Jan
1
Hello world!
Filed Under Uncategorized
Trying something new. I won’t be updating here until I get all the bugs worked out, so for now you can visit me at my other blog.
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Dec
23
What Looks Good: Movie Trailers
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I love Dorian’s blog for a lot of reasons, but one of my favorites is his occasional reviews of movie trailers. I don’t always agree with him, but he consistently manages to let me know about some stuff I didn’t know about, and remind me of some stuff I’d forgotten about.
Like this stuff here:
Push: I agree with Dorian that the Jumper vibe is too strong to be unreservedly enthusiastic, but that the cast is also too cool to dismiss. Chris Evans, Djimon Hounsou, the cave girl from 10,000 BC, and Dakota Fanning looking not half as annoyingly cute as usual all have me interested.
Timecrimes: Saw this trailer before They Call Me Bruce. Hooked.
Dark Streets: Didn’t know about this one until Dorian pointed it out. Like he says, it’s a jazz age murder mystery and that’s all you need to know. Well, that and BB King did the soundtrack.
The Lodger: I love the Hitchcock silent version because of the story as much as for Hitchcock. It’s been remade at least three times already (once with George Sanders; once with Jack Palance) and I’ve been wondering since I saw it when the next remake might be. It tickles me to no end to see that the new version will star Simon Baker (The Mentalist), Rachel Leigh Cook, and Alfred Molina.
Duplicity: In the course of two-and-a-half minutes, I went from being excited about a Clive Owen spy movie, to disappointed that it was an Ocean’s Eleven rip-off, back to excited about a Clive Owen/Julia Roberts romantic comedy/caper movie.
The Uninvited: Violet from Lemony Snicket vs. Hand that Rocks the Cradle and some creepy imagery about black goo. I don’t know why that works so well for me, but there you have it.
Nov
5
The Atlantis Journal: Crackpots, Warlords, Super-Heroes, and Donovan
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I can tell I’m going to have to be more selective with the Atlantis stuff I link to. About half of what follows is totally goofy and makes me think that Atlantis isn’t nearly as awesome a concept as I’d like it to be.
But then Doug McClure comes along to save the day.
The Legend of Atlantis
I’m not the kind of guy who can sit and watch an hour-long video on the Internet. Especially not an hour-long video that’s only the first part of at least three that I can tell. But if you are that kind of person and you’re interested in a cheesy, New Agey “documentary” about Atlantis and its outer-space forefathers, have I got something for you.
Atlantis vs. the United States
This one’s even longer and crazier. If the first few minutes are representative of the whole thing, it suggests that a faction of the United States’ forefathers intended for the US to continue the work started in Atlantis and that their Satan-worshiping heirs are still working towards that goal.
The United States of Atlantis
I’ll take my Atlantis/US fiction written by Harry Turtledove, thanks.
Lords of Atlantis
Or, if you’re in the mood for something a little older, there’s always Wallace West.
Warlords of Atlantis
Or or, for those of us without a lot of time to read…
Unfortunately, it isn’t available on DVD.
Brave and the Bold’s Aquaman
I think I’ve posted some of this before, but here are a couple of good looks at Aquaman as he appears in the upcoming Batman: The Brave and the Bold cartoon (debuting November 14th). I’ve already got TiVo set up and ready to go.
How to Make an Underwater City
PhotoShop Talent shows you how.
Donovan’s “Atlantis” and Other Greatness
More goofy-ass Atlantis music can be found at Alex V. Cook’s blog.
Jul
7
Awesome List: Gorilladon, relevant space opera, robots, Ridley Scott’s Nottingham, Rainn "Xena" Wilson, and pirate kitties
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Gorilladon Lives!
Artist samaxAmen is creating a giant monster graphic novel starring that handsome beast above. Tentatively scheduled to be released by the end of the year.
