Have you ever watched a movie or a TV show that you really, really liked? Probably. At least, I hope you have. If you're only watching things that you DON'T enjoy, then the terrorists have already won, haven't they? Now, have you ever watched a movie or TV show that you really, really liked and thought, "Man, that was great, BUT...I wish they'd done so-and-so differently instead"?
If you answered yes to the question above, then you'll know exactly how I feel going into this blog post. I recently took in the new Disney movie, Frozen, and I'm happy to say that it was mega-awesome (I'd make some kind of pun about the movie being "cool", but some sins are just unforgivable, folks). It was a stellar, well-rounded, beautifully-animated feature that harkened back to the glory days of Aladdin or Beauty & the Beast, when Disney was the reigning champion of cartoons everywhere and our childhoods were rife with plush Abus and "Under The Sea" sing-along cassette tapes. But, having said that, there was one part of Frozen that totally fell flat for me, and that was the way it ended. Well, lo and behold, a few days after watching it, I came up with an idea for how it SHOULD have ended that is so maddeningly better than the ending they actually used that it makes me grind my teeth to think that I'm not working for Disney right now.
I'll tell you what it is, but f you want to fully appreciate the ending I came up with, you'd best see the movie first. Needless to say, what I'm about to tell you is gonna be deep in the heart of spoiler territory. So if you haven't watched Frozen yet, watch it: It's great. Watch it, then come back here and finish reading this. And if you HAVE seen it, then settle in, grab some popcorn, and let me regale you with how this one humble writer thinks Frozen SHOULD have ended.
And if anyone from the Walt Disney animated studios happens to be reading this: I'm available. I'm very, very available. And my last name is Fantasia, for crying out loud, I'm practically gift-wrapped for you.
XXXXXXXXX SPOILERS FOR FROZEN AHEAD XXXXXXXXX
Okay, boys & girls. So, at the end of the movie, Elsa (our ice-slinging anti-heroine) is accepted by the townsfolk of Arendelle. Her sister, Anna, shares a first kiss with her new hubby, Kristoff. Then we pan away from the castle, a snowflake glitters in the foreground, and that's about it. Cut to credits.
Well, in the ending I came up with, we get one final scene after all of that. It's the middle of the night. Anna is lying in bed. The door to her room opens, and Elsa tiptoes inside. She sits on the edge of the bed, leans in, and sings one line of dialogue in a soft voice:
"Do you want to build a snowman?"
Anna smiles and opens her eyes. Cut to black. The end.
I just think this would be such a sweet, beautiful way for the girls to come full circle. Frozen is, after all, their story. It's not the typical princess romp that revolves solely around finding true love, heck no. It's a tale of a broken family, and the two sisters left to pick up the pieces and try to salvage what's left of their childhood. Ever since accidentally hurting her younger sister at the beginning of the film, Elsa has shut herself away from life. She stopped having fun. She stopped showing emotion. She stopped living, in a sense. As kids, it was always Anna who would approach her for nighttime adventures like building snowmen and ice skating in the castle ballroom. So to have ELSA be the one to instigate that -to have her rouse Anna on a quiet night so that the sisters can have fun and enjoy one another's company -is a perfect way for her character arc to complete itself. I honestly can't imagine how Elsa's story could have ended any other way. It would have been a beautiful close to an absolutely wonderful movie.
Agree? Disagree? Feel free to share. And if you DO work for Disney, like I said: Very. Very. Available.
Stay cool (sorry, I just couldn't resist that time).
Friday, January 24, 2014
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Canon in D Major
Something has come up in the nerdia world of late, something potent enough to make me get off my lazy behind and write another TQM post. Sorry it's been so long since the last one, but I've been busy teaming up with Corey Feldman and Jennifer Love-Hewitt to save the president from space-pirates. That was a thing that happened.
Anyhoo, the big brouhaha in the news lately seems to revolve around the demise of one of video gaming's most trailblazing development companies, LucasArts. Since it was a subsidiary of LucasFilm, LucasArts became property of Disney during their acquisition of the company in October of last year. When Disney announced the other day that it was shutting down LucasArts and cancelling some of the titles the game developers had currently been working on, some fans (kind of understandably) had a bit of a spot of bother with the whole situation.
But what's REALLY getting people riled up is the fact that -since Mickey Mouse is now effectively emperor of the Star Wars sandbox -other properties related to the films' Expanded Universe, or EU (i.e. comic books, novels, video games, etc., anything related to the movies but NOT the movies themselves) will also be stricken from the record.
But you know what, fellow sexy Star Wars disciples? This doesn't really bother me. And it shouldn't really bother you, either. Here's why.
LucasArts was a company. Companies can appear and disappear at the drop of hat. They can exist one moment and be gone the next. All those Star Wars-related books and video games, however...you can't UNmake them. They've been made. They exist. They're filling out our bookshelves and gracing our TV screens and embedded in our collective subconscious. If you liked them, then you have nothing to worry about; they'll always be there.
But that's not what most fans are concerned about, is it? No, what most fans are concerned about is that Disney's new films and projects will render previous EU material non-canon. For those of you aren't fluent in Geekish, non-canon is a fancy word that describes something that is related to or set within a fictional storyline that isn't actually an official part of that storyline at all. For example, I bet everybody has heard of Twilight, right? Well, let's say I read the first Twilight book, then I sat down and wrote a 4,000-page story featuring Edward, Bella, and Jacob teaming up to fight space-pirates with Corey Feldman. What I wrote is 100% related to Twilight. It takes place in the Twilight universe. It features all of the characters and settings. But it's not officially part of the Twilight story. Ergo, it is non-canon. But a year later, Stephanie Meyer releases New Moon, the official sequel to Twilight. New Moon, therefore, is canon. (Although, one couldn't help but make the argument that MY story would have been a million times more erotic and awesome. Just sayin')
There are probably something like 500 books that have been published telling the stories of what happens to Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia after the events of Return of the Jedi. And fans are upset because they believe that after all these years, those stories will be rendered obsolete by whatever movies Disney makes. The Disney movies (being actual, official Star Wars movies) will replace all of those other stories as the Star Wars canon.
But I'm here today to tell all those fans that they literally have nothing to be upset about. Because all of those Expanded Universe novels and comic books and video games and lunchboxes NEVER WERE CANON TO BEGIN WITH.
You heard me right, fanboy brethren. None of that stuff is or ever was officially canon, at least not in the sense we've been discussing so far. Heir to the Empire takes place in the Star Wars universe. It's a great book. A lot of people read it. But Timothy Zahn (the gentleman who penned it) is no different from me writing my masterpiece about Edward, Bella, Corey, and the space-pirates from beyond the Moon. Timothy Zahn is just like us: he's a Star Wars fan who loved the movies so much he created his own fantasies about what would happen next. The only difference is, he has some pull with publishing companies and whatnot and managed to sell his fantasies for a considerably impressive profit. And if we all had his writing skill, we probably would have, too. Knights of the Old Republic takes place in the Star Wars universe. It's a great game. A lot of people played it. But aside from being developed by an offshoot of George Lucas' own company, it still just came to life because a bunch of hardcore fans wanted to create a cool new experience in the galaxy we're all so familiar and in love with.
All Expanded Universe Star Wars media is, in essence, fan-fiction with a budget.
That's not to say that I'm undermining all of that work or questioning its quality. Just the opposite. Some of the best Star Wars stuff out there comes from these games and TV shows. The Clone Wars cartoon is actually so well-written and complex that some of its episodes put all six movies to shame. But at the end of the day, it comes down to one guy creating an original piece of material, and everybody loving the material to such an extent that they use it as fuel for their own creative endeavors. If you so much as played with Star Wars action figures as a kid, you were creating Expanded Universe stories.
What I'm suggesting here is that if we love Star Wars as much as we claim we do, then at the end of the day, canon is all relative, isn't it? Who's to say that the events of the novel Heir to the Empire and the events of the upcoming Episode VII aren't both canon, simply taking place in universes/timelines parallel from one another? I don't think any sci-fi fan on the planet is averse to the idea of alternate universes, if Star Trek, Back to the Future, Fringe, LOST, Doctor Who, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Legend of Zelda, Assassin's Creed, Futurama, Stargate, He-Man & the Masters of the Universe, and every single comic book ever made EVER are any indication. If you absolutely adored Heir to the Empire and end up wholly detesting Episode VII with every fiber of your being, then who is Disney to dictate what is or isn't your own personal canon? In your eyes, the events of Heir to the Empire are what REALLY happened to the heroes of the Rebel Alliance after the fall of the Empire, and Episode VII was just some crappy parallel universe "what-if" storyline that never really appealed to you. And vice versa. Just like how in my eyes, Edward and Bella never ended up as a couple; instead, Bella fell head-over-heels in love with Corey Feldman and his dreamy brown eyes, while a bitter Edward joined the crew of the S.S. Scallywag and became a (literally) bloodthirsty space-pirate who sailed the seven galaxies in search of treasure and debauchery until being defeated in single combat by a time-traveling dinosaur with a fancy mustache. That shit is my canon.
Anyhoo, the big brouhaha in the news lately seems to revolve around the demise of one of video gaming's most trailblazing development companies, LucasArts. Since it was a subsidiary of LucasFilm, LucasArts became property of Disney during their acquisition of the company in October of last year. When Disney announced the other day that it was shutting down LucasArts and cancelling some of the titles the game developers had currently been working on, some fans (kind of understandably) had a bit of a spot of bother with the whole situation.
But what's REALLY getting people riled up is the fact that -since Mickey Mouse is now effectively emperor of the Star Wars sandbox -other properties related to the films' Expanded Universe, or EU (i.e. comic books, novels, video games, etc., anything related to the movies but NOT the movies themselves) will also be stricken from the record.
But you know what, fellow sexy Star Wars disciples? This doesn't really bother me. And it shouldn't really bother you, either. Here's why.
LucasArts was a company. Companies can appear and disappear at the drop of hat. They can exist one moment and be gone the next. All those Star Wars-related books and video games, however...you can't UNmake them. They've been made. They exist. They're filling out our bookshelves and gracing our TV screens and embedded in our collective subconscious. If you liked them, then you have nothing to worry about; they'll always be there.
But that's not what most fans are concerned about, is it? No, what most fans are concerned about is that Disney's new films and projects will render previous EU material non-canon. For those of you aren't fluent in Geekish, non-canon is a fancy word that describes something that is related to or set within a fictional storyline that isn't actually an official part of that storyline at all. For example, I bet everybody has heard of Twilight, right? Well, let's say I read the first Twilight book, then I sat down and wrote a 4,000-page story featuring Edward, Bella, and Jacob teaming up to fight space-pirates with Corey Feldman. What I wrote is 100% related to Twilight. It takes place in the Twilight universe. It features all of the characters and settings. But it's not officially part of the Twilight story. Ergo, it is non-canon. But a year later, Stephanie Meyer releases New Moon, the official sequel to Twilight. New Moon, therefore, is canon. (Although, one couldn't help but make the argument that MY story would have been a million times more erotic and awesome. Just sayin')
There are probably something like 500 books that have been published telling the stories of what happens to Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia after the events of Return of the Jedi. And fans are upset because they believe that after all these years, those stories will be rendered obsolete by whatever movies Disney makes. The Disney movies (being actual, official Star Wars movies) will replace all of those other stories as the Star Wars canon.
But I'm here today to tell all those fans that they literally have nothing to be upset about. Because all of those Expanded Universe novels and comic books and video games and lunchboxes NEVER WERE CANON TO BEGIN WITH.
You heard me right, fanboy brethren. None of that stuff is or ever was officially canon, at least not in the sense we've been discussing so far. Heir to the Empire takes place in the Star Wars universe. It's a great book. A lot of people read it. But Timothy Zahn (the gentleman who penned it) is no different from me writing my masterpiece about Edward, Bella, Corey, and the space-pirates from beyond the Moon. Timothy Zahn is just like us: he's a Star Wars fan who loved the movies so much he created his own fantasies about what would happen next. The only difference is, he has some pull with publishing companies and whatnot and managed to sell his fantasies for a considerably impressive profit. And if we all had his writing skill, we probably would have, too. Knights of the Old Republic takes place in the Star Wars universe. It's a great game. A lot of people played it. But aside from being developed by an offshoot of George Lucas' own company, it still just came to life because a bunch of hardcore fans wanted to create a cool new experience in the galaxy we're all so familiar and in love with.
All Expanded Universe Star Wars media is, in essence, fan-fiction with a budget.
That's not to say that I'm undermining all of that work or questioning its quality. Just the opposite. Some of the best Star Wars stuff out there comes from these games and TV shows. The Clone Wars cartoon is actually so well-written and complex that some of its episodes put all six movies to shame. But at the end of the day, it comes down to one guy creating an original piece of material, and everybody loving the material to such an extent that they use it as fuel for their own creative endeavors. If you so much as played with Star Wars action figures as a kid, you were creating Expanded Universe stories.
What I'm suggesting here is that if we love Star Wars as much as we claim we do, then at the end of the day, canon is all relative, isn't it? Who's to say that the events of the novel Heir to the Empire and the events of the upcoming Episode VII aren't both canon, simply taking place in universes/timelines parallel from one another? I don't think any sci-fi fan on the planet is averse to the idea of alternate universes, if Star Trek, Back to the Future, Fringe, LOST, Doctor Who, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Legend of Zelda, Assassin's Creed, Futurama, Stargate, He-Man & the Masters of the Universe, and every single comic book ever made EVER are any indication. If you absolutely adored Heir to the Empire and end up wholly detesting Episode VII with every fiber of your being, then who is Disney to dictate what is or isn't your own personal canon? In your eyes, the events of Heir to the Empire are what REALLY happened to the heroes of the Rebel Alliance after the fall of the Empire, and Episode VII was just some crappy parallel universe "what-if" storyline that never really appealed to you. And vice versa. Just like how in my eyes, Edward and Bella never ended up as a couple; instead, Bella fell head-over-heels in love with Corey Feldman and his dreamy brown eyes, while a bitter Edward joined the crew of the S.S. Scallywag and became a (literally) bloodthirsty space-pirate who sailed the seven galaxies in search of treasure and debauchery until being defeated in single combat by a time-traveling dinosaur with a fancy mustache. That shit is my canon.
Friday, November 9, 2012
War Song
I'm still a bit too excited and edgy to come up with a clever, biting opening to this article. So, if it's okay with you beautiful people, I'mma skip the formal intros and get right to the main course, because I've got a lot to say about this one. Cool? Cool.
So. Star Wars.
Yup, we're going there.
Anyone who knows me in person knows that Star Wars is to me what Tyra Banks was to Will Smith circa 1992...i.e. I know too much about it for my own good and it's pretty much the only thing I ever talk about. I'm the quintessential Star Wars nut: I love all the movies, I've got about thirty Hasbro action figures, I've read a bunch of the expanded universe novels, and I've got about six different visual dictionaries on the subject. You know that alien band that's playing in the bar in A New Hope? Well, I'm such a detail-obsessed wackjob that I can tell you what that band's name is and what planet they come from. (If you really have to know, they're called Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes, and their species [the Bith] come from Clak'Dor VII. One of the instruments they play is called an "omni box". What else do you wanna know, ladies?). Yeah, I'm one of those guys. But I like to think that what differentiates me from the more creepy, hygienically-impaired members of the nerd society is that I obsess because I LOVE, not because I like to nitpick about things on internet chat rooms or show off my "skillz" to impress Goth chicks.
So, naturally, when I joined the rest of the world last week in discovering that Disney bought out LucasFilm and plans on making at least three more Star Wars movies, I went through a variety of confusing (and sometimes arousing, but we won't go there) emotions in a very condensed period of time. Face it, Star Wars is my lifeblood: sure, I'm also a huge fan of superhero movies, Lord of the Rings, LOST, Harry Potter, Joss Whedon, The Simpsons, Assassin's Creed, Pixar, Nintendo, and other nerdia (which is a word I just made up that means "nerd-media"), but Star Wars is the king. The Mac Daddy. It trumps them all. It was the first true fanboy experience that any of us had. If being a fanboy was a religion, Star Wars wouldn't just be the Book of Genesis: it'd be the entire goddamned Old Testament. And maybe the Letters to the Corinthians, too,
I wanted this TQM post to be about my personal thoughts on this revelation. And to be honest, it's still kind of hard to put it into words. Am I excited? Sure I am! I mean, George Lucas had mentioned toying with the idea of doing sequels to Return of the Jedi in the past, but we long ago dismissed those as the mere ramblings of a crazy old flannel-man, and George stated very firmly that the prequels would be the final installments in the film series. So to find out now that we're going to see a multitude of new Star Wars movies...well, it's a little bit surreal. It feels like a false rumor, or a cruel practical joke...until you find out that it isn't.
