A Scanner Darkly (2006)

Morgan Avery2 Comments

Another adaptation from a Philip K. Dick story, though I have to confess that I don’t think I’ve actually read this one.

I was, I must admit, somewhat nervous about this movie, as it is rotoscoped (a form of animation where they draw over the top of filmed actors/scenes) and I’ve had bad experiences with rotoscoping in the past – namely Ralph Bakshi’s truly awful The Lord of the Rings (1978).

But in this case it actually worked, the quirks – mostly in the form of scenery moving quite strangely if the camera tracked at all – of the medium made the unsettled nature of much of the movie (the key characters are drugged up to the eyeballs and paranoid/delusional most of the time) even more disturbing.

The story, set in the not too distant future, involves an under cover police officer (Keanu Reeves giving the most animated role he has in years) known by the code name of Fred, as he spirals towards destruction through his use of a highly addictive new drug called Substance D, as well as his friends and girlfriend – all of whom are also on D, amongst other things.

It’s dark, with constant surveillance of phone calls, cameras on all city streets (and hidden in many private homes) and brutal police tactics being used to suppress the people.  But to be honet, the tory doesn’t really fixate on that stuff too much, it spends a great deal more time enjoying the company of Fred’s crazy drugged up friends, played by Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, and Rory Cochrane with Winona Ryder as Fred’s girlfriend (more like friend with no benefits, though, poor guy).

To single out any of the performances would be unfair on the others, as all these actors put in truly stellar performances – really! – even through the animators paint.

Considering the mostly quite dark subject matter, there are some inspired comedy scenes, including a delightfully delusional scene in which Barris (Downey Jr.) arrives at Fred’s house (where he’s been crashing) wearing lemon yellow bike pants, on a new mountain bike he’s just bought, and then proceeds, with the help of the rest of the crew, to discover that his 18 speed has actually been modified by the gypsies who sold it to him to have either 9 or 8 speeds.  Though of course it’s perfectly fine, it’s just a probably stolen bike.

To understand the bike joke, you have to watch the film, and I strongly suggest that you do.

It drags a little near the end, when a bunch of unneccessary exposition happens with Fred and Winona Ryder, and at least half of the big twist is really obvious, but so what, the rest of the film is absolute gold.

It’s just one more time, at 1.30pm on Wednesday July 19th at the awful Civic Theatre (nice decor, terrible seating) but will almost certainly be out on a more general release some time after the festival.

Animation Now! (2006)

Morgan Avery

Animation Now! is a bit of a film festival staple, I’ve been going to them off and on for many many years now, it’s a combination of short animation pieces from around the world, and can be pretty spectacular sometimes.

Last year, for intance, they had academy award winning animations included, and the ones that hadn’t won academy awards were still pretty astonishingly good.  For the most part at least.

This year it seemed a lot more hit and miss.

There was one real stand out piece, an Australian short (about 5 minutes long) called ‘In My Day’ (2005), which is a collaborative effort between primary school children, elderly residents, and a local animator from a small town called Natimuk, the older residents tell tales of their childhoods in the town (and in the school) in the 1930s, and the children drew pictures to go with the storie.  Really brilliant stuff.  And the only piece that got applause from the audience.

‘McLaren’s Negatives’ (2005) was interesting, telling the tale of the life and works of animator Norman McLaren.  There was a tiny little Australian one called ‘An Unusual Circumstance’ (2005) which was very sweet.  And there was a horrible, brutal, and really just generally unpleasant piece from the USA called ‘Son of Satan’, nasty nasty stuff.  Another quite nicely made piece was out of Taiwan, and called ‘The Man of the Hour,’ pretty good stuff.

Worst pick of the bunch?  I don’t know.  But ‘Sans Secularity’ (2004) was pretty friggin’ bad.  Otherwise, I guess it would be pretty mean to list all the bad ones, so I won’t bother.  (Also, bad animation is so forgettable you tend to, you know, forget it.)

It was only on once, so I don’t need to bother saying ‘save the price of the ticket for something a bit more reliably good’.

This film is not yet rated. (2006)

Morgan Avery

The first movie we’ve seen so far at this years Auckland International Film Festival, is a documentary which concerns itself with the secretive goings on of the privately run (by the Motion Picture Associate of America) film ratings board.  An unqualified, unidentified, and distinctly shady group of religious conservative "parents" who have effective control over the ratings given to all American movies.

Kirby Dick presents the jaw dropping facts in a sometimes humorous way, as humorous as it can be seeing what these guys get up to. 