The relevance of space opera
A long time ago, SF Signal ran a post collecting the opinions of various scifi authors about whether or not it’s a challenge to keep space opera relevant. Since space opera is one of only two scifi sub-genres I have time for (the other being steampunk), I was going to do a long post on the subject. But laziness has won the day, so I’ll just say that I mostly agree with Jonathan Strahan:
…how could you possibly argue that space opera is NOT mainstream when we live in the same world as Star Trek and Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica and so on and so forth? Whether it’s universally *respected* or not, space opera is very much a part of our mainstream culture.
Ash Wood robot
This could’ve gone in the Gallery, but I like it better here. As much as I dig Ash Wood’s robot comics, I like his statues even more.
Proof that I was an idiot in 2005
I knew about Marvel’s Fantastic Four and Iron Man vs. giant monsters comic, but for some reason I didn’t buy it. That will be corrected shortly.
Separated at birth?
About a year ago I expressed interest in a cool-sounding steampunk novel called Mainspring. Little did I know that it’s author Jay Lake sort of looks like me. He and Dan Wickline and I should start a band.
Space Monster Pictures
An independent outfit called Space Monster Pictures is making a stop-motion giant monster film called Tuatara. They have some creature photos on the website; just beware the link to their hideously unreadable MySpace page.
Bolt
I saw a trailer for Disney’s Bolt last week and it looks fun and all, but oh, what might have been. /Film has a look at what Chris Sanders (Lilo and Stitch) had in mind for the film before he was replaced for being “too bold.” Sigh.
Yeah, Disney. Take out the cat with the skull eye-patch and put in a fat hamster in a plastic ball. Great move.
At least Sanders’ pirate cat lives on in Kiskaloo, his excellent webcomic.
Prehistoric Life Murals
Coming this Fall: 176 pages of all of William Stout’s murals for The Houston Museum of Natural Science, Walt Disney World’s Animal Kingdom, and the San Diego Natural History Museum. Dinosaurs and mammoths galore.
Rainn Wilson is a nut
But that’s just the way I like him.
Nottingham
It’s totally not true that Christian Bale was going to play Robin Hood, but what’s important here is that Ridley Scott is putting together a Robin Hood movie. I didn’t know that.
Jun
21
Giant Robot Spider vs. the Futuretron
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Technically, this is the last set of our vacation pics, but “Vacation photos: Saturday” doesn’t do justice to the Awesomeness of the day. We saw steampunk machines, mechanical animal musicians, and giant robots galore and ended up with David expressing his love for Kong.
May
5
Michael Clayton (2007)
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Michael Clayton is another one of those movies that’s disguised as another kind of movie. It’s a character piece pretending to be a thriller.
As a thriller, it’s pretty average. George Clooney plays a lawyer who doesn’t take cases, but instead cleans up messes for the prestigious firm he works for. Your rich client hit a jogger and drove away from the scene of the accident? Call Michael Clayton. The lead council on your multi-billion dollar law suit lost his mind and took off all his clothes during a deposition? Call Michael Clayton.
Unfortunately, Michael is good buddies with said Crazy Lead Council (Tom Wilkinson) and halfway believes his claims that a) the firm is backing the wrong client and b) he has the documents to prove it. I won’t spoil the plot, but needless to say Michael gets pulled deeper into the intrigue and before long his life is at risk. The way he gets in and out of the situation is by-the-numbers thriller storytelling, but the movie’s strength is in its portrayal of the main characters: Michael, Arthur (Wilkinson’s character), and the corporate lawyer representing their client (Tilda Swinton).
An average thriller would give us a quick character sketch of the main character – just enough so we could invest in him a little – and that would be it. Arthur would just be a plot element – a way to get Michael involved in the story – and Karen Crowder (Swinton’s character) would just be the heartless villain. But Michael Clayton spends a lot more time on all three.
Michael’s not just dissatisfied with his job; he hates it. He’s been trying to get out for a while, even trying to go into the restaurant business with his younger brother, an alcoholic deadbeat who’s driven the restaurant deep into debt with the mob and left Michael to pay off all by his lonesome. Michael’s divorced and has a young son whom he doesn’t listen to enough. As my wife observed, Michael the Fixer has a severely broken personal life that he can’t mend. Ooh, the irony.