I am a bit saddened, though, that the series will no longer be part of the LucasFilm family. Disney, it seems, won't be content until they own everything, everywhere. They already locked down Pixar and Marvel Comics, and now they've added Star Wars to that list. I wouldn't be surprised if next year we'll be hearing that Disney has just spent $8.03 billion to purchase the rights to coffee. Not a coffee franchise; just coffee, period. And every time anyone buys a cup of coffee or roasts a coffee bean anywhere in the world, Mickey Mouse will reap the benefits somehow. And the year after that, it'll be doors. Wanna have a front door to your house? Not until Disney gets their cut, chump.
I'm in the middle of a little love-hate spat with Disney right now, because -in my opinion -they've been slacking. They made Hercules, then they made nothing good after that. For a long time. And then they just bought out everybody who was making good things and rode their long coattails all the way to the bank. If you were to ask me, the only worthy piece of entertainment Disney put out themselves after Hercules was Pirates of the Caribbean. It's kinda sad that the company who led the world in family entertainment back in the early nineties spends the present just sitting back getting fat while Pixar, Marvel, and (now) LucasFilm do all the hard work. But that's a matter for a whole other blog post entirely. If you ask me, Star Wars won't be quite the same without hearing that 20th Century Fox theme before the opening titles. :(
But other than that...yeah, I'm pretty optimistic! There's obviously a lot that could go wrong, but that can be said for any movie. There's also plenty more that could go right, and that's what I'm looking forward to. I'm just curious as to what the hell these new movies could possibly be about! I mean, the current 6-film saga is about Darth Vader: his childhood, youth, descent into darkness, and redemption. Now he's dead, his son Luke (SPOILERS!) has forgiven him for his injustices, the Empire is defeated, and all is right with the galaxy. For the first time in a long time, there's peace. And call me crazy, but the idea of watching Star Peace just doesn't have the same appeal. I'm sure a clever enough writer can come up with something intriguing enough to spawn a whole new series, but until then we can only speculate. And if they're hard-pressed for said writers...I'll do it. For free. Come on, Disney, you're lookin' at a free lunch here!
Though as long as we're on the subject, here are my two cents:
HAVE FUN WITH IT, PLEASE.
Whatever you do, Disney, please DON'T jump on the 21st-century bandwagon and make a hard-boiled, gritty, Star Wars Begins where Han and Leia's badass son is played by Jason Statham, and everyone wears black trenchcoats, and lightsaber blades only come in silver now because primary colours aren't hardcore enough for today's modern audiences. Just remember what made the original six movies so magical and expand upon that in every way possible.If you're going to try to be edgy and gritty, then you're not making a Star Wars movie; you're just making some other shitty movie and calling it Star Wars. Just be kids again. Design cool-looking spaceships and take us to awesome planets and introduce us to likeable characters who pilot imaginative land, sea, and air vehicles. The beauty of Star Wars is that its limitations are only defined by your own. So don't squander that opportunity, Disney, or I'm throwing away my Junior Mouseketeers membership for good.
I'm no whiny, squealing complainer...I'm not going to demand that you include Boba Fett or a cloned Emperor or anything like that. I'm putting my faith in you, creators of the new films. In 2015, I hope you pleasantly surprise me. There's only one thing I can think of that you really, really need to consider putting into these movies, only one thing that is absolutely irreplaceable: John Williams. In this humble writer's opinion, without Mr. Williams behind the conductor's baton, it just wouldn't be Star Wars.
P.S.- "Nerdia": copyright Andrew Fantasia, 2012, by the way. Just sayin'.
So. Star Wars.
Yup, we're going there.
Anyone who knows me in person knows that Star Wars is to me what Tyra Banks was to Will Smith circa 1992...i.e. I know too much about it for my own good and it's pretty much the only thing I ever talk about. I'm the quintessential Star Wars nut: I love all the movies, I've got about thirty Hasbro action figures, I've read a bunch of the expanded universe novels, and I've got about six different visual dictionaries on the subject. You know that alien band that's playing in the bar in A New Hope? Well, I'm such a detail-obsessed wackjob that I can tell you what that band's name is and what planet they come from. (If you really have to know, they're called Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes, and their species [the Bith] come from Clak'Dor VII. One of the instruments they play is called an "omni box". What else do you wanna know, ladies?). Yeah, I'm one of those guys. But I like to think that what differentiates me from the more creepy, hygienically-impaired members of the nerd society is that I obsess because I LOVE, not because I like to nitpick about things on internet chat rooms or show off my "skillz" to impress Goth chicks.
So, naturally, when I joined the rest of the world last week in discovering that Disney bought out LucasFilm and plans on making at least three more Star Wars movies, I went through a variety of confusing (and sometimes arousing, but we won't go there) emotions in a very condensed period of time. Face it, Star Wars is my lifeblood: sure, I'm also a huge fan of superhero movies, Lord of the Rings, LOST, Harry Potter, Joss Whedon, The Simpsons, Assassin's Creed, Pixar, Nintendo, and other nerdia (which is a word I just made up that means "nerd-media"), but Star Wars is the king. The Mac Daddy. It trumps them all. It was the first true fanboy experience that any of us had. If being a fanboy was a religion, Star Wars wouldn't just be the Book of Genesis: it'd be the entire goddamned Old Testament. And maybe the Letters to the Corinthians, too,
I wanted this TQM post to be about my personal thoughts on this revelation. And to be honest, it's still kind of hard to put it into words. Am I excited? Sure I am! I mean, George Lucas had mentioned toying with the idea of doing sequels to Return of the Jedi in the past, but we long ago dismissed those as the mere ramblings of a crazy old flannel-man, and George stated very firmly that the prequels would be the final installments in the film series. So to find out now that we're going to see a multitude of new Star Wars movies...well, it's a little bit surreal. It feels like a false rumor, or a cruel practical joke...until you find out that it isn't.
I am a bit saddened, though, that the series will no longer be part of the LucasFilm family. Disney, it seems, won't be content until they own everything, everywhere. They already locked down Pixar and Marvel Comics, and now they've added Star Wars to that list. I wouldn't be surprised if next year we'll be hearing that Disney has just spent $8.03 billion to purchase the rights to coffee. Not a coffee franchise; just coffee, period. And every time anyone buys a cup of coffee or roasts a coffee bean anywhere in the world, Mickey Mouse will reap the benefits somehow. And the year after that, it'll be doors. Wanna have a front door to your house? Not until Disney gets their cut, chump.
I'm in the middle of a little love-hate spat with Disney right now, because -in my opinion -they've been slacking. They made Hercules, then they made nothing good after that. For a long time. And then they just bought out everybody who was making good things and rode their long coattails all the way to the bank. If you were to ask me, the only worthy piece of entertainment Disney put out themselves after Hercules was Pirates of the Caribbean. It's kinda sad that the company who led the world in family entertainment back in the early nineties spends the present just sitting back getting fat while Pixar, Marvel, and (now) LucasFilm do all the hard work. But that's a matter for a whole other blog post entirely. If you ask me, Star Wars won't be quite the same without hearing that 20th Century Fox theme before the opening titles. :(
But other than that...yeah, I'm pretty optimistic! There's obviously a lot that could go wrong, but that can be said for any movie. There's also plenty more that could go right, and that's what I'm looking forward to. I'm just curious as to what the hell these new movies could possibly be about! I mean, the current 6-film saga is about Darth Vader: his childhood, youth, descent into darkness, and redemption. Now he's dead, his son Luke (SPOILERS!) has forgiven him for his injustices, the Empire is defeated, and all is right with the galaxy. For the first time in a long time, there's peace. And call me crazy, but the idea of watching Star Peace just doesn't have the same appeal. I'm sure a clever enough writer can come up with something intriguing enough to spawn a whole new series, but until then we can only speculate. And if they're hard-pressed for said writers...I'll do it. For free. Come on, Disney, you're lookin' at a free lunch here!
Though as long as we're on the subject, here are my two cents:
HAVE FUN WITH IT, PLEASE.
Whatever you do, Disney, please DON'T jump on the 21st-century bandwagon and make a hard-boiled, gritty, Star Wars Begins where Han and Leia's badass son is played by Jason Statham, and everyone wears black trenchcoats, and lightsaber blades only come in silver now because primary colours aren't hardcore enough for today's modern audiences. Just remember what made the original six movies so magical and expand upon that in every way possible.If you're going to try to be edgy and gritty, then you're not making a Star Wars movie; you're just making some other shitty movie and calling it Star Wars. Just be kids again. Design cool-looking spaceships and take us to awesome planets and introduce us to likeable characters who pilot imaginative land, sea, and air vehicles. The beauty of Star Wars is that its limitations are only defined by your own. So don't squander that opportunity, Disney, or I'm throwing away my Junior Mouseketeers membership for good.
I'm no whiny, squealing complainer...I'm not going to demand that you include Boba Fett or a cloned Emperor or anything like that. I'm putting my faith in you, creators of the new films. In 2015, I hope you pleasantly surprise me. There's only one thing I can think of that you really, really need to consider putting into these movies, only one thing that is absolutely irreplaceable: John Williams. In this humble writer's opinion, without Mr. Williams behind the conductor's baton, it just wouldn't be Star Wars.
P.S.- "Nerdia": copyright Andrew Fantasia, 2012, by the way. Just sayin'.
Sunday, October 28, 2012
Black & Yellow
Good evening.
Fellas, this one is for you. But ladies, you're more than welcome to stick around! You may learn a thing or two you didn't already know about us strapping, enigmatic Y-chromosomers.
Those of you familiar with the practices of the Jewish faith will know that when a boy reaches a certain age, he becomes a man in the eyes of his peers by partaking in a custom known as a Bar Mitzvah. This is an age-old tradition that's been going on for generations. But I'm here tonight to tell you -and you're hearing it here first, folks! -that I've discovered a second custom, another rite of passage that can be used to identify the passing from boyhood into manhood. It is a symbolic struggle that every boy on the planet must deal with at one point or another. But it doesn't come in the form of a religious experience, nor does it take shape via physical transformation. Instead, this rite of passage is nothing more (and nothing less) than my own namesake: a single, solitary question.
The question being: Betty or Veronica?
For the uninitiated, here's a quick history lesson: Archie Andrews is an American comic book character who debuted in 1941 from the comic company MLJ Magazines. The character eventually became so popular, however, that they shortly changed their name to Archie Comics. In a nutshell, Archie Andrews is a well-meaning but naive ginger-haired teenager who surprisingly has not one, but TWO smokin' hot girls both pining for his affections. And Archie, that beautiful idiot, can never seem to decide on which one he loves most. To this day, Archie comic books are still being published...which means that Archie has been unable to decide between the two girls for over 70 years now.
But let's give the man some credit...this ain't exactly an easy choice.
The two aforementioned smokin' hot candidates in question are Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge. Betty is a blonde beauty, sweet, kind-hearted, gentle, shy, but spunky. She has the unbelievable ability to be both a tomboy and a girly-girl all at once; she could be slipping into her Riverdale High cheerleader outfit one minute, then sliding under a car to give the engine a tune-up the next. She adores Archie and treats him (and everyone else, for that matter) with the utmost respect. Veronica Lodge is a gorgeous brunette who also happens to be the daughter of a multi-millionaire. Thus, Veronica tends to be bratty, spoiled, and stubborn. She's a very high-maintenance gal, who enjoys such pleasures as shopping, sunbathing on the beach, and going out for wallet-gouging dinners at French restaurants. She also adores Archie, but she tends to take him for granted, and often brushes him off entirely to continue her on-again, off-again relationship with Riverdale High's resident asshole, Reggie Mantle.
Now, at this point, most of you are probably waving your arms in the air and insisting that only the most obtuse, OBTUSE idiots would pick Veronica. But back that judgment train up for a sec, homies. Like I said, this isn't that simple.
Yes, Veronica can be a bee-otch at times. But can we blame her? Her rich daddy, Hiram Lodge, spoils the pants off of her, and lavishes her with money and credit cards without ever really teaching her the true value of a dollar. As for Veronica's mother, the woman is barely present. I've read over 100 Archie comic books and I think I may have seen her once: Veronica has a piss-poor male role model and a nonexistent female one. That's got "recipe for bee-otch" written all over it.
Besides, let's remove Archie from the equation for a minute. When she's not hanging out with boys, Veronica spends her time with her best friend in the whole world...who happens to be none other than Betty Cooper. And when these two are alone together, that's when the real Veronica Lodge starts to bubble to the surface a bit. On her many girls-nights-out with Betty, I've seen Veronica selflessly stand up for her friend, donate all of her childhood toys to poor kids, pay for all of her friends' Christmas shopping, organize school bake sales and pep rallies, & tons of other stuff that no self-proclaimed bee-otch would touch with a 10 foot pole. See, Veronica plays the hard-to-get card around the boys because her lack of a normal childhood has made her more than a little insecure. She needs to flip-flop between Archie and Reggie; not because she's mean, but because she simply doesn't know what she's doing. And she'd never admit that, of course. So she just smirks and pretends that it's all part of her "bad girl" routine. Unbeknownst to the boys, she's a total sweetheart. And because of her rich, cold upbringing, this means that she became a total sweetheart all on her own. That, my friends, is one hell of an admirable accomplishment.
Most people who read Archie Comics start doing so at a young age, but when we get older we inevitably find ourselves staring for longer than usual at those pages where Betty and Veronica are lying on the beach in their generous bathing suits, and we take to asking ourselves: if we were in Archie's EXTREMELY lucky shoes...who would we pick? And the answer that immediately follows usually sounds something like this:
"Betty! No, wait, Veronica! Yeah, Veronica! Or...no, screw that, I'll go with Betty! Maybe. Or Veronica....definitely Betty. Probably. 50-50." And then we'd give up and pull out a coin to settle things.
Therefore, I submit to you that this, THIS is the ultimate test of manhood. There is no right or wrong answer to this question: what matters is whether you can answer it without second-guessing yourself. And that is what separates the men from the boys. Archie is 17 years old and has about as much intelligence as a baby monkey; he's still got a long way to go before he can pick one girl over the other. It could take some men years to finally realize what it is they truly want. It's never too late to find out what your answer will be, and you'll learn something valuable about yourself in the process.
So to those of you who can answer the question without a moment's hesitation, congratulations. You've reached a level of wisdom and maturity that others can only dream of. And to those of you who still don't know for sure, don't be discouraged. Mulling it over, after all, is half the fun. :)
.............................................................
Oh, you're still here? What's that? You're asking what my choice would be? Well, gosh, if you really want to know, I guess it wouldn't hurt to tell you. But remember: this is a personal journey. Choices are based completely on individual emotional response, so don't go looking to my answer to help you out with yours, okay?
To learn whom I would choose between Betty or Veronica, feel free to highlight the spoiler-free section below.
Both. In a hot tub. With some strawberries.
Fellas, this one is for you. But ladies, you're more than welcome to stick around! You may learn a thing or two you didn't already know about us strapping, enigmatic Y-chromosomers.
Those of you familiar with the practices of the Jewish faith will know that when a boy reaches a certain age, he becomes a man in the eyes of his peers by partaking in a custom known as a Bar Mitzvah. This is an age-old tradition that's been going on for generations. But I'm here tonight to tell you -and you're hearing it here first, folks! -that I've discovered a second custom, another rite of passage that can be used to identify the passing from boyhood into manhood. It is a symbolic struggle that every boy on the planet must deal with at one point or another. But it doesn't come in the form of a religious experience, nor does it take shape via physical transformation. Instead, this rite of passage is nothing more (and nothing less) than my own namesake: a single, solitary question.
The question being: Betty or Veronica?
For the uninitiated, here's a quick history lesson: Archie Andrews is an American comic book character who debuted in 1941 from the comic company MLJ Magazines. The character eventually became so popular, however, that they shortly changed their name to Archie Comics. In a nutshell, Archie Andrews is a well-meaning but naive ginger-haired teenager who surprisingly has not one, but TWO smokin' hot girls both pining for his affections. And Archie, that beautiful idiot, can never seem to decide on which one he loves most. To this day, Archie comic books are still being published...which means that Archie has been unable to decide between the two girls for over 70 years now.