I must say, our own office of films videos and publications classification seems like a far more open and honest system by comparison, but I already thought that.  How cool is it that our chief sensor is a publicly out gay man?

With numerous interviews with the film makers who have themselves been affected by the heavy handed (and uninformed) decisions sent down by the ratings board, including from Kevin Smith, Matt Stone, Michael Tucker, Atom Egoyan, and many many others, as well as side-by-side comparisons of what the big-studios get away with next to what smaller independently produced films get snapped for.

The members of the film ratings board are secret, which makes it hard for Dick to talk to them, or about them, so he hires a private investigator, who later turns out to be a gay mother, working with her lesbian partner, we go along on stake outs and car pursuits with these women, follow them into restaurants where they surreptitiously record the day to day goings on of the staff from the ratings board until they end up with a list of all of their names, these identities can then be placed against known quotes from the former head of the MPAA (for 38 friggin’ years!) Jack Kirby, talking about how all of the member of the ratings board are parents of children between 5 and 17 years and so forth.  The reality is somewhat different, some of the censors (for that is what they really are) have no children, they’re virtually divorcees, and a majority of the ones that are parents have grown children (we’re talking 20 – 30 year olds).  Of course, this wouldn’t matter at all if the publicity they spread about themselves didn’t make it an issue.

Later in the piece, Kirby Dick has to submit his own film, which of course includes footage of the censors, their names, video of their homes, and so on, to the ratings board itself, and no one is especially surprised when it comes back with the very highest possible rating.

His only recourse is a supposedly open and transparent appeals board, only their lawyer tells him he can’t take footage, he can’t ask for identities, and so on.  So of course he gets his private investigators on the case again, and it turns out the review board includes several representatives of the American clergy (one Catholic, one Episcopalian) and the rest of the board is all made up of theatre chain owners and film buyers and so on who have such incredibly vested interests, that no more really needs to be said from that point.  (So he just names them, lists their affiliations, and then illustrates how the vast corporate ownership of American media rests, really, with just a few companies.)

I thought it was a great documentary, I would have liked it if maybe they’d had some better cameras (it seems to be shot entirely on video), but the content more than makes up for that.

Highly recommended if you have an interest in media and censorship matters.

It’s playing again only once in Auckland, this Monday July 17th at 8.45pm, check the New Zealand Film Festival website for more details.  And who knows about a longer run at Rialto of somewhere later on down the line.

Super Captain Jack Returns

Morgan Avery

Last weekend we met up with Karl & Louise, grabbed a coffee (actually a couple of big white chocolate decaf mochas), then headed into Imax to watch the ‘enhanced for imax’ print of Superman Returns.  The enhancement in question was a number of 3D sequences.  And it actually worked pretty well.

If you’ve ever been to a movie that used those red/blue glasses, you’ll know how completely useless and sucky they can be.  This didn’t use those.  It used very oversized polarised lenses, kindly designed to be comfortably worn over glasses if required. Things definitely popped more on screen during the sequences when the glasses had to be put on.  But that did require being pulled out of the movie universe by flashing red icons at the bottom of the screen, putting the glasses on for a while, then taking them back off after a while, which didn’t entirely allow me to really sink into the story.

The movie itself?  Well, I guess it felt like a slightly updated version of the Superman movies from the 70s & 80s.  And perhaps they could have updated a bit more to suit the more cynical modern audiences.  Such as what Batman Begins did, with the dirt and the violence and so on.  We’re dealing with bad nasty criminals here, would it kill you to have them swear from time to time?

What Superman did have, was special effects.  A great many.

Right from the opening sequence you could see that the poor CG techs had probably given themselves a few nasty cases of RSI in the production of the film.  It started with the supernova that ate Krypton, and then during the opening credits we travelled along with Kal-El as he made his way to Earth, passing many weird and varied planets and other astronomical thingamabobs.

They clearly did a lot to get rid of the corny, cringe inducing cheese that seems to float around Superman’s oily head, but there was still some there.  Changing Lois Lane for a more interesting actress probably would have made it better.  A bit of swearing from the bad guys, and maybe a bit more visceral violence.  Who says Superman can’t just punch someone’s head off then throw their body into the sun?  Or just pull off their skin?  Burn their eyes out?

What do you mean that’d make him the bad guy.  That’d make him the AWESOME guy. 