Okay, that last sentence was snotty, but that’s the way I feel about it. Even though the film goes deeper into characterization than a lot of thrillers, there’s still not much new even to that part. We’re told that Michael’s this brilliant fixer, but we never see it. He muddles Arthur’s case by being too close to Arthur and the only other case he spends any time on is the hit-and-run one I mentioned before. And he pretty much washes his hands of that one. There’s a brief montage showing him taking and redirecting a lot of phone calls in the course of a typical business day, but it’s not enough to convince me that Michael’s as awesome at his job as everyone says he is.
See, it’s not the writing that brings these characters to life. We get that Arthur’s beating himself up for helping a chemical company escape paying for all the people it gave cancer to, but there’s not much more to him than that. And Karen is pretty much a standard corporate bad guy willing to do whatever it takes to avoid paying the people whose lives her company has destroyed.
What saves the movie from being run-of-the-mill is the acting. Clooney plays Michael not as damaged, but just completely torn up inside. You can see the job eating away at him without his having to ever say a word about it. It does come up in conversation, but it’s a natural part of the dialogue, not an expository, we-have-to-tell-the-audience-how-Michael-feels kind of thing. We know how Michael feels just by watching him.
Wilkinson’s Arthur is heart-breaking in his remorse and so believable in his obsession in trying to correct his past mistakes.
I said that Karen is “pretty much” a standard villain, but there is a cool twist to her that Swinton does amazing things with. Karen is new in her role and is written as a woman who’s desperately trying to prove that she’s up to the task of defending this case. Swinton plays her as always in danger of collapsing under the pressure. She’s tough and polished in public or when she spars with Michael, but in private she quivers and sweats and stammers her way through practice speeches. We never like her, but we feel sorry for her and I don’t remember ever feeling that way about a bad guy before.
I should also mention Sydney Pollack because I love him and he does his usually great acting job as the head of Michael’s firm. He’s not a pleasant character, but he obviously cares about Michael and that makes him likeable. Come to think of it, that’s another point for the writing, so I don’t want to suggest that that part is no good at all. It certainly has its moments, but the real treat of the movie is watching the performances. All three of the main actors deserved the Oscar nominations they got, even if the movie as a whole didn’t.
Three out of five country-road car chases.
Feb
6
Comic World News RIP
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We’re closing down Comic World News. The reasons are all in the link, but as sad as I am to close out this part of my online “career,” I’m also excited about the freedom it gives me to pursue other things like working on my novel and comics projects.
And I’m still going to be contributing to the online comics community via the Newsarama blog. In fact, I’ve already been talking with JK Parkin about increasing my commitment level there.
Speaking of which, I forgot to mention that this week I reviewed the first volume of a scifi/fantasy manga called Andromeda Stories. Check it out here.
I’m also helping out with the Screen Bites feature, which is more or less The Awesome List from here only focused solely on movies. It might take me a while for me to figure out how to balance Screen Bites with The Awesome List, but for now I’m thinking that I’ll probably post some of the same links in both places. I’ll see how that goes and tweak it as I go.
Jan
22
Heath Ledger 1979-2008 RIP
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I’m having a hard time getting my head around this. Heath Ledger is dead.
Jan
12
This Week in AdventureTV
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This is going to require some work, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep it up every week, but I thought it might be interesting to do a list of cool movies and shows coming up on TV this week.
All times are Central Standard. I’m sorry if that’s confusing, but it’s where I live and I suck at math.
