Make the most of now

I first learn of Vodafone's 'teaser island' on Second Life News Network (SLNN), my first port of call for all things corporate in SL. SLNN is sponsored by 'virtual world agency' Rivers Run Red (RRR), who are, amongst other things, the agents of Vodafone's arrival in SL. No wonder Avalon, RRR's stylish and brilliantly conceived home in SL, has the occasional whiff of detergent thereabouts, the same flavour that SLNN, with its shiny finish and sterile editorial, is swimming in.

For my part, having been repeatedly snubbed by RRR's CEO in both lives, I'd love to denounce the article as shameless advertorial. In truth brand-centric non-events like this seem to be SLNN's bread and butter, regardless of the agency behind them (a fact I was quick enough to take advantage of when it suited me, although that bridge must now be considered burnt). Furthermore, amidst two paragraphs of regurgitated press release, their roving reporter even finds time for some journalism, pondering the curious timing of the announcement, it being the night before the night before Christmas.

Sure enough, little is stirring inside SL when I arrive, not even the mouse of friend and round-the-clock confidante Emilly O. She's abandoned her vigil in an eerily quiet Steelhead to tend to a meatspace vindaloo (Hardly the most festive of fare, but she's a cave-dweller and a pagan of sorts, so she's just relieved the days are getting longer at last).

I find the island of 'Vodafone' on the map, wince, and tp in. I have in instinctive dislike of brand named islands. Maybe I'd feel differently if I was one of their customers, or felt some affinity to their brand. However, given their dwindling market share, and my proclivity for going to unimaginable lengths to abandon underachieving service providers, surely I'm exactly the kind of floating voter they ought to be getting on-side?

I realise the non-descript furry white object I've been deposited on is a cloud at precisely the moment I stroll casually off the edge. Easing seamlessly into freefall, I have time to reflect on how irritated I am - and to wonder who moved the page up button - before I hit concrete, which turns out to be sea water, and floods my punctured lungs. It's an undignified entrance, by anyone's standards. I rest on the sea bed for a moment, considering legal action.

I surface, and fly, moth-like, towards the glowing red column signalling... something. I'm soon hovering a short distance away from a small, bright, perfectly circular yellow island, peppered with Super Mario-style flora and fauna, in the shadow of three enormous intertwined brass horns. A multi-coloured butterfly appears and glides through my midriff, it's wings beating gently in the imagined breeze. I'm reminded of Hate Something Change Something, Honda's testimony to the fact that corporations can do trippy. It occurs to me that the viability of any creative treatment ultimately comes down to its pertinence in relation to the underlying message. I drift gently downwards, determined to find one.

The three enormous brass horns stand silent. I check for my volume control, but it isn't there. Looks as though nobody is blowing Vodafone's triple-headed trumpet, least of all themselves. They remind me of the inner workings of the human ear, of cochleas, canals and tympanic membranes. They also remind me of one of the most disastrous branding exercises in history, BT's Piper, who breathed his last in 2003, 12 years after a £50m rebrand.

Beneath the horns, and a large rotating welcome message, is the island's centrepiece; a watercooler, almost monolithic atop its tiered red pedestal. The message explains that I can touch the watercooler to receive today's goodie, or take a watercooler of my own. Today's goodie turns out to be a selection of seasonal stocking fillers; a sign pointing towards the north pole; a sprig of mistletoe; some reindeer antlers.

In the first instance, I don't think it's particularly appropriate to point the few winter guests I can look forward to receiving in the direction of the North Pole. And, for my own part, and without wishing to seem uncharitable, I really couldn't give a flying fuck where the North Pole is. As for the mistletoe, I contemplate for a moment turning up on Emilly's doorstep brandishing a sprig. Most likely she'd strip me naked, put the antlers round the base of my bollocks, and whip my winkle with the mistletoe until I could pass myself off as riding astride the world's most famous reindeer.

On the tablet above the cooler, the words 'make the most of now' sign off Vodafone's welcome message. As if by magic, Emilly IMs me. I tell her to gather some holly and expect me shortly, but not before reflecting on the fact that this can't be what Lucy Vodafone, owner of the watercooler, intended.

If it is, I'd definitely like to make her acquaintance.

Time to die

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.

Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.

I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

Time to die.

ROY BATTY (Rutger Hauer), BLADE RUNNER, 1982

ALTERED (2006) - Dir. Eduardo Sanchez

If you want to know about the real curse of the Blair Witch, Ed Sanchez is living through it right now. Almost a decade on from the release of directorial debut THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (TBWP), costing $35,000 to produce and grossing over $250,000,000 worldwide, nothing Sanchez touches will escape critical comparison with this defining work.

In fairness to we critics, Sanchez isn't exactly making it difficult for us. ALTERED, his new film, sees a clutch of guys (and a token gal) holed up in some rustic corner of the great American outback, at odds with an unearthly tormentor whose insidious presence turns our protagonists gradually against one another. Sound vaguely familiar? Would it help if I told you that this is where the similarity ends, that ALTERED trades the narrative spontaneity and sinister, suggestive power of TBWP for a deft little script and some nifty special effects? Probably not.