I guess my favourite scene was the one with the minigun, Superman flys in and stands in the stream of projectiles, shielding a couple of idiot security guards, and slowly walks towards the gunman.  Bullets ricocheting off his chest strike all over the roof of the building they’re on.  Finally the glowing barrels of the gun spin to a halt, then the gunman draws his pistol, points it directly at Superman’s head and shoots him in the eye.  In super slow motion we watch as the hammer strikes, the charge ignites and the bullet exits the barrel of the gun propelled by a growing cloud of hot gas, it travels the couple of inches to his face, then squashes flat on Supermans eyeball, before dropping to the ground.

What should happen next would be the gristley crunching of the dudes spine being removed, but what does happen next is Superman slightly tilting his head and the bad guy knowing his number is up.  That’s it.  No spine pulling at all.

Other fun was the very quick catch up on Clarke Kent’s development into Superman, discovering his powers and so on, all very entertaining, watching him running through corn fields and gradually adding new twists, jumping higher and higher, and so on.  Charming stuff.

In balance, I have to admit that the movie was rather a lot better than I expected.  If you have the choice, I think you should see the Imax release, the 3d sequences are better than anything you’ve seen in a popular release movie before.

This weekend we decided to see another movie, so on Saturday night we headed (with Louise and Sandra) to De Poste for an early(ish) dinner  – I had Belgian sausages and stoemp and a glass of the exceptionally ordinary Palm Speciale, it tasted like Lion Red to me, exceedingly average and certainly not special, let alone speciale, and Claire had steamed mussels and a glass of some sort of wine I have to confess to not paying much attention to (I was busy with the sausages, forgive me).  Then we headed to meet up with Karl at the Lido, where we watched ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest’ – this is the second part of a trilogy based, most bizarrely, on a freak*ng theme park ride.

Let’s start with the easy stuff, Johnny Depp is really is a great actor.  It’s not exactly a controversial thing to say, I know, he’s got a huge body of work behind him featuring a broad range of characterisations.  For example, contrast his character from Once Upon a Time in Mexico with his portrayal of Willy Wonka now compare that with his portrayal of Raoul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  Go on.  See?  He’s good, and he’s not afraid to play challenging characters.  That’s moot.

This movie, however, I’m just not sure about.

Once again, it’s heavy on the special effects – and they are pretty bloody good.  Davy Jones’ crew featured some amazing CG work, it looked, for the most part, like real things.  (As with other CG, who knows what we’ll think of it in 5 or 10 years, it might looked like something from Nintendo by comparison, but for today, it’s good work.)

As for action, let’s just say that all buckles are swashed.  Including pirates going for a zorb ride in a spherical cage made of the bones of their crew mates while being chased by hordes of cannibal savages.  And an extended sword fight on top of a very large water wheel as it careened out of control through the undergrowth of a jungle covered island.

Let me just sum up by saying that while I enjoyed the movie, and yes it was entertaining – something was missing.  I was left with a slight hollow feeling.  Perhaps if you’ve seen the movie you can share your thoughts on why this might be.

Things that are easy to like:

Trinity of Silver’s Eggs Benedict with Bacon.

I’m not kidding, these were simply the best eggs benny I’ve ever had.  Add organic free range eggs & bacon and you have a lovingly crafted meal balanced with the peace of mind of ethically treated animals. The sauce was just right, the bread was light and crunchy.  Great job.  You should go and try them out.

The Great Blend and such…

Morgan Avery3 Comments

With my mother newly back in the country after 3 months in one of the most gastronomically homogenous countries in the Western World, we decided that we had to take her to ‘somewhere Asian’ we narrowed the choices down to Thai (Claire and I are both completely crazy for Tom Kha Gai) or Chinese, and what with Canton being so fabulous, Chinese won out. Canton is one of those places where the more people you have, the better your dinner will be, with just 3 people along, we had to fake it by ordering waaaay to much food.  It worked pretty well.

Saturday was Karajoz Great Blend day, Russell Brown‘s little micro-conference featuring a couple of cool things, a discussion panel, live music, and good coffee.  It worked out great, I thought.  Though I didn’t think the keynote speaker (Danah Boyd) did a very good job.  She clearly had a great deal of knowledge in the field of community websites (MySpace specifically) but her presentation was so scattered – I mean, really completely without focus – that it made it hard for me to get anything out of her speech.  The couple beside me lost patience with her a bit sooner than I did, the husband saying "This is never going to go anywhere, is it?"  I couldn’t help but agree.

