For Those About To Grok

Doctor Who Preview, The Wedding of River Song

2011-09-26T19:06:00.007-04:00

It could just be Dress Like a Pirate Day...

(clicky the pic to embiggen)

So the Doctor Who fandom is having shouting matches all over the internet (I must say, polite ones) about theories on the Season 6 finale, and some of the theories make sense and others make my Flesh-boot Doctor seem genius.

Take the above photo. many questions are raised, such as:

1.) Why do River, Amy, and Rory all have Madame Kovarian eye-patches? What are the eye-patches for?

eye-patches are cool, that's why.

2.) Why are the Greys (not sure what to call them now since the race isn't really called The Silence or Silents) submerged in a tank of (presumably) water while all the other ones are running around free?

I'm moisturizing AND I'm doing the dishes... at the same time!

3.) What's up with Rory's get up here? Is this like an alternate time-line version of Rory, like the Micky who worked for an alternate universe's Torchwood?

Super-Rory? UNIT Rory? G.I. Rory? Hot Role-Play Rory?

4.) Are you seriously trying to get us to believe that the Doctor doesn't know how to knit already? What's he need anyway, a cozy for his sonic?

OMG They have a Hello Kitty section!

5.) But I think the most exciting is this photo, which really seems to bring it home that the Doctor ain't messin' about this time...

Hmmm. Well I think after the last episode's finale, everybody's pretty much agreeing that the eye-patch thing must be a way to circumvent the effect the Grey Silents have on you. Other footage from the show seems to suggest a splintering of time, with lots of historical events happening at the same time... as if all of history is taking place in the present. Hence the pterodactyl, the future pyramid thingy, the Romans still being around, and it'd even explain (kinda) how Dorium the merchant returns after being decapitated, but I bet they're going to explain that away with something cuter, like his race doesn't keep anything important like a brain in their head.

All in all it looks to be a very curious episode and could be incredibly good or incredibly awful. Just so long as it's not incredibly average.

Doctor Who Review: Closing Time

2011-09-25T02:03:00.010-04:00

Closing Time was a pretty good return to form.

Next week, the Doctor travels to Lake Silenci...

...mmm? Yes, I know it's not much of a review, but while the show was good, it wasn't really much of a show was it? It was... good. It's like when I gave up reading Ultimate Spider-Man. It's not that it was bad... it was just more Ultimate Spider-Man. This was more Doctor Who, more of the character of Craig Owens...

he has a profile on biggercity.

Oh okay. So in the previous Craig Owens episode, chubby chasers finger-banged their poop-holes for an hour over James Corden, who portrayed The Lodger mentioned in the title, with his slight fuzz and chubby cheeks and omghessocute... Well. I gotta admit he's a nice looking fellah, but I've never been one to understand getting your panties all bunched up about movie and TV stars. Well in Closing Time, all those fanfic slash people who wrote about Craig and the Doctor hooking up so that one of them could sonic the other right in his TARDIS probably lost control of their bowels during this scene:

their love is so pure.

...in which the Doctor and Craig have instantaneously been transported into the Cybermen's lair only Craig doesn't realize it yet so the Doctor tries to distract him by feigning a sexual and love interest in his friend and asking if he could kiss him and kind of being absolutely dirty about it. I imagine their bladders also emptied when Craig didn't really fight him all that much.

Personally, the thought of snogging Matt Smith kind of makes me gag, but whatever, I've had worse I guess.

their crotches are really close there.

So they beat the Cybermen and the Doctor gives Craig and his annoying girlfriend (who are NOT married and have a baby, living in SIN) a new living room suite as a goodbye gift.

And then we get to the really good part of the show: one word... spoilers.

River Song, i.e. Melody Pond, Amy's daughter. We did see her parents in this ep, as the Doctor hid from them as Amy signed an autograph for a small fan. Why is she famous? She's the model for a line of perfume, for the woman who's tired of waiting. Cute. Anyway, River's just received her doctorate in (presumably) archaeology, when Madame Kovarian (sp? who the fuck cares) pays a visit. And is it just me, or does Madame Kovarian look like Captain Kathryn Janeway from Star Trek: Voyager?

separated at birth?

Anyway, my thoughts that maybe it was really Future Amy from the Girl Who Waited ep who was really in the astronaut suit was shot out of the sky, as MK and the greys (I guess we can't really call them the Silents or the Silence anymore) put River in it to set up the next episode.

BUT. I still have a theory. It's not really the Doctor who gets killed.

WELL... it is, but it's not. It's a Flesh doppleganger.

I know, I know... this is not a new theory. But what is new about it is how the Doctor-ganger survived his fate. I know plenty of fans think it's this fake doctor from the Rebel Flesh two- parter earlier in the season:

bowties are cool.

So we all think that the Doctor Two (I think that's cuter than Doctor-ganger) sacrifices himself at Lake Silencio so the real Doctor can live. But why? And how did the Flesh Dr. get there when we saw him discombobulate? And where is the Doctor's TARDIS in the first ep? And why was he driving an Edsel? Here, dear Dr. Who fans, are the answers to all of those questions.

1.) The Edsel is the TARDIS. The Doctor fixed the chameleon circuit for just this adventure. After all, a police box was a very British thing... if he was going to "die" in America, he'd need an American icon, and the Edsel is as good as any other transport... distinctly American, a thing out of time. And pretty fucking good looking too.

2.) Why does Doctor Two sacrifice himself? Because of two reasons. A.) the Doctor would, for him, in his place, but B.) because the universe needs to believe the Doctor is dead. So his huge legend dies with him and he is no longer a being who can stop a fleet of attacking invaders with a little speakerphone like he did at Stonehenge with the Pandorica.

3.) How did the Flesh Doctor survive? His shoes.

Remember, they changed shoes so they could fuck with Amy Pond and figure out more about The Flesh and her signal to it. They never changed back, did they? And those shoes the real Doctor were wearing were part of Doctor Two, and each cell of the Flesh contained his whole structure and stuff... you know, like stem cells. That one captain of the humans in The Rebel Flesh said that the Flesh can grow, it's cells can divide. The Doctor kept the shoes, put them in a safe place in the TARDIS, and regrew Doctor Two.

BOOM. Did I freak you out? ARE YOU TRIPPING BALLS NOW?

Anyway, we'll all find out next week when The Wedding of River Song airs... I'll hopefully be watching it from Missouri with Dale.

Military precision camping

2011-09-20T17:07:00.001-04:00

Don't Ask Don't Tell gets repealed and it's already started...

Doctor Who Review: The God Complex

2011-09-19T22:21:00.004-04:00

The God Complex. Considering what happens at the end of the episode, this one was really, really disappointing.

The problem really isn't the episode in and of itself. It's a perfectly fine but mediocre episode. There's nothing wrong with mediocre episodes. They have to happen eventually, even in a show that's been hitting it out of the park as much as Doctor Who has. The problem is that a very, very seemingly important thing happens at the end of the episode, and given the story arc we're in, it really changes everything about the show... and you wind up not caring nearly as much as you should.

Let's just recap what's going on. There's this guy:

On the DVD edition, George Lucas is going to dub in the minotaur screaming "NOOOOOOO..."

He's a minotaur, kinda. Later we find out he's very old, way older than the Doctor. He's been in his Labyrinth a long time, his "labyrinth" being a kind of holodeck version of an 80's American hotel with a seemingly infinite amount of rooms, each one containing somebody's personal scariest fear, such as:

Yes, some people shit themselves over clowns. I can understand that. I personally never was bothered by clowns, until working for a cluster of radio stations in Dallas. We'd changed formats of one of the stations to a Regional Mexican music channel, which meant to celebrate, we had an authentic (right) Mariachi band wandering the halls of the station playing La Cucaracha or some such stuff as loud as they could, and also wandering... or rather, stumbling... along behind them was a drunken Mexican clown.

Seriously, I could smell the tequila on him when I got off the elevator. They joined the mid-day guy in the on-air studio (which was adjacent to mine... they shared a window between them), and he did absolutely nothing but stand there, swaying and half-asleep, seemingly only kept on his feet by his handful of helium balloons.

Anyway, so each room is filled with a personalized horror for a future or current guest. Long story short, the Doctor finds other guests, hey what, I'll rescue you, bally ho the TARDIS has gone missing, oh did we mention the corridors change and you can't find an exit, and soon everybody starts dying.

This is me watching the episode.

After one particularly frustrating death for the Doctor, a Muslim nurse/medical student/something (I've not watched the episode twice so I can't remember) who was potential Companion material, the Doctor realizes that the creature isn't feeding on fear, it's feeding on faith, oh dear, Amy has too much faith in the doctor so she falls under the creature's spell, which is eventually broken when the Doctor admits he's not all that and a plate of chips after all, boom the monster is dying, everybody goes home.

Including Rory and Amy. Seems the good Doctor is scared that Amy might die during one of his adventures and he's eager to shove her and her husband out the door so they can get on with their life together. As a going away present he seemingly has acquired a blue flat for them (with TARDIS-blue door even) and a red Jaguar for Rory, which he eagerly accepts. He explains himself to Amy and then takes off, alone.

First off... really? NOW? This is the adventure that makes him say, "Whoa, I better stop while they're still alive!" NOT losing Amy in an alternate time stream and then having to kill her future self? Not fucking up their chance at parenthood by losing their baby so that they grow up together instead of raise her? Not Amy being held prisoner for HOW long while PREGNANT and replaced by a replicate? He kicks them out after this one and they don't get all up in his grill about it?

And the whole Amy's stolen baby storyline isn't even resolved yet. Really? That's how they want to end it?

We know they'll at least be back in the final episode, to answer the question about who shoots the Doctor at Lake Silencio (I still think Amy does... maybe even Future Amy... we never really saw her die, after all). But even if they are back in the TARDIS after next week's comedy relief return of Craig Owen (the lodger from the episode The Lodger), I still think it was a weak point to kick them out.

Mediocore episode. Big ending whose emotional impact was kind of quelled by it. Too bad.

Next week:

Closing Time!

Right, stop that, this is all too silly...

2011-09-18T21:54:00.003-04:00

I know what you're thinking. I'm such a big fan of John Cleese, he must be my favorite Monty Python member. I love A Fish Called Wanda as well as Fierce Creatures and even Clockwise is in my collection, never mind the Fawlty Towers box set I bought the day it was released, I must love John Cleese above all others.

I'd be lying if I said John Cleese wasn't one of the funniest minds on the planet. He is. Trained to be a lawyer, I believe, which helped him with delivering lines properly when he joined Footlights and met Graham Chapman, his brief writing partner for the duration of the Monty Python TV show. But no. While John Cleese is one of my favorites, the one who always made me laugh the most was the late Graham Chapman.

From his autobiography, which I was lucky enough to find on bittorrent recently in audio form (oh yes, I know I can get it on Audible and pay for it, but if they insist on giving me a lower bitrate just because it's spoken word, they can fuck right off):

Graham - The Homosexual by tabkendouglas

I don't care if it's Eric Idle's joke there, the way Graham recounts it is hysterical. And every time I hear it I still laugh out loud. Even recounting one of his first meetings with then-drummer for The Who, the now-late Keith Moon, is pretty funny:

Graham and keith by tabkendouglas

The thing is, the autobiography isn't that funny... it deals with Graham's battle with alcoholism, and it's actually kind of one of the things that convinced me there is a big difference between an alcoholic and a drunk. Chapman's descriptions of what he went through during withdrawal, at times funny (like in the beginning, when common furniture seems to be attempting to punch him as he tries to do simple things like making it down the staircase), wind up being more sad than funny very early on. And of course there's the whole story of his coming to terms with his sexuality, which is surprisingly unfunny and stark. He pretty much said to himself, "Fuck all them if they can't deal with it, I'm not going to live a lie anymore." You have to applaud that, if you can't laugh at it.

