Predators: A Musical
So saw Predators over the weekend.
It started off promising enough. Then within three minutes the cliches started flying. And kept on flying. There were some interesting bits among the cliches and cribbing from other movies — cribbing from Predators, of course, is to be expected, but what the frak was up with the Kurosawa sword fight in the field? — but not enough to keep my mind from wandering while I watched it, imagining a much better movie:
Predators: The Musical.
Which is a full-tilt Broadway faux rock opera. Where the characters sing their cliched dialog in full-throated anguish, the Predators fly in on wires, and the grass-field sword fight is a waltz with severed limbs and silk ribbons as blood.
Anyway, it was still better than Alien vs. Predator: Requiem.
Adventures in Clay
So Amy treated me to a night of clay modeling last night. First time I’ve worked clay since I built a Tie Fighter mug in fifth grade.
The good ones — Amy did those.
Despicable Inception – My Two Movie Weekend
Saw both Despicable Me and Inception over the weekend.
Despicable Me was a boat-load of unequivocal fun. A simple story, well told, and some great gags. My only regret is we didn’t see it in 3-D, but mostly only for the roller coaster scene — didn’t notice its absence anywhere else.
Inception, on the other hand… not so unequivocal. It was a solid action movie, yes. And a fine PKD-ian sci-fi movie. But was it a great movie? Nope. It was good — and I loved all the in-camera practical effects — but it was overlong, over-expository, and it seemed to completely ignore the way people dream in favor of an invented, mundane dream experience. But maybe that was necessary to do the action story Nolan wanted to do. There were a couple of logic holes, too — why when the first dream layer went freefall, and the second lost “gravity”, didn’t the third layer also loose gravity? Wounds from the first layer carried through to the third — so freefall should have as well. Maybe I missed the explanation. There sure was a lot of explanation. Maybe a bit much. But my biggest pet-peeve of the movie: the ending, suggesting [SPOILER] that the happy ending is still part of the dream — a fifth layer. End the movie already.
Jared Hess is Not One of Us
After seeing and getting excited about the trailer way back when (“Oh, my holy crap, surveillance does! I hate those.”) I finally got around to watching Gentlemen Broncos (IMDB | Amazon) last week. It’s a decent enough movie — typical Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre), a character piece with a sweet heart at its weird middle — but unfortunately one that also disses sci-fi, sci-fi writing, and sci-fi fans.
Hess hits all the tired stereotypical anti-sci-fi/geeklife points. His sci-fi writers are either hapless nerds or self-obsessed egomaniacs. His sci-fi novels (even the good ones) are awkwardly written, inanely plotted, and hopelessly cliched. His sci-fi fans are all costume wearing, wide-eyed sheep-freaks.
All for comedic effect, sure. But not funny. Just tired and, frankly, the more I think about it, insulting. Intentionally so? Can’t say. But intentional or not, Gentlemen Broncos just comes off as a subtle slap in the face to geeks — no better than the typical pandering-yet-insulting sci-fandom-tinged episode of Bones.
So, if you want to see a movie that respects sci-fi and sci-fi fans, see Galaxy Quest (Amazon).
Arkham Polytech’s Dead Slow and Needs Fixed
The Arkham Polytech web site has been deteriorating for a month now. Thought it was the server, but that’s been switched, and the other sites on that same server (including Slackpocalypse) are nice and speedy. Page loads are horrible, and getting in to the admin back end (and taking any actions once I’m in there) takes 30 plus seconds. I seriously think my viewer numbers would be higher if people could actually access the site. I have no idea what’s causing the problem, but I know what may fix it… I’m redoing the backend from the ground up. New DB and all. Hopefully the changeover, which will happen over the next few days depending on how much time I can devote to it, will be transparent and mostly harmless. However, I may lose all the comments people have entered — which really sucks, ’cause I love comments. But if that’s what it takes to get the site healthy again… I do what I must do.
Roy Batty, You’re My Hero
I was watching the making-of Blade Runner documentary Dangerous Days over the weekend (again) and an odd idea hit me: Batty is the protagonist of Blade Runner. He’s the hero. Deckard is actually the antagonist. And that realization only makes me love the movie more.
Let me ’splain.
Classic story structure demands the protagonist is the person that moves the plot forward through their actions, is the person audiences are the most sympathetic to, and who takes final action in the climax to end the story conclusively. Batty fits all three bills in a way Deckard does not.
Batty is on a quest. He’s a slave looking to find his origins, to live longer — and enjoy the same freedom others have. He takes care of and cares for his fellow freedom-seeking slaves in a very paternal way. Yes, he kills, but in the context of his quest, the killing is justified. His actions dictate the ebb and flow of the story — he is proactive. And in the end, it’s his decision to simply let go and die, at peace with his life — and letting Deckard live.
