The Saw Project

So you may have heard of this series of movies called Saw. The opinion of these movies will vary primary depending on whether you've seen them or not. People who have not seen the Saw series generally refers to it in distaste. Those who have seen it vary between convoluted and genius, and they have about the same opinon on the movies too (zing!).

I'm one who has seen all six of the existing movies, and there is a solid reason why these movies have won awards for their physical effects. The scenes that Saw is known for (oh yes, there will be blood) are very graphic and extremely well done. There are even some that are cringe-worthy in nature that you honestly want to turn your head from because they are just painful to watch. But while the torture scenes might bring some people in, these are not the scenes that bring people back.

Saw is the story of a man named John Kramer. He was a guy who met the girl of his dreams, married her, helped her start a drug rehab clinic (who doesn't want to live that dream?), and meticulously planned for a child to be born in the chinese year of the pig. John was an engineer and even had a book about engineering. He bought a slew of old, abandoned buildings with a lawyer named Art Blank, and together, they planned on remodeling these building into low-cost housing. Even had several families lined up when tragedy struck. John's wife, who was seven months pregnant, ran into one of her patients while closing up the clinic, and he held her at knifepoint to break into the clinic to steal some drugs. He failed to pay attention to where she was on his hasty escape and slammed the door into her stomach causing her to lose the baby. John entered a deep depression, and dropped out of the project with Art Blank which left all the disrepaired buildings in disrepair. It wasn't long after that John was diagnosed with an incurable cancer, and he tried to kill himself by driving off a bridge. He survived, and after facing death, he decided this gave him a new appreciation of life. Looking around him, he saw that most people lived their life without any appreciation of the blessing they were given, and so he decided to give them the same "gift" he had been given: a chance to face death and realize what kind of a gift life really is. Problem is that most of his subjects couldn't pass their tests and were subsequently killed. Thus, the newspapers dubbed him "The Jigsaw Killer" since he cut a piece of skin out of his subjects following their death showing that they were missing a vital piece of their lives: the will to live.

The series is told in a combination of current events and flashbacks to fill in the history of Jigsaw, his apprentices, and his life. Each movie in the series has a major reversal, or twist, at the end of it that generally folds the movie back on itself and reveals secrets that you may have missed or that the movie deliberately concealed during its duration by misdirection. The twists have generally been immensely clever, fooling even die hard movie goers dsuch as myself, bringing a big goofy smile to my face. Thought I generally disliked the second movie the first time I saw it, I loved the twist(s) at the end. Thinking about it, the movies usually toss a two or three reversals there at the end, though the twists in 6 were a little weaker than most of the earlier ones.

So weird as it may seem, I've been working on a chronological cut of the six Saw movies (and keeping the project open to insert the seventh film next year when it hits DVD). Saw is the only movie that I've bought on DVD after getting a blu-ray player primarily because a) it's a gritty movie that works well on DVD and b) I don't have a blu-ray player on my computer so I couldn't copy the film over if it were on blu-ray. So I took my MPEG2's and loaded them into my movie editor and started cutting and moving scenes. I wasn't concerned over transitions or voiceovers, really (in most cases). It was more about the sequence of events.

The project has consumed my past month and I'm finally to a point where I can rip me a copy of the nearly 10-hour masterpiece. I'm not burning it to DVD since I don't want to waste the plastic disc (5 or 6 of them actually) on an unfinished item. Seven will come out and I'll just need to reopen it. So I'm making files of it to watch on my iPod to see how I did and make any necessary changes to it. It's just really easy to get lost in the events and a lot of them occur simultaneous to other events, so I've wanted to make a chronological cut of the movies ever since the mind-bending twist in the fourth movie. I started on the first four, but the editor I was using had trouble with the growing movie that was pushing 7 hours long at that time. So I stopped for awhile until I bought the last couple movies last month, and I started back in on it.

I had a lot of fun watching all six movies again, and meticulously going through it scene by scene to break it down. The movies are good enough to survive that sort of dissection, so if you've been curious about the Saw series, here's my thoughts for you. First, DO NOT listen to anyone who has not seen it for an opinion on "what they heard about it," especially if they just say it's disgusting. Yes, you need a strong stomach for it. I considered a "tame" cut of the movies so the Queen could enjoy it, but such a cut is not possible because of how everything fits together. A lot of horror flicks you can chop out the blood and guts and lose nothing of the story, but in this series, those bloody tests are integral to the plot, and they permeate almost every scene. It is very bloody and very violent. However, they have infused the series with a rare element in the horror genre: character. The characters drive the plot in these movies, and it is the tests that bring out the characters, which is another reason they cannot be just cut out. To fully appreciate Saw, you have to watch it in its entirety in order. You can't take a single out of the mix and view it. It's not James Bond. You also have to take it as a story, and not watch it for the "torture porn" or you'll miss the point. What is the point?