In the end, though, he inspired as much comedy as he created. In fact, one of the funniest pieces from John Cleese was a eulogy he gave for Chapman himself... I can't tell you how many times I've watched this, and how many times I've known Chapman himself would have nodded with approval at it, puffing on his pipe to make people think he was brighter than he was. (He was extremely bright too... a licensed doctor, you know.)

From time to time I wonder what would have become of him if he'd lived as old as the other Pythons.

Doctor Who Review: The Girl Who Waited

2011-09-14T22:37:00.007-04:00

Well, Doctor Who tried really hard this week to make me cry again, but it fell just short of the mark.

"The Girl Who Waited" is another rehash... much like "Night Terrors" was a sort-of rehash of "Fear Her" from the Tennant era, "Waited" could be seen as a reworking of "The Girl In The Fireplace."

Look, I like Jim Steinman. So even when it's an obvious rehash, I can't get upset, so long as it's not just a blatant rip-off. And this one didn't feel like it. It deals with two time streams running at two different speeds, much like the ones in "Fireplace." Amy is trapped in a hospital in a room that compresses time, causing her to live out her life in a day, a facility which was built for people who contract a heinous virus that kills them in a day. The Doctor and Amy's husband, Rory, are in another time stream, this one running at normal universal time, but they can communicate with Amy through a type of magnifying glass... one side shows one time stream to the other.

Basically the upshot is the Doctor locks onto Amy's timestream but things go all wobbly and pear-shaped, and they wind up thirty-six years into their Amy's future when they finally arrive to rescue her.

Amy lives in the Two Streams facility all this time, learning how to hack the computers, the robots that want to give her a "kindness" (euthanize her), and she basically becomes a badass warrior by the time Rory and the good Doctor show up. And she is NOT happy.

Even if this ep didn't get weepy towards the end, it would have been one of the most emotionally charged episodes of recent memory. Amy's anger at the Doctor is tangible, and when she interacts with her past self, her love for Rory seems real as well. Karen Gillian gives an incredible performance as young Amy and old Amy, both with radically different worldviews of their best friend and their true love.

At the end, the Doctor has said that he can save both Amy's (Amies?) but in truth he can't. The TARDIS starts to lose its shit as they both get closer... the paradox can't be sustained. Rory is able to carry young Amy, his Amy, into the TARDIS, but as he tends to his unconscious wife... the Doctor shuts the door in the face of old Amy.

That, dude, was cold.

And THEN he tells Rory, who is adamant that they can save both versions of his wife, that he needs to decide himself which one to save. And here come the hankies. The tender moment they share is heartbreaking, as future Amy says her goodbye, so that Rory's Amy can have all the days of Stupid-Face that she never had. It's a tragic moment. And punctuated as the Doctor callously walks off in silence to let Rory tell his wife that he killed her future self.

Frankly I'm starting to wonder why Rory and Amy are still with the Doctor. He's always being a bit of a cunt donkey.

But it was a wonderful episode. Next week?

Oh I WISH it was another Weeping Angels ep. We'll see how much of a role they play this Saturday night in "The God Complex."

The Texas Chainsaw Masscara

2011-09-13T17:22:00.010-04:00

Yes, that's Leatherface. In drag. Leatherface, the transvestite. Leatherface, the big screaming girly femme transvestite. The tagline for this hot mess was "If looks could kill, he wouldn't need the chainsaw." Sometime in the early to mid-nineties, some movie execs looked over their pile of franchises and decided that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre needed a third sequel.

"How are we gonna make Leatherface scarier? Kids today are used to hack and slash."

"How about we make him a nelly, fruity crossdresser who screams all the time like a monkey being raped?"

"Awesome. Green-light."

"Shouldn't we write a script first?"

"You're fired."

My brother saw this one night on Chiller, watched about three minutes of it and was bored. I can't blame him. Most of the beginning of this horror show (and I say "horror" in the saddest sense) is about bored teens out on prom night walking through spooky woods. So he turned it off. Then he was curious about it and looked it up online, and holy shit what a clusterfuck of a movie. We got it from Netflix and watched it together.

It's so awful. But it has some good points. For example, if you hate Renee Zellwegger as much as most people do, you get to see her smacked around, electric cattle-prodded, punched, and tied up and thrown in the trunk of a car while stuffed in a garbage bag. It's almost worth it at that point. And if you ever wondered what all that jazz about Matthew McConaughey yelling at the sky in Texas and acting crazy naked banging bongos on his porch with a stoned out friend of his, you can easily imagine it after seeing his performance in this, as the patriarch of the homicidal family of maniacs. He hoots, he hollers, he punches women. Oh, and he has a bionic leg.

No, they don't explain that.

Anyway, you don't even need to watch most of this movie. Just put it in and fast forward to til you see this:

Yes, that's Leatherface (or as my brother calls him now, Purdyface) wearing a woman's skin and putting on lipstick. Oh, and you should see the pretty blouse he puts on. To be honest, he kinda looks like he's dressing up to go to a Halloween party as Julia Sugarbaker. Oooh! Maybe he'll do the "night the lights went out in Georgia" speech!

I should mention that there's actually precedent for having the killer play Pretty Pretty Princess like this... after all, the original movie was inspired by the story of Ed Gein, the Wisconsin murderer and body thief. Besides making a woman-suit out of corpses, presumably for a fancy-dress ball, he had a shoebox with nine pussies in it. I think the guy might have potentially been a tranny.

From this point on, the film is still a mess, but at least you can make fun of it... we literally had nothing to work with up til that point.

The coup de grace came at the end, though, when McConaughey's character dies after being buzzed by a random passing prop plane (and no explanation is given for that, either) and Purdyface absolutely loses his/her shit, swinging the chainsaw around in circles and screeching like Fran Drescher on a bad acid trip. My brother made the above LOLcap from the movie, as well as the one below, for my birthday:

Wasn't that sweet?

Oh by the way, despite the title... well, let's hope Purdyface's looks CAN kill... because nobody dies via chainsaw in the movie. The end.

Flying the Coop

2011-09-05T00:33:00.006-04:00

Okay. Look at that album cover. Is it any wonder I was nervous about this album? It looks like somebody tried to update the classic, wonderful cover to Welcome to my Nightmare with a bad Photoshop job and Heinz Ketchup. So seeing this a month ago didn't exactly stoke my fires. Neither did having Bob Ezrin (who produced the original WTMN) do much... after all, didn't he produce Brutal Planet? Not a bad album, but just not Alice. Or, not the Alice I like.

I have to say, after listening to the album, I'm satisfied. It's half-awesome. Even when it falters, like the ballad (all AC albums have to have a ballad, you know), it's not horrible. And when it shines it's more earworm than those slugs they stuck in Chekov's ear in The Wrath of Khan.

Welcome 2 My Nightmare starts off in a very worrying manner, with the piano riff from Steven, one of Alice's seminal classics. Will this simply be a rehash, Jim Steinman style? No, soon it deviates from the original. In a way it reminded me of that one ST:TNG ep where Captain Picard fell for some piano-playing astrophysicist, and she came buy to jam with him and her roll-up keyboard, and they played with the melody of whatever that classic song was, too lazy to look up all the details right now. It's interesting, and forgiveable, as it's a link to the original album... and then Alice Cooper starts singing.

And he's auto-tuned.

Yes, the song I Am Made of You has Alice auto-tuned. Like Cher's Believe. Alice. Cooper. Auto-tuned.

And it works.

It's a very powerful song, and I just realized that it's pretty much Alice talking blatantly and forthright about being a Christian and what it's meant to him all these years. I guess all the years of the spam email chains of "Praise Jeebus, Alice Cooper is saved!" finally got to him. You know, I'm an atheist, but if Alice's Christianity can make a song this powerful and good, I don't mind one bit.

Besides, if anybody needed help singing, it's Alice. I mean, come on!

The next song, Caffeine, at first listen, was irritating as fuck. But on subsequent listens, it becomes... well, this album's frenetic Under My Wheels track. Pretty good, really.

Next is a revisit to Steven with The Nightmare Returns... you could say that Alice ran out of speed to stay awake, and finally he fell asleep in his Steven personna... and it revisits that motif and builds on it. While I didn't like this when I heard it by itself, on the premiere special for radio stations, I liked it on the album as a whole.

Next is probably this album's Some Folks... a Tom Waits sounding song, The Last Man on Earth. To be honest, it reminds me of the Heat Miser/Snow Miser songs from the Rankin/Bass animated special, The Year Without a Santa Claus. It's pretty awesome.

The rest of the album? I still need to listen to. The song Disco Bloodbath Boogie Fever, which includes Alice's attempt at (cough) rap music, was at first a real horror show. But now, it's kind of effing catchy. I've listened to it a few times. But I'm not sure I'd wanna see it live.

The album ends with an instrumental mashup of riffs from both the original WTMN and W2MN. An interesting piece, but only after you're familiar with the new album.

All in all... not as good as The Eyes of Alice Cooper. But still pretty damn good.

The Big Bang review

2010-06-27T22:13:00.011-04:00

A review by kirkslashspock+++

Well finally, my Saturday nights are my own again. After finally getting employed at the radio station I started my career at (kind of), after a year of unemployment, I am once again laboring to "working for the weekend." Yes, that precious forty-eight hours of time-off is finally mine again... no weird scheduling, like some friends have, where there jobs of management require them to work odd hours (although, honestly, I would love to work second shift like I did in Portland, when they simply didn't have studio space for me until the morning show vacated around 2 p.m... there's plenty of studio space in the skeleton-crewed place I work now). No, I'm a Monday to Friday, eightish to fiveish regular Joe, one who for the first few Saturdays of being married to his new and underpaid ball-and-chain has been spending those Saturday nights glued to the bittorrent feeds waiting for the new Doctor Who ep to finish downloading.

The series started with a bang...

...whereupon the new Doctor, the very young Matt Smith, almost universally charmed the audience of old fogeys and newcomers like myself. I've only been really into The Doctor since David Tennant took the role. I watched Tom Baker when I could in the eighties, but far too often the bus driver taking us home from school would take the long way 'round to my place, and we would be stuck with just Addams Family reruns.

The season had been mostly hit and sometimes miss for me, with the return of River Song and the Weeping Angels two-parter being the highlight of the middle of it. I'm not sure why some Whovians felt such disdain towards the character... simply a fellow time traveller that knew the Doctor well, who just happened to be going the other way through time. What's the big deal? I thought the character was well thought out, and obviously writer (and now showrunner) Stephen Moffat knew exactly what he wanted from the character when he created her. I think perhaps it was even known back then that Russell Davies would be leaving and Moffat would be taking over... which is why they introduced such an important (to be, anyway) character in the fourth season, even if they did kill her off in a way.

The return of the Weeping Angels, however, was a thrill. They were how I got my little brother hooked on the show... I made him watch "Blink" with me and suddenly he was there when repeats were on, there to enjoy The End of Time and The Waters of Mars along with me. It's been a long time since we've shared a show together, so it kind of felt special to me. Then again we also watch Warren The Ape together, perhaps I shouldn't put so much empathy into that then.

