Wednesday
Mar222006
Animation gone all wrong
Wednesday, March 22, 2006 at 13:25 
Here I am with my friend from Canada.He is also a almost pro-wrestler so you would figure he could stay in character. It could have been a good one.
Wednesday, March 22, 2006 at 13:25 References (1)
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Response: tai ChiA recent post I need to add to the permanent links
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Lori
“LAURA’S DILEMMA”
God finally gets around to creating a daughter. She's the most beautiful angel ever. One day, she asks to go to earth to experience the human world. Though grieved by her wish, and knowing what evils lay ahead, god, out of absolute love, let’s her go. She's born to a good family and grows up in a big city unaware of her origins. She feels average emotions and frustrations, and has an idealistic, generous nature, as well as a magnetic personality. Her body is perfectly formed and she grows into an exceptionally strong, beautiful young woman. Her name is Laura. Everyone adores her.
During her adolescence, however, adoration turns to lust, and Laura’s pursued night and day by boys, men and lesbians of all ages. She learns to thwart her peers’ unwanted advances, but one night she’s brutally raped by a gang of older males. As a consequence, she becomes bitter, angry, and confused.
She starts to rebel at school, and gets into trouble with the law. Maddened by irrational guilt, she runs away from home and lives on the street. Drugs, thievery and physical violence are routine. One day, she encounters one of her rapists and beats him to death in an alleyway with a brick.
Laura establishes a reputation for being an exceptional fighter. During a brawl with a group of young men, she attracts the attention of a martial arts master who offers to train her. To save herself from a life of depravity, she dedicates herself completely to fighting. Everyone is amazed at how quickly she advances. Her moves are inhumanly fast and accurate. She herself is astonished at how, by the tender age of 15, she already dominates every training partner, every competitor, never losing except when she feels sorry or embarrassed for her opponent. Her revered teacher is one such person who, out of gratitude and respect, she always lets win. He eventually realizes this and concedes that he’s taught her everything he knows. She’s the master now.
Within a few short years she goes on to win the highest awards and titles in several martial art styles. Ridiculously under-matched against the other women, she begins exhibition fighting against men. She’s indomitable here too, and gains international attention as possibly the best, and at times most vicious, fighter of all time. Exceptions are made so she can challenge the strongest and most celebrated men in every form of fighting, and ruthlessly takes apart the few who have the courage, or stupidity, to accept.
Savvy businesses quickly exploit her fame to sell products, and Laura amasses a fortune. Researches strive to discover why, after hundreds of fights, she’s acquired no scars or broken bones, subjecting her to tests that reveal nothing but breathtaking physical form and geometry. At the same time, she demonstrates a deep and subtle intelligence in worldly matters far beyond her age and limited education. Suddenly, she’s everywhere in the media, in constant demand by scholars, political leaders, and entertainment moguls. She can’t go around in public without being mobbed. Countless suitors and opportunists court her continuously.
In spite of her acclaim, Laura feels lonely. She longs for a love which, at 20, she’s only dreamed of. Though she still harbors anger at the abuses she’s suffered, she manages to have sexual relationships with a variety of lovers. After numerous unfulfilling encounters with some prominent athletes and intellectuals, she eventually resigns herself to fate and shacks up with a professional bodybuilder to amuse herself. In time, the man comes to resent Laura’s effortless and increasingly rough control over him, and her ultimate dismissal of him as a fool. Bitterness turns to rage. He plots to swindle the young woman’s money and have her murdered one weekend in Palm Springs, where she has an appointment with a spiritual teacher.
She drives through the desert alone, incognito, to prepare her thoughts in solitude for the meeting. In the spare time before her appointment, Laura goes down to the hotel’s outdoor swimming pool to relax. Among the people there is a guy who attracts her attention. Tall, tanned, with a perfect body and unbelievably good looking, she watches him gracefully dive into the pool. Fascinated with this beautiful man, Laura introduces herself, looks into his deep blue eyes, and instantly falls in love with him. With senses heightened to a new level by his powerful charisma, she invites him to dine with her that evening.
When he arrives at her room, he’s dressed in an elegant suit and presents her with a beautiful blue long-stem rose, the most unique thing she’s ever seen. Inexplicably overwhelmed with emotion, Laura moves into his arms and kisses him. As soon as their lips meet, she has a psychedelic experience, time seems to stand still, and suddenly she’s in a dream world. She drops the flower as her body goes into panic and she’s unable to move a muscle. She sees things she can’t describe or understand, but feels like she’s been here before.
Words come to her from a deep oblivion in a huge and wonderful voice. She’s told that unless she acts quickly she’ll be murdered that evening by her devious lover’s design. She’s told that the man she’s kissing is someone she once knew, someone who loves her very much. Confused, not knowing what to believe, Laura shakes off the spell in a fit of panic and incredible determination. With lightning fast reflexes, she grabs the man behind the neck with both hands and pulls his body down, kneeing him twice in the chest with all of her might. With a gasp, the tall, athletic man crumples to the floor, his heart no longer beating.
Horrified and disoriented, she pulls the stranger’s lifeless body into the room and closes the door. She sits on the bed in shock, and tries to collect her thoughts. Just then, someone knocks softly at the door. Immediately she knows the man was telling the truth. Without hesitation, she runs to the balcony and leaps off it into the swimming pool five stories below in the courtyard. Turning back briefly, she sees a group of angry armed men on her balcony, then escapes.
Over the next year, Laura succeeds in staying alive and having her ex-lover and cohorts prosecuted. But she fails to learn anything about the man who had saved her life. Who she had killed. His body, as well as the strange blue rose, has disappeared from the hotel room by the time the police arrived.