But let's give the man some credit...this ain't exactly an easy choice.
The two aforementioned smokin' hot candidates in question are Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge. Betty is a blonde beauty, sweet, kind-hearted, gentle, shy, but spunky. She has the unbelievable ability to be both a tomboy and a girly-girl all at once; she could be slipping into her Riverdale High cheerleader outfit one minute, then sliding under a car to give the engine a tune-up the next. She adores Archie and treats him (and everyone else, for that matter) with the utmost respect. Veronica Lodge is a gorgeous brunette who also happens to be the daughter of a multi-millionaire. Thus, Veronica tends to be bratty, spoiled, and stubborn. She's a very high-maintenance gal, who enjoys such pleasures as shopping, sunbathing on the beach, and going out for wallet-gouging dinners at French restaurants. She also adores Archie, but she tends to take him for granted, and often brushes him off entirely to continue her on-again, off-again relationship with Riverdale High's resident asshole, Reggie Mantle.
Now, at this point, most of you are probably waving your arms in the air and insisting that only the most obtuse, OBTUSE idiots would pick Veronica. But back that judgment train up for a sec, homies. Like I said, this isn't that simple.
Yes, Veronica can be a bee-otch at times. But can we blame her? Her rich daddy, Hiram Lodge, spoils the pants off of her, and lavishes her with money and credit cards without ever really teaching her the true value of a dollar. As for Veronica's mother, the woman is barely present. I've read over 100 Archie comic books and I think I may have seen her once: Veronica has a piss-poor male role model and a nonexistent female one. That's got "recipe for bee-otch" written all over it.
Besides, let's remove Archie from the equation for a minute. When she's not hanging out with boys, Veronica spends her time with her best friend in the whole world...who happens to be none other than Betty Cooper. And when these two are alone together, that's when the real Veronica Lodge starts to bubble to the surface a bit. On her many girls-nights-out with Betty, I've seen Veronica selflessly stand up for her friend, donate all of her childhood toys to poor kids, pay for all of her friends' Christmas shopping, organize school bake sales and pep rallies, & tons of other stuff that no self-proclaimed bee-otch would touch with a 10 foot pole. See, Veronica plays the hard-to-get card around the boys because her lack of a normal childhood has made her more than a little insecure. She needs to flip-flop between Archie and Reggie; not because she's mean, but because she simply doesn't know what she's doing. And she'd never admit that, of course. So she just smirks and pretends that it's all part of her "bad girl" routine. Unbeknownst to the boys, she's a total sweetheart. And because of her rich, cold upbringing, this means that she became a total sweetheart all on her own. That, my friends, is one hell of an admirable accomplishment.
Most people who read Archie Comics start doing so at a young age, but when we get older we inevitably find ourselves staring for longer than usual at those pages where Betty and Veronica are lying on the beach in their generous bathing suits, and we take to asking ourselves: if we were in Archie's EXTREMELY lucky shoes...who would we pick? And the answer that immediately follows usually sounds something like this:
"Betty! No, wait, Veronica! Yeah, Veronica! Or...no, screw that, I'll go with Betty! Maybe. Or Veronica....definitely Betty. Probably. 50-50." And then we'd give up and pull out a coin to settle things.
Therefore, I submit to you that this, THIS is the ultimate test of manhood. There is no right or wrong answer to this question: what matters is whether you can answer it without second-guessing yourself. And that is what separates the men from the boys. Archie is 17 years old and has about as much intelligence as a baby monkey; he's still got a long way to go before he can pick one girl over the other. It could take some men years to finally realize what it is they truly want. It's never too late to find out what your answer will be, and you'll learn something valuable about yourself in the process.
So to those of you who can answer the question without a moment's hesitation, congratulations. You've reached a level of wisdom and maturity that others can only dream of. And to those of you who still don't know for sure, don't be discouraged. Mulling it over, after all, is half the fun. :)
.............................................................
Oh, you're still here? What's that? You're asking what my choice would be? Well, gosh, if you really want to know, I guess it wouldn't hurt to tell you. But remember: this is a personal journey. Choices are based completely on individual emotional response, so don't go looking to my answer to help you out with yours, okay?
To learn whom I would choose between Betty or Veronica, feel free to highlight the spoiler-free section below.
Both. In a hot tub. With some strawberries.
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Exhibit E
They say that he who lives in the past is doomed to miss out on the future. That's all well and good, but if the future of action cinema is going to be Andrew Garfield skateboarding through New York and moping about his parents, then you'll forgive me if I continue to look backwards.
And what better way to look backwards than with this summer's heaping helping of nostalgic macho goodness that is The Expendables 2? Oddly enough, upon stepping out of the theater, I came to a funny realization. In a year that gave us The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man and Brave and ParaNorman and Madagascar 3, I stand to reason that The Expendables 2 is still the most kid-friendly movie of 2012.
If you're done laughing and shouting out loud to your computer screen that it's the most violent movie of the year and that I'm some kind of idiot for making such a claim, lemme try to explain myself here. Yes, E2 has a lot of action and a lot of violence. It's also got some healthy doses of blood, gore, explosions, and light profanity. But you know what? It's also a TON of fun! Nostalgia aside, let's pretend we haven't been waiting for this on-screen team-up for 30 years and try to get into the mindset of, say, an 8-year-old boy. This would be his favourite movie. There are big explosions, loud guns, tanks blasting shit to pieces, wacky characters spouting funny one-liners, good guys who act really heroic, bad guys who act really nasty, and generally a lot of ass-kicking and subsequent name-taking. This is exactly, to the letter, the kind of stuff 8-year-old boys love. Want proof? Just watch an 8-year-old boy play with his action figures for five minutes. The stuff he'll come up with could be ripped from the pages of any Expendables script.
There are themes in cinema that are not appropriate for young audiences, but I don't think E2 had any of them. There are no F-words, no adult themes, no heavy emotional duress. There's hardly even a mention of sex (the general consensus the movie puts forward, in fact, seems to be that girls are icky, unless they're cool and tough like the boys are). There's nothing in here that an adult would have to explain to an inquisitive kid. And yet I saw no children in the audience for The Expendables 2. Instead, I saw all of the children seated in the theater for The Dark Knight Rises, a movie that features (among other things): sex, partial nudity, numerous adult themes, the death of heroic characters, stock market jargon, frightening images, a bus full of little orphans about to be blown up by an atomic bomb, and corporate espionage. You know, for kids! Hey, parents, when you take your little ones to a movie, here's a hint: do some fucking research first. Just because Batman is on the poster doesn't mean it's going be a magical ride of smiles & rainbows.
On that note, The Expendables 2 is also a perfect movie for adults. We are, after all, the target demographic here. Everybody who's been waiting for these actors to blow shit up onscreen since the 1980s will finally get their wish granted. The first movie was a little more tame and light on the fan-service, but this one doesn't pull any punches. If somebody told me 25 years ago that one day I'd get to see Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger team up to fight a bunch of soldiers who were working for Jean-Claude Van Damme, I'd have probably peed my pants with glee. Heck, I almost peed my pants with glee yesterday when I watched the damn thing happen. There's something euphoric about seeing all of these heroes in one movie; The Expendables 2 is for action cinema what The Avengers was for comic books. Going back to the 8-year-old playing with action figures example, it reminds me of exactly that: anyone who's played with action figures in their youth knows how cool it was to team up a Ninja Turtle with a Spider-Man villain and make them fight a battle against Optimus Prime and the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Your imagination was the limit. That's how E2 felt.
You know what? Even the elderly will find something to enjoy here, watching aged relics like Stallone & Schwarzenegger take part in another glorious bullet-opera as the two actors playfully jab about one another of glory days long past, and reminisce about how much fun they used to have. The two actors are still having lots of fun (it shows), and I think that will put a smile on any Golden Ager's face; it's a nice little testament to the fact that our elders have indeed been through a lot of great shit in their time, and they've seen and been through things the rest of us couldn't even dream of. If there's any movie of 2012 that really sticks home the "respect old people" thing, I can't think of a better example than E2.
In a nutshell, The Expendables 2 proves that -while it may be no masterpiece of film, and is by no means the best picture of the year -it's got something everybody can enjoy. And that's worth something. So take your kids. Take your parents. Take your grandparents. This is a movie for everybody.
So...now that that the more serious stuff is out of the way, can I be a geek for a moment? Because here is my wish list for The Expendables 3:
-it should be a much longer movie, to give more screen-time to the growing list of actors.
-instead of having one villain, the villains should be another team of Expendables, only these guys have much darker agendas. That way every one of the heroes can be pitted against an evenly-matched opponent and make for some bone-crunchingly good fights.
-Schwarzenegger has to get in there with his fists this time, Commando-style.
-new additions to the cast should include: Carl Weathers, Michael Biehn, Nicolas Cage, Jackie Chan, Steven Seagal, Harrison Ford, The Rock, Daniel Craig, Liam Neeson, Jean Reno, and (if there's a just and loving God) Sean Connery.
Make it happen, Hollywood!
And what better way to look backwards than with this summer's heaping helping of nostalgic macho goodness that is The Expendables 2? Oddly enough, upon stepping out of the theater, I came to a funny realization. In a year that gave us The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man and Brave and ParaNorman and Madagascar 3, I stand to reason that The Expendables 2 is still the most kid-friendly movie of 2012.
If you're done laughing and shouting out loud to your computer screen that it's the most violent movie of the year and that I'm some kind of idiot for making such a claim, lemme try to explain myself here. Yes, E2 has a lot of action and a lot of violence. It's also got some healthy doses of blood, gore, explosions, and light profanity. But you know what? It's also a TON of fun! Nostalgia aside, let's pretend we haven't been waiting for this on-screen team-up for 30 years and try to get into the mindset of, say, an 8-year-old boy. This would be his favourite movie. There are big explosions, loud guns, tanks blasting shit to pieces, wacky characters spouting funny one-liners, good guys who act really heroic, bad guys who act really nasty, and generally a lot of ass-kicking and subsequent name-taking. This is exactly, to the letter, the kind of stuff 8-year-old boys love. Want proof? Just watch an 8-year-old boy play with his action figures for five minutes. The stuff he'll come up with could be ripped from the pages of any Expendables script.
There are themes in cinema that are not appropriate for young audiences, but I don't think E2 had any of them. There are no F-words, no adult themes, no heavy emotional duress. There's hardly even a mention of sex (the general consensus the movie puts forward, in fact, seems to be that girls are icky, unless they're cool and tough like the boys are). There's nothing in here that an adult would have to explain to an inquisitive kid. And yet I saw no children in the audience for The Expendables 2. Instead, I saw all of the children seated in the theater for The Dark Knight Rises, a movie that features (among other things): sex, partial nudity, numerous adult themes, the death of heroic characters, stock market jargon, frightening images, a bus full of little orphans about to be blown up by an atomic bomb, and corporate espionage. You know, for kids! Hey, parents, when you take your little ones to a movie, here's a hint: do some fucking research first. Just because Batman is on the poster doesn't mean it's going be a magical ride of smiles & rainbows.
On that note, The Expendables 2 is also a perfect movie for adults. We are, after all, the target demographic here. Everybody who's been waiting for these actors to blow shit up onscreen since the 1980s will finally get their wish granted. The first movie was a little more tame and light on the fan-service, but this one doesn't pull any punches. If somebody told me 25 years ago that one day I'd get to see Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger team up to fight a bunch of soldiers who were working for Jean-Claude Van Damme, I'd have probably peed my pants with glee. Heck, I almost peed my pants with glee yesterday when I watched the damn thing happen. There's something euphoric about seeing all of these heroes in one movie; The Expendables 2 is for action cinema what The Avengers was for comic books. Going back to the 8-year-old playing with action figures example, it reminds me of exactly that: anyone who's played with action figures in their youth knows how cool it was to team up a Ninja Turtle with a Spider-Man villain and make them fight a battle against Optimus Prime and the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Your imagination was the limit. That's how E2 felt.
You know what? Even the elderly will find something to enjoy here, watching aged relics like Stallone & Schwarzenegger take part in another glorious bullet-opera as the two actors playfully jab about one another of glory days long past, and reminisce about how much fun they used to have. The two actors are still having lots of fun (it shows), and I think that will put a smile on any Golden Ager's face; it's a nice little testament to the fact that our elders have indeed been through a lot of great shit in their time, and they've seen and been through things the rest of us couldn't even dream of. If there's any movie of 2012 that really sticks home the "respect old people" thing, I can't think of a better example than E2.
In a nutshell, The Expendables 2 proves that -while it may be no masterpiece of film, and is by no means the best picture of the year -it's got something everybody can enjoy. And that's worth something. So take your kids. Take your parents. Take your grandparents. This is a movie for everybody.
So...now that that the more serious stuff is out of the way, can I be a geek for a moment? Because here is my wish list for The Expendables 3:
-it should be a much longer movie, to give more screen-time to the growing list of actors.
-instead of having one villain, the villains should be another team of Expendables, only these guys have much darker agendas. That way every one of the heroes can be pitted against an evenly-matched opponent and make for some bone-crunchingly good fights.
-Schwarzenegger has to get in there with his fists this time, Commando-style.
-new additions to the cast should include: Carl Weathers, Michael Biehn, Nicolas Cage, Jackie Chan, Steven Seagal, Harrison Ford, The Rock, Daniel Craig, Liam Neeson, Jean Reno, and (if there's a just and loving God) Sean Connery.
Make it happen, Hollywood!
Thursday, July 19, 2012
The Ballad of the Spider
Gather round, children, I've a tale to share with you. Pull up a chair and listen close, and you might learn a thing or two before the end...
Once upon a time -not so long ago, in fact -there was a man named Marvel. When Marvel was young, he was one of those children who had a lot of toys. His bedroom was littered with fun toys of all shapes, sizes, and colours. And Marvel loved each and every one of them. He would sit in his room, perched atop his bed or inside a fortress constructed out of blankets, and play for hours. Every toy was used and appreciated to its fullest extent. But Marvel's absolute favourite toy of all was Spider-Man.
Spider-Man was one of those toys that Marvel took everywhere. He brought it in the car with him. He took it over to grandma's house. He would bring it to school, tuck it safely in his backpack during class, and play with it all recess long. Marvel adored the Spider-Man toy; cherished it, even. To him, Spider-Man was more precious than all the gold in the world.
As the years went on, and Marvel grew older, he gave away some of his lesser-used toys to other children. When he found out that his uncle & aunt (to whom he was very close) were having a baby, Marvel did a very noble thing and gave that lucky baby the coveted Spider-Man toy.
"But, Marvel, you love that old toy!" his aunt said to him.
"Yeah, I do," admitted Marvel as he handed the toy over. "And I've got a lot of fond memories of it, too. But here's hoping my new baby cousin will make all-new memories. I only hope this Spider-Man toy makes him as happy as it's made me."
So more years rolled by. By now, Marvel was in his late twenties, married, and his wife had just given birth to twins. An ecstatic Marvel was at the top of the world; life was certainly good, and could only get better from here. But one night, as he sat watching his newborn twins drift softly off to sleep in their crib, he noticed a few inches of empty space between them and couldn't help but feel that something was missing. It only took him a few moments to realize what it was...
The very next morning, Marvel went back over to his uncle and aunt's house to visit his little cousin, a precocious nine-year-old boy named Sony. Marvel made his way down to the basement of the house to find Sony sitting lazily on the carpet, sucking on his thumb and not really doing much of anything. Scattered about the room was a mess of unused toys and other odds and ends. It was a hot summer morning, so a ceiling fan rotated overhead, bathing the room in cool air. The boy looked up when his older cousin entered the room. "Hi, Marvel!"
"Hi, Sony!" Marvel said, kneeling down so that he could be at eye level with the boy. He noticed an enormous black electronic device positioned next to the wall in the corner, and curiously inquired as to what it was.
"Oh, that? That's my PlayStation!" Sony chirped happily. "It's my favouritest toy in the whole, wide world! I play with it every day!"
"Sounds like fun!" said Marvel. He noticed something else, a flat black box with sleek LED lights. "And how about that?"
"Oh, that? That's my Blu-Ray player! It's also my favouritest toy in the whole, wide world! I play with it every day, too!"
"Sounds great!" said Marvel. Then he noticed a massive pile of colourful toys sitting next to the Blu-Ray. "And what are all those?!"