There are other, more superficial distinctions. In ALTERED the villain of the piece is not a witch but a visitor from outer space, an alien who - in a simple and satisfying reversal of roles - is quickly abducted by three gun-toting Florida hicks. We soon learn that this is by way of retribution for some transgression that took place fifteen years ago, resulting in the death of a childhood friend and the ruin of each of their respective backwater lives.


Duke (Brad William Henke), Cody (Paul Boyington-McCarthy Jr) and Otis (Michael C. Williams) whisk the alien off to a lock-up owned by their friend Wyatt (Adam Kaufman) and his girlfriend Hope (Catherine Mangan), and try to lie low on the off-chance that none of its extra terrestrial travelling companions will come looking for it. However, as the night wears on the abductee begins to manipulate its captors, turning them against one another and bending them to its will, we move inexorably towards a spectacular... nerve-shredding... finale?

Ok, ok, so I've only seen the first 57 minutes (see 'My first time at the drive-in' to find out why). And maybe I'm doing Sanchez a terrible injustice, having the temerity to review his movie without watching it in its entirety. Or maybe it's you, my beloved readers, who are being sold short, and ALTERED comes apart in the last half hour in a way that has to be seen to be believed. At least the latter might explain the distributor's decision to send ALTERED it straight-to-DVD. With 57 minutes under my belt I find this decision incomprehensible (as, it would seem, does Sanchez - who, it must be hoped, has watched the film in its entirety).


True, ALTERED has a slightly glossy made-for-TV feel more akin to an uberseries like INVASION, exemplified by the presence of the assured and implausibly attractive Kaufman, a veteran of Steven Spielberg's TAKEN. But far worse movies than this have mustered a theatrical release, however limited, and none of them could boasted of having been brought to you by one of the directors of TBWP.

Make no mistake, ALTERED is a B-movie, but not the C-movie TBWP would have been if Sanchez and his 'crew' hadn't struck improvised gold as they led their bewildered 'cast' a merry dance through Maryland forest. Confined by the strictures of script and special effects budget, ALTERED is the work of a man feeling his way towards something like the normal film-making process. When he arrives, he might bless us with a grade-A feature, something with the power and production values of Ridley Scott's ALIEN or John Carpenter's THE THING, something compact, claustrophic, performance-driven. Failing this, falling victim to his own preposterously front-loaded success, he may come to be regarded as one of cinema's one-trick ponies, albeit one of the cruellest and most brilliant tricks ever played.

My first time at the drive-in

SLNN gives me a couple of days notice that Eduardo Sanchez, co-director of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, is personally presenting his new film ALTERED at 5PM SLT on the 19th December. It's my first chance to see a feature-length movie in SL, and I'm not going to miss it.

The venue is Flux Hoyseck's recently opened Phreeq Drive-In. Flux is one of a selection of residents who've been given the green light to build in Motorati, Pontiac's sprawling six island sim, after submitting an idea to Land-A-Polooza. This inspired initiative positions Pontiac as 'insane landlords with a taste for fast cars and big ideas', and their sim as a user-created monument to the proud American automotive tradition.

ALTERED opens at 1AM GMT, on a school night, just 29 hours after Rivers Run Red launch their Virtual Life TV Network with a screening of the 1997 sci-fi movie VELOCITY TRAP, as reported in yet another press release vomited into markup and passed off as journalism by SLNN. The tickets, we're told, 'will be distributed via lottery. Only the first 25 people interested in the event will be invited to attend.' This marks a new degree of unintelligibility, even by SLNN's standards.

Any which way, something tells me I'll struggle to make the cut. Furthermore, given that my wife and I will be toasting her 30th birthday with hot wine and spit-roasted pork in central Prague when it happens - and that VELOCITY TRAP is an obscure sci-fi flick of little obvious distinction - I'm not going to try to put somebody, least of all myself, on the inside.

ALTERED, on the other hand, is shaping up like a fun night out. Sanchez made my fingernails itch with THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, so much so that I slept under a rug on our living room floor rather than brave the hallway, shrouded in darkness, to reach the sanctuary of my matrimonial bed. I used to play in the woods behind our house all day long, until it was almost too dark to find my way home. The thought of the trees and the twilight turning against me, driven by a force of pure evil, chilled me to the core.

I recce the drive-in early on the 19th, and I'm not disappointed. It's not just any old drive-in theatre. In Flux's own words, it's 'a 1950s themed malt shoppe drive-in theatre, combining two of the greatest cultural landmarks of the time'. The malt shoppe itself is decked out in chopshop furniture from Flux's store, Phreeq, and the theatre includes skateways for waitresses running between the cars. The prim count looks low enough, but I still worry about how that's going to change once avs start rolling up in whatever they're driving these days. I IM Flux and he tells me to arrive early to avoid disappointment.

