody of National Lampoon's Vacation's signature song ("Ease on Down the Holiday Road"–isn't it obvious?). By the end of the movie, I wished it had wit.

Decoys (2004) – DVD

August 3, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi

**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C-
starring Corey Sevier, Stefanie Von Pfetten, Meghan Ory, Kim Poirier
screenplay by Matt Hastings & Tom Berry
directed by Matt Hastings

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Faithful watchers of Canadian film held their collective breath when it was announced recently that the major funding bodies would no longer be supporting arthouse fare. Instead of nurturing the next Atom Egoyan, the country would shepherd in Hollywood-esque fare like Foolproof (ironically co-produced by Atom Egoyan), hoping for an increase in ticket sales and perhaps a rejoinder to those critics who attack our cinema for being a ruthless killjoy. The question remained: would a simple shift in mode rid us of the tag of funbusters? In the case of the recent, terrible Decoys, the answer is: not bloody likely. Despite its dedicated efforts at reproducing American-style mindlessness, it rings all of the Canadian bells about sexual disgust, aversion to pleasure, and fear of decisive action that have bedevilled our country's cinema from the very beginning. That it's awful on its own terms is beside the point: it's how it's awful that's most instructive.

New York Minute (2004) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

August 2, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Romance, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A- Extras D+
starring Mary-Kate Olsen, Ashley Olsen, Eugene Levy, Andy Richter
screenplay by Emily Fox and Adam Cooper & Bill Collage
directed by Dennie Gordon

Newyorkminutedvdcapby Walter Chaw At some point in New York Minute, a Chihuahua gives Andy Richter (playing an Asian man, natch) a golden shower in the backseat of a limousine, saving one of the Olsen twins from the intimidation and possibly torture of Richter's distaff Fu Manchu archetype mother, Mama Bang (Alannah Ong). (Mama Bang later threatens that Chihuahua with a pair of chopsticks. Because chinks eat dogs–get it?) At another point in the picture, director Dennie Gordon, a woman who should be ashamed of herself, films the seventeen-at-the-time-of-shooting twins in sexy-commercial slow-motion; they're wearing towels after having showers in a cute guy's hotel room, and when said guy (Jared Padalecki) walks in on them, he asks, "Hey, is today my birthday?"

Wave 2: FFC Interviews Stacy Peralta & Greg Noll

August 1, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Interviews

RidinggiantsinterviewtitleAugust 1, 2004|The first time I met Stacy Peralta, it was little more than a month after September 11, 2001. He had come into town for the Denver International Film Festival (which I was covering for the first time for FFC), and I felt daunted by both the mood of the festival and by Peralta's status as a living legend amongst a small, rabid group of extreme-sports enthusiasts. Peralta was there to accompany his first documentary, the much-praised Dogtown & Z-Boys, the success of which led to a few still-kicking projects, including a feature film adaptation of Dogtown directed by Thirteen's Catherine Hardwicke. First appearances spoke volumes: Self-effacing and modest, he was genuinely concerned about what had happened in New York and at the Pentagon. He was able to put his work into perspective in regards to not only life and death calamity, of course, but also in regards to more experienced filmmakers–artists he admires in a medium to which he's still relatively new. The next time I meet Stacy Peralta, it's in the crowded lobby of Denver's Mayan Theater, where he and surf-legend Greg Noll are preparing to do a Q&A with an audience that's just seen Peralta's newest documentary, Riding Giants. The crowd is raucous, Noll is nervous, and Peralta? He's cool as the other side of the pillow in trademark ballcap, sporting a sincere look upon shaking my hand and remembering the conversation that we had almost three years ago now. I sat down with Mr. Peralta and Mr. Noll ("Greg, please, just 'Greg'") the following morning to chat about riding big waves and the siren's call of filmmaking for skate brats and surf hounds. Both men are the real deal, having stuck their irons in hotter coals than junkets and promotional screenings, emerging with the grace to deal with attention and inane questions. They're in the moment, as Buddhists would remark, riding the quiet part of the wave.