And then there was the historical figure episode. Normally I do not look forward to these, and I did not look forward to Vincent Van Gogh warning of a deadly creature in a church a'la John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness, but the creature itself was barely a blip on the radar compared to the examination of the tortured Van Gogh (who I shall now always pronounce as "Van Goff" rather than the American "Van Go"). For one thing, it would appear that Van Gogh, in this imagining, has a bit of synesthesia... that is, one sensory perception, say how you look at color, can be represented by another, such as taste or smell. In the case of Van Gogh, he didn't just see a black night sky... in one amazing scene with The Doctor and Amy lying in a field with him, he helps them to see the sky as he sees it, awash with deep blues, pitch blacks, lighter shades of lavender, and the stars aren't merely bright pinpoints but swirling explosions of color and light... slowly the sky morphs into the Starry Night painting. Awesome scene.

But that wasn't even the best. So far Doctor Who's revitalization has made me almost cry twice. Once was in Blink, when Sally Sparrow, who keeps receiving messages from the past from people who used to be in her present, meets detective Billy Shipton. I can't recognize Billy's accent, it doesn't seem Jamaican but it definitely isn't English. But he is sweet on Sally, and when he tells her that she's not seeing the big question about her little mystery, she asks him what it is.

"Would you have a drink with me?" "What?" "You, me, drink?" It's a very sweet scene, where he tells her that he's knocked off of work and wants to ask her out because "Life is short and you are hot." Normal rambunctious hormones, yes? He gets a phone number for his troubles... not a promise, just a phone number, before she leaves and the Angels steal his potential time energy to feed upon, whipping him into the past, where he's found by the Doctor.

Although only minutes have passed for Sally, the next time she hears from Billy he is an old man. He had to take the long way through time to contact her again, living live from 1969 to present day 2007 the old fashioned-non-Tardis way. Like Sparrow's friend who was also zapped by the Angels, Shipton lived his life, married, and now at his old age is facing his final day of life, and he's using it to help Sally solve her mystery and help the Doctor. He takes her hand and says, "Life is long, and you are hot..." and dude, I almost lose it every time. Every single time. Sally just met this man that she was obviously a little taken with, and now he's going to die, old and broken. Billy has waited his entire life to have one final moment with a girl he never really knew. THAT IS THE SADDEST THING EVER. But it is also part of one of the best time-travel stories ever, and that's why I love it and love this show.

The other time it's nearly made me cry was when the Doctor, knowing that even with the grande adventure they've had with Van Gogh, he was still going to commit suicide, decides to give him one final hurrah... he takes him to a Paris museum, this drunk of a man who couldn't sell a painting in his lifetime, and lets him stand among his works as dozens of admirers coo and gasp at his artwork. Then he has the curator say some of the most awesome things about Van Gogh, just within earshot of the artist, and to watch this man who was never appreciated in his lifetime come to realize the lives he'd eventually touch with his art, the one thing he could cling to and know was real to him when nobody else cared... it was one of the sweetest moments in TV for me for a long time.

Certainly better than that damn glowing fairy pond in LOST anyway.

The season finale was a doozy. In any other show, indeed even Doctor Who past, I would cry foul at the use of time travel in the manner that it's presented here, but it's obvious they've been setting us up for this the entire time. The useage of the Vortex Manipulator to hop through time and enter previous episodes to set up sequences would be a cheat if they had not actually set those sequences up. The talk with Amy in the forest, especially, was something fans had figured out way before the finale popped up. And I didn't quite get it, at first, but after my second viewing, I don't see how Amy remembering the TARDIS for her wedding (old, new, borrowed, blue) was at all a cheat. The entire episode hinged on her memories. It was perfect. Best season finale so far for the show. And such a happy one... Rory and Amy married, going off with the Doctor for more adventures. These are new times we live in, and I am glad Doctor Who is turning out to be such a crowd pleaser.

Now if we can just figure out what role River Song is to play... is she a good witch, or does her bank account go up by thirty pieces of silver next season? We get to find out for sure, according to Moffat...

The Big Bang... Doctor Who finale

2010-06-24T09:05:00.001-04:00

For once in my life, I don't want to read any spoilers at all. I will be glued next to the computer refreshing the screen until the bittorrent is posted. This promo from BBC doesn't have anything we didn't see in part one.

The Dalek's entry in the Hitchhiker's Guide

2010-06-24T03:04:00.001-04:00

Talk about a well done slab of fried gold... this mashup between two sci-fi universes continues to make me giggle.

Iron Man 2: Demon in a Bottle

2010-05-21T21:45:00.008-04:00

I gotta say, I loved Iron Man 2.

I'm glad Marvel kept Favreau as the director. Unlike Michael Bay, who tries to emulate the "actors talking over each others' lines because that is how people talk in real life" style of acting, Favreau does it right and it doesn't seem too fake. It only seems fake in that nobody is that witty that much of the time. It's not as bad as a Kevin Smith movie, I mean.

The sequel avoids the pitfalls of some super-hero genre, wherein there are simply too many villains. In fact, I think there's a perfect proportion of villains... the Whiplash Drones and Whiplash himself. I guess Justin Hammer can also be considered a villain, buthe's not suited up, so he doesn't really count.

They did, however, go kind of overboard with the heroes. Iron Man, War Machine, Black Widow, Sgt. Fury... the thing they did well to balance this is avoid having to really explain the characters. Even if you didn't see the first Iron Man, Nick Fury's character explains himself through his actions. Black Widow does as well... in fact, I don't think they ever really use her code name, do they? You don't need to know her comic book history to know she's a fucking badass chick who will eff your ess up if you're in her way.

But what I loved most about IM2 was, in fact, it's portrayal of Tony Stark's alcoholism. It was so hysterical.

I should perhaps at this point say that Stark didn't seem like an alcoholic so much as a drunk, to me. And there is a big difference. I should know, because I wanted to get treated for alcoholism at one time, convinced I was one, until they started questioning me. it was pretty funny. I was in the hospital to have my gall bladder taken out, when I was asked if I had any other problems they should know about. I said immediately, alcoholism and depression.

Well, first they started asking me about my depression. How often do I hear voices talking to me? Telling me to do things I know are wrong? Uh, none. What? And then things like, do you ever harm yourself on purpose, like cutting yourself with a razor? --Really? No. I don't do that. I pick at scabs but that's as bad as I try to hurt myself, and I'm really not trying to hurt myself there, they just fucking itch. Anyway, all the depression questions went along this line, making me realize that people with depression are fucking crazy, God bless them and all and I hope they get the help they need. I wasn't one of them.

Then came the alcoholic portion of my treatment. They told the nurses to be prepared for when I get "the shakes." The what? Shakes. You start to shake uncontrollably from withdrawing from alcohol. I do? Yes, when did you last drink? Uh, a week ago, before this gall bladder shit started up. You've not drank in a week and you're not having withdrawal? I guess not. Do you want a drink now? Not especially.

So I came to realize that I wasn't an alcoholic, and that I was just stupid and didn't know when I'd had enough to drink. That's a drunk. And I feel now that you really should pity alcoholics. True alcoholics really can't go without a drink... believe me, if the way they described the symptoms, I'd keep a bottle on hand for emergencies too. They're not getting a real choice to drink. Drunks, however, always choose to drink. They know they might have a hangover, or puke, or something the next day. They choose to do that.

Anyway, this is all backstory to talk about how I love how they displayed Tony Stark's drinking problem. I say this because I think drunks are a more widespread problem than alcoholism. I only know like one real alcoholic. He literally can't function without drinking, or at least, he used to not be able to. Now drunks? I know drunks. I grew up in Kentucky, after all.

Tony Stark had a battle with the bottle, and they laid the groundwork for that in this film with the scene with DJ/AM. In the above shot, you can see a clearly disheveled Tony Stark with the DT's, sweating like he's in Hotlanta during sweat season, unshaven, and worried about something. Is this an alcoholic, as they're trying to portray with the whiskey bottle next to his left hand? No, it is not. If he was alcoholic, that bottle wouldn't be nearly as full. And he wouldn't be worried about whether his multinational is going to collapse from his drunken neglect (after all, he does still have Pepper Potts to run the thing). No, he's a drunk, realizing that he's really fucking his life up getting so drunk all the time. Big difference.

Anyway, I've always wanted to see the scene that regular people see with the drunks in their lives, regarding Iron Man, which they showed as Stark doing all sorts of repulsor stuff while intoxicated. That was awesome... that's exactly how it would be. An alcoholic? God, Stark would kill himself after one week in the armor. But a drunk? Yeah he'll be repulsoring expensive champagne thrown into the air by chesty babes, trying to dance to DJ/AM's phat beats, etc. This is what he was... Stark was a drunk, NOT an alcoholic. An alcoholic would only look that way if the whiskey bottle was nearly empty and the stores were all closed.

But it could get a lot more realistic than that... like, he shows up to a fight with Kang The Conqueror, the time travel terrorist, he's LATE and besides that flying erratic with only one boot jet working because he's still too drunk from the night before to lace the other one up properly. And everybody on the Avengers team just GROANS knowing that he's three sheets.

"Oh, Gods," Thor would say, praying to the one-father Odin for an intervention. Captain America would simply shake his head in disapproval, being the epitome of a Boy Scout. The Wasp would make some quip, "Really, Tony, again?" And Kang would be all tough and shit. "Drunken sow! You complete my ultimate plan! Now I will use you for my foil to undo the" blah blah blah, whatever Kang, you always lose.

Or... Stark showing up in the Iron Man armor on top of the Golden Gate Bridge's arches, repulsoring pigeons and peeing on the cars below.

Or Stark standing down The Mandarin and his ten rings, only to puke in his own helmet uncontrollably as Mandy gets away. "Just... glug... just give me a minute... oh gawd..."

Anyway, the movie was awesome, you should go see it.

What Lost Did Tonight

2010-05-11T23:46:00.001-04:00

So just imagine you're hanging out in Hollywood or something, celebrity-spotting, when up walks your favorite, LOST. "Oh, hi LOST, I love your show, I can't wait to see how it ends!"

LOST smiles at you and nods and is very nice in general. "What are you looking forward to the most?" he asks.

"Oh, I just can't wait until you explain the mysteries. I know you're not going to explain everything, but I just can't wait to find out the backstory on Jacob or Smokey or the island..."

And LOST says, "Hey that's great." He shuffles a little closer and whispers, "Would you like a preview of it?"

"WOULD I? OMG I have to tweet this," you say, and in your hurry to Tweet "Met MiB in Pinkberry's, getting dish on next ep now," you fail to notice that he's leading you into the bathroom. "Lay down on the floor please," he says, holding a medical chair that looks suspiciously like something an infant would toilet-train with, only adult sized.

"Why?"

"Come on, don't be a spoil sport. Just lie in the floor." Not being a fool, you are able to put some puzzle pieces together and you say:

"I don't think you're going to explain anything. I think you're just trying to shit on my face."

LOST looks at you, aghast. "Shit on your face? Pishtosh, nothing of the sort. Now come on, lie on the floor." And so, you lie on the floor, because you REALLY want to know about the number sequence and what about the sideways universe anyway. And when you're lying on the floor, he puts the toilet trainer right over your face.