Time ticks by. I get some meatwork out of the way, and drop in on Liam at Silverscreen to confound him with some impulsive feedback on the state of the build. I know it pisses him off when I throw these whimsical revisions at him, but he knows as well as I do that SL has to remain fluid, transient, whatever we want or need it to be. Build it, enjoy it, but don't get too attached to it. You never know when you might have to tear it down to create space for the next big idea.

I drop Emilly a line to see if she wants in. She's making good money out of me these days, especially since I got the expense account. She'd probably shoot it for free, but I pay her anyway, as a point of principle.

She sends through some shots from an SL launch party she covered the day before, marking the DVD release of A SCANNER DARKLY. The way she tells it everyone turned up at once and spread themselves too thinly over the four venues. There was no real cohesion and focus. She mooched around, took some photos, got chatting to some guy who was almost interesting. Then the sim fell over. She didn't go back.

I'd drop in myself to survey the aftermath and find the organiser there, one MSGiro Grosso of RL interactive services agency Green Grotto Studios. I ask him how it went and he's quick to note that people don't seem to arrive fashionably late in SL. I, apparently, am the exception to this rule. I nose around, watch some VAM in a tiny screening room, and sample a little Substance D freely dispensed on arrival. It's after the event, but I can see the potential, and MSGiro has clearly gone some way towards realising it.

Emilly and I are talking movies, and a certain amount of codshit, and all of a sudden it's the witching hour. I go to meet her in Motorati. It's dark now, and she's already there when I arrive, in yet another drop-dead outfit. Beauty may grow on trees in SL, but style still counts for something. She tells me these are FallnAngel's designs, the top hat, the tinted Lennon specs, the tailcoat. And she stands there, like Bram Stoker's Dracula, sucking down a malt. I don't dare ask the flavour.


A few other avs are already kicking around. Emilly and I get comfortable on the shoppe roof, which turns out to be the best seat in the house; the perfect vantage point to watch the movie and the crowd. Meanwhile I'm reading on SLNN that VELOCITY TRAP was successfully screened to twenty residents from around the world and 'kept most, if not all, viewers present and alert throughout the nearly 2 hour showing'. It seems like an odd choice of words. In fact, that rather neatly describes Garret Bakalava's entire piece.

The drive-in's getting busy. Now, avs might be avs, but you can still get the measure of an SL crowd. I was at the launch of the Avalon Film Festival in early December and it didn't take a genius to see that it had drawn a crowd of beautiful people, yours truly included. ALTERED on the other hand seems to have cooked up a mixed grill of motorheads, speed freaks and screen junkies, riding high and lying low in silver-finned cadillacs, gas guzzling convertibles and an assortment of other automotive curios. Somebody arrives on a supercharged sofa, with afterburners for arms. Rich red flames lick the burnished black bodywork; a high octane flying carpet, with genuine persian fire in its belly. The numberplate reeds PHREEQ.

1.15 GMT and the movie still hasn't started. Nobody seems to care. Emilly and I have been helping an over-excited noob get his video working, while frying his unguarded mind with a discussion of where best to sup blood from the human body. She plumps for the inner thigh, and all my blood seems to rush to the region in anticipation. I shift in my seat, in nervous discomfort. Emilly spots this and goes for the jugular, describing an act defying mention on these hallowed pages. I ejaculate vomit onto the ground below.

She mops at my brow with a black silk handkerchief, telling me everything's going to be ok. I ask her to define ok, and moments later the rest of my partially digested maraschino malt splashes against the sidewalk, like fresh news breaking on SLNN. I look up through teary eyes. The movie has just started.

My review of ALTERED (or, as it turns out to be, my review of the first fifty-seven minutes of ALTERED) will be available as a separate post, asap. For the purposes of completing this installment, know this:

1. The fact that the quality of the playback nosedives after just under an hour, such that I have to relog and get dumped back at the opening credits, bears no reelection on the the event or its organisers. Anybody who saw me a month ago, dizzy as hell and unable to stop myself turning circles on the spot, knows that my laptop is an antiquated piece of shit full of green tea and assorted human detritus. Rest assured, once I forge a tiny opening in my day to requisition a new one, this fucker will feel the full extent of my wrath.

2. Even in spite of any technical hiccups my experience at the drive-in is positive, and powerfully formative. I later read that 'the director hung out for a long while to talk with people. He was very friendly and pretty straightforward. You've gotta love SL - where one minute you're chatting with a friend, then you're talking to the director of the Blair Witch Project.' I'd go along with that, but for my part the main event is the opportunity to take in a movie with a friend and kindred spirit who just happens to live on the other side of the world; to share the same conceptual space, and the same utterly tangible sense of occasion.

It seems to me that theatrical cinema survives because people still enjoy being part of a broader audience, whispering in each others ears and poking fun at - or simply poking - the people sat in front of them. By extending this experience into SL we can create a worldwide audience gathered together around a common interest, sharing their enjoyment in real time, in something like real space. A few months ago I'd have been lying on the sofa right now watching tv, maybe a movie. Instead I can start to frame these experiences within a context of interaction, experimentation, adventure, choosing what I want to watch, and who I want to watch it with.

I fall asleep smiling.