"Oh, those? Those are Underworld, Ghostbusters, The Karate Kid, and Men in Black! I've had those toys since I was a baby! They're my favouritest toys in the whole, wide world times infinity!"
"That sounds swell, Sony!" Marvel said with a happy chuckle. "Looks like you've got a lot of really neat toys down here." He shifted his weight on the shag carpeting to get more comfortable. "Actually, Sony, speaking of toys...that's what I came here to talk to you about today."
"Whaddya mean?" asked Sony, tilting his head curiously. Then his eyes flashed with excitement. "Did you buy me a new toy?!?!"
"Um, no, not today. Sorry," Marvel said. "See, buddy, the reason I'm here is because...as I'm sure you know by now...my wife and I just had two babies. Twins, actually."
"Yeah, mom and dad mentioned it last week," said Sony, who looked utterly disappointed that there were no new toys in his forseeable future.
"Well," Marvel explained, "we bought a lot of new toys for the babies, and we really don't need any more. But...I was setting them down to sleep last night, and a thought occurred to me. I thought that it would be so nice, and so sweet, and so gosh-darn poetic, if I could give my very own children my favouritest toy in the whole, wide world. If I could pass down the one toy I cherished above all others to my babies, and let it be loved for a whole other generation."
"Which toy is that?" asked Sony.
"Well, the Spider-Man toy, of course," said Marvel. "I loved that toy more than anything when I was little."
"But you gave that to me!" said Sony.
"I sure did," said Marvel, "back when you were born. And I'm sure you've had a lot of great times with it, too! But you've gotten bigger since then, and you don't use that Spider-Man toy anymore. You've got plenty of other toys that you love more. So I thought it would be nice to be able to pass Spider-Man down to my babies."
"Uh...no, I use it all the time!" Sony lied. "I use it plenty!"
"No you don't," said Marvel. "I can see it from here. It's lying right there behind the couch, under that pile of unwashed socks and crushed soda cans."
Sony rushed over and retrieved the Spider-Man toy from beneath the pile of garbage, clutching it defensively against his chest. "No! It's mine!"
"But your parents told me you haven't played with it in almost five years now," Marvel said gently. "Don't you think you should let someone younger have it? Someone who'd appreciate it more?"
"No! Mine!" Sony whined. "I appreciate it more."
"But, Sony, be reasonable. I was here five years ago, the last time you played with Spider-Man! I remember you said -and I quote -'This toy is stupid and I don't want to play with it anymore'. Then you tossed it behind the couch onto that exact spot where it's remained for these past five years until you moved it just now!"
But alas, little Sony wouldn't budge an inch. He kept the toy securely in his hands and scoffed. "Mine!"
Marvel sighed, defeated. He knew his little cousin well enough by now to know that there was no arguing with him. "Okay, Sony," he said, his shoulders slumping with disappointment. "You win. You can keep my cherished childhood toy." Before Marvel turned to leave, though, he added, "But...I want you to make me a promise right now. I want you to promise me that you'll play with it. You'll take good care of Spider-Man and you'll play with it and appreciate it and never treat it carelessly. Because that toy means more to me than any other toy in the world. And I want to make sure I'm leaving it in good hands. Okay? Do you promise?"
"I promise!" Sony squealed with delight. "I'll play with it right now! Watch!" And he tossed Spider-Man up into the air triumphantly.
But unfortunately, Sony tossed the wall-crawler a little TOO high. Spider-Man collided with the whirring overhead ceiling fan and shattered upon impact, scattering a dozen bits of broken plastic every which way until pieces of the mutilated Spider-Man were strewn all over the basement. "Oops!" Sony blurted out. "Oh, well!" And he continued to suck his thumb obliviously as a heartbroken Marvel turned and left the room.
And that, boys and girls, brings us to the end of our little story. So what have we learned? We've learned that there are some things in life too precious to give away. One person's idea of gold might be another person's idea of pure garbage. Toys are meant to be played with, kids, not hoarded. They're meant to be loved and enjoyed and appreciated to their fullest extent possible. If you've got toys you never use, guess what? There are a million people out there who would love to use them. Waste not, want not.
The end.
Once upon a time -not so long ago, in fact -there was a man named Marvel. When Marvel was young, he was one of those children who had a lot of toys. His bedroom was littered with fun toys of all shapes, sizes, and colours. And Marvel loved each and every one of them. He would sit in his room, perched atop his bed or inside a fortress constructed out of blankets, and play for hours. Every toy was used and appreciated to its fullest extent. But Marvel's absolute favourite toy of all was Spider-Man.
Spider-Man was one of those toys that Marvel took everywhere. He brought it in the car with him. He took it over to grandma's house. He would bring it to school, tuck it safely in his backpack during class, and play with it all recess long. Marvel adored the Spider-Man toy; cherished it, even. To him, Spider-Man was more precious than all the gold in the world.
As the years went on, and Marvel grew older, he gave away some of his lesser-used toys to other children. When he found out that his uncle & aunt (to whom he was very close) were having a baby, Marvel did a very noble thing and gave that lucky baby the coveted Spider-Man toy.
"But, Marvel, you love that old toy!" his aunt said to him.
"Yeah, I do," admitted Marvel as he handed the toy over. "And I've got a lot of fond memories of it, too. But here's hoping my new baby cousin will make all-new memories. I only hope this Spider-Man toy makes him as happy as it's made me."
So more years rolled by. By now, Marvel was in his late twenties, married, and his wife had just given birth to twins. An ecstatic Marvel was at the top of the world; life was certainly good, and could only get better from here. But one night, as he sat watching his newborn twins drift softly off to sleep in their crib, he noticed a few inches of empty space between them and couldn't help but feel that something was missing. It only took him a few moments to realize what it was...
The very next morning, Marvel went back over to his uncle and aunt's house to visit his little cousin, a precocious nine-year-old boy named Sony. Marvel made his way down to the basement of the house to find Sony sitting lazily on the carpet, sucking on his thumb and not really doing much of anything. Scattered about the room was a mess of unused toys and other odds and ends. It was a hot summer morning, so a ceiling fan rotated overhead, bathing the room in cool air. The boy looked up when his older cousin entered the room. "Hi, Marvel!"
"Hi, Sony!" Marvel said, kneeling down so that he could be at eye level with the boy. He noticed an enormous black electronic device positioned next to the wall in the corner, and curiously inquired as to what it was.
"Oh, that? That's my PlayStation!" Sony chirped happily. "It's my favouritest toy in the whole, wide world! I play with it every day!"
"Sounds like fun!" said Marvel. He noticed something else, a flat black box with sleek LED lights. "And how about that?"
"Oh, that? That's my Blu-Ray player! It's also my favouritest toy in the whole, wide world! I play with it every day, too!"
"Sounds great!" said Marvel. Then he noticed a massive pile of colourful toys sitting next to the Blu-Ray. "And what are all those?!"
"Oh, those? Those are Underworld, Ghostbusters, The Karate Kid, and Men in Black! I've had those toys since I was a baby! They're my favouritest toys in the whole, wide world times infinity!"
"That sounds swell, Sony!" Marvel said with a happy chuckle. "Looks like you've got a lot of really neat toys down here." He shifted his weight on the shag carpeting to get more comfortable. "Actually, Sony, speaking of toys...that's what I came here to talk to you about today."
"Whaddya mean?" asked Sony, tilting his head curiously. Then his eyes flashed with excitement. "Did you buy me a new toy?!?!"
"Um, no, not today. Sorry," Marvel said. "See, buddy, the reason I'm here is because...as I'm sure you know by now...my wife and I just had two babies. Twins, actually."
"Yeah, mom and dad mentioned it last week," said Sony, who looked utterly disappointed that there were no new toys in his forseeable future.
"Well," Marvel explained, "we bought a lot of new toys for the babies, and we really don't need any more. But...I was setting them down to sleep last night, and a thought occurred to me. I thought that it would be so nice, and so sweet, and so gosh-darn poetic, if I could give my very own children my favouritest toy in the whole, wide world. If I could pass down the one toy I cherished above all others to my babies, and let it be loved for a whole other generation."
"Which toy is that?" asked Sony.
"Well, the Spider-Man toy, of course," said Marvel. "I loved that toy more than anything when I was little."
"But you gave that to me!" said Sony.
"I sure did," said Marvel, "back when you were born. And I'm sure you've had a lot of great times with it, too! But you've gotten bigger since then, and you don't use that Spider-Man toy anymore. You've got plenty of other toys that you love more. So I thought it would be nice to be able to pass Spider-Man down to my babies."
"Uh...no, I use it all the time!" Sony lied. "I use it plenty!"
"No you don't," said Marvel. "I can see it from here. It's lying right there behind the couch, under that pile of unwashed socks and crushed soda cans."
Sony rushed over and retrieved the Spider-Man toy from beneath the pile of garbage, clutching it defensively against his chest. "No! It's mine!"
"But your parents told me you haven't played with it in almost five years now," Marvel said gently. "Don't you think you should let someone younger have it? Someone who'd appreciate it more?"
"No! Mine!" Sony whined. "I appreciate it more."
"But, Sony, be reasonable. I was here five years ago, the last time you played with Spider-Man! I remember you said -and I quote -'This toy is stupid and I don't want to play with it anymore'. Then you tossed it behind the couch onto that exact spot where it's remained for these past five years until you moved it just now!"
But alas, little Sony wouldn't budge an inch. He kept the toy securely in his hands and scoffed. "Mine!"
Marvel sighed, defeated. He knew his little cousin well enough by now to know that there was no arguing with him. "Okay, Sony," he said, his shoulders slumping with disappointment. "You win. You can keep my cherished childhood toy." Before Marvel turned to leave, though, he added, "But...I want you to make me a promise right now. I want you to promise me that you'll play with it. You'll take good care of Spider-Man and you'll play with it and appreciate it and never treat it carelessly. Because that toy means more to me than any other toy in the world. And I want to make sure I'm leaving it in good hands. Okay? Do you promise?"
"I promise!" Sony squealed with delight. "I'll play with it right now! Watch!" And he tossed Spider-Man up into the air triumphantly.
But unfortunately, Sony tossed the wall-crawler a little TOO high. Spider-Man collided with the whirring overhead ceiling fan and shattered upon impact, scattering a dozen bits of broken plastic every which way until pieces of the mutilated Spider-Man were strewn all over the basement. "Oops!" Sony blurted out. "Oh, well!" And he continued to suck his thumb obliviously as a heartbroken Marvel turned and left the room.
And that, boys and girls, brings us to the end of our little story. So what have we learned? We've learned that there are some things in life too precious to give away. One person's idea of gold might be another person's idea of pure garbage. Toys are meant to be played with, kids, not hoarded. They're meant to be loved and enjoyed and appreciated to their fullest extent possible. If you've got toys you never use, guess what? There are a million people out there who would love to use them. Waste not, want not.
The end.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Let's Reboot!
I'd imagine that somewhere deep in the bowels of Hollywood is a studio where most of the industry's screenwriting takes place. Located within this studio, there must be an impossibly gigantic whiteboard which all of the writers look to for inspiration. The whiteboard contains nothing less than Hollywood's current formula for success. The words "HOW TO WRITE A MOVIE" are (I assume) plastered firmly in thick, red silicon letters above this whiteboard so that there can be no question as to what the board's contents are all about. And written on the whiteboard itself would be the two sentences that studio executives are practically demanding their writers to follow:
"Step #1: Reboot something that's already popular".
"Step #2: Make it dark and gritty now".
It fells like by this point, the words "dark" and "gritty" have gotten tossed around so often in Hollywood that most folks there have become a bit confused as to their meaning. For example, every other blockbuster that gets released these days boasts about how "gritty" their fresh new story is, how it's "the grittiest film" you'll ever see. But we know that's a lie right away, don't we? The grittiest movie I've ever seen and ever will see was Spider-Man 3, because it had a character who was literally made of millions of tiny particles of sand and grit (although, since the majority of it takes place on sand, I'd say Beach Blanket Bingo would be a close second). But I digress.
Reboots are the other half of this trend. Everything is getting rebooted or remade now, and even their titles are getting an extreme makeover. Remember Judge Dredd? It's getting a reboot this year. Only, it's just called Dredd now. How about Invasion of the Body Snatchers? They got a remake, but it was called The Invasion. Why? Because in today's fast-paced, smart phone-fueled world, people don't have time for silly things like words. Brb ttyl LMFAO.
The reason I started writing these blogs at The Question Mark in the first place is because I've always wanted to continuously hone my writing skills and hopefully get exposure which could lead to future writing jobs some day. I'd really like to get paid to write books and scripts for the film/TV industry, so I'm dedicating this week's TQM entry to all of the Hollywood producers out there who are looking for writers to pen their next great masterpiece. I'm presenting you producers with six ideas for six great movies, all while never straying from your golden rules: "reboot something that's already popular; make it dark and gritty now". Also, Hollywood, I'm going to cater to your other whim: the titles will be as short as possible, so that people can spend less time telling the box office clerk which movie they want to see and more time paying for their ticket, okay? So here are my six ideas. If this doesn't make you wanna hire me, then I have no idea what will.
GUMP
This is the retold, much better story of the life of everyone's favourite dim-witted southerner, Forrest Gump. This time around though, his mother never really loved him and Jenny died in a horrific car crash when she was 14. So Gump has become a gravelly-voiced badass bent on revenge. The entire movie will focus on his time as a soldier in the Vietnam War. The effects of war make him psychotic (as war is wont to do), and he starts imagining that he sees Jenny wandering the jungles. He goes mad trying to follow her specter, ripping the throats out of enemy soldiers in really cool, bloody ways as he inches closer to Jenny, only to have her slip away from him again and again. His commanding officer, Lieutenant Dan, decides to utilize Gump's psychosis by unleashing the man into a P.O.W. camp and letting him run wild. The "Life is like a bandolier of bullets" scene will have the audience cheering with delight.
TOY
Woody is an antique cowboy doll whose owner (a boy named Andy) was killed in an attempted terrorist attack on Washington D.C. by Al Qaeda insurgents. Driven mad with grief, Woody has become a gravelly-voiced badass bent on revenge. He, Buzz Lightyear, and a shitload of G.I. Joe toys discover a way of constructing actual working miniature guns out of Lego and TinkerToy. Together, the small army leaves the safe confines of Andy's house and wages war on the terrorists who dared to mess with them. Instead of learning to overcome their differences like they did in that bland "original" version, this time Woody and Buzz learn that dousing a chainsaw in gasoline and setting it ablaze allows you to kill twice as many terrorists as you would with a normal chainsaw. Also, Jason Statham does a few voices in it. He plays everybody.
PARK
John Hammond is a wealthy scientist and entrepreneur who has spent the last several years cloning dinosaurs on an uncharted island southeast of Costa Rica. The cloning is a success, and before long Hammond hatches plans to open a dinosaur gaming reserve (because theme parks are juvenile; gaming reserves are much more gritty and edgy). However, Hammond is stranded in the jungle one night and is devoured by a T-Rex. Hammond's son Jack, a gravelly-voiced badass, becomes bent on revenge. Armed with an arsenal of weapons that would make The Terminator blush, Jack ventures into the depths of the island to lay the smackdown on his father's creations and teach those overgrown iguanas who's really at the top of the food chain.
BANG
A poverty-stricken man and his two small children are trying to eke out a life in a post-apocalyptic Seattle. One day, the children find an abandoned antique car in a junkyard and insist on fixing it up. Before long, the father and his kids have converted the vehicle into a wicked-cool fire-red Lamborghini Diablo with side-mounted guns and rocket launchers. The kids nickname the car "Bang" because that's the sound its guns make when they're fired, and the car seems to take on a mind and personality of its own. Instead of the childish plot of the original, silly musical version, this movie takes a drastic turn when both children are kidnapped and tortured by a serial killer/drug lord who also has an army of zombies for some reason. The kids' father, who was already a gravelly-voiced badass to begin with, automatically becomes bent on revenge. He and Bang embark on a cross-country road trip of blood, bullets, and collateral damage in an attempt to rescue the children and save the day.