More confusing was the gentleman from TVNZ (I’m afraid I didn’t catch his name) who stood up to speak briefly about FreeView, the coming terrestrial/satellite digital TV platform.  He started off very promisingly "FreeView is an open platform, you can use it, you decide what you want to do with it, and it’s easy to access." and then went on to outline the facts, which basically ruled out anyone normal having easy access at all (which I hadn’t even considered as a possibility until he hinted at it, before then taking it back off the table).  In fact it’s quite expensive to pump your content into FreeView, though he wasn’t actually clear on the physical mechanism for how you get your content into the network — do you need to have your own satellite uplink?  I have no idea.  But you do need millions of dollars, serious resources, and loads of equipment.

I think FreeView could be a super great thing, with more channels potentially allowing for lots of niche content that doesn’t necessarily appeal to a lot of people, but those it does appeal to it does so enormously.  For example, how about a 24 hours a day loop of New Zealand created short films?  That would be really cool.  Or a TVNZ or TV3 channel which just plays all their licensed Sci-Fi content all day and night?  I’d love that.  And obvious things like a BBC channel, though I don’t know what their licensing terms are like outside of the UK.  If FreeView were to hire me to be their Mr. Awesome, I’d make it into a wonderful exciting service.  After this guys very brief speech, I’m not sure how wonderful or exciting it will be at this stage.

Moving backwards through the Great Blend line-up, we make our way to the first people on stage, the guys from Misshapen Features who produced the parody piece Star Lords, a  video mashup of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, which is some really great stuff, it starts off like one of those ‘Romantic Comedy of the year: The Shining’ or ‘TopGunBrokeBackMountain’ mashups that got suddenly popular a while ago, and then evolves somewhere along the way into a music video with Yoda and Gandalf busting mad break-dancing moves.  A little over-long perhaps (though not in the same way as my Earth Sandwich thing was) but very funny for the most part – funny and eye opening.  It’s interesting to see how similar a lot of Peter Jackson’s shots in Lord of the Rings were to the composition in George Lucas’ Star Wars. 

A couple of other video pieces were shown, but nothing that compared very well to the ‘Star Lords’ main video event.

Now moving, perhaps confusingly, forwards in time….  Following the break after Danah Boyd’s keynote – during which I chatted with various people about sundry things, and Chris Knox about weird movies we’ve seen – there was a discussion panel featuring a handful of commentators (and a dude that was added to the panel at the last minute, and I think shouldn’t have been, sorry Matt).  Robyn was up there, but didn’t really get much opportunity to share her thoughts.  But the person that really stole the show, at least in my humble opinion, was Justin, the founder / owner / whatever of SkyKiwi a New Zealand Chinese Community website that is most interesting in that if you’re not Chinese, you’ve almost certainly never heard of it, and you definitely can’t use it.  He was great, very funny in an extremely dry way – perfect deadpan –  and very successful (Russell pointed out that SkyKiwi is currently pulling in over a million dollars a year in advertising revenue).  I think we could have done with a lot more from him, and maybe a bit less from Danah Boyd (it might even have helped her, she’s clearly very bright and well informed, she just needed more focus).

We hung out and chatted with friends and others while SJD played, then decided that we all – well, Robyn, Simon & Lin – fancied a spot of dinner, so we made our way caravan style to Minsokchon for Korean only to find it closed, and newspaper up in the windows – I hope it’s just being refurbished, I loved that place and would be disappointed if they close, so instead we headed down to Dominion Rd for the second Chinese banquet of the weekend.  Finishing about 1.45am, we dropped Robyn off on the way home, and hit the sack to watch some American TV.

All in all I’d say that it was a really good night out, and that Karajoz coffee is really good stuff.  I’m not sure why we hadn’t tried it at home already.

Up at the crack of 6 hours later, I pulled out my mountain bike for some maintenance before kicking off to meet up with Louise to ride a mountain bike trail she’d recently discovered called the Manukau Hop.  It was pretty nice, really great scenery, and no real challenge (no technical riding at all, mostly along walking trails) and we’ll probably have to do the trail again soon.

Today?  Well, let me just say that any day on which you have lamingtons for lunch has to be at least partly good.

Broadcast this!

Morgan Avery3 Comments

Too many people were watching the video on my server to be healthy for our bandwidth bill, so I’ve shifted it over to YouTube – this should make it much easier for everyone to watch, but the quality obviously takes a bit of a hit.

Additionally, instead of just killing off the old video clip and having who knows how many dead links to it from who knows who’s website, I replaced it with a much smaller, equally silly little clip, which is also now on YouTube.