"Wait a minute! You're trying to shit on my face!"

LOST's face comes into view of the toilet seat, saying "Nothing of the sort! Don't be silly. Now close your eyes." You close your eyes and you hear the curious sound of a belt buckle being undone and pants being unzipped.

"HEY! You're about to shit on my face!" "Nothing of the sort! I'm just getting comfy. Why are you so jumpy?" "Because you want to shit on my face, you do!" "Nonsense, I've put on weight and just need to adjust my pants is all." And then LOST sits on the toilet-trainer seat, his naked, hairy and smelly ass mere inches from your face.

"You ARE trying to shit on my face! I can smell your ass!"

"My goodness, you simply have no patience do you! Does little baby want his bottle?" LOST continues to tease you until you're embarrassed into silence, reminding you that all your LOST friends are going to ridicule you when they find out you met LOST in Pinkberry's and you could have learned all the important secrets but you couldn't keep quiet. You acquiesce, and lay in wait for the knowledge to flow.

AND THEN LOST SHITS ON YOUR FACE.

As LOST leaves the bathroom you yell at him, "Hey, no fair! You said you weren't going to shit on my face! Well what do you call that?"

And LOST replies, "The Aristocrats!" *snaps fingers*

That's what LOST did tonight.

Doctor Who Two

2010-05-07T22:42:00.002-04:00

Woo hoo! "Common / People" is a finalist for the CJA's! I feel a little down that the Body/Buffy mashup didn't make it, but okay. It's an honor to be nominated, I guess...

...except that, if this musical Dr. Who video is any indication of the rest of the entrants, I don't think I have a chance...

I especially love the Weeping Angels/Madonna bit at the end. I mean, I like my little animated slashfilm, but damn, THAT was a lot of work. Somebody's got a TB drive to rip stuff to.

But I digress, this post was really just an excuse to not strut about with my chest puffed out like a rooster showing off his feathers, but to talk about how deliriously much I love the new take on Doctor Who by Stephen Moffat.

See that promo? It's kind of crap. It didn't really inspire me to think we'd be seeing anything worth paying attention to, not after David Tennant's incredible run as the tenth Doctor. But after just one episode, I was won over.

Of course, I immediately had to download it as soon as it was available, like many here in the States. The thought of waiting two weeks to see how absolutely horribly they'd screwed up the Doctor was like a death sentence. No, we needed to know NOW how bad it was. And then the reviews came out.

"Pretty good" and "Fantastic" and "Totally won me over" were common phrases, with a few die-hards moaning about the theme music ("They've ruined a classic," please, it's not like they got Lady Gaga to remix it or something... hmmm now there's a thought) or just spoil-sports all around about how things just haven't been the same since Pertwee or Baker or whoever your favorite Doctor was.

I expect every time they change actors, you have to deal with this, but when the original Doctor Who's run stopped you had to actually listen to these people in person at the comic book shop or at the science fiction convention you were attending and what not. Now it's all-pervasive... you can't log on to one of your sci-fi interest sites without a deafening din of outraged or delighted fanboys/girls demanding justice and/or squeeing messily about how great/awful the new thing you used to like is.

So I admit, Matt Smith, in promo pics, wasn't doing it for me. He looked too strange. Out of a lineup of possible Doctors, I doubt I would have picked him. But the first episode, "The Eleventh Hour," hooked me from the very beginning of the show, and never let go.

I won't recap it, because if you care you've seen it and already dismissed or lauded it as a failure/success. I loved it. Sure, the next couple of episodes were kind of light... Starship UK was kind of a so-so mediocore DW ep, and the new Daleks were obviously just a setup for something further down the road. But then "Time of the Angels" aired, and anything I might have been holding back, dreading, were all let go.

I make no apologies that my favorite episodes of the new run of Doctor Who are the more silly ones, totally deus ex machina at the end and such. But my favorite episode so far? "Blink," with the Weeping Angels, a new and terrifying enemy who, by their nature, will probably always lend themselves to thrilling episodes, as long as they're not overused (I'm looking at you, Daleks).

"Blink" was not only one of the best Doctor Who episodes, but it was one of the best time travel stories I've ever watched. While Time Travel is at the core of the Doctor Who mythology, it's not really used all that much except to set up each story, but in this one it was woven into the story perfectly. The Doctor and Martha, trapped in the past without their Tardis, must set up a series of events to give a message to a person in the future that will ensure that the person not only escapes a nasty fate, but provides them with information about the very event they're warning her about somewhere in their past timeline. Genius.

Anyway, the two parter reintroducing the Weeping Angels to DW was simply phenomenal, although I think Brits liked part two a little more than I did. In a very weird turn, I think part two needed more obvious explanation about how things happened, but it was great. And I take back what I said about Matt Smith before; he may be weird looking, but he is an awesome Doctor Who.

Although I still think he has awful hair.

Creative Junkyard Awards

2010-05-05T15:23:00.004-04:00

Hoping that one of my two mashups will win something in an online competition...

Of course there's the Common People one...

And then there's the Buffy/Sheryl Crow mashup...

Big Man Japan

2009-05-13T04:25:00.000-04:00

I am so totally first in line for this movie.

STAR TREK, a review by Kirkslashspock

2009-05-09T20:19:00.004-04:00

In high school, if you knew me then, you'll probably remember that I was a bit of a science geek. Not just a science fiction geek, but a science geek. In fact, bathroom reading material right now includes physicist Michio Kaku's last book about impossible (and possible) science fiction concepts, and astronomer Phil Plait's book about how our planet is a fragile little thing in this cosmos that could succumb to everything from gamma ray bursts following a local supernova to comets smashing into the earth to unlikely events like alien invasions and the like.

So naturally the only thing that really bothers me is the science. Oh ho, you're bothered by the science in Star Trek NOW? Well, I was then, but I didn't think JJ Abrahms was going to play so loose with concepts and terminology. For example, to try not to spoil anything, there was a part where a character was describing a supernova (exploding star) that was 'a threat to the galaxy...'

Here, we tread into the dangerous mistake of confusing what a galaxy is and what it isn't. For example, our sun and the planets around it aren't a galaxy. They are a solar system. A system with two suns is a binary system, and one with three is a trinary. But they aren't galaxies.

Let's quote Monty Python here to describe the Milky Way Galaxy that our planet resides in:

"The galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars; it's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, fifteen thousand light years thick, but out by us it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from Galactic Central Point, we go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions and billions in this amazing and expanding universe..."

So, basically, one sun exploding isn't going to take out the galaxy. The galaxy is big. Really big. Now, a supernova can theoretically kill a lot of life in a wide area thanks to the Gamma Ray Burst it generates, but the whole galaxy? Not even remotely impossible.

There were all sorts of little science facts like this, avoidable ones that could have easily used the conceit of science fiction to get away with a lot of this, but they didn't seem to even try it as much as they are trying to do it on Lost. Frankly, I thought Scotty would pull out a fairy wand at one point when teleporting people onto ships going at warp drive or the main villain using Magic Ragu Sauce to destroy a planet.

But, I liked it.

It did seem a little too much like STAR TREK: THE WRATH OF SHAKEY-CAM at some points, or STAR TREK: THE SEARCH FOR LENS FLARES, but even once you get past the prettiness of the new ship and the awfulness of Chekov's voice, and the plot holes you could drive a Klingon Bird-of-Prey through, it was a really fun film. I've always felt that the film version of these characters from the Original Series were New Takes on those characters. Sure, they had the same flavor as The Original Series, but they felt different. More adult for their time, perhaps.

In much the same way, Zachary Quinto's take on Spock is much the same, as are most of the rest of the cast's performances. I wish we'd seen more of Simon Pegg's take on Scotty, but in the movies Scotty really only had one or two good scenes per movie.

Still, it's an interesting thing, this reboot. What will the sequel be? The Wrath of Khan? How can we have TWOK without having Space Seed first? It'll be interesting to see if they screw this up further or if they keep it alive.

But I'm not buying any toys.

Muppetstar Galactica

2009-03-29T02:54:00.004-04:00

Hah, now THIS was funny...

So. The ending of Battlestar Galactica has upset some people, and I'm trying to figure out why. I think the reason why is because these people never actually watched the original series, or they watched it and don't remember how incredibly religious the characters were. They were, after all, following the prophecies handed down by their gods, y'know?

I think a lot of people I know are irked that it would actually turn out that the show actually contained apparitions that must be labeled "angels" and such. Let's face it, many of my acquaintences are either atheist or at the very least agnostic, and being forced to face up with the fact that one of their favorite shows was thinly veiled religious dogma is a bit upsetting. But I think they're not really thinking things through, and are just taking things at face value a little too seriously.

First, the first BSG was way more religious than this one. And they even went so far as to give us a character who actually seemed to be the Biblical devil... Count Iblis, in the two part War of the Gods episodes. When shot with a blaster, he transforms briefly into a demon of sorts.

Lots of people are upset that Kara died and came back to life as some kind of angel given flesh. The same thing happened to Apollo in the original series... he sacrificed himself to save a fellow crew member who had fallen under Count Iblis' influence. Then suddenly his body disappears!

Sound familiar?

Now don't get me wrong. I really don't think this is what they were shooting for when they originally put the series on the table. In fact, I don't think they had anything lined up except that Galactica would make it to Earth in primitive times and populate it, mating with the primitive man living there, eventually leading to our present day society. See, the whole BSG mythos has always been based on Erich Von Daniken's Ancient Astronaut theories. His, and Zechariah Sitchin's ideas. Do any of them hold water? Not really, if you do your research. Granted, reading their books, Chariots of the Gods from Daniken and Sitchin's whole saga about the planet Nebiru... those books are all very gripping, but when you research them, they just don't hold that much water.

Arthur C. Clarke said that any technology, sufficiently advanced of a society, would appear to be magickal in nature. Now, magic, at least to me, is synonymous with religion. Miracles? Magic. Immortality? Magic. Religion? All about magic. The unexplainable. Nobody can explain magic, that's its nature. Nobody can explain religion to a scientific mind, either.

So where do these "Angels" appear in the original BSG time frame? In The Ship of Lights. The Seraphs, as they were referred to in the script but not actually on the series, were these white-clad mysterious beings who told the Colonials "We were once what you are, we are what you may be." Or something like that. Well, anyway, they resurrected Apollo after this devil-being struck him down. They made his body disappear.

My point is: nothing happened that hasn't happened before in BSG. Well, okay, lots of things did, but what's causing so much commotion among fans has happened before.

My ideas:

The "Angels" were part of a sufficiently-advanced society that tried to accelerate man's evolution more than once. The first trial led to the creation of Cylons, which led to war and the depopulation of both species. The Angels (Seraphs... seraphim?) saw the damage they had done by interfering, felt appropriately guilty, and resolved to help both races to break the cycle they saw them performing. They weren't really Angels... they were an alien race sufficiently advanced to seem magickal. Is that so hard a stretch?

Oh there were things I didn't like. Starbuck being an agent of Death. I don't mind President Roslin not dying before finding the real Earth, because she rejected prophecy... she saw that prophecy was not infallible. Our paths are our own. But the Angels? Angel Six and Angel Baltar? Those were master strokes. I mean, how else were you going to explain them? What, Caprica Six stuffing Baltar's face in her junk during a nuke imprints her programming on his subconscious as she returns to the Resurrection Hub while he survives? That seemed to be the popular reasoning until Head Baltar started showing up with Caprica Six's subconscious.

