Saturday, February 07, 2009

Pyramids vs. Aliens


We looked at this film in relation to the Super Bowl ad and the monsters' appearance in the bizarre shapeshifting-reptile ad for Sobe. Well, surprise, surprise- the poster for Monsters vs. Aliens features the Transamerica Pyramid, that weird synthesis of pyramid and obelisk in San Francisco. 

But there's another pyramid-capped building cropped to the left (which looks a lot like WFC 3), so there seems to be a motif at work here. Again, this is the same semiotic pairing of aliens and Ancient Egyptian iconography which we saw last week in the context of The Secrets of Isis, though it's a bit more subtle here. 

Apparently, the film was moved to March to avoiad competing with James Cameron's Avatar, which looks to be jam-packed with all sorts of predictive-programming themes: militarism, environmentalism, space colonization, gene-splicing, walk-ins and on and on. Avatar will definitely get the Synchrosphere hopping- if it ever actually comes out.

UPDATE: From a snarky Scottish hipster site:
"I'm Jazz, man - this is my bar," said the slightly drunk Englishman as we entered a tiny dive in semi-suburban Prague. So we got talking. Or, arguing fiercely more like, because for all that this Jazz fellow was pretty funny, he was also an obstreperous bastard, and we just couldn't take his claims seriously. 
"We're descended from aliens, who built the pyramids" was a key theme. "I moved to Iceland to escape the apocalypse." All this, put forth aggressively, followed by "I co-wrote the New Zealand national anthem, with Mauris." 
"Bollocks" we said. 
Bit of googling the next day and it turned out he wasn't lying. But also our man 'Jazz' had failed to tell us his most outstanding claim to fame, that he was in fact Jaz Coleman, frontman of the occasionally mind-blowing post-punk outfit Killing Joke. [RJ Thomson]