I hope you enjoy my little nuggets of video fun.

My time zone for the day.

Morgan Avery

Is Zombie Standard Time, that’s roughly GMT+NoSleep.

After about 6 hours of struggling to make my way down into slumber town, I gave up and got dressed. And now I’m just trying to recharge my batteries with StupidCoffee™ which is a thick gluggy double shot, with a couple of spoons of added bournvita, and a couple of heaped spoons o’ brown sugar.  More specifically, it’s made up of horrible.  And milk.

Anyway, for now I’m struggling to underravel a smelly pile of rubbish spewing out of my office radio (a spinswoman talking about the murder of the infant twins, and the blatant disrepect for the law of the land being shown by the family – she just called it the "tight 12" good lord – justifying, exceptionally ineptly, the obfuscation of the murder through the casual use of the tikanga card.  "We want to find the culprits ourselves" she says, as if the family doesn’t already know exactly what happened.)

Perhaps I should just try to enjoy the morning bird song while the sun slowly rises on a velvety mauve sky.

Lordy, there’s enough light now to see that there’s a pretty healthy frost on the lawn.  What a time of year, eh?

I think I might go and walk the dog now, and then perhaps I’ll do a couple of lines of redbull before heading on down to the airport to pick up my mother as she arrives back from 3 blimmin’ months in Italy.

Earth Sandwich

Morgan Avery15 Comments

[Update: this video is also available on YouTube.]

The video clip I mentioned the other day is all done and dusted – at least as much as it’s ever going to be. I’m still feeling a bit weak from my food poisoning and get quite light headed very easily, so I’m just not going to edit this sucker anymore. And it probably needs a bit more cutting. I think it’s funny as is, but still overlong by probably 3 minutes.

Earth Sandwich

About ‘Earth Sandwich’

Ze laid a challenge on his site to create the first Earth Sandwich, this is a piece of bread on opposite sides of the globe placed on the ground. I placed mine in my front yard, the opposite happened to be on land (which isn’t true of most of the entrants who placed their bread in North America – resulting in a sandwich that needs its other half in the middle of the Indian Ocean) in Spain.

Some really cool guys (Canadian brothers Jon & Duncan from Scourist.com) flew from London to Portugal, then drove into Spain and with the aid of their GPS handset found their way to the exact opposite side of the planet, where they placed their half of the Earth Sandwich. They released a clip of their escapades, and I didn’t want to be left out so I made a clip of my own – even though my expedition was far, far less exciting or cool.

Amazingly, by our powers combined, we beat everyone else on the planet.

Even so, to make up for the un-cool-ness of the placement of my half of the sandwich, I had to resort to farce, sound effects, and speeding up my footage.

I think it’s hilarious, but I’m very very sick right now, so you’re free to disagree. (Either way, leave a comment, it’s fast and easy.)

About this clip

It’s pretty big, so if you’re not on broadband, it might not be worth the wait. It’s encoded to MP4 so it could be worse. Quicktime will play the file nicely, as will VLC, or I guess Windows Media Player might be able to do it if you keep quite up to date.

Any further hypothetical video clips will certainly be a lot shorter and smaller.

Baguette Recipe

500g flour
4 tsp yeast
300ml warm water
3 tsp salt

Mix the flour and yeast in a large bowl until evenly distributed, then add warm water and mix well for a minute, finally add the salt and knead well for about 15 minutes.

Roll out into 2 or 3 rough baguette shapes, place on a lightly floured baking tray, then cover with a cloth and put somewhere warm for 20 – 30 minutes to raise. (I put mine in the hot water cupboard.)

Score each baguette 5 or 6 times with a sharp knife, then bake in a pre-heated oven at 240c for about 30 minutes. Keep a good eye on them, you’ll notice that while I said mine looked good, they were actually pretty dark brown (but they really were very delicious). I’ve cooked this recipe a bunch of times, and our oven seems to have some difficulties maintaining the even temperature, so it hasn’t been quite the same twice.

Vomit Sandwiches

Morgan Avery2 Comments

!!!WARNING!!! Today’s entry discusses sickness and vomit in great detail.  Please don’t read it if you’re suggestable or easily upset. !!!WARNING!!!

Today I was working on a video thing (probably be up tomorrow) and around 1pm I decided to take a nice lunch break, looking in the fridge I found some freaking delicious looking bacon, so I made some unbelievably good bacon and (free range) egg sandwiches.