No, they're not really Angels. That's how the Colonials perceive them, because the Seraphs, the aliens, are so far advanced that's all we can do to resolve them into our reality.

So there were disappointments with the ending, but not enough for me to really be upset. I think a lot of people aren't really thinking things through, or they just don't know the history of the show. Sorry, guys, but all this has happened before, and it will happen again... you should have done a little research when you heard that the first time.

Supaidaaman

2009-03-18T04:01:00.003-04:00

Let's talk Shogun Warriors.

The Shogun Warriors were a really cool toy when I was a kid. I actually saved up my lawn mowing money and bought Raideen myself, the first major toy I did that for. I had no access to the fledgling anime market making the rounds, syndicated on independent channels, so only the commercials I'd see on Saturday morning TV fed my imagination for these Jumbo Machinders, these giant robots who would eventually be the progenitors of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and more importantly, Dynaman.

Occasionally you can catch people putting their Dynaman clips up on Youtube. The only ones I can find nowadays are the clips from the episode The Lizard of Oz. Originally, see, when Saban Entertainment brought the whole sentai culture to the US, he was trying to market it as a comedy, with lines redubbed with insanely funny dialogue that had little to do with the original plot. In fact, a couple of the Kids in the Hall were responsible for the original episodes, which contrary to what you might read on the internet, didn't premiere on Night Flight... they were syndicated.

I'm thinking they take down the Dynaman clips on Youtube because they'd really like to release the Dynaman eps on DVD but can't while they're not protecting their copyright. But then again, why don't they go ahead and release the eps? Probably music rights. The original Dynaman parodies were so well put together that they had an epic 80s soundtrack to them. "Hip To Be Square," by Huey Lewis. "Kids Wanna Rock," by Bryan Adams. It was so In The Moment with 80s pop culture, I have no idea why it didn't originally succeed. Later, Night Flight would employ its lesser talented staff to make new eps. The Power Rangers followed a few years after, and were a hit.

But as far as I can tell, this all started way back when with the Japanese Spider-man series. Toei Studios (who I believe were responsible for many of the super sentai series) bought the rights to Spider-Man in Japan at the same time that the US show starring Nicholas Hammond was making the rounds. As fondly as I remember that show, I really wish Supaidaman was the one I'd been weaned on. Because it is screwed up.

One of the things I used to like to do, before the Power Rangers ruined it, is make my friends watch the original (well... American-dubbed original) Dynaman and watch them freak out when suddenly there's a giant freakin' robot in the middle of everything. That kind of originated with Supaidaman... yes, Spider-Man had a giant robot. Leopardon, who knows where he got that name from.

My point in all of this is that if you have patience for subtitles, you can enjoy the Japanese take on Spider-Man right now on Marvel's website. They are streaming eps every week, with the subtitles, although somehow it's more enjoyable not knowing what's going on. Currently my brothers and I are trying to find a way to Dynaman the Japanese Spider-Man... I have one of the most talented female voice-talents willing to do voices for me, plus I'm not a stiff myself. Hopefully we can get something going, if we can figure out enough jokes and a storyline. And a soundtrack.

In the meantime, freak yourself out to the first episode!

And here's the third ep!

Next time on Battlestar Fawlty

2009-03-05T18:22:00.006-05:00

Basil gives his Colonial Viper a damn good thrashing.

Other awesome Star Trek Mashups

2009-03-05T17:59:00.001-05:00

While I quite like my own mashup of Shatner's Common People, I found this one to be freakikng hilarious.

The return of Beanworld

2009-02-26T20:56:00.001-05:00

I'm not sure exactly how to describe Beanworld. I don't think you can. The creator of Beanworld, Larry Marder, has many different catchphrases for it (by the way, did you know "catchphrase" is the only English word with six consonants in a row? useful for Trivial Pursuit or Jeopardy). Perhaps a video would help out....

The Chow Raid from fashionbuddha on Vimeo.

Okay that didn't help out. What happened was the Beans went on a "Chow Raid" after their spiritual leader, GranMa'Pa (the tree) gave them a Sprout Butt... after beating up on a Hoi-Polloi ring that contained delicious Chow (which the Hoi-Polloi use to gamble, but the Beans need for food) they left the sweetened Sprout Butt for the Hoi-Polloi to sing sweet songs to it and inspire it to sacrifice itself and dissolve into Chow to replace what they'd lost. Then the Beans went back to Beanworld, put the stolen Chow in the Chowdown Pool and had dinner, soaking up nutrients and vitamins in a community bath.

I know. That didn't help out either. But for me, the late 80s and early 90s were made much brighter with the addition of Tales of the Beanworld. I'm glad to say that Beanworld has returned! I hold in my hands the first collection of those comics, in HARDBACK even, and it's still as creative and imaginative as it used to be. It's not for everybody... certainly not for the super-hero crowd... but if you are into things like the Monomyth (the path of the hero), Native American mythology, independent comics, or Marcel Duchamp, you should spend the twenty bucks and buy the new hardback. It's definitely worth it. And keep up with Larry at his blog... http://larrymarder.blogspot.com.

What R2 is really saying...

2009-02-25T18:41:00.001-05:00

In the not too distant future...

2009-02-22T02:14:00.003-05:00

I'm watching Eagle Eye right now, and basically it's a rip-off of Warren Ellis' Global Frequency, with what seems to be a crazy HAL-ish computer in charge of stuff and normal people who aren't really Agents as Agents. So now seems a perfect time to talk about MST3k.

So my interest in horror show hosts stemmed originally from reading about them in Famous Monsters. That led to interest in Elvira, mainly because she wasn't syndicated to our market, and of course the stuff you can't have is the stuff that must be good. (It wasn't until this year that I actually saw an episode of Movie Macabre, thanks to Amazon's video on demand service, and to say I was unimpressed and disappointed is a bit of an understatement. Despite what I've read in various magazines, I've only seen a monologue-driven horror movie commentary punctuated by a... random sound effect (weird) given by an emo Valleygirl prototype with big hooters. Not interesting to me.) After that was Monsterpiece Theatre, if you read my soppy, teen-angst ridden previous post. But of course after that was MST3k.

Anybody reading this doesn't need to know the background on MST3k, or a history lesson. They may need to know about its descendants. One is Rifftrax, by Michael Nelson, Kevin Murphy (Tom Servo Mk.2) and Bill Corbett (Crow Mk.2). I'm not as hot on that one, because it involves a lot of fiddle-faddlery starting DVDs and then starting commentary...a bit like watching The Wizard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon playing. I enjoy their shorts, which you can download with the riffing, but I'm not going through all the trouble of all those shenanigans.

Cinematic Titanic, however, is another story. Joel Hodgson, Trace Beaulieu (Crow Mk.1, Dr. Clayton Forrester), J. Elvis Weinstein (Tom Servo Mk.1, Dr. Ernhardt), Frank Conniff (formerly TV's Frank, now DVD's Frank), and Mary Jo Pehl (Dr. Forrester Mk.2, all henceforth collectively known as the Titans) got together and are again doing silhouetted movie riffing, and it's pretty damn good.

So far, there've been six DVDs released. Plus, a tour. I went to the tour both nights (different movies riffed) that they performed in Boston at the Somerville Theatre. I had originally planned to walk to the shows, as it wasn't really that far... but the inclement (cold and effing windy) weather convinced me to just Find Parking. Which I did, easily somehow, both nights.

The first night was a hoot. Except for being stood up by my friend, something which I'm not going to write about except for that one bit there. Anyway, the show was awesome; Blood of the Vampires, which was supposed to take place in 1920's Mexico but was filmed in the Phillippines, and has many actors in blackface. BLACKFACE. After the show, I did not stay to meet the Titans, as I was back into a sour mood after being entertained for two hours.

The second night I met up with a work-mate to see the show. Unfortunately, I knew this meant I was not getting Pictures With The Titans, because I knew he'd probably take off for beers after the show, which he did. But we both had a really good time; sitting in the mezzanine seats was pretty uncomfortable, but It seemed to give a better view than my seats from the previous night. The Dynamite Brothers was a cross between Kung-fu and Blaxsploitation movies. And it was glorious.

And then there was the after-show. Well, of course I managed to make a stammering mess of myself tonight at the second show when I met the Titans.

When I got to Trace he gave me A Look. I'm used to getting Looks, because I'm 6'2" and 360... I'm a very large, imposing and to some people scary looking guy. Like, this could be your typical MST3k/CT/comicbook/scifi/comedy nerd, or he could also be a dangerous stalker. I think he correctly saw that I was really nervous and was trying to lighten me up, which he did. He also commented that he liked the Superman t-shirt I was wearing.

Honestly, I've never been this nervous meeitng famous people. I actually get to meet a lot of famous people in my job. I work for the "we play everything" radio station in town, like the one Josh did a bit about; so far this past year I've met Rainn Wilson from The Office, Paul Stanley, Phil Donahue, Phil Collen from Def Leppard, Simon Pegg... none of them made me nervous at all. But I've been a fan of MST3K since season 2... this was like meeting my comedy gods.

I moved on to Josh, got a signature, complimented him on the songs. More about Josh in a moment. Mary Jo was very sweet to me and I think she could tell I was quite nervous because at this point I think I may have just been talking in vowels. I had taken one of the DVD covers out of the 20th anniversery MST3k box set to get signed, only I was using the inside of the cover, which is perfect for getting autographs, but she hadn't seen it before and when she realized what it was she said "Oh cool, I haven't seen this yet... " which kind of made me squee a little.

Frank was cordial, but I just wanted to get through so I just asked for an autograph.

Joel was also very nice. Actually I did want to get a photo with him, but my friend had to bail so I had nobody to take the photo for me, and besides that, like I told Joel, photos of me with famous people usually wind up looking like "Joel Hodgson was accosted by a homeless person for money in Davis Square today... he said he wasn't going to spend it on liquor, but he did."

So far what's really been the most pleasant surprise of CT, especially the live shows, is how great Josh is. I think the role of voicing Tom Servo probably kept his performance limited, and I never really got enough of a sense of his personality. He really shines through on stage, and was very nice to me despite me being a stuttering fanboy. It makes me glad that they're actually not doing characters like on MST3k, so they're not limited in how they can riff. Still, some kind of host segment that's not silhouetted is something I'd love to see in the future, if the budget ever allowed for it.

All in all it was a pleasant show. Probably the biggest laugh for me was their reaction to the "n-bomb" that got dropped near the opening of the movie. Well co-ordinated. I wonder how that'll translate to DVD...

Pretty much every blog today is posting this so why not

2009-01-15T14:21:00.000-05:00

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

Who's gonna watch The Watchmen

2009-01-13T12:11:00.001-05:00

Is it weird now that it's an American dream to be a blogger? As far as I know, most people who do this for a living aren't making a ton of scratch from it. But just being able to pontificate and feel important because YOU HAVE AN OPINION and then get paid for it... well, that's much better than bagging groceries at the Piggly Wiggly, I guess. So I know from my statistics that I get some traffic here, and if people do read the blog, I assume they're geeky like me, into sci-fi, comics, and other geek traditions.

I am about to drop in readership significantly.

I don't care about The Watchmen. I'm not excited about it. I didn't like the comic book and I think Fox has every right to try to stop the film from release until Warner Brothers gives them some money.