FERRIS
Ferris Bueller is an average American high school student who happens to be gifted with exceptional cleverness and improvisational skills. Faking illness to get out of school, Ferris prepares for a day of fun and excitement...and gets more than he bargained for. See, it turns out that the reason he's so clever and witty is because he's had a top-secret government chip implanted in his skull, a chip containing thousands of covert agent training tactics and escape plans. When the government discovers Ferris' location, they send agents to kill him. Luckily, they enter his house while he's out catching a Cubs game, but they murder his sister in cold blood. Ferris, whose voice is now full of gravel and whose personality is now badass and driven by revenge, decides that he's going to play by his own rules from now on. He sets out on a quest to take down the government agents one-by-one, utilizing every one of his awesome skills at disguise, identity theft, and theatricality to achieve his bloody goals. And all the while, his bumbling yet lovable principal Ed Rooney is constantly trying to prove that's he's not really sick after all!
BUSTERS
Peter Venkman, Egon Spengler, and Ray Stantz are three down on their luck scientists obsessed with the paranormal and occult. With no means of garnering income, they open up a ghost-catching business in the hopes of becoming New York heroes. Instead, they're ridiculed. Until one fateful night, when a truckload of Al Qaeda insurgents (who were planning some kind of terrorist attack on the MetLife building) all perish in a fiery explosion before they can accomplish their goal. The terrorists' ghosts are angry, bitter, and full of resentment, and strike a deal with a Sumerian god of destruction named Gozer to harness the powers of Ancient Evil and make New York City burn! Catching wind of this nefarious scheme, the Ghostbusters trade in their proton packs for some much more badass heavy artillery machine guns that can also kill ghosts, and they set out to make sure that justice is served the American way! Rick Moranis stars again as an aged Louis Tully, who is no longer an accountant but an Iraqi War vet who has a surprisingly soft-spoken voice but regardless is full of thoughts of revenge. Also, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man is just a big white tank now, because that's grittier.
"Step #1: Reboot something that's already popular".
"Step #2: Make it dark and gritty now".
It fells like by this point, the words "dark" and "gritty" have gotten tossed around so often in Hollywood that most folks there have become a bit confused as to their meaning. For example, every other blockbuster that gets released these days boasts about how "gritty" their fresh new story is, how it's "the grittiest film" you'll ever see. But we know that's a lie right away, don't we? The grittiest movie I've ever seen and ever will see was Spider-Man 3, because it had a character who was literally made of millions of tiny particles of sand and grit (although, since the majority of it takes place on sand, I'd say Beach Blanket Bingo would be a close second). But I digress.
Reboots are the other half of this trend. Everything is getting rebooted or remade now, and even their titles are getting an extreme makeover. Remember Judge Dredd? It's getting a reboot this year. Only, it's just called Dredd now. How about Invasion of the Body Snatchers? They got a remake, but it was called The Invasion. Why? Because in today's fast-paced, smart phone-fueled world, people don't have time for silly things like words. Brb ttyl LMFAO.
The reason I started writing these blogs at The Question Mark in the first place is because I've always wanted to continuously hone my writing skills and hopefully get exposure which could lead to future writing jobs some day. I'd really like to get paid to write books and scripts for the film/TV industry, so I'm dedicating this week's TQM entry to all of the Hollywood producers out there who are looking for writers to pen their next great masterpiece. I'm presenting you producers with six ideas for six great movies, all while never straying from your golden rules: "reboot something that's already popular; make it dark and gritty now". Also, Hollywood, I'm going to cater to your other whim: the titles will be as short as possible, so that people can spend less time telling the box office clerk which movie they want to see and more time paying for their ticket, okay? So here are my six ideas. If this doesn't make you wanna hire me, then I have no idea what will.
GUMP
This is the retold, much better story of the life of everyone's favourite dim-witted southerner, Forrest Gump. This time around though, his mother never really loved him and Jenny died in a horrific car crash when she was 14. So Gump has become a gravelly-voiced badass bent on revenge. The entire movie will focus on his time as a soldier in the Vietnam War. The effects of war make him psychotic (as war is wont to do), and he starts imagining that he sees Jenny wandering the jungles. He goes mad trying to follow her specter, ripping the throats out of enemy soldiers in really cool, bloody ways as he inches closer to Jenny, only to have her slip away from him again and again. His commanding officer, Lieutenant Dan, decides to utilize Gump's psychosis by unleashing the man into a P.O.W. camp and letting him run wild. The "Life is like a bandolier of bullets" scene will have the audience cheering with delight.
TOY
Woody is an antique cowboy doll whose owner (a boy named Andy) was killed in an attempted terrorist attack on Washington D.C. by Al Qaeda insurgents. Driven mad with grief, Woody has become a gravelly-voiced badass bent on revenge. He, Buzz Lightyear, and a shitload of G.I. Joe toys discover a way of constructing actual working miniature guns out of Lego and TinkerToy. Together, the small army leaves the safe confines of Andy's house and wages war on the terrorists who dared to mess with them. Instead of learning to overcome their differences like they did in that bland "original" version, this time Woody and Buzz learn that dousing a chainsaw in gasoline and setting it ablaze allows you to kill twice as many terrorists as you would with a normal chainsaw. Also, Jason Statham does a few voices in it. He plays everybody.
PARK
John Hammond is a wealthy scientist and entrepreneur who has spent the last several years cloning dinosaurs on an uncharted island southeast of Costa Rica. The cloning is a success, and before long Hammond hatches plans to open a dinosaur gaming reserve (because theme parks are juvenile; gaming reserves are much more gritty and edgy). However, Hammond is stranded in the jungle one night and is devoured by a T-Rex. Hammond's son Jack, a gravelly-voiced badass, becomes bent on revenge. Armed with an arsenal of weapons that would make The Terminator blush, Jack ventures into the depths of the island to lay the smackdown on his father's creations and teach those overgrown iguanas who's really at the top of the food chain.
BANG
A poverty-stricken man and his two small children are trying to eke out a life in a post-apocalyptic Seattle. One day, the children find an abandoned antique car in a junkyard and insist on fixing it up. Before long, the father and his kids have converted the vehicle into a wicked-cool fire-red Lamborghini Diablo with side-mounted guns and rocket launchers. The kids nickname the car "Bang" because that's the sound its guns make when they're fired, and the car seems to take on a mind and personality of its own. Instead of the childish plot of the original, silly musical version, this movie takes a drastic turn when both children are kidnapped and tortured by a serial killer/drug lord who also has an army of zombies for some reason. The kids' father, who was already a gravelly-voiced badass to begin with, automatically becomes bent on revenge. He and Bang embark on a cross-country road trip of blood, bullets, and collateral damage in an attempt to rescue the children and save the day.
FERRIS
Ferris Bueller is an average American high school student who happens to be gifted with exceptional cleverness and improvisational skills. Faking illness to get out of school, Ferris prepares for a day of fun and excitement...and gets more than he bargained for. See, it turns out that the reason he's so clever and witty is because he's had a top-secret government chip implanted in his skull, a chip containing thousands of covert agent training tactics and escape plans. When the government discovers Ferris' location, they send agents to kill him. Luckily, they enter his house while he's out catching a Cubs game, but they murder his sister in cold blood. Ferris, whose voice is now full of gravel and whose personality is now badass and driven by revenge, decides that he's going to play by his own rules from now on. He sets out on a quest to take down the government agents one-by-one, utilizing every one of his awesome skills at disguise, identity theft, and theatricality to achieve his bloody goals. And all the while, his bumbling yet lovable principal Ed Rooney is constantly trying to prove that's he's not really sick after all!
BUSTERS
Peter Venkman, Egon Spengler, and Ray Stantz are three down on their luck scientists obsessed with the paranormal and occult. With no means of garnering income, they open up a ghost-catching business in the hopes of becoming New York heroes. Instead, they're ridiculed. Until one fateful night, when a truckload of Al Qaeda insurgents (who were planning some kind of terrorist attack on the MetLife building) all perish in a fiery explosion before they can accomplish their goal. The terrorists' ghosts are angry, bitter, and full of resentment, and strike a deal with a Sumerian god of destruction named Gozer to harness the powers of Ancient Evil and make New York City burn! Catching wind of this nefarious scheme, the Ghostbusters trade in their proton packs for some much more badass heavy artillery machine guns that can also kill ghosts, and they set out to make sure that justice is served the American way! Rick Moranis stars again as an aged Louis Tully, who is no longer an accountant but an Iraqi War vet who has a surprisingly soft-spoken voice but regardless is full of thoughts of revenge. Also, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man is just a big white tank now, because that's grittier.
Friday, June 29, 2012
25 to Life
One June 8th, 1987, I emerged from the womb. On June 8th, 2012, which was just a few weeks past, I turned 25 years old. Normally, I'm not one to let a little thing like age stand in my way. It's just a number, after all, a little tally to remind oneself how much time (approximately) one has spent on this earth. It means nothing more and nothing less than a simple mathematical equation. So why, then, do we worry so much about our age? And why did I suddenly start doing it, too? What was it about the number 25 that made me want to dive under my bed in fright, never to emerge until I'd somehow mastered a way to hack into the time-space continuum and somehow freeze my age in this perfect position for the rest of eternity?
In a nutshell, I think it's because (like everyone else) I was intimidated.
Anyone who's met me in person knows that I'm pretty much an overgrown kid with stubble. I never really had what you could call a "normal" childhood; it got pretty wacky at times, and certain situations pretty much forced me to grow up way earlier than any kid should be expected to. In light of that, I'm pretty sure I developed what them crazy shrinks like to call "Peter Pan Syndrome" or something; because I was forced through some heavy stuff and had to make some big adult decisions as a kid, I seem to be making up for it now by being more of a kid than ever. Try to talk to me about politics or taxes or insurance or pretty much anything that has to do with money, and you'll notice that my eyes will start to develop a fine glaze, my mouth will slowly droop open, and I'll just proceed to smile and nod until you change the subject to something my little brain can wrap itself around. I could have a two-hour conversation with you about dragons. I could talk for days about the finer points of why Count Dooku's lightsaber is curved. I could write a friggin book about the evolution of Batman from his inception to present...but try to explain to me how no-fault car insurance works, and before long I'll be begging you for a quick and painless death so that I won't have to hear any more.
Now, that sounds like kind of a bad thing, doesn't it? Common sense dictates that any responsible adult living in this madcap world should have some kind of idea of how taxes and insurance work. They should at least know a little bit about residual income or savings accounts or the detailed benefits of choosing one cell phone plan over another. Knowing about this, after all, is important. More important than Batman, at any rate. But I just can't. I physically CANNOT get my brain to understand these things. When I try, it hurts. You'd get the exact same response from me as you would if you tried to explain these things to a 3-year-old. Which, in short, would be, "Huh?!?"
I don't think this will ever change. As far as taxes and accounting are concerned, I'm pretty sure that I'm a lost cause. And you know what? I'm cool with that. Batman and dragons and lightsabers may be silly things that were made up by silly people, but you know what else is a silly thing made up by silly people? Taxes and insurance and cell phone plans. They're all just random bits of data. Nothing more than numbers. Kinda like age. Some people care about 'em, and some just don't give a damn.
Like I said earlier, the idea of "getting old" never really bothered me, because I always feel like a kid inside anyway. It wasn't until this year that it started to actually make me think. Two separate incidents, one at each of my jobs, gave me a bleak feeling inside. And for a while, I felt a little down in the dumps. Until a third incident occurred which completely turned me around.
Incident #1: I recently came into the position of a Starbucks barista, which means I make overly-complicated caffeinated drinks for bitchy, picky soccer moms who leave their sunglasses on indoors because...well, because they're bitchy, picky soccer moms. During one of my shifts, I was asked to walk around the store with a tray full of frappuccino samples to hand out to the crowd. When I approached a small family, the mother thanked me and took one of the samples. Her little boy tugged on her sleeve and said, "Mommy, can I have a sample, too?" To which his mother replied, "Well, sweetie, you'll have to ask the Starbucks man for one." At that moment, I froze dead in my tracks because I realized it was the first time ever that someone had referred to me as a "man" without adding the prefix "young" or the suffix "child". I was so stunned that I didn't even hear the kid when he asked me for a drink. I was sure that his mother must have been talking about somebody else; perhaps my manager was standing right behind me and he was the fabled "Starbucks Man" in question. But nope.
It hit me all of a sudden right then and there, in the middle of the store, as I stood holding that tray of delicious frozen mocha-coconut beverages amidst a crowd of increasingly confused onlookers. I realized that no matter how many Simpsons quotes I knew, no matter how many Star Wars action figures I owned or how far I could get in Super Mario Bros. without dying or what my favourite Pokemon was...I wasn't a little kid anymore. I wasn't a teenager, either. Hell, I don't even classify as a young adult! According to my age, I am, without question, an adult. A man. A grown-up. Remember when we used to say,"When I grow up, I want to..."? I've reached that point, the point where I'm supposed to stop dreaming and make that "..." a reality.
Incident #2: The day before my 25th birthday, I was called in to work a shift at the banquet hall (my other job). I was expecting another wedding, or a stag, or a baby shower, or an engagement party, or the usual fare. Instead, the party in question was something I'd never done before: a high school prom.
As I went about my business, serving pasta and veggies to a bunch of hyperactive 18-year-olds who were too focused on trying to get laid to touch any of their food, I felt as if the greater hands of fate had put me in this position before my 25th birthday so that I could face my own mortality in some weird way. Here were these upstart youngsters, graduating from high school, fresh and ready and eager to take on the big world that waited just beyond the horizon. Many of those kids will go on to college and university to become doctors or executives or chefs or hotel managers or teachers. And here I was, seven years their senior, with nothing to show for it but two minimum wage jobs, a stagnating acting career, and a few unpublished manuscripts that nobody's interested in reading because "ooohhh, they're too long". Needless to say, I was kinda bummed out.
And then, today, something glorious happened. Incident #3: I beat The Legend of Zelda.
Being one of the biggest and most epic games in the entire Nintendo library, very few people back in the day could boast that they'd successfully finished the game. It was one of the very first video games I ever remember getting my grubby little paws on. If I close my eyes, I can still see myself: I'm 3 years old, sitting on my little plush blue chair in the middle of the living room in the Rexdale-based apartment I used to call home. The coffee table was to my right, the ginormous tacky wall unit to my left. And in front of me, encased in a cocoon of wood grain, was the television set. I had a plastic NES controller in my hand, and a second after my mom pressed the POWER button on the console, that little red light blinked on, and the Zelda theme music began to whistle its way through the television speakers.
I spent hours upon hours hunkered down in that blue chair, trying in vain to get any farther than Level 4, but I just couldn't. Anyone who's played it can back me up here, too: The Legend of Zelda ain't no walk in the park. As a little kid, I could beat the likes of Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog easily. But Zelda? No such luck. The game defeated me. I loved it enough to keep trying, but could never get far.
Until today.
June 29th, 2012: I booted up my Nintendo Wii and selected the virtual console version of The Legend of Zelda. After hacking and boomeranging my way through nine increasingly merciless levels (and admittedly using a walk-through to help me find some heart pieces and stuff) I stepped into that last room and lay the smackdown on Ganon, the Prince of Darkness himself. And you know what? He was surprisingly easy.
After he exploded, I made my way behind him to where the imprisoned Zelda stood. She proclaimed me the Hero of Hyrule and thanked me for all of the shit I had to go through to get this far. Then the credits rolled, and the game congratulated me on a job well done, ending with a reminder that I could now try the much more challenging "Second Quest". And that was it.
I sat perched on my couch, Wii controller in hand, my memories flooding back to that apartment in Rexdale where the much younger me had tried in vain to get this far. And it hit me like a ton of 8-bit bricks. Ganon, Zelda, Link, the Triforce, all of it...it opened my eyes to what was really going on with this whole "turning 25" business.
Like I said, my childhood was rough around the edges, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way. We've all had to sit through some pretty unpleasant times with nothing to comfort us but the hopes that they would soon be over and we could get back to the good stuff. We've faced a lot of challenges and had to make some pretty hard decisions, and for better or worse, they've all led us to where we are today. Whether you're 5 or 15 or 25 or 75, you are who you are because of what you've done to get here. And though things may seem hard or intimidating, they're really not all as bad as they appear. When Ganon started attacking me, I was startled by how quickly I was able to dispel him with a few hits of my sword. And before I knew it, he was dead at my feet. I was expecting some nigh-invincible demi-god of evil. Instead, I only had to deal with a big blue pig in a helmet who exploded after five hits.