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004)

July 30, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Germany, Theatrical

***/****
starring John Cho, Kal Penn, Neil Patrick Harris, Anthony Anderson
screenplay by Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg
directed by Danny Leiner

Haroldkumargotowhitecastleby Walter Chaw Danny Leiner's Dude, Where's My Car isn't as bad as you'd think and his Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle is probably a good deal better than you have any right to expect. It begins as any number of gross-out frat-boy comedies do, with a white guy picking on a quiet Asian dude–and then it makes the interesting decision to stay with the quiet Asian dude (Korean actor John Cho (Harold)) and his roommate, East Indian Kumar (Kal Penn), as they embark on a quest to kill marijuana munchies at the revered White Castle hamburger chain. It's about, as Harold says at one point, the feeling of a man getting what he really wants. A simple enough statement (certainly a simple enough basis for a picture–some would say too simple), but it speaks volumes of our culture that it's so unusual that Harold and Kumar are not only not merely racial shorthand caricatures, but also just young men.

The Manchurian Candidate (2004)

July 30, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Jonathan Demme, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep, Liev Schreiber, Kimberly Elise
screenplay by Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris, based on the novel by Richard Condon
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Walter Chaw Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate is arguably more of a retelling of William Cameron Menzies’s Invaders from Mars (1953) than it is of John Frankenheimer’s incomparable 1962 original. Like Menzies’s science-fiction B-movie classic, the premise of Demme’s updating is that some alien force (Earthling mad scientist in this instance instead of Martian) has implanted a small device in certain respected members of our society in order to manipulate them into harming our surprisingly fragile good old American value system. Also like Invaders from Mars, the whole film moves with the logic of a fever dream, all intense close-ups, hallucinatory visions, and suggestions of going underground.

Riding Giants (2004) + Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (2004)

July 29, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, France, Music, Sports, Theatrical

RIDING GIANTS
**/****
directed by Stacy Peralta

METALLICA: SOME KIND OF MONSTER
**/****
directed by Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky

by Walter Chaw Skateboard legend Stacy Peralta's follow-up to his highly-regarded Dogtown & Z-Boys is the big wave surfing documentary Riding Giants. Equal parts ecstatic archival sports video and hagiography of the pioneers of the deep water (a new meaning for "swells"), its strengths are the same as those for Dogtown: a great soundtrack, and a sense of kinetic energy that manages to confer, at least in fits and starts, the breathlessness of the subject to an enraptured audience. But it lacks the background sociology of Peralta's prior work, failing for the most part to explain how the surf culture came to be even as it offers a survey history of the entire pastime. The film is strong on the usual suspects and the dazzling locations–and weak on the kind of lawlessness and maniacal urge to rebel that created something like an extreme beach Woodstock almost twenty years before our collective cultural dam broke. Just mentioning the Beat Poets is not enough.

Wyatt Earp (1994) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

July 27, 2004Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Western

**½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras D
starring Kevin Costner, Dennis Quaid, Gene Hackman, Jeff Fahey
screenplay by Dan Gordon and Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Lawrence Kasdan

by Walter Chaw It seemed like a good idea at the time: Kevin Costner–still a hot commodity just four years removed from Dances with Wolves, fresh from what might be the most important film of his career (A Perfect World), and not yet stigmatized by Waterworld–reteaming with his Silverado director Lawrence Kasdan, then one of the best genre writers in Hollywood, for a biopic of the famous lawman Wyatt Earp. Unfortunately, Wyatt Earp flopped like Kurt Rambis in the paint. It was too long, too prosaic, and in what appears in retrospect to be a pathological lack of pretense, too pretentious by half. It was the first real nail in Costner's career coffin–a product of his having way too much power and way too little savvy in a cynical America that had outgrown his kind of aw-shucks long about Gary Cooper. Costner's still shouting, but it's hard to hear him from all the way back there in 1940.