Sorry, there, I said it.

The honest truth is that, while I appreciate what Alan Moore was trying to do with his epic tale, which seems to be the deconstructing of the super-hero fantasy and placing such ideas in the real world... sure, it's great, and I'm glad he did it, but I think it's been done better since... even by Moore himself.

When I first read The Watchmen, I wasn't that into complex comics... to be honest there weren't a lot of them out there, if you didn't live near a comic book shop. In fact my first real introduction to that kind of epic storyline was Sandman #8... I'd had my father picking up Comic Buyer's Guide for me when he went to the 'big city' of Lexington, KY, and for a few months all anybody could talk about was a new horror comic called Sandman, written by some guy I'd never heard of. Well, once I turned 16 and got my license, I finally began to (occasionally, as I was poor) going to Lexington myself, and one of my first trips to the comic shop saw me purchasing this comic book.

I remember sitting in my car behind the shop after buying it. I'd read so many reviews and seen so many blurbs that I had to see what it was about. After I was done, I went in and bought the other seven issues.

This began my introduction to "indie" comics, like Tales of the Beanworld, Zot!, Nexus, The Elementals and more. Eventually I began tracking down other well-reviewed indie comics, starting with Alan Moore's other epic story, Miracleman.

Wow. Just, wow. The whole idea of taking an antiquated super-hero like that and asking "What if they really existed? What if we took super-hero physics and applied them to our world?

"What would it be like if these gods walked among us?"

The savage Kid Miracleman was unparalleled violence in comics, at the time, and it was also so amazingly good. Yes! This is what they would be like. Superman wouldn't be a Boy Scout, he'd take what he wanted. He'd find all the Kryptonite in the world and hide it on Europa and make sure we were never able to get to it.

So, it was around 1995 that I first read The Watchmen. My general response today would have been "Meh." I really only liked the Dr. Manhattan stuff, because Alan Moore was taking quantum theory (as it was at the time) and twisting it up and that was fun, but all the other stuff just bored me.

I've tried since to get into the series, but it never resonates with me. It feels like a relic. Perhaps it is.

That said, the movie looks pretty decent from what I've seen. Warner Brothers reportedly isn't being completely faithful to the story, but come on, do we really need a giant squid, guys? Eh, some people are bunchin' their panties up about that, I'm not. But all in all, Warner Brothers looks to be doing a smashing job on the movie.

And here comes Fox to fuck it up!

Okay, here's where I differ from the fanboys crying for a boycott of Fox to protest what they're doing. Are Fox being dicks? Absolutely. And they have every rights to be dicks about it because they still own the rights to distribute the movie. Why Warner Brothers would even contemplate putting this into production without first securing the rights is beyond me. Would it be okay for me to film and distribute a sequel to The Dark Knight without securing the rights to the characters? No it wouldn't.

Fox is completely within their rights to get compensation for a movie adaptation that they still own the distribution rights to. Warner Brothers should have locked this down a long time ago, and yes, it would have cost them a pretty penny. But now that penny is going to be much, much prettier.

That said, I'll still go see the movie, if only to oggle Dr. Manhattan's Smurf junk.

Batman: The Brave and the Bold

2009-01-09T20:27:00.007-05:00

Have I mentioned how shocked I am at Batman: The Brave and the Bold?

When Cartoon Network first announced the series, my eyes rolled into the back of my skull so quick you'd have thought I was a slot machine. A new animated Batman series that looks more based on the Adam West-era Batman than the current, angsty version that Paul Dini and company had kept alive and on the air? Who's going to watch that?

Besides, I'd already been disappointed with two other "cutesy" animations of the DC Universe... the Legion of Super-Heroes didn't do anything for me, and while Teen Titans wasn't bad, all I really cared about was Puffy Ami Yumi's super-cool theme song (a song I'd totally do at karaoke). Cutesy just didn't work for me anymore.

Wrong.

The show had me from the first clip I saw online. And frankly, Even just hearing the super-jazzy theme song and opening titles, and I realized that there's nothing wrong with a Batman that's not grimacing all the time and trying to figure out what level of raspy is appropriate for his voice. There's nothing wrong with a Batman that was... well, fun.

The best thing about the show is what promise it holds for fans of the DC universe... you're practically guaranteed every week team-ups with others from the DC Universe, both heroes AND villains, similar to the also-excellent Justice League: Unlimited. So far we've seen the current Blue Beetle, Firestorm, the Green Lantern Corps, and R. Lee Emrey voicing Wildcat. WILDCAT.

I mean, he teamed up with B'wana Beast in the episode I just watched. B'wana Beast.

It's an incredibly fun show with an incredibly fun, retro score to it that I really hope gets released as some sort of soundtrack, similar to the very excellent Batman Beyond. I could listen to that all day, never mind what I'd do with it at my job.

Fridays on Cartoon Network at 8 PM EST. Put it on Tivo, just once, why doncha?

Doctor Who???

2009-01-05T08:30:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure how to react to Matt Smith being named the next Doctor Who.

Of course the cutesy approach is also appropriate... "Doctor WHO?" Meaning, who the fuck is this guy. I have to say, as much as I want to chime in with all of the complaints... he's too young, he's too emo, look at that hair... I really don't feel it in my bones. After all, I thought Tennant looked perfectly silly when he first showed up. And I would not have thought the other guy was appropriate either, until I saw him in the role.

I guess it all boils down to how they'll write the character. Will he still be aloof, mysterious, with just a streak of viciousness now and again? Will he be too goofy? Will he be too serious?

But to be honest, the real thing that matters, to me at least, isn't going to be who's playing The Doctor... it's going to be a.) first and foremost, the stories, and b.) nearly as important, the companion. Yes, I'm one of those weird ones that frets more over the companion than I do The Doctor.

Rose was a wonderful companion, but she left at the right time. A big part of me didn't want to see her come back (particularly when she did come back and seemed to have one hell of an overbite or something). And Martha... well, Martha was shocking to me, because I began to realize that deep down inside of me somewhere, I was a little bit racist.

It's true. Sure, it wasn't a "join the Klan let's burn a cross" racism, but a part of me couldn't believe that they could pull off a black companion with The Doctor. In this day and age, I felt that. Now, a black Doctor? I don't think I'd have a problem with that. If I can accept a black Ford Prefect, a black Doctor isn't a problem. But somehow the companion... it just wouldn't fit for some reason.

After the second episode I'm glad to say my doubts were gone, and I couldn't believe that there was a time that I felt otherwise. Still, it was disconcerting to find even a sliver of racism in me.

On to Donna Noble. I know it's fashionable to say "I warmed up to her" or "Well she irritated me at first" or "It's about time somebody stood up to The Doctor," but holy hell did I hate that screeching harpy. To me... to me it felt like she was getting a free ride because of her comedy element. She was distracting in her first episode and distracting when she returned. Shrill, obnoxious, not likeable at all.

So for me, this young pretty boy dilemma is really a non-issue. Sure, he looks like he just stepped out of a screening of Twilight. Tell me who the companion will be, and I'll tell you whether I need to worry.

BluRay dieting & Doctor WHO?

2009-01-04T18:53:00.002-05:00

I tell myself that I will not allow a collection of BluRay Discs to form and amass and get out of control like my DVDs did. After getting a first generation DVD player from my workplace (and breaking several laws doing it, I might add), my collection once neared 750. Mind you, a lot of them were garbage, but I like watching garbage.

So when I got my PS3 (part of a bundle for my HDTV) I made the promise that only timeless classics (to me anyway) would be bought. At first, the purchase of three discs were enough:

Alice Cooper, Live at Montreux 2005: an actual Alice Cooper concert shot in HD at the Montreux festival. It was from the Dirty Diamonds tour, an album I didn't hate but didn't particularly find appealing, as opposed to the previous AC album, The Eyes of Alice Cooper, which was phenomenal. Timeless Alice Cooper concert classics like Steven, Ballad of Dwight Frye and Welcome to my Nightmare mixed with newer classics like What Do You Want From Me... and even a gem from the album From The Inside appears... a rarity.

The Omega Man: to me, the best part of the Charlton Heston sci-fi trilogy of the late 60s/early 70s (the other two being Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green). Nothing says I'm a Product of the 70s like this movie. kind of like Return of the Living Dead epitomized the 80s for me, or The Crow for the 90s. Albino vampires and the immortal, lovely Rosalind Cash with my favorite movie quote ever: "Don't screw up. I know how to roll, but it's hard on the elbows. And if you just have to play James Bond, I'll bust your ass." Plus an incredible score that I was fortunate enough to snag a copy of when it was released on a limited edition CD recently.

Dark City: Alex Proyas' masterpiece as it was meant to be, and probably the disc I've watched the most. I love the fact that Roger Ebert did a new commentary for the new release, just as he did for the original DVD release. And it's just as interesting to listen to.

Well, after these first three purchases, I was content to skip buying new discs until The Dark Knight came out, and I admit I'm not against making more purchases... but unlike DVD, they'll need to be very very limited to my Most Favourite Things. So, some Star Trek movies? Perhaps. Shock Treatment, Rocky Horror and Little Shop of Horrors, yes, if they're ever issued. Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? would be a favorite. But probably no Godzilla movies; no Britcoms, no TV shows (except Spaced and Wonderfalls) and no really bad movies.

However, I'm content to put them on my Wish List and let my family buy them for me. Yesterday my brother's Christmas gift finally arrived:

Young Frankenstein: the funniest Mel Brooks movie ever, and his most perfect. Now don't get me wrong, I know that this is pretty much tied with Blazing Saddles among Brooks fans, and I can't deny how important a movie like Blazing Saddles was and is; there's no way you could make a Western Comedy nowadays where an old lady tells the black sherriff, "Up yours, nigger!" But Young Frankenstein is simply perfect. It is a perfect love song written to the James Whales movies, which you don't even have to have seen to appreciate. It's also genuinely funny, no matter how many times you've seen it; who can't crack up at PUDDDDINONDARIZZZZZZZZ?

2001: Stanley Kubrick's super-boring movie is also one of the best science fiction stories ever, both in movie form and in Arthur C. Clarke's novel (and even going further back, to the original short story, The Sentinel), and it looks especially good on BluRay. The new documentaries that come with it are snazzy too; that's always been my favourite bit of DVDs, the docs you get with older films.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day: Who doesn't love this movie? I don't think they actually did any special HD recoding or anything for this edition, but damn, does it look pretty in HD. It's making me want to get another 5.1 setup though, because neither the Dolby or DTS mixes properly transmit the soundtrack on my HDTV.

OH! I didn't mention the best thing about the Young Frankenstein disc... besides the new docs, it has an isolated score! So now I gotta dig through all my old shit and find my MiniDisc recorder and make a copy.

I was going to talk about the new Doctor Who also, but this post has gone on long enough, I'll post about it next time.

Mystique is pregnant

2008-12-31T17:44:00.001-05:00

I'm really loving how the internet is allowing upstarts like Funny or Die to let actual stars do actually funny comedy on their own terms.

"Mystique is Pregnant" featuring Jerry O'Connell and Rebecca Romijn by Jerry Minor

Comics waning

2008-12-30T16:17:00.003-05:00

As the year closes out I am faced with the possibility that I will soon stop reading comics.

Not altogether, of course. With Beanworld returning, I couldn't do that. But since Beanworld will now mostly come out in graphic novel form (after the previous series have been reprinted), I might find myself wandering into the comic shops with less frequency.