And when Zelda thanked me for my courage and praised me for getting this far, she really wasn't kidding. In 25 years, I've accumulated a lot of experiences. Some good, some bad, some absolutely mind-blowingly fantastic. Each one of them has made me stronger and taken me one step closer to this point. If everyone would take the time to look back on things they've been through, they'd congratulate themselves, too. Finishing school. Getting married. Making friends. Keeping friends. Performing good deeds. Learning to drive. Learning to walk. Just like in the Nintendo game, these steps became increasingly more difficult as time wore on. But we never shut the game off and gave up. We kept on playing, discovering new things, forging new paths, and making wiser choices. So congratulations to all of you for making it this far. We've beaten Ganon, we've rescued Zelda, and (best of all) we have more to look forward to!
The game encouraged me to try the "Second Quest", which features a rearranged world map that's twice as hard as the first game. When I turned 25, I reached a point in my life where one chapter had definitely ended and a new one was about to start. Up until now, I'd just been focusing on how slow my progress seemed to be, and how intimidating the upcoming chapters looked from my perspective. But now that I've learned to look back on the accomplishments it took to get here, I can proudly and confidently flip the bird at the screen and tell Ganon to go fuck himself, because I know that if I could make it this far, you can be damn sure that I'll trudge my way through the Second Quest, too. And who knows? Maybe that will take me another 25 years, when I'm 50 and I'm huddled in front of the Wii 4000, ignoring the young man in the business suit who's desperately trying to explain to me how retirement savings plans are supposed to work. Or maybe I can use my newfound knowledge to beat the Second Quest in a matter of weeks. Either way, I'll be there with bells on.
To all those of you who've sat back and frowned at the prospect of aging, who've desperately sought after hair dye and botox and sports cars and trophy wives to latch onto that youth that you feel is slipping out of your grasp, relax and take it from me. That youth isn't going anywhere unless you want it to. You're just in the middle of the Second Quest, babe. And you're going to beat it...eventually. We all will. So bring it on.
Cue the Zelda theme.
In a nutshell, I think it's because (like everyone else) I was intimidated.
Anyone who's met me in person knows that I'm pretty much an overgrown kid with stubble. I never really had what you could call a "normal" childhood; it got pretty wacky at times, and certain situations pretty much forced me to grow up way earlier than any kid should be expected to. In light of that, I'm pretty sure I developed what them crazy shrinks like to call "Peter Pan Syndrome" or something; because I was forced through some heavy stuff and had to make some big adult decisions as a kid, I seem to be making up for it now by being more of a kid than ever. Try to talk to me about politics or taxes or insurance or pretty much anything that has to do with money, and you'll notice that my eyes will start to develop a fine glaze, my mouth will slowly droop open, and I'll just proceed to smile and nod until you change the subject to something my little brain can wrap itself around. I could have a two-hour conversation with you about dragons. I could talk for days about the finer points of why Count Dooku's lightsaber is curved. I could write a friggin book about the evolution of Batman from his inception to present...but try to explain to me how no-fault car insurance works, and before long I'll be begging you for a quick and painless death so that I won't have to hear any more.
Now, that sounds like kind of a bad thing, doesn't it? Common sense dictates that any responsible adult living in this madcap world should have some kind of idea of how taxes and insurance work. They should at least know a little bit about residual income or savings accounts or the detailed benefits of choosing one cell phone plan over another. Knowing about this, after all, is important. More important than Batman, at any rate. But I just can't. I physically CANNOT get my brain to understand these things. When I try, it hurts. You'd get the exact same response from me as you would if you tried to explain these things to a 3-year-old. Which, in short, would be, "Huh?!?"
I don't think this will ever change. As far as taxes and accounting are concerned, I'm pretty sure that I'm a lost cause. And you know what? I'm cool with that. Batman and dragons and lightsabers may be silly things that were made up by silly people, but you know what else is a silly thing made up by silly people? Taxes and insurance and cell phone plans. They're all just random bits of data. Nothing more than numbers. Kinda like age. Some people care about 'em, and some just don't give a damn.
Like I said earlier, the idea of "getting old" never really bothered me, because I always feel like a kid inside anyway. It wasn't until this year that it started to actually make me think. Two separate incidents, one at each of my jobs, gave me a bleak feeling inside. And for a while, I felt a little down in the dumps. Until a third incident occurred which completely turned me around.
Incident #1: I recently came into the position of a Starbucks barista, which means I make overly-complicated caffeinated drinks for bitchy, picky soccer moms who leave their sunglasses on indoors because...well, because they're bitchy, picky soccer moms. During one of my shifts, I was asked to walk around the store with a tray full of frappuccino samples to hand out to the crowd. When I approached a small family, the mother thanked me and took one of the samples. Her little boy tugged on her sleeve and said, "Mommy, can I have a sample, too?" To which his mother replied, "Well, sweetie, you'll have to ask the Starbucks man for one." At that moment, I froze dead in my tracks because I realized it was the first time ever that someone had referred to me as a "man" without adding the prefix "young" or the suffix "child". I was so stunned that I didn't even hear the kid when he asked me for a drink. I was sure that his mother must have been talking about somebody else; perhaps my manager was standing right behind me and he was the fabled "Starbucks Man" in question. But nope.
It hit me all of a sudden right then and there, in the middle of the store, as I stood holding that tray of delicious frozen mocha-coconut beverages amidst a crowd of increasingly confused onlookers. I realized that no matter how many Simpsons quotes I knew, no matter how many Star Wars action figures I owned or how far I could get in Super Mario Bros. without dying or what my favourite Pokemon was...I wasn't a little kid anymore. I wasn't a teenager, either. Hell, I don't even classify as a young adult! According to my age, I am, without question, an adult. A man. A grown-up. Remember when we used to say,"When I grow up, I want to..."? I've reached that point, the point where I'm supposed to stop dreaming and make that "..." a reality.
Incident #2: The day before my 25th birthday, I was called in to work a shift at the banquet hall (my other job). I was expecting another wedding, or a stag, or a baby shower, or an engagement party, or the usual fare. Instead, the party in question was something I'd never done before: a high school prom.
As I went about my business, serving pasta and veggies to a bunch of hyperactive 18-year-olds who were too focused on trying to get laid to touch any of their food, I felt as if the greater hands of fate had put me in this position before my 25th birthday so that I could face my own mortality in some weird way. Here were these upstart youngsters, graduating from high school, fresh and ready and eager to take on the big world that waited just beyond the horizon. Many of those kids will go on to college and university to become doctors or executives or chefs or hotel managers or teachers. And here I was, seven years their senior, with nothing to show for it but two minimum wage jobs, a stagnating acting career, and a few unpublished manuscripts that nobody's interested in reading because "ooohhh, they're too long". Needless to say, I was kinda bummed out.
And then, today, something glorious happened. Incident #3: I beat The Legend of Zelda.
Being one of the biggest and most epic games in the entire Nintendo library, very few people back in the day could boast that they'd successfully finished the game. It was one of the very first video games I ever remember getting my grubby little paws on. If I close my eyes, I can still see myself: I'm 3 years old, sitting on my little plush blue chair in the middle of the living room in the Rexdale-based apartment I used to call home. The coffee table was to my right, the ginormous tacky wall unit to my left. And in front of me, encased in a cocoon of wood grain, was the television set. I had a plastic NES controller in my hand, and a second after my mom pressed the POWER button on the console, that little red light blinked on, and the Zelda theme music began to whistle its way through the television speakers.
I spent hours upon hours hunkered down in that blue chair, trying in vain to get any farther than Level 4, but I just couldn't. Anyone who's played it can back me up here, too: The Legend of Zelda ain't no walk in the park. As a little kid, I could beat the likes of Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog easily. But Zelda? No such luck. The game defeated me. I loved it enough to keep trying, but could never get far.
Until today.
June 29th, 2012: I booted up my Nintendo Wii and selected the virtual console version of The Legend of Zelda. After hacking and boomeranging my way through nine increasingly merciless levels (and admittedly using a walk-through to help me find some heart pieces and stuff) I stepped into that last room and lay the smackdown on Ganon, the Prince of Darkness himself. And you know what? He was surprisingly easy.
After he exploded, I made my way behind him to where the imprisoned Zelda stood. She proclaimed me the Hero of Hyrule and thanked me for all of the shit I had to go through to get this far. Then the credits rolled, and the game congratulated me on a job well done, ending with a reminder that I could now try the much more challenging "Second Quest". And that was it.
I sat perched on my couch, Wii controller in hand, my memories flooding back to that apartment in Rexdale where the much younger me had tried in vain to get this far. And it hit me like a ton of 8-bit bricks. Ganon, Zelda, Link, the Triforce, all of it...it opened my eyes to what was really going on with this whole "turning 25" business.
Like I said, my childhood was rough around the edges, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way. We've all had to sit through some pretty unpleasant times with nothing to comfort us but the hopes that they would soon be over and we could get back to the good stuff. We've faced a lot of challenges and had to make some pretty hard decisions, and for better or worse, they've all led us to where we are today. Whether you're 5 or 15 or 25 or 75, you are who you are because of what you've done to get here. And though things may seem hard or intimidating, they're really not all as bad as they appear. When Ganon started attacking me, I was startled by how quickly I was able to dispel him with a few hits of my sword. And before I knew it, he was dead at my feet. I was expecting some nigh-invincible demi-god of evil. Instead, I only had to deal with a big blue pig in a helmet who exploded after five hits.
And when Zelda thanked me for my courage and praised me for getting this far, she really wasn't kidding. In 25 years, I've accumulated a lot of experiences. Some good, some bad, some absolutely mind-blowingly fantastic. Each one of them has made me stronger and taken me one step closer to this point. If everyone would take the time to look back on things they've been through, they'd congratulate themselves, too. Finishing school. Getting married. Making friends. Keeping friends. Performing good deeds. Learning to drive. Learning to walk. Just like in the Nintendo game, these steps became increasingly more difficult as time wore on. But we never shut the game off and gave up. We kept on playing, discovering new things, forging new paths, and making wiser choices. So congratulations to all of you for making it this far. We've beaten Ganon, we've rescued Zelda, and (best of all) we have more to look forward to!
The game encouraged me to try the "Second Quest", which features a rearranged world map that's twice as hard as the first game. When I turned 25, I reached a point in my life where one chapter had definitely ended and a new one was about to start. Up until now, I'd just been focusing on how slow my progress seemed to be, and how intimidating the upcoming chapters looked from my perspective. But now that I've learned to look back on the accomplishments it took to get here, I can proudly and confidently flip the bird at the screen and tell Ganon to go fuck himself, because I know that if I could make it this far, you can be damn sure that I'll trudge my way through the Second Quest, too. And who knows? Maybe that will take me another 25 years, when I'm 50 and I'm huddled in front of the Wii 4000, ignoring the young man in the business suit who's desperately trying to explain to me how retirement savings plans are supposed to work. Or maybe I can use my newfound knowledge to beat the Second Quest in a matter of weeks. Either way, I'll be there with bells on.
To all those of you who've sat back and frowned at the prospect of aging, who've desperately sought after hair dye and botox and sports cars and trophy wives to latch onto that youth that you feel is slipping out of your grasp, relax and take it from me. That youth isn't going anywhere unless you want it to. You're just in the middle of the Second Quest, babe. And you're going to beat it...eventually. We all will. So bring it on.
Cue the Zelda theme.
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Much E3 About Nothing
Well, E3 has come and gone, I've spent the past several days basking in its aftermath. For those who are a smidge out of the loop, E3 is the Electronic Entertainment Expo, in which a series of press conferences are held showcasing the coming attractions of the video game industry for the following nine or ten months. This year, a whole ginormous crop of new games got revealed, and it has this fanboy's panties in a twist with veritable excitement.
Although I risk making myself sound like EVERY other Joe out there with a keyboard and a ranting blog, I'd like to spend this week's entry geeking out about some of the titles that looked great (and some that looked not-so-great). I'll talk about how I feel about them, and what kind of impact their reveals left on me. But of course, this is The Question Mark, and I'm nothing if not a rebellious pioneer with a handsome, chiseled jaw and an available evening this coming Friday if any ladies out there are looking for a good time! So, instead of ranting and rambling on in a sea of typos and poor grammar (I'm looking at YOU, rest of the Internet), I'll talk about these upcoming games in iambic pentameter, the way Shakespeare intended.
NEW SUPER MARIO BROS. U
The sequel to the game on Wii we love,
Except on a whole new system this time.
The standard fare: get coins from blocks above.
It's all the same, but hey, is that a crime?!
LUIGI'S MANSION: DARK MOON
It sounds like a Transformers film, I know.
But this might end up being lots of fun!
I like Luigi more than Mario.
He's the George Harrison: "The Quiet One".
You're catching ghosts, that's all that I have seen.
Like Peter Venkman! Only, you know, green.
SOUTH PARK: THE STICK OF TRUTH
The South Park kids are in an RPG!
Will it be weird? You bet your ass it will.
We'll grind some levels with profanity!
Ten bucks says halfway through, Kenny gets killed.
PLAYSTATION ALL-STARS BATTLE ROYALE
The Sony answer to the Super Smash.
It's kind of shameless how close these two are.
Who'd want to play as Nathan Drake or Crash?
One of Sony's silliest moves by far.
But maybe it'll work? I hope it will.
So Sony geeks (all two of us out there)
can answer the question that's plagued us ill:
Who'd win? Kratos' scowl, or Nathan's hair?
PAPER MARIO: STICKER STAR
The first half of this title sounds A-plus!
A fourth Paper Mario? That sounds great!
But then the second half gets D-minus.
The sticker thing, I've gotta say, I hate.
But hey, let's not be rash, let's let it be!
Nintendo's pulled off wacky shit before!
Yarn seemed to work pretty well for Kirby.
If this is bad, at least the first three score.
STAR WARS 1313
Uncharted was an awesome game, no doubt.
Star Wars is taking pages from its book.
The veins of Nathan Drake all run throughout.
(At least that's how the too-short footage looked).
WATCH_DOGS
Ubisoft, you guys blew my mind away
When you showed footage from your new IP.
All of that sexiness was IN-gameplay!
Take all my money, please. And marry me.
ASSASSIN'S CREED III
Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!
Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!
Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! I really want to play!
Yes! Yes! Yes! Requiescat in Pace.
Exit, pursued by an Orc.
Although I risk making myself sound like EVERY other Joe out there with a keyboard and a ranting blog, I'd like to spend this week's entry geeking out about some of the titles that looked great (and some that looked not-so-great). I'll talk about how I feel about them, and what kind of impact their reveals left on me. But of course, this is The Question Mark, and I'm nothing if not a rebellious pioneer with a handsome, chiseled jaw and an available evening this coming Friday if any ladies out there are looking for a good time! So, instead of ranting and rambling on in a sea of typos and poor grammar (I'm looking at YOU, rest of the Internet), I'll talk about these upcoming games in iambic pentameter, the way Shakespeare intended.
NEW SUPER MARIO BROS. U
The sequel to the game on Wii we love,
Except on a whole new system this time.
The standard fare: get coins from blocks above.
It's all the same, but hey, is that a crime?!
LUIGI'S MANSION: DARK MOON
It sounds like a Transformers film, I know.
But this might end up being lots of fun!
I like Luigi more than Mario.
He's the George Harrison: "The Quiet One".
You're catching ghosts, that's all that I have seen.
Like Peter Venkman! Only, you know, green.
SOUTH PARK: THE STICK OF TRUTH
The South Park kids are in an RPG!
Will it be weird? You bet your ass it will.
We'll grind some levels with profanity!
Ten bucks says halfway through, Kenny gets killed.
PLAYSTATION ALL-STARS BATTLE ROYALE
The Sony answer to the Super Smash.
It's kind of shameless how close these two are.
Who'd want to play as Nathan Drake or Crash?
One of Sony's silliest moves by far.
But maybe it'll work? I hope it will.
So Sony geeks (all two of us out there)
can answer the question that's plagued us ill:
Who'd win? Kratos' scowl, or Nathan's hair?
PAPER MARIO: STICKER STAR
The first half of this title sounds A-plus!
A fourth Paper Mario? That sounds great!
But then the second half gets D-minus.
The sticker thing, I've gotta say, I hate.
But hey, let's not be rash, let's let it be!
Nintendo's pulled off wacky shit before!
Yarn seemed to work pretty well for Kirby.
If this is bad, at least the first three score.
STAR WARS 1313
Uncharted was an awesome game, no doubt.
Star Wars is taking pages from its book.
The veins of Nathan Drake all run throughout.
(At least that's how the too-short footage looked).
WATCH_DOGS
Ubisoft, you guys blew my mind away
When you showed footage from your new IP.
All of that sexiness was IN-gameplay!
Take all my money, please. And marry me.