Sunday, January 13th
The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) (FMC; 7:00 am)
The Eye (2002) (IFC; 10:45 am)
Fathom (1967) (FMC; 12:00 pm)
Independence Day (1996) (FMC; 2:00 pm)
S.W.A.T. (2003) (FX; 4:30 pm)
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (FOX; 7:00 pm)
Comanche Moon, Part One (CBS; 8:00 pm)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) (IFC; 8:30 pm)
Monday, January 14th
Tokyo Drifter (1966) (TCM; 1:00 am)
The Day of the Jackal (1973) (TCM; 2:30 am)
Two in the Dark (1936) (TCM; 5:00 am)
Man Hunt (1941) (FMC; 5:00 am)
13 Rue Madeleine (1946) (FMC; 7:00 am)
Mystery House (1938) (TCM; 9:00 am)
The Iron Curtain (1948) (FMC; 9:00 am)
Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers (2004) (Disney; 9:30 am)
Evelyn Prentice (1934) (TCM; 11:30 am)
The Salzburg Connection (1972) (FMC; 1:00 pm)
The Quiller Memorandum (1966) (FMC; 3:00 pm)
The Ex-Mrs. Bradford (1936) (TCM; 4:00 pm)
Whistling in the Dark (1933) (TCM; 5:30 pm)
The Vanishing (1993) (FMC; 7:00 pm)
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (FOX; 8:00 pm)
Cat People (1942) (TCM; 8:30 pm)
The Osterman Weekend (1983) (FMC; 9:00 pm)
I Walked With a Zombie (1943) (TCM; 9:45 pm)
Tuesday, January 15th
The Leopard Man (1943) (TCM; 12:30 am)
The Seventh Victim (1943) (TCM; 1:45 am)
The Curse of the Cat People (1944) (TCM; 3:00 am)
The Body Snatcher (1945) (TCM; 4:15 am)
Isle of the Dead (1945) (TCM; 5:30 am)
Bedlam (1946) (TCM; 6:45 am)
Decision Before Dawn (1951) (FMC; 10:30 am)
Batman Begins (2005) (FX; 6:00 pm)
Commando (1985) (FMC; 7:00 pm)
Comanche Moon, Part Two (CBS; 8:00 pm)
No Such Thing (2001) (IFC; 10:00 pm)
Targets (1968) (TCM; 10:45 pm)
Wednesday, January 16th
Solaris (1972) (IFC; 12:00 am)
Suddenly (1954) (TCM; 5:00 am)
Planet of the Apes (1968) (AMC; 6:15 am)
Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) (AMC; 8:45 am)
Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) (AMC; 10:45 am)
San Francisco (1936) (TCM; 5:00 pm)
The Punisher (2004) (FX; 7:00 pm)
Comanche Moon, Part Three (CBS; 8:00 pm)
Thursday, January 17th
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961) (AMC; 5:30 am)
Frisco Kid (1935) (TCM; 7:15 am)
Crown vs. Stevens (1936) (TCM; 12:45 pm)
Hotel Reserve (1944) (TCM; 5:15 pm)
Cocoon (1985) (FMC; 7:00 pm)
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997) (SciFi; 10:00 pm)
Notorious (1946) (TCM; 11:15 pm)
Friday, January 18th
To Catch a Thief (1955) (TCM; 1:00 am)
The Three Musketeers (1939) (AMC; 5:00 am)
Psych (USA; 9:00 pm)
Saturday, January 19th
Barbarella (1968) (TCM; 1:00 am)
The Wild, Wild Planet (1967) (TCM; 2:45 am)
The Brain Eaters (1958) (AMC; 3:30 am)
Secret of the Whistler (1946) (TCM; 9:00 am)
The Return of the Whistler (1948) (TCM; 10:15 am)
Okay, that was way too time consuming. There’s no way I can keep that up every week, especially since I’d like to also include links to the IMDB or Amazon entries for the movies. That way you could learn more about each one and maybe discover something new.
I might just do the TV shows and the TCM movies. I was hesitant to even include SciFi Channel and AMC movies this time since they interrupt their movies with commercials. I forget if FX does; I don’t think so.
Anyway, we’ll see what kind of time I have for this next week. I think it’s a cool idea; I just need to make it manageable.