Deckard, on the other hand, is a wash-out who shoots women in the back. His actions are re-active. And in the end, he impotently sits by while Batty dies.
Making the “bad guy” the protagonist and the “star” the antagonist probably, more than anything, explains why Blade Runner was a flop when it was first released. And, I think, it was perhaps the final giant nail in the coffin of the 1970s anti-establishment film movement, moving us inexorably towards the cookie-cutter Hero’s journey formula movies that have dominated since.
Jonah Hex – or, A Coffin Full of Suck
Ah, Jonah Hex. The movie. Also known as the Crow Goes to the Wild Wild West. Seriously. That’s the plot. Of all the movies to model on, they chose those two?
Yeah, it was bad. Uwe Boll bad? No. But not good.
And this was one of the ones I was sorta looking forward to. I mean, horse with gatling gun, right? Sure that was cool, but it was used once in the beginning of the movie, and then Jonah traded down for some weird dynamite crossbow things. Jonah wasn’t the only one making bad decisions like that in the movie. In front of or behind the camera. I won’t catalog the stupidity — I don’t have all day. I will mention one, though, since it’s a doozy, in terms of setting up motivations. Jonah Hex’s backstory, as presented in the movie, has him killing a superior officer who wanted to burn down a hospital. This the trigger for the rest of the movie, setting everything in motion. But do we see that confrontation on screen? Nope. We are told about it several times. It might have been quite the dramatic scene, but all we get are words, most of them mumbled by Hex. It’s not like they didn’t have time to show it — the movie’s less than 90 minutes long, credits included. It was just lazy story-telling.
The whole thing was that lazy.
But on the bright side, there were plenty of explosions. And a cool (if completely implausible and apparently magic) super-gatling canon. And, at least at the theater we saw it, the Tron Legacy trailer, which dripped with awesome.
Godzilla is My Copilot
Ever since I dove in to writing Sharkasaurus vs. Robo-Twister (SvRT), I’ve been getting re-obsessed with all things giant monster. Been watching Godzilla movies on the Netflix stream, and my writing music of choice the past couple days has been the Godzilla vs Megaguirus soundtrack I picked up over the weekend at Half-Price books for $4. SvRT may have started out as a parody of those bad SyFy mega-monster of the week movies, but the more I plot it out and write, the more it’s shaping up to be like a classic Daikaiju piece. (Which, when you look at it, Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus was too, frankly.) Which, in my mind, is all the better.
Chasing My Own Cut-Off Tail
So, after six months of running in circles trying to write a novel (five novels, to be exact) I’ve decided I need a break from the pursuit and the anxiety. Gonna write a another script.
Sharkasaurus Versus Robo-Twister.
Yeah, I know… I’d given up scriptwriting because nobody’s even looking at the stuff I already have out there, and even if something gets bought, the chances of a film being made that resembles what I wrote are remote. But, the novel writing has been me throwing myself at a brick wall, and I’m starting to bruise. Time to step back and just get something on paper — for some reason, screenwriting just doesn’t have the same anxiety for me as novel writing. Probably because I don’t see it as “real” writing — don’t get me wrong, I take it seriously, and its a valid artform… it’s just that my entire life has been aimed at writing novels and there’s all this mental investment in the pursuit. It’s all in the head.
I’ll throw myself back into tilting at the novel windmill after the script’s done, which, if anxiety doesn’t hit it too, should be a month.
I’ll post a scene every now and again for you guys to laugh at. Intentionally, I hope.
100 or Out
I’ve always had this magick number in my head for Arkham Polytech: 100 unique returning viewers a new strip day, for at least two consecutive weeks (without the aid/crutch of a Reddit link). If I can hit that magick number by the end of the year, I’ll consider Arkham Polytech a personal success (if not a particularly popular one) and continue doing it another year (with a new goal of 1000 uniques a day). If I can’t hit that number, then Arkham Polytech gets a final saying-goodbye strip the last week of 2010 and I move on to something else.
Why am I bringing this up now, when it’s only June? Because it’s half-way through the year — half-way through the first year of the strip — and traffic’s been growing nicely since the start (thanks mostly to a whole bunch of nice people on twitter spreading the word daily). In fact, I’ve been averaging about 40 unique returning viewers for the last two weeks. Which in my mind says a 100 isn’t an unrealistic goal. So, kinda happy about that.
So to those 40 or so regular readers, thanks! Now, go tell your friends.
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