The Tarzan Collection – DVD + Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984) – DVDs

July 26, 2004Posted in1930s, 1940s, 1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, UK

TARZAN THE APE MAN (1932)
***/**** Image B- Sound B+
starring Johnny Weissmuller, Neil Hamilton, C. Aubrey Smith, Maureen O’Sullivan
adaptation by Cyril Hume; dialogue by Ivor Novello
based on characters created by Edgar Rice Burroughs
directed by W.S. Van Dyke

Tarzancoltheapemancapby Bill Chambers As with most “origin” Tarzan films, Tarzan himself is an off-screen promise for the first third of Tarzan the Ape Man, though his famous yodel (which the studio maintains was artificially created) portends his appearance about ten minutes before he actually materializes. Likewise, as with most origin Tarzans, this one has become something of a viewing formality: The basics of Tarzan are pop-culture fundamentals passed down through the generations as if by osmosis, and so any film that aims to tell the story from scratch is bound to seem a little sluggish. It’s remarkable, then, that Tarzan the Ape Man, in addition to exhibiting a surprising immunity to the ravages of time, is also mostly spared the contempt born of familiarity. Cutie-pie Maureen O’Sullivan essays the talkies’ first Jane, who joins her father James’s (C. Aubrey Smith) expedition in Africa and immediately casts a spell on dad’s right-hand man, Harry Holt (Neil Hamilton). Once they begin their treacherous journey across the Mutia escarpment, beyond which allegedly lies an elephant graveyard that James and co. plan to raid for its ivory, Jane meets her true intended, the monosyllabic, acrobatic Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller). Though Tarzan more or less abducts Jane, their compatibility is such that she refutes her father’s claim that Tarzan belongs to the jungle when she’s reunited with the caravan. “Not now. He belongs to me,” she pouts.

The Belly of an Architect (1990) – DVD

July 26, 2004Posted in1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, UK

***/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Brian Dennehy, Chloe Webb, Lambert Wilson
written and directed by Peter Greenaway

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Living as I do in Toronto’s rapidly-gentrifying Queen West gallery district, I am often subjected to graffiti and other detritus romantically asserting the social necessity of art and aesthetics–as if a fresh coat of paint and some nicely-arranged furniture will somehow go towards solving the homeless problem. I find this hilarious, because despite the left-wing cast that the artistic community has acquired, it can all too easily turn into the plaything of the rich, as has happened with local hotspot the Drake Hotel, a former transient lodge transformed into a posh art venue and nightclub for pretentious scenesters. Peter Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect simultaneously addresses and embodies the creative hubris that overlooks this fact, whipsawing between annoyance at its corpulent hero’s placement of aesthetic considerations above all human interactions and wistfully lamenting the fact that such considerations often add up to nothing. If the results are imperfect, they’ll at least give the art-minded a certain amount of pause.

Garage Days (2002) – DVD

July 25, 2004Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music

*½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
starring Kick Gurry, Maya Stange, Pia Miranda, Russell Dykstra
screenplay by Dave Warner & Alex Proyas and Michael Udesky
directed by Alex Proyas

by Walter Chaw A film done better just last year with Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People, the brilliant Alex Proyas’s third film is a relatively innocuous, mostly-failed rags-to-rags garage-band opera that finds its speed in its usage of stock crowd footage from an old INXS concert. Garage Days is, as you might assume, a period piece of sorts, but period only in the sense that a Baz Luhrman film is a period film (Baz is even referenced, in the picture’s best moment, in an LSD hallucination set to Rick James at his sleaziest)–ostensibly taking place on the Manchester-esque mean streets of Sydney sometime in the last twenty years, though unmistakably a product of the self-reverential school of the post-modern visual boom-factory. The style the substance, Garage Days is all cover and no book and the sort of picture that seems like a lot of fun without actually being all that much fun: Trainspotting with amplifiers.