ASSASSIN'S CREED III
Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!
Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!
Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! I really want to play!
Yes! Yes! Yes! Requiescat in Pace.
Exit, pursued by an Orc.
Monday, May 28, 2012
BLANK-pocalypse
If you've been keeping up with the news lately, you've probably heard the horrific (if not a tad hilarious!) story about the zombie attack that took place in Miami, Florida.
Okay, so maybe it wasn't technically a zombie attack. But the transition between this paragraph and the one previous must have been pretty damn suspenseful, am I right? I mean, hearing that something akin to an actual, factual zombie outbreak might have happened in the real world...it's nuts! Zombies are such an enduring part of popular fiction -much like dragons or leprechauns or Eskimos -that the thought of one actually existing in real life is so surreal it can be downright scary. What actually happened in Miami is as follows: a crazed man (quite probably under the influence of lycergic acid diethlamide, only even more potent) ran naked out onto the street and attacked a homeless person who was just minding his own business. But the naked man didn't attack him using a knife or a pistol or even a length of rubber hose. No, sir, this particular naked individual tackled the homeless man to the ground and proceeded to -and I shit you not here, folks -devour the victim's nose and eyeballs.
Seriously. I wish I was making this up. I'm not.
Sounds just like something George Romero would conjure up, doesn't it? And that gives me the perfect opportunity to spend this week's article touching upon something that's bothered me for a while, and that's the whole fascination with zombie apocalypses in general. Namely, I don't like 'em.
For one thing, they're always grossly misrepresented. Maybe they're just hard up for new employees over at ZombieCorp. or something, but from where I stand it seems that anything and everything can qualify as a 'zombie' these days. Infected lunatic? He's a zombie. Drugged-out porn star with a taste for blood? She's a zombie. A Nazi who injects an experimental growth enhancement serum into his eyeballs, only to have it backfire, melting his skin and turning him into a shambling mess of liquefied sinew and foul-smelling bodily fluids? Ohhh, you'd better believe he's a zombie! Personally, I'm one of those sticklers who believes that a true, definitive zombie is just the corpse of a deceased human being that is granted mobility through the use of black magic, witchcraft, or (primarily) voodoo. None of this "infected with a disease" bullshit. It doesn't matter how many brains he tries to chomp on, kids, a man infected with a maddening disease is not a zombie. He's just a sick, sick man. Therefore, if you want to see what a "true zombie" should look like, horror movies won't help you there. The best place to look would probably be Weekend at Bernie's II.
For a second thing, the idea of a zombie apocalypse has kind of run out of appeal at this point. I mean, it might be entertaining to see a man in a cowboy hat slice a zombie in half with a chainsaw or something to that extent, but how long can we stand to see that kind of thing? Zombie apocalypses are like the plain potato chips of apocalypses, in that we should stop settling for plain and try a goddamn FLAVOUR for once. At this point, every time I turn on the TV and see zombies ravaging a countryside, their undead limbs flailing and covered in buckets of corn syrup-based fake blood, I just can't help but roll my eyes and think, "Okay. We get it. Zombie apocalypses would be bad. Can we please just move on now?"
There are so many different kinds of apocalypses we could be experimenting with, and they could prove to be loads more entertaining than yet another movie where Ving Rhames gets trapped inside yet another enclosed building with yet another assortment of makeshift weapons at his convenient disposal. To prove how well these different flavours could work, here's a special treat: 5 all-NEW apocalypses, each one sexier and scarier than the last. So writers, the next time you start up a screenplay and think about adding zombies to the mix, do yourselves a favor and say "Fuck it", and go with one of these instead.
You can thank me later. With royalty cheques.
CAT APOCALYPSE: Cats may be soft and cuddly, but they're assholes. It's just a proven fact. They act nice because we feed them and we clean their shit, but if they had the opportunity, cats would kill us and everyone we love just to prove that they're superior. So imagine if every cat on the planet suddenly woke up one morning with a heightened sense of intelligence, not unlike Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Only these cats don't wait to be mistreated before starting to rebel: it's pretty much instantaneous. They're picking up butcher knives in their little paws and stabbing Grandma and Grandpa through the forehead without a second thought. And when precocious little 4-year-old Timmy tries to pick up his tabby, his tabby responds by clawing out precocious little 4-year-old Timmy's eyes. Scary? Definitely. Plausible? Yeah, I could see it happening. Plus, their fur would get everywhere.
GHOST APOCALYPSE: You know those scary movies where a family movies into a haunted house and their lives are turned upside down by the terrifying poltergeist who dwells within the house's walls? The family can't get a decent night's sleep, the children are traumatized with fear, the parents go crazy trying to resolve the situation, one or two members of the clergy get involved and only end up regretting it later...it's mass hysteria. Now, instead of concentrating that hysteria within one home, imagine that happening in every home. In every city. In every country on the planet. Boom. Apocalypse. I mean, look at all the shit that happened to that couple in Paranormal Activity; and that was just ONE ghost! Everyone who actually could fall asleep would have nightmares for the rest of their lives. Terrifying? You bet your ass. To paraphrase Cal Evans from Undergrads, "Ghosts are scary, guy."
INSECT APOCALYPSE: Aside from those really weird scientists that people generally don't enjoy talking to, nobody likes bugs. Bugs suck. They're ugly, they're unpleasant, they make our skin crawl, and some of them can bite and/or sting us, causing pain and -in some extreme cases -even death. Worst of all, they're everywhere. Literally everywhere. Jungles, forests, deserts, cities, countrysides. Beneath the floorboards. In your bed. Under your kitchen sink. Crawling across your arm right now. The world has pretty much been going through an insect apocalypse since the end of the last ice age. But the one saving grace? They're small. Miniscule, even. So we begrudgingly put up with them, comfortable in the knowledge that we could easily reach out and snuff out a bug's life with a simple flick of our mighty mammal wrists. But what if, suddenly, they weren't so small anymore? Imagine a wasp the size of a transport truck. Imagine a scorpion as big as the Empire State Building. Haven't you ever seen a fantasy that had giant tarantulas in it? Giant tarantulas are scary as hell! Normal tarantulas are scary as hell!! This is the stuff of nightmares, people! If an insect apocalypse comes, I'd be one of the first ones to put a shotgun in my mouth and end the pain before it can begin.
SUPERMODEL APOCALYPSE: Stop rolling your eyes. This can work. Imagine if a beautiful supermodel suddenly gained the supernatural ability to turn any woman she touched into an equally beautiful supermodel. And all those women, in turn, would be granted the same ability. Kind of like zombies creating more zombies, only this involves more miniskirts and much nicer hair. Imagine half of the women on the planet become "infected" with the supermodel virus, while the other half remains normal (so far). Now imagine you are one of those normal women. Every day, you live in constant fear that your husband is going to leave you to run off with one of those skanky supermodel bee-otches that are slowly dominating the planet. The normal women would go crazy with paranoia. Some of the less stable ones might murder their husbands out of sheer suspicion alone. And think of the impact this could have on society as a whole! If everyone is "beautiful", will it be necessary for the concept of "beautiful" to change? How will we cope in a world where all women are of equal visual appeal, and all men are suddenly beneath them? I know I'd be on the edge of my seat for this one.
ACTUAL APOCALYPSE: You know, the one from the Bible? With the demons and the angels and the fiery swords and whatnot? Why the fuck isn't that a movie yet? That sounds awesome!
Okay, so maybe it wasn't technically a zombie attack. But the transition between this paragraph and the one previous must have been pretty damn suspenseful, am I right? I mean, hearing that something akin to an actual, factual zombie outbreak might have happened in the real world...it's nuts! Zombies are such an enduring part of popular fiction -much like dragons or leprechauns or Eskimos -that the thought of one actually existing in real life is so surreal it can be downright scary. What actually happened in Miami is as follows: a crazed man (quite probably under the influence of lycergic acid diethlamide, only even more potent) ran naked out onto the street and attacked a homeless person who was just minding his own business. But the naked man didn't attack him using a knife or a pistol or even a length of rubber hose. No, sir, this particular naked individual tackled the homeless man to the ground and proceeded to -and I shit you not here, folks -devour the victim's nose and eyeballs.
Seriously. I wish I was making this up. I'm not.
Sounds just like something George Romero would conjure up, doesn't it? And that gives me the perfect opportunity to spend this week's article touching upon something that's bothered me for a while, and that's the whole fascination with zombie apocalypses in general. Namely, I don't like 'em.
For one thing, they're always grossly misrepresented. Maybe they're just hard up for new employees over at ZombieCorp. or something, but from where I stand it seems that anything and everything can qualify as a 'zombie' these days. Infected lunatic? He's a zombie. Drugged-out porn star with a taste for blood? She's a zombie. A Nazi who injects an experimental growth enhancement serum into his eyeballs, only to have it backfire, melting his skin and turning him into a shambling mess of liquefied sinew and foul-smelling bodily fluids? Ohhh, you'd better believe he's a zombie! Personally, I'm one of those sticklers who believes that a true, definitive zombie is just the corpse of a deceased human being that is granted mobility through the use of black magic, witchcraft, or (primarily) voodoo. None of this "infected with a disease" bullshit. It doesn't matter how many brains he tries to chomp on, kids, a man infected with a maddening disease is not a zombie. He's just a sick, sick man. Therefore, if you want to see what a "true zombie" should look like, horror movies won't help you there. The best place to look would probably be Weekend at Bernie's II.
For a second thing, the idea of a zombie apocalypse has kind of run out of appeal at this point. I mean, it might be entertaining to see a man in a cowboy hat slice a zombie in half with a chainsaw or something to that extent, but how long can we stand to see that kind of thing? Zombie apocalypses are like the plain potato chips of apocalypses, in that we should stop settling for plain and try a goddamn FLAVOUR for once. At this point, every time I turn on the TV and see zombies ravaging a countryside, their undead limbs flailing and covered in buckets of corn syrup-based fake blood, I just can't help but roll my eyes and think, "Okay. We get it. Zombie apocalypses would be bad. Can we please just move on now?"
There are so many different kinds of apocalypses we could be experimenting with, and they could prove to be loads more entertaining than yet another movie where Ving Rhames gets trapped inside yet another enclosed building with yet another assortment of makeshift weapons at his convenient disposal. To prove how well these different flavours could work, here's a special treat: 5 all-NEW apocalypses, each one sexier and scarier than the last. So writers, the next time you start up a screenplay and think about adding zombies to the mix, do yourselves a favor and say "Fuck it", and go with one of these instead.
You can thank me later. With royalty cheques.
CAT APOCALYPSE: Cats may be soft and cuddly, but they're assholes. It's just a proven fact. They act nice because we feed them and we clean their shit, but if they had the opportunity, cats would kill us and everyone we love just to prove that they're superior. So imagine if every cat on the planet suddenly woke up one morning with a heightened sense of intelligence, not unlike Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Only these cats don't wait to be mistreated before starting to rebel: it's pretty much instantaneous. They're picking up butcher knives in their little paws and stabbing Grandma and Grandpa through the forehead without a second thought. And when precocious little 4-year-old Timmy tries to pick up his tabby, his tabby responds by clawing out precocious little 4-year-old Timmy's eyes. Scary? Definitely. Plausible? Yeah, I could see it happening. Plus, their fur would get everywhere.
GHOST APOCALYPSE: You know those scary movies where a family movies into a haunted house and their lives are turned upside down by the terrifying poltergeist who dwells within the house's walls? The family can't get a decent night's sleep, the children are traumatized with fear, the parents go crazy trying to resolve the situation, one or two members of the clergy get involved and only end up regretting it later...it's mass hysteria. Now, instead of concentrating that hysteria within one home, imagine that happening in every home. In every city. In every country on the planet. Boom. Apocalypse. I mean, look at all the shit that happened to that couple in Paranormal Activity; and that was just ONE ghost! Everyone who actually could fall asleep would have nightmares for the rest of their lives. Terrifying? You bet your ass. To paraphrase Cal Evans from Undergrads, "Ghosts are scary, guy."
INSECT APOCALYPSE: Aside from those really weird scientists that people generally don't enjoy talking to, nobody likes bugs. Bugs suck. They're ugly, they're unpleasant, they make our skin crawl, and some of them can bite and/or sting us, causing pain and -in some extreme cases -even death. Worst of all, they're everywhere. Literally everywhere. Jungles, forests, deserts, cities, countrysides. Beneath the floorboards. In your bed. Under your kitchen sink. Crawling across your arm right now. The world has pretty much been going through an insect apocalypse since the end of the last ice age. But the one saving grace? They're small. Miniscule, even. So we begrudgingly put up with them, comfortable in the knowledge that we could easily reach out and snuff out a bug's life with a simple flick of our mighty mammal wrists. But what if, suddenly, they weren't so small anymore? Imagine a wasp the size of a transport truck. Imagine a scorpion as big as the Empire State Building. Haven't you ever seen a fantasy that had giant tarantulas in it? Giant tarantulas are scary as hell! Normal tarantulas are scary as hell!! This is the stuff of nightmares, people! If an insect apocalypse comes, I'd be one of the first ones to put a shotgun in my mouth and end the pain before it can begin.
SUPERMODEL APOCALYPSE: Stop rolling your eyes. This can work. Imagine if a beautiful supermodel suddenly gained the supernatural ability to turn any woman she touched into an equally beautiful supermodel. And all those women, in turn, would be granted the same ability. Kind of like zombies creating more zombies, only this involves more miniskirts and much nicer hair. Imagine half of the women on the planet become "infected" with the supermodel virus, while the other half remains normal (so far). Now imagine you are one of those normal women. Every day, you live in constant fear that your husband is going to leave you to run off with one of those skanky supermodel bee-otches that are slowly dominating the planet. The normal women would go crazy with paranoia. Some of the less stable ones might murder their husbands out of sheer suspicion alone. And think of the impact this could have on society as a whole! If everyone is "beautiful", will it be necessary for the concept of "beautiful" to change? How will we cope in a world where all women are of equal visual appeal, and all men are suddenly beneath them? I know I'd be on the edge of my seat for this one.
ACTUAL APOCALYPSE: You know, the one from the Bible? With the demons and the angels and the fiery swords and whatnot? Why the fuck isn't that a movie yet? That sounds awesome!
Monday, May 21, 2012
Six Seasons and a Movie
Popular culture is a bit like God: it's hard to define, a lot of people worship it blindly, and it often works in mysterious ways.
The best way I can think of to visually describe what pop culture (or, to use a more complex and hilariously foreign-sounding term, the "zeitgeist") might look like...picture a very, very long road running straight through a barren desert. As you drive down this road in a vehicle of your choosing (for the sake of argument, let's go with a 2004 Prius), you can see man-made structures erected on either side of the road. Lots of them. Some of them are run-down grey piles of rubble,dilapidated, forgotten, abandoned, and unloved; while others are towering fortresses with majestic towers and stained-glass windows tinted with blazing colour that provides a literal orgasmic delight to your eyeballs as you drive idly past, pressing your nose up against the window of your Prius.
These houses are the framework of pop culture itself, the literal backbone: namely, the ideas and creations set loose upon the world for audience consumption. Be they works of literature, television, cinema, comic books, websites, video game, sports, or any other media, they are represented on this dusty road by one of those man-made structures. The 1958 movie The Blob has its own structure. Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol has a structure. The Muppets Christmas Carol has a structure right next to it, just a few structures down from the L.A. Lakers structure. Everything is represented. But the thing is, every one of them starts off looking exactly the same: a plain, unadorned grey box, virtually empty and waiting to be expanded upon. Creators can only make something exist. It takes fans and -most importantly -love to make something ALIVE.
That grey box representing the L.A. Lakers didn't stay small and grey for long, because the Lakers have a plethora of fans supporting them through every game of the season. Through the good games, and through the bad, those fans continued to paint their faces purple and gold, slap on their Number 32 jerseys, and fill in the seats at the Staples Center. And that's exactly the kind of unconditional love that has allowed the grey box representing the Lakers to flourish into a towering castle of purple parapets, with golden banners fluttering in the breeze and a varnished hardwood drawbridge. It's a far cry from the structure next door, which represents a by-the-numbers, cops-&-robbers movie that only a handful of people have seen and already forgotten about, which lies in shambles of broken plaster and shattered windows.