How are you living your life? Do you exploit others for your own benefit, or do you actually appreciate life for the gift that it is? Life is something to not be taken for granted, but something where every day is a blessing and living it should be a joy, not a chore. Are you grateful for another day or will you find yourself a subject of Jigsaw encouraging you to be grateful...once you pass his test?

Did It Again

So it occurred to me that I've done it again. I've let this blog lapse into obscurity with no new posts. You gotta make sure you have new posts or Google won't index it. I considered for a long time how I would keep this one alive. Obviously any life has enough stuff go on that one could not only fill a few paragraphs a day, but volumes and volumes of books with what happens. We just don't assign enough significance to it. I know what I want to do here, but I'm not sure I have the wherewithall to pull it off. Yet, I think it's the only way to do it without feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of documenting my days.

Here's the plan: I'll keep notepad open all day long and record what happens throughout the day, and once the day is done, I'll record it in here. I would be willing to wager that some days will be drier than others, but that's how life is sometimes, isn't it? Some days are interesting, and some are boring. I will try, however, to stick to high points and not just a timeline of the little things. After all, you, as a reader, won't be interested in what I'm wearing every day, would you? At least, I wouldn't think so. My clothing choices as a geek are actually really uninteresting. Khaki pants and a polo shirt sums up 66% of the year. Jeans and a polo shirt sums up another 20-25%. There you have it.

Hence, most of my future posts will be dated for the end of any given day. For today, I'll touch on a few high points for yesterday.

My job is changing for a big one. A guy who has been at my workplace for eleven years took a job somewhere else (we wish him the best), and given how fast I learn stuff, the powers that be tapped me to replace what he does. It occurs to me that this would have been a good decision to make within a day of him giving notice, so I could sit with him for his last two weeks. There are other people who collectively know what he knew, so I'll pick it up little by little, but getting it from him would have been better. Oh, well. Hindsight and all that. The job is  partly programming, which I do enjoy, and a bigger part just supporting a different product with my company, which is ok. The programming language is still BASIC, which I started on when I was seven, though the "version" they use here is Visual Basic, which has a few extra parts to it that old school BASIC (or even Turbo BASIC from high school) didn't have. Should be interesting though.

Other than that, yesterday consisted of meeting with my parents and siblings at Ron's Hamburgers for dinner. We meet with them every week and have done so since before the Queen and I were married. It became a weekly tradition, and has worked out very well since it allows us all time to catch up and they can see how the princesses are all growing up. The place varies from week to week and even the days have shifted around here and there, but we almost always get together once a week. I typically order the sausage cheeseburger (plain and dry, yeah hold your comments) and some chili cheese fries. Very good, as usual.

In the evening, I worked on my Saw project, which I'll go into in more detail on a different post. I basically converted one of the MPG's I made of part of the chronological cut into an iPod compatible file so I could view it on my iPod.

Following that, I sat down with the Queen and watched the musical, Company, that I got from Netflix. Yes, I watched a stage musical on DVD. I've always loved musicals, and even wrote a couple once upon a time. It's a medium I'd like to get back into writing someday when life allows more time at the keyboard. Company was really, really good. The staging was beyond clever. I never even conceived of a show where the actors were also the orchestra. Seriously. The actors/singers played various instruments on stage eliminating the need for a pit orchestra. It made me smile a lot especially when they were switching instruments. I swear, each person up there played at least 2 to 3 instruments, and not always from the same family. Several string players switched to saxophone, for example. The oboe player also played tuba. Since not every person was in every scene, it made each person that much more essential and on stage for the whole show instead of disappearing into the green room except for cast numbers. So I thought it was really cool.

The only weirdness I have was last night at around 2am. I woke up and thought I heard voices. The voices were female and muffled, like they were coming from behind the walls. Whether they were from outside the house or the princesses woke up in the middle of the night, I couldn't say, since I couldn't understand what they were saying. The computer was compiling another MPEG2 of another part of my Saw Project, so the processor fan was going full speed, drowning out a lot of the voices anyway. When I got up this morning, the house was more than intact, so it's not as if someone was where they shouldn't have been, though I discovered the reason the Queen was crowding me in bed was because Ladybug joined us during the night. I'm sure I'll hear about what was up with that tomorrow.

I do recall something about her wanting to sleep with us before we went to bed, but I don't remember what the reason was behind that. Oh well. Maybe I'll be reminded today...

Let the day commence!