[Okay, if you think that was a cheesy turn, I’ve got an even worse one for you. Forget what happened after the point where she’s kissing the guy, and start again like they do in the movies]
Confused, not knowing what to believe, Laura shakes off the spell in a fit of panic and incredible determination. With lightning fast reflexes, she grabs the man behind the neck with both hands and pulls his body down, kneeing him twice in the chest with all of her might. Though the sheer force of her attack would have certainly hurt any normal man, it doesn’t phase this one. Stunned, she looks at the man’s calm, loving eyes and asks who he is.
After stepping inside the room and carefully locking the door, the man says he’s a divine being who has assumed human form in order to warn her of the plot against her. He tells her that she is in fact his daughter and he can’t bear to lose another child at the hands of mortals. After some demonstration and discussion he wins Laura’s partial trust, but as a free and physical human being she can’t completely accept his story. It doesn’t make sense to her.
If he is in fact all-powerful, why didn’t he prevent all this in the first place? He must have known this was going to happen all along. If she’s really his daughter, why doesn’t she recognize him? Why didn’t he warn her about the rapists when she was younger? If he doesn’t want to interfere in human affairs, why is he here now?
The man not only fails to win Laura over, she becomes angrier and more confused by the moment. She shouts at him, saying that even if he is who he says he is, she’s incensed by the cruelty of his creation. She accuses him of being a pitiless coward who’s never had to taste his own medicine. Finally, she challenges him to relinquish his supernatural powers for a single hour to show her his sincerity.
The man concedes that from the human perspective, Laura’s argument is sound. He tells her that although her assumptions are wrong, he agrees to live in complete human vulnerability for an hour so she’ll ultimately appreciate the full depth of his love.
Laura searches the man’s eyes for signs of deception. Still perfectly blue, she notices they don’t have the same affect on her they did earlier. But she detects nothing suspicious. Taking his large, powerful hand, she applies a thumb lock to test him. Though he remains calm, she sees that he does feel pain. Not a lot, but it’s a large and strong hand, she concedes. A look of superiority crosses the man’s face as he says that he’s indeed a powerful man. Laura pretends to be impressed and asks him to remove his shirt and jacket to show her the muscular torso she’d glimpsed earlier at the pool. It suddenly occurs to her that this can’t be her father. She grew up with her real father, who she still genuinely loves. He’d never act like this toward her! Never. As he’s almost finished removing the jacket, Laura takes advantage of his position and with lightning speed again draws him down from behind the neck, butting his broad rib cage twice with her powerful knee kick.
With a grunt, the man collapses to the floor gasping for air. For the next hour, Laura maniacally beats the luckless god-body to a bloody pulp, breaking teeth and fracturing bones, stifling his pitiful screams with a wet hand towel stuffed down his throat. Though he’s unconscious within minutes, she continues to pummel and tear him with the ferocity of a rabid lioness releasing all of her repressed resentment in a bloody torrent. When he starts to regain consciousness, she rips his eyes out of their sockets with her fingers and crushes his testicles to a squishy pulp in her hands. Standing over the mutilated, once beautiful body, she begins to weep uncontrollably, thinking she must be going insane. Either way, god or man, crazy or not, she’s in a terrible situation. Is she going to kill a crazy man? What will happen to her celebrated life when the police catch up with her?
Despite these agonizing thoughts, just before the hour ends, Laura takes the man’s bloody head in her arms and snaps the neck at the top with one powerful twist, thus ending his life.
Emotionally drained, she sits down on the bed and tries to collect her thoughts. Just then, someone knocks softly at the door. Immediately she knows the man’s warning was in earnest. Oh my god, what have I done! She gets up and runs toward the balcony, but momentarily stumbles in amazement when she sees that the body, the blood, and the strange rose have all disappeared as though they were never there. Three assassins come crashing through the door just as Laura is jumping off the balcony. One of them, a woman, fires a round that finds its target in Laura’s back and pierces her heart. She lands on the tiles next to the swimming pool in the courtyard five stories below. Dead.
[Okay, that’s enough of this. As dumb as this is, it probably WILL be made into a film. A high-grossing one at that (pun not included). In which case, I demand points and a nice advance. How’s that?]
Yes, the whole thing's ridiculous. It's just a quick, fairytale, fable type of metaphor in the form of a bad action film.
But, for the sake of argument, is it really that far fetched to love someone at one moment, then hate them the next? True, this is compressed into a single evening. But the truth of the matter can be found daily in the newspapers. It's often said that love makes very little sense. That's the meaning of "as a free and physical being, it (the god perspective, i.e. pure love) didn't make sense to Laura. How cruelty (evil) can come from love (perfect good) is a human, as well as a tired old theological, paradox. It's epitomized by her insane attack on the man.
In a way, this expresses the paradox of the fighting female in general. The mystery lies in the same dualism that raises the question of good and evil. One could say it's the question itself that doesn't make sense. Still, who doesn't ask it at one time or another?
So, yeah, we have gratuitous violence, way over the top, a mix of John Woo and the brothers Grimm. Not going for Nobel Prize or the Pulitzer here.
Why did you have two endings instead of one? To show the possible consequences of Laura's choices?
That's the main reason, though I wouldn't say "choice", but rather, "circumstances". The first version has the guy collapsing dead after a few kicks, the second has him unphased until he temporarily relinquishes his divine invulnerability, and becomes truly, for an hour, a human being. The main difference between the endings is that Laura is punished for denying the facts in the second version. By denying, she "stumbles" on her own incredulity, her own ego, actually.