The truth is, visiting what has become the Bendis Sandbox has become tiresome. He breaks everybody's toys, for one. And while I pooh-poohed the idea that Joss Whedon was a misogynist, I have to actually wonder about Bendis. Let's see:

He made the Scarlet Witch go crazy and de-power most mutants (not that you can really tell from the proliferation of titles still out there) and then sent her off to Genosha or Salami or some other weird place nobody cares about.
Killed The Wasp by using her as a weapon of mass destruction.
Killed The Ultimate Wasp by having The Blob eat her entrails. ("Tastes like chicken?" Really, Bendis? That's the wittiest you can come up with? What about "Where's the beef" or "Pardon me, do you happen to have any Grey Poupon?")

Okay, well that's only three. But they're big characters, and Marvel doesn't really have that many iconic female heroes. You're not going to convince me She-Hulk, Ms. Marvel, or Spider-Woman are "big heroes." Plus, the whole inane concept of Secret Invasion, now that it's over, is mind-bogglingly thin. After an incredible kickoff, plot threads were left to dangle until they just fell off with no consequences. What was the point of the ship full of Skrull heroes? I mean, it was just a distraction right? Not a distraction for our real heroes, but a distraction for us, the reader, so we wouldn't notice the lack of story.

For what, four issues, pretty much nothing happened. Just heroes looking at Skrulls saying "Oh yeah? Well.... come over HERE and say that!" Which of course they never did. Because God loves his Skrulls.

Oh and just let me talk about that scene with Spider-Woman Skrull. Who, I might remind you, is a shape-shifter. Remember that, they can take other forms. But apparently an arrow through the jaw is enough to knock her off her snickerdoodle so that she couldn't even push her jaw back into place.

A shapeshifter.

And Bendis, please, can you please stop trying to make us care about characters nobody gives a shit about? There's a reason The Hood's series got canceled. Nobody cared. And if you simply MUST revive people nobody cares about and you do try to make them interesting, please stick with your plot point... you can't do a reveal that The Hood's hood is possessed by Dormammu and put "to be continued" at the bottom of the page and then not continue it.

DC has had, if you can imagine, an even worse couple of misfires. While able to put out quality books like All-Star Superman and Ex Machina, they've stunk up their continuity with drudge like Final Crisis and that pointless series that led up to it. I don't even want to talk about Batman RIP. What a way to fake out your readers once again... who will take up the cowl with Batman gone? Until he comes back?

I should point out that I think the idea behind Batman RIP was an interesting one: Batman, sometime in the past, creates a backup personality in case he is ever driven insane by one of his enemies. Or something like that. Anyway, it's the kind of fucked up shit that Grant Morrison is known for. If you've never seen an interview with GM, I call your attention to Disinfo TV. It's a DVD available from the folks at disinformation.com, a site of lots of fringe ideas that at times are very interesting and other times are total whackjobs. Morrison appears talking at a seminar on the special features of the DVD set, and guess which one he comes off sounding like: interesting or whackjob.

Take a cookie if you chose the latter. Seriously, it sounded like Deepak Chopra witnessing for The Secret during a showing of What the Bleep Do We Know, Anyway? But usually, even being nuttier than squirrel shit, Morrison can weave a story that interests me. With Batman RIP, every issue just seemed like a waste of my money.

Luckily, DC has Blackest Night looming on the horizon, and if you ask me this should have been the Final Crisis story, not this Let's-Kill-Kirby's-New-Gods story, which I still fail to see having anything to do with DC's Crisis events. Green Lantern has been stellar of late, which is good because I fear the movie they have in production will turn out to be a tad silly, and may kill off the character for a while. But the whole Sinestro Corps War more than made up for the Final Crisis misfire, especially with the revelation of the whole Spectrum of power rings.

Speaking of horses of a different color: I'm over the Red Hulk. And no, I will not call him by his nickname. This has drawn out far too long, and it is no longer a mystery and is merely annoying, no matter how much Arthur Adams art we get out of it. I mean, are people forgetting that The Hulk just tried to destroy New York? Shouldn't Banner be in chains sedated into a coma or something? I admit the first few issues were interesting, but the interest has reached it's peak, and if the main point of the next year's stories are going to be new batch of heroes fight Red Hulk, who is he, oooh we don't know, it's so mysteious... I'm sorry. Bruce Jones did that Hulk-as-an-X-Files-mystery joint a few years back, and let the bait dangle too long on the hook. I'm not going for it a second time.

But my point is, I hope TPTB don't look at the new Spectrum War thingy happening in Green Lantern and think that if three different colored Hulks were cool, what if we do the whole box of Crayolas? Can you imagine how stupid that would be?

Anyway. So my comic book days may be waning. There are still a few I'm interested in, and I'm sure I'll check out a few more as time goes on, but I notice already that I skip two, three weeks between going to the store now. It's not long until I've moved on, I guess.

A letter to Forry:

2008-12-04T00:54:00.001-05:00

Dear Mr. Ackerman,

I will not preface this with condolences about your condition, as I'm sure others have done that far more eloquently than I could. Find the one that touched you, perhaps, second most, and pretend that I signed in in good honor as well, because I'm sure I feel the same way. But I do feel that I should express what you meant to me growing up. And it meant much, much more than I ever thought it might have.

I first encountered Famous Monsters at my cousins' place. They frequently stayed with my aunt/their grandmother, partly because of the messy divorce their parents had to go through and also because they liked visiting with my brothers and I. We all had the same interests; comics, science fiction, monsters, horror movies, and the like. We'd often have sleepovers if the UHF station WXIX in Cincinnati (Channel 19... get it?) was showing 50s monster movies on Friday nights. Granted, 19's reception was sketchy because we lived two hours away and didn't have that great an antenna, but once in a while, especially during thunderstorms for some reason, it would slowly lose it's snowy picture and we'd be able to watch 20 minutes of a great old movie before the snow returned.

(I should mention that I know now that this shouldn't have happened, now that I work in the telecommunications business; UHF signals aren't supposed to be affected by the weather are they? And yet, it seemed the best Friday nights to sleep over were during thunderstorms.)

I think the first FM issue my cousin Jeff showed me was the red one with the Zombi story on the cover. Late bloomer, yes, but I was intrigued. He let me borrow it, and he never saw it again. To be honest, I didn't care about zombies at the time, but there were monsters; there was Star Wars; there was the catalog in the back, where I'd pretend I'd order from one day to get all these cool monster-based things.

I was so intrigued by this magazine that I ignored Jeff feeding his python a lab rat while playing Alice Cooper's Welcome To My Nightmare on his LP. I took it home and read it until it literally fell apart one day. Jeff let me know that he'd bought that issue recently, at the Convenient store near the airport.

(Note: "Convenient" was the actual name of the chain at the time, but it was a convenience store. The airport shouldn't be noted as impressive except for the fact that we had one; it was a small affair only for small planes. Our city only had 5000 residents. I should consider myself lucky they even stocked FM at that store.)

I began begging my father to take me there on days when FM was being released. I took the release dates in the back of the book as religious days at first, but learned quickly that nobody else in my town was interested in the magazine, so if I had to wait a week or so to pick up my magazine, I could. Dad indulged my behavior, for a while.

One day Mom's leg blew up, and everything changed after that.

Long story short: blod clot. They did surgery, put her on painkillers she was allergic to. Took her off those medications, and put her on ones that she was more allergic to. She had a nervous breakdown, and for a few years we were left without a mother. Oh, and since Dad didn't have any health insurance, we also lost our store, and went from lower-middle class to below poverty level.

It was not fun times.

One of the things that kept me going through it was FM. Oh sure, now I had to gather pop bottles, cans, take them to be recycled, mow lawns around the neighborhood, but I was always able to afford my FM magazine. Of course, Dad refused to drive me to the Convenient store anymore, which was the only place that sold FM at the time. Which was fifteen miles away. However, I was glad to walk there and back myself. FM was my escape; I couldn't afford to go see One Dark Night at the drive-in, or Sleepaway Camp, or any of those movies. I lived through FM's reporting. I would never see Heartbeeps; I would never see Dragonslayer; I would never see Empire Strikes Back, at least, not until I got older. FM was the only thing that kept me up to date on these things in that pre-internet era.

I remember my disappointment when FM stopped coming out. I had no way to find out what happened until many years later. But by then I was entering puberty in full blast, and other things were grabbing my attention. But still, all these years, I missed FM, and your writing.

I was nearly knocked over with shock when I saw FM reappear in Walgreen's many years later. But I'll not talk about that; it wasn't the same, and the story behind it doesn't need to be recounted. I bought one issue; that was all I needed.

All I want to do is tell you how much your magazine meant to me growing up. I remember seeing that special Toho Monsters issue in the back issue orders for such an unattainable price. For years I dreamed of owning it, as I was a kaiju freak. Last year I found it on an auction on eBay, and snagged it for just twenty bucks. It's been read and is framed now, in my living room, in a place of honor.

Thank you so much for keeping the wonder of monsters and aliens and science fiction and horror alive through my youth, and allowing me to springboard it into my life as I grew into an adult. I wish I'd been able to come visit your house and your collection before now. I wish you as well as can be, and thank you for keeping the kid alive in me all these years.

Secret Invasion #8

2008-12-02T22:41:00.001-05:00

So first I'm watching William Shatner's Raw Nerve on the Bio Channel right now. He's grilling Valerie Bertinelli like she's a well-seasoned T-bone steak. So, the idea of William Shatner using his sometimes abrasive and often obnoxious personality to interview celebrities is, of course, a hypnotic idea. But it's Valerie Bertinelli!

That's kind of what's making it so interesting to watch. I kind of say at points, "Um, Bill, see you next Tuesday..." if you get my meaning. And other times I think he's getting answers from Valerie that only his abrupt, interrupting style could draw out. It's interesting. I'm setting it up for a Season Pass.

There's a fly buzzing around in my house right now. It's December, aren't they supposed to be dead?

Tomorrow Secret Invasion #8 comes out. I think, and I hesitate to say this, but I think it's going to decide exactly how much I'm going to care about comic books in my life from now on. Brian Michael Bendis has pissed me off a lot over the years... abandoning ALIAS, one of the best-written comics ever, for the lame idea of The Pulse... House of M... Avengers series that didn't star the Avengers (the current roster, I'm talking about... not any classic line-up)... and then Secret Invasion comes along, and at first it's great. The first issue punched me in the gut and made me scream NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO like a newly-born Darth Vader with sand in his vagina-respirator. And a few more issues that did the same...

...and then there were issues where I'd close the final page and go, "Um... did I just read a comic? Why didn't anything happen?" It's like the heroes and the villains took two steps forward and one back, puffing out their chests like the Power Pack boys in that one issue I'm referencing that nobody else will get but if they do they'll laugh.

And then there was the House of M, again. Oh God. Please strike me dead if I have to go through that whole debacle again. And Civil War? Well, I guess it was good, but I hate that one of the lynch-pins of that story was Peter Parker unveiling himself as Spider-Man, which was completely overturned when he made a deal with the fucking devil. Yeah, with great power responsibility blah blah and all that. Sure Satan, let's make a deal! I'll take door number two.

So basiclaly Marvel has been fucking up their shit for a while, and I'm losing interest in pretty much every Marvel series I'm reading, and it's really coming down to whether or not Secret Invasion #8 can pull off a big Holy Shit moment that actually does, yes, change everything about the universe we're reading about.

