The (chess) (gif) Thing

During the ramp up Election night i was visiting Bryan Alexander, and found a relevant movie to watch, John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Relevant? Heck yes- shape shifting monsters that emerge every now and then from the ice?

Watching of the early scenes, we smiled at the retro computer chess game that Kurt Russell’s character RJ Macready curses at when he loses

This scene cried out to me to be GIFfed; the first one I trimmed out the segment in MPEG Streamclip where he is just drinking his JBs, the glass up and down is a great repeat, and he has a little bit of q wry smile. Its kind of dark (as is the movie). For tis one, I extracted abut 12 frames and imported into The Gimp, dropped maybe 5 that were not critical. I then used the Groom method, lassoing the key area to animate, set as a layer mask, and apply to each layer.

So here Macready wonders about the machine, who he thinks he is master of, but it is the machine who really is the better (weighs in at 534k)

But the real scene, again somewhat of a metaphor of how Macready deals with what he cannot control is the end of the scene, where he calls Chess King a “cheating bitch.”

For this one, I used MPEG Streamclip to make a trim, and saved it as MP4. I converted it to MOV with Quicktime player, then and used PhotoShop to import into layers, using every 4 seconds. I dropped about 8 frames that had only small amounts of motion. This one is only 646k.

The movie was a wild ride, my first view. It is both a horror movie on the surface, if you focus on the freaky monster and the gore scenes. But it also a whodunnit, a mystery, as it tricks you into guessing who is the human and who is the replicant. And the creature is a different kind of monster, what doe sit say that what terrorizes us is what can imitate and become one of us?

And this is where my post should end except…

I peeked at the related links, and am blown away by this edit idea- we see scenes from the Kurt Russell character in the original, from the very scene I used above, cut in with the trailer from the less than stellar 2011 remake, as if he is actually watching the remake:

Do you get it? Character from a classic movie watching the trailer of a more modern movie? Can you say coming soon to a ds106 assignment bank near you?

Or how about George C Scott’s Patton getting worked up about the Adam Sandler’s “Jack and Jill” trailer

Or Malcom Macdowell’s Alex, from a CLockwork Orange, enjoying the same?

Oh the tangent threads of this here web…

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