Man, they were so good.  So I chowed down, then dug back into editing my thing together, about 3.30pm I went outside to shoot a bit of last minute footage and I didn’t know if it was just the shock of leaving my warm cosy little office for the out of doors coldness, but I started to feel a bit funny.

I came back inside, and noticed I was sweating, which didn’t seem right, then I decided that I really was queasy, I messaged Claire to that effect, then headed for the bathroom.  I had a bad feeling.

I assumed the position, kneeling before the throne.  Still not knowing if I was really that sick – you see, I haven’t thrown up in about 9 years – I decided that this might not be comfortable if I was going to be waiting around for 30 minutes before the feeling passed, and I could get back to work.
  So I decided to pull the liner out of the bathroom bin, and sat on the toilet with the bin on my lap.

Within seconds, I was throwing up.  Seconds later I was passed out.  I came to and realised I was throwing up, so I pulled the bin back towards me (I’d been throwing up on my shirt, pants and the floor – I was feeling awful.  I didn’t know what the do next, covered in vomit and feeling weak.  I tried to figure things out, and realised the best thing to do would be to pass out again.  So I did that.  I came to throwing up a bit more.  And then I felt quite a bit better.  I mean, not good.  But better.  I sat there for a while, covered in stinking red vomit, with bits of bacon and eggs on my pants and arms.  (It was red due to all the tomato sauce, God it was horrible until I realised that.)

After a while, I carefully slipped off my shoes (which were miraculously un-vomitty) then stripped off the rest of my clothes and embraced the soothing heat of the shower, and a pack of antibacterial soap, for ages.

Clothes in the washing machine, and mop and bucket later, and I decided actually I was really far to weak to continue with doing anything, at about that time, Claire got home, so we crashed on the sofa for a while.  Berocca was really a godsend.

We’d made plans for dinner, and I told her to go without me, eventually finding the energy to cook up some rice, and a dash of salt and pepper, and a little fish later, I was feeling much more human.

No I’m going to bed to watch some Grey’s Anatomy, and hoping I really am over it.

(I’m pretty sure the bacon must have gone over the edge during the power cut, or something.  But it was delicious man.  I had no freaking idea.)

Great Big Pan Cakes.

Morgan Avery2 Comments

Yes, I said Pan Cakes, not pancakes.  Capitalised, and two seperate words.  They deserve it.  These are some seriously heavy duty items of foodification.

Great Big Pan Cakes looking all golden brown and bubbly.

Recipe is good for two, there are options I’ll lay out as we go through things.

Ingredients

  • 2 – 4 Tbsp butter.
  • 2 – 4 Tbsp brown sugar.
  • 1/2 – 1 tsp cinnamon.
  • 3 eggs.
  • 1 1/2 cups flour.
  • 1 1/2 cups milk.
  • 1/2 tsp salt.

Optional
Fruit.  Apples, pears, or peaches.  Just a few slices is plenty.

Method
Pre heat oven to 200c, while it’s heating put 1 – 2 Tbsp butter into bottom of two oven safe pans, a small cast iron frying pan is ideal, but you can probably get away with using a cake or pie tin as well.

Beat the eggs in a mixing bowl, don’t go crazy, once they’re well beaten and just starting to froth is heaps.   Sieve in the flour, pour in the milk, and sprinkle on the flour.  Now beat again, but only until it’s all just mixed, some lumps are fine.  If you over mix it won’t work right.  Don’t waste time doing this, you don’t want to leave the pans in the oven too long, the butter will start to burn off once the oven gets up to temperature.

Take the now hot pans out of the oven, gently swirl the butter around to cover the interior of the pans, including up the side walls a bit (be careful, it’s hot) now sprinkle 1 – 2 Tbsp of the brown sugar, then the cinnamon, into each pan.  Now if you want fruit in your Pan Cake, distribute the slices around the base of the pan.

Now pour on the batter mix, and put the pans into the oven.

After about 25 minutes they should be very puffed up and golden brown.

Great Big Pan Cakes with butter and maple syrup.

Remove from the pans to a warmed plate, you’ll find that the body of the pancakes is very light and springy, and quite wonderful.  Serve with butter & maple syrup, or whatever you like on normal pancakes.

Great Big Pan Cakes with fruit.

If you included fruit (in this photo, about a third of an apple, rougly sliced) maybe you’d rather have cream than maple syrup, but really, do what you like.  I’m not the pancake police.  If I was I might make you have it with custard, but I have no idea how that’d turn out.