I can't read it until like five tomorrow. I'm interested.

*****************

Meanwhile, DC still has me hooked, despite the moronic Grant Morrison whipping out his flaccid dick to piss all over Batman (Batman: RIP) and the New Gods (Final Crisis). Seriously, FC is about the most inane and uninteresting story I've ever read. Makes more sense than Batman: RIP but then again it'd really have to work at it not to.

But DC has Blackest Night waiting in the wings, which is basically DC Zombies, and I'm hyped for that. So perhaps I'll just lose interest in Marvel for a while, then they'll do something to catch my eye again later. I guess it all depends on how tomorrow goes. I'll make sure to make a report, here.

Star Wars Mythos

2008-10-20T23:29:00.000-04:00

Growing up, seeing Star Wars and their sequels at the drive-in, I thought I was seeing the greatest science fiction movies of all time. This is the silly idea of what a child thinks SF is. Star Wars, at least the three 'real' films, are no more science fiction than The Matrix is. In fact, you'd have to tip the hat to The Matrix as far as science fiction goes, but not by much. The Matrix simply has more science fiction trappings to drape over its shoulders. They're both Fantasy, and they're both just simple retellings of the Monomyth, or the Hero's Journey.

Now, I love both trilogies, although the second Matrix movie isn't one I tend to watch when it's on cable. But there have always been things about Star Wars that have always bugged me, and that's what I'm going to write on today. What I hate about them is Droids have no rights.

This is where the Star Trek universe and Star Wars differ. How many episodes have there been where ST writers have tried to establish that technology-created personalities deserve to be recognized as citizens? At least two, one in Next Generation and one in Voyager. The poor Droids in Star Wars have no such recognition.

In fact, if you watch the movies, they're literally treated as little more than smart toasters that can walk/roll. When 3PO has all his fucking limbs shot off, as well as his head, the reaction isn't one of horror but of irritation. "Oh 3PO! You're a mess!" Like somebody just upended his crumb drawer and well fuck now we're gonna have to clean it up.

Or the multiple times R2 is shot up. While 3PO nells it up that his butch top just got a laser labotomy, everybody else is just kind of shrugging their shoulders and going "Oh, well we'll just get him some new circuits or something." I don't know about you, but if I considered somebody a sentient being whose life I valued, seeing their brains shot out would be a horror. Heck, if I came home and my HDTV had a pixel out, I'd probably find religion over it.

It makes me wonder why as a kid I identified with the Droids so much. Of course, I didn't notice how they were being treated at the time, but yeah, that's how people treated me as a kid. I wasn't a real person... oh just ignore him til he stops his crying. Kind of pissed me off, a lot.

I also had a sub-topic dealing with Dark City and how Roger Ebert, in BOTH his commentaries, never mentions the very important line that Mr. Hand (Richard O'Brien) utters on the rooftops: "We use your dead as vessels." Considering we know the true form of the aliens are inside these bodies, it makes the movie a little more horrifying; so they're experimenting on us AND when we die they scoop out our brains and crawl inside to animate us? GROSS. However, it's almost midnight and I need to get up early, so bed time for me.

Also I'm proud to say I've never seen any of the SAW movies.

Bendis

2008-10-14T11:55:00.000-04:00

I'm taking the day off from work because I'm sick. I really shouldn't be sitting here typing this. I should be in bed. I should amend that, I really shouldn't be sitting here in bed typing this, I should be resting. Or, if I insist on sitting up, I should just be mindlessly watching TV and not getting out of bed for anything but peeing and juice refills.

But I have more than just that bug. I have a bug up my ass. That's why I'm sitting up typing this. And this bug's name is Brian Michael Bendis.

I remember when I was first introduced to Bendis; my friend gave me a birthday gift of, among other things, the first Powers trade collection. I'm always wary of this friend, because he tends to do that "well I like this so surely my friend will like it too" kind of gift giving that really is not the safest way to give gifts if you're wanting everybody to be happy in the end. In this particular case he hit a home run.

Bendis had a fresh new voice for comics, and was part of an emerging crew of writers that were really changing the face of modern funnybooks. Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison, Mark Millar among others. Yes, yes, Alan Moore and what'shisBatmanface originally changed the landscape of comics back in the 80s, but come on... things just snapped back after that. Does nobody remember Maximum Clonage?

So Bendis comes along and damn, if he's not awesome. Powers? Awesome. Alias? Beyond awesome. Daredevil? The best it's been since Frank Miller (better, I think). Along with the others, it seemed like we'd entered a new golden era of comics.

And then. House of M. Avengers Disassembled. Civil War. One misstep after another, it seemed. It seems the top dogs at Marvel just gave Bendis and Millar keys to the kingdom and said, "Go play! There are no rules." It's like the kid in the sandbox who was the only one who brought toys, and he wants to play with all of them at once. Everybody thinks he's a dickhead.

So now Secret Invasion comes along, and damn if I don't love it. The first book was great. They were all great books. Up until the last one, when nothing happened. Seriously, it's like, did I just read a comic book or not? Because nothing happened. We're at the same place we were in the story before we began. That's the first sign of cracks in the armor.

The second one was it looks like we're going to have to go back and relive fucking House of M again. Yeah, the book is the New Avengers, they're in it about half the time, we have to see House of M through the eyes of the Skrull invaders. Why? Continuity, because some asshole fanboy might question when the Skrulls first invaded and if they'd been replacing our heroes then were they replaced and good God do I hate this.

Is continuity as important as a good story? I was enjoying Secret Invasion just fine. I didn't need to go back a couple of years in New Avengers and see that Luke Cage had figured it out all along! Well isn't he the smartest! He knew they were being manipulated! SEE IT ALL FITS.

I don't care if it all fits. Really, at all. Not anymore. Just tell the story and stop telling the main story in other books. And more than anything, please, please, stop telling the same story from somebody else's POV over and over. I don't care.

Anyway, back to being sick.

Dallas

2008-09-22T09:59:00.000-04:00

When I lived in Dallas there came a time in my life when it seemed all the most important people to me were moving out of the city for one reason or another. Now, this included people I needed to stop associating with for health reasons, people who I know I would have a bond with no matter where either of us lived, and people I just wanted to fuck. Still, those are three very important qualifications, and it was distressing to see them all go. So when the time came, I took an offer and left.

Now it seems that I can't get away from people wanting to move to Dallas. No less than five people I've been associating with and/or talking to are moving to the city. This makes me feel weird, like I've got some Dallas germ that I've passed along to yankees.

What I'm surprised by is how it doesn't make me feel bad at all, or give me some desire to return to the place. No, don't get me wrong. I loved almost all of Dallas. The two things I didn't like were the High Five and the sun. Thunderstorms were rare, and they were nowhere near as fun as in Kentucky, but they were there, occasionally.

Up here, well, I have to say the weather is much more to my suiting. It's the first day of fall and the skies are horribly overcast. Not a drop of the sun is making it through. I quite like it. It's better of course when it's storming, but this year was a mild season for that, although last night we did have a surprise cloudburst which led to a harrowing drive home from my birthday supper with friends.

I just find it interesting that so many people I've been peripherally associating with are heading to my old stomping grounds. I wonder who they'll meet that I knew from back then, because they inevitably will meet some of them. I wonder if those people will talk about me at all.

I wouldn't say I miss Dallas. Nostalgia isn't the same thing.

Disney

2008-09-19T11:01:00.000-04:00

Let me set the record straight: I don't hate Disney.

I visited my brother in California a long time ago and he took me to Disneyland. I was pretty excited about going. It's such an iconic destination, how could you not be? And everybody who I know who went to Disneyland all share some kind of special bond, it seems. This would be life-changing.

About an hour into the trip, I looked at my brother and his friend, and they were having a grand old time, and that's when it hit me: I didn't like anything about what we were doing. Literally, I didn't like it. I wasn't having a bad time, I just wasn't interested in any of it. I wasn't interested in getting a mouse ear hat, or some giant swirly lolly pop with Donald Duck on it, I didn't care for Cinderella's castle or the Pirates of the Carribean ride. None of it was interesting to me.

Then I realized I've never cared for Disney. Ever! It was quite a shock. I'd just assumed... well, actually, I hadn't assumed anything. Disney was just this thing. I never thought about it and wasn't interested in it at all.

Then Goofy came up to us and I wanted to punch him in his nuts.

I feel kind of bad about this. I have a friend who is a Disney nut who posts all the time now about his trips and obsession, and I feel kind of bad when I realize he's written another post I'm just going to skip over. I mean, you could be the best writer in the world and I don't think you'd be able to make me interested in anything about Disney, ever. But, I guess my friend understands this.

Still, I don't want anybody to think I'm just a miserly old geezer and not really a kid at heart, because I am. I just... Disney. It's not for me.

The First Post is Always the Hardest

2008-09-18T21:29:00.002-04:00

So, here's my first post on this blog. It may become my main blog.

I work in the telecommunications biz and I am an amateur video editor. The first subject for this blog is the most popular online video I've done, which is this one:

Common / People - a Kirk-Spock slash mashup from kirk spock on Vimeo.

It's a 'slash-up' of William Shatner's cover of Pulp's Common People and video from the Star Trek animated series, done to a theme of Kirk/Spock stories. As of this writing, it's been on Youtube for three months and has generated 177,000+ views.

I did another mashup video, to the episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer called "The Body" and Sheryl Crow's song "On The Outside" from the original TV soundtrack to the X-Files. That can be found here:

On the Outside - The Body/Sheryl Crow mashup remix from kirk spock on Vimeo.

It was flagged by Youtube the day after I put it up, so it's only on Vimeo, and I worry that it'll get taken down from there, too. But as of now it's still there.

If I have other blogs registered, why this one? Well, because I'll feel more open in this one, thinking nobody is reading. I can't post openly in my other blog, as I have an online stalker who is obsessed with me. (p.s. Everybody you contacted knows it's you, you psycho.) Therefore, I likely won't post personal stuff here, just geek stuff.

There are many subjects I'd like to touch on. Marvel's Secret Invasion series is one, but that's a post for another time, when I've read a new issue. I guess I should just touch on wondering why UPS hates me.

When I lived in another city and state, a long, long time ago, my apartment number was "I." Now, that's not a one, it's the letter "i." So when I'd order something from UPS, they would label the package as "no such address" and not deliver it, despite the fact that all the other fucking apartments had letters for numbers as well.

I should probably have mentioned that there might be swearing in this blog.

So this is a pattern in my life, where UPS simply cannot figure out where I live and they give up on my package. It happens all the time. Currently I live in an apartment that has an actual street address (it's a duplex). That address, for some reason, was placed at the bottom of the door instead of the top. Because of this, UPS freaks their own shit when they look for my place, and they give up rather easily. For the past two days I've been trying to get my copy of WARHAMMER from UPS, and yet three days later I still don't have it. So, pissed off, I wrote Amazon and demanded a refund. Sure, it's not their fault it's not here yet, but UPS isn't going to do squat for me. I'm taking a bunch of X-Box and Wii games off to the GameStop tomorrow and purchasing it.

I plan on playing on a role playing server, because as annoying as role-players are, they're not as annoying as the general populace, and while you won't catch me doing OrcSpeak at any time, I will play "in character." I'm unsure if I'll still use my old handle in the new game, but I liked it so much I probably will.