The point I'm dragging towards at a snail's pace here is that of the half-hour TV comedy, Community, the third season of which reached its climactic end this past Thursday on NBC. To submit my application to be nominated for Biggest Understatement of the Century Award, this has been a tumultuous year for the show. Cast & crew disagreements almost came to blows, the network dropped it from syndication in favor of programs with less than a fraction of Community's talent or cleverness, and the dreaded monster called Cancellation seemed to be looming around every turn, hiding in dark crevasses and waiting to sink its teeth into another juicy morsel. The people responsible for making Community happen (i.e., the cast & crew) kept right on making the same great stuff they'd always been making. But that's not what kept the show from floundering. The life raft was tossed not by NBC, or by showrunner/creator Dan Harmon...it was tossed by us. The fans who love it so much that we'd rather jump in after it than watch it sink.
As soon as the show's mid-season hiatus was announced, there was an outcry akin to the swarm of villagers grabbing their pitchforks and storming the gates of Dr. Frankenstein's castle. Petitions were written and signed with enough speed to make Sonic the Hedgehog blush. Threats were made to the network responsible. Less psychotic fans held vigils outside of the NBC offices, chanting memorable songs and quotes from Community episodes. The Twitter hashtag #SixSeasonsAndAMovie became the single-highest trending topic for months, becoming so popular that it's now pretty much considered to be the unofficial slogan of the show itself. These outcries continued until the show finally came back on the air to seas of thunderous applause. And now, not only did the show complete its third season with a trio of spectacular back-to-back episodes, but it's been renewed for a fourth season next fall.
If you're thinking right now that these people are getting a little too worked up about some TV show, you're missing the point. NBC wanted to pull the show because of poor ratings. Ratings = money, which is the sole language spoken by most people in this industry. Community was saved not by money, but by love. If those fans didn't love the show as much as they did, there'd have been no petitions, no vigils, no hashtags, no YouTube videos, no death threats. The structure on the side of that desert road representing Community was in danger of being smashed through with a wrecking ball. But an army of stalwart supporters linked arms and stood in the way, shielding the structure from harm and fortifying its defenses until it became an almost-untouchable palace of solid gold rainbows complete with a working Dreamatorium and E Pluribus Anus flags aplenty.
That's just the kind of show Community is. It seemed destined to be a classic before the second episode even aired. It's that special kind of show where literally 100% of it is fan service, no matter what you happen to be a fan of. It brings back staples of TV that we didn't even realize we've missed until we saw them again. Everything from inside jokes to wacky character costumes to catch phrases to end-credits scenes. Every episode of Community is a grab bag of unpredictability: you never know which of your fanboy stimuli are going be tickled next. To me (and, I'm sure, to those legions of fans who hashtagged and petitioned their way through those long,dark hiatus months), the show that started off as a loving tribute to The Breakfast Club has become a quotable, genre-defying juggernaut that someone may very well create a loving tribute to thirty years from now. In the same way that Star Wars or LOST or Harry Potter touched so many hearts and minds that they became institutions unto themselves, so too has Community reached heights that other media can only dream of. In my eyes, Ben Chang is just as iconic a villain as Darth Vader or Hannibal Lechter; Abed Nadir is just as classic a hero as Frodo Baggins or Hercules. Those are the kinds of lasting impressions that Community has left us. And it's only three seasons in.
Even though the hiatus is over and NBC has conceded to fan demands, the dreaded monster Cancellation still hasn't left our peripheral vision. The next season is going to be a shortened, 13-episode run, and there's still the lingering dread that the monster might strike at any time and snuff out the show's life for good. At this point, though, if that were to happen...I don't think it would be as bad as it sounds. Like Firefly or Arrested Development before it, Community seems destined to live on no matter what the network execs decide to do with it. It has transcended the boundaries that ground normal, humdrum shows and escaped into the world. It's touched so many people that it literally has created itself: a COMMUNITY. And no amount of cancellation could ever, ever take that away. The structure that represents Community can no longer be demolished, even if we can't add any more rooms or towers to its already imposing facade. In a perfect world, we may get our six seasons and a movie. But even in the darkest possible timeline, where the fourth season ends the show prematurely and we never see any further adventures of Jeff, Britta, Abed, Troy, Pierce, Shirley, and Annie again...we still come out on top. Because the show was that good. It'll have died honorably on the battlefield, staring its executor in the eye and daring it to pull the trigger.
Pop Pop.
The best way I can think of to visually describe what pop culture (or, to use a more complex and hilariously foreign-sounding term, the "zeitgeist") might look like...picture a very, very long road running straight through a barren desert. As you drive down this road in a vehicle of your choosing (for the sake of argument, let's go with a 2004 Prius), you can see man-made structures erected on either side of the road. Lots of them. Some of them are run-down grey piles of rubble,dilapidated, forgotten, abandoned, and unloved; while others are towering fortresses with majestic towers and stained-glass windows tinted with blazing colour that provides a literal orgasmic delight to your eyeballs as you drive idly past, pressing your nose up against the window of your Prius.
These houses are the framework of pop culture itself, the literal backbone: namely, the ideas and creations set loose upon the world for audience consumption. Be they works of literature, television, cinema, comic books, websites, video game, sports, or any other media, they are represented on this dusty road by one of those man-made structures. The 1958 movie The Blob has its own structure. Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol has a structure. The Muppets Christmas Carol has a structure right next to it, just a few structures down from the L.A. Lakers structure. Everything is represented. But the thing is, every one of them starts off looking exactly the same: a plain, unadorned grey box, virtually empty and waiting to be expanded upon. Creators can only make something exist. It takes fans and -most importantly -love to make something ALIVE.
That grey box representing the L.A. Lakers didn't stay small and grey for long, because the Lakers have a plethora of fans supporting them through every game of the season. Through the good games, and through the bad, those fans continued to paint their faces purple and gold, slap on their Number 32 jerseys, and fill in the seats at the Staples Center. And that's exactly the kind of unconditional love that has allowed the grey box representing the Lakers to flourish into a towering castle of purple parapets, with golden banners fluttering in the breeze and a varnished hardwood drawbridge. It's a far cry from the structure next door, which represents a by-the-numbers, cops-&-robbers movie that only a handful of people have seen and already forgotten about, which lies in shambles of broken plaster and shattered windows.
The point I'm dragging towards at a snail's pace here is that of the half-hour TV comedy, Community, the third season of which reached its climactic end this past Thursday on NBC. To submit my application to be nominated for Biggest Understatement of the Century Award, this has been a tumultuous year for the show. Cast & crew disagreements almost came to blows, the network dropped it from syndication in favor of programs with less than a fraction of Community's talent or cleverness, and the dreaded monster called Cancellation seemed to be looming around every turn, hiding in dark crevasses and waiting to sink its teeth into another juicy morsel. The people responsible for making Community happen (i.e., the cast & crew) kept right on making the same great stuff they'd always been making. But that's not what kept the show from floundering. The life raft was tossed not by NBC, or by showrunner/creator Dan Harmon...it was tossed by us. The fans who love it so much that we'd rather jump in after it than watch it sink.
As soon as the show's mid-season hiatus was announced, there was an outcry akin to the swarm of villagers grabbing their pitchforks and storming the gates of Dr. Frankenstein's castle. Petitions were written and signed with enough speed to make Sonic the Hedgehog blush. Threats were made to the network responsible. Less psychotic fans held vigils outside of the NBC offices, chanting memorable songs and quotes from Community episodes. The Twitter hashtag #SixSeasonsAndAMovie became the single-highest trending topic for months, becoming so popular that it's now pretty much considered to be the unofficial slogan of the show itself. These outcries continued until the show finally came back on the air to seas of thunderous applause. And now, not only did the show complete its third season with a trio of spectacular back-to-back episodes, but it's been renewed for a fourth season next fall.
If you're thinking right now that these people are getting a little too worked up about some TV show, you're missing the point. NBC wanted to pull the show because of poor ratings. Ratings = money, which is the sole language spoken by most people in this industry. Community was saved not by money, but by love. If those fans didn't love the show as much as they did, there'd have been no petitions, no vigils, no hashtags, no YouTube videos, no death threats. The structure on the side of that desert road representing Community was in danger of being smashed through with a wrecking ball. But an army of stalwart supporters linked arms and stood in the way, shielding the structure from harm and fortifying its defenses until it became an almost-untouchable palace of solid gold rainbows complete with a working Dreamatorium and E Pluribus Anus flags aplenty.
That's just the kind of show Community is. It seemed destined to be a classic before the second episode even aired. It's that special kind of show where literally 100% of it is fan service, no matter what you happen to be a fan of. It brings back staples of TV that we didn't even realize we've missed until we saw them again. Everything from inside jokes to wacky character costumes to catch phrases to end-credits scenes. Every episode of Community is a grab bag of unpredictability: you never know which of your fanboy stimuli are going be tickled next. To me (and, I'm sure, to those legions of fans who hashtagged and petitioned their way through those long,dark hiatus months), the show that started off as a loving tribute to The Breakfast Club has become a quotable, genre-defying juggernaut that someone may very well create a loving tribute to thirty years from now. In the same way that Star Wars or LOST or Harry Potter touched so many hearts and minds that they became institutions unto themselves, so too has Community reached heights that other media can only dream of. In my eyes, Ben Chang is just as iconic a villain as Darth Vader or Hannibal Lechter; Abed Nadir is just as classic a hero as Frodo Baggins or Hercules. Those are the kinds of lasting impressions that Community has left us. And it's only three seasons in.
Even though the hiatus is over and NBC has conceded to fan demands, the dreaded monster Cancellation still hasn't left our peripheral vision. The next season is going to be a shortened, 13-episode run, and there's still the lingering dread that the monster might strike at any time and snuff out the show's life for good. At this point, though, if that were to happen...I don't think it would be as bad as it sounds. Like Firefly or Arrested Development before it, Community seems destined to live on no matter what the network execs decide to do with it. It has transcended the boundaries that ground normal, humdrum shows and escaped into the world. It's touched so many people that it literally has created itself: a COMMUNITY. And no amount of cancellation could ever, ever take that away. The structure that represents Community can no longer be demolished, even if we can't add any more rooms or towers to its already imposing facade. In a perfect world, we may get our six seasons and a movie. But even in the darkest possible timeline, where the fourth season ends the show prematurely and we never see any further adventures of Jeff, Britta, Abed, Troy, Pierce, Shirley, and Annie again...we still come out on top. Because the show was that good. It'll have died honorably on the battlefield, staring its executor in the eye and daring it to pull the trigger.
Pop Pop.
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Justice For All
So, last week I asked you all to indulge my geekosity (which, if it isn't a word already, will become one as of now) and let me ruminate about what's on the minds of everyone who was blown away by The Avengers: that is to say, "Long-term, inter-movie, fan-service crossover events are not only possible, but they can be done EXTREMELY WELL on the FIRST TRY and they can make oodles upon oodles of MONEY! Hooray!" With that in mind, my fellow citizens of the People's Republic of Nerd, can the same thing be done...with DC Comics?! (Cue dramatic music. Actually, screw the cue, here's a link to some dramatic music).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g9WjcGdxuM
The answer (or, I should say, my answer) to that question is a resounding "maybe". It would be a hell of a lot easier, that's for damn sure, considering EVERYTHING under the DC sun is owned by the good people at Warner Bros. Entertainment. So right off the bat, we'd have no problems with licensing/rights agreements or any of that bullshit. But can the almighty WB really get their act together and give us an epic Justice League crossover to rival the awesomeness that was Joss Whedon's The Avengers? Let's hypothesize! Which is a scientific way of saying, "I 'unno."
First things first: for those not "in the know" on comic book superhero jargon and whatnot, here's a crash course. DC and Marvel are the two major competing comic book publishers. There have been others, but Marvel and DC have been the Top 2 since comics started existing. As it was in the beginning, is now, and forever shall be. Amen. Marvel is the company who owns the characters you see in The Avengers (i.e. Iron Man, Captain America, The Hulk, Thor, etc.), as well as others like the X-Men and Spider-Man. DC, on the other hand, are the minds behind characters like Batman & Robin, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, and Superman. And the DC Universe has its own dream team of superheroes banding together to fight great evil, only they don't call themselves the Avengers. That would be copyright infringement, kids! Instead, they opt to go by the title of the Justice League of America.
The Justice League's revolving door policy has resulted in a roster of heroes that has gone through more men in tights than a slutty ballerina hanging around backstage to keep the male chorus occupied during scenes when they're not needed. But the mainstays of the Justice League usually tend to be the same 7 heroes: namely, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, and Martian Manhunter.
That's 7 heroes, 7 big stories, 7 movies to make to lead up to one ginormous big-screen Justice League extravaganza. And I think, with the proper nudging and motivation of certain parties, it can be done, and done well! Here's my take on it:
First off, we've already got Batman and Superman covered, so that's two down right there. I know Chris Nolan said he never wants to make another Batman film, and ditto Christian Bale. But you know what? Fuck them! We don't need them to have a good time! (Actually, I'm sorry for cursing at you, Mr. Bale. PLEASE don't yell at me!!!) Let's assume we've got Bale as Batman and the upcoming Henry Cavill reprising his role as Superman. And if Christian Bale absolutely, positively refuses to return, then we'll replace him with Jim Caviezel and make Bruce Wayne an older guy. Seriously, if you're not already watching Caviezel on Person of Interest, start watching! That show is literally Batman without costumes.
Alright. Let's try something a little more difficult: Green Lantern. We got that *snicker* "movie" last June starring Ryan Reynolds, which had great special effects and a pretty good cast, but...yeah. that's about all it had going for it. So let's delete that from our memory and start fresh. Break out a whole new Green Lantern film series, a big, epic, sprawling one, I'm talking 5 or 6 movies here. Remember, this is a sci-fi alien smorgasbord we're talking about here, there's PLENTY of room for 5 or 6 movies worth of stories to tell. Besides, there are actually four major Green Lantern characters: Hal Jordan (who we say Reynolds play), John Stewart, Guy Gardner, and Kyle Rayner. There you go, you have at least a trilogy's worth of stuff right there. Recast Hal Jordan: Nathan Fillion (of Castle fame to you non-geeks out there, of God fame to everyone else) can play him with his eyes closed. Or if you wanna go the John Stewart route and have him be African-American, no problemo. Leonard Roberts from Heroes could pull that off without a hitch, and either one of them would fit in just fine in the Justice League.
Still too easy, you say? How about Aquaman? He's like a joke; if it weren't for Entourage, there'd probably be a whole slew of folks who don't even know that Aquaman exists. But he's a pretty hefty character, being the freaking King of Atlantis and all! Let's go with the older, grizzled version of Aquaman, the one with the beard and the Captain Hook hand. I know he's overused at this point, but I think Mr. Jolie himself, Brad Pitt, might be able to get Aquaman right, as long as they focus less on his "hunk factor" and more on his 'I'm an older guy with a big burden on my shoulders factor". One of Aquaman's biggest character traits that separates him from the rest is that he's a father. And if anybody knows about taking care of kids, it'd be the man who adopts foreign children like he's ordering take-out. Throw in Jamie Foxx as his archenemy Black Manta and you're good to go.
Martian Manhunter? Piece of cake. His story would make a great movie. He's essentially a Martian who gets teleported to Earth by a mad scientist. The scientist then dies before he has a chance to finish his experiments, and Manhunter escapes the lab. He's unable to return home, so he roams the Earth, assumes a human identity, and tries to fit in to avoid being experimented on whilst continuously searching for a means of getting back to Mars. Giancarlo Esposito (who plays Gustavo on Breaking Bad and the Magic Mirror on Once Upon A Time) certainly has a way of making humans seem inhuman, and vice versa. I think he could pull off the Manhunter very nicely. Boom. Done.
The Flash. He's trickier, yes, but not impossible. First of all, let's avoid the obvious dumb Hollywood route and NOT cast Ryan Reynolds again, for the fourteenth time, in a superhero picture. Flash is a redheaded fellow with a smart-ass attitude, so I'd like to see him played by Zack Ward. If you're a fan of A Christmas Story, you'll remember l'il Zack as the bully, Scut Farkas. I'm not too familiar with the Flash storylines, but considering there's been about 50 bjillion people to step into the red-and-yellow Flash spandex at one point or another, I'm sure there's gotta be some script fuel in there somewhere. I think his archenemy is a chubby guy with a snow theme named Captain Cold, so let's toss Phillip Seymour Hoffman into an oversized blue parka and Bob's your uncle.
That leaves Wonder Woman. Now she is tricky. Much like Thor of Marvel Comics fame, WW stands apart from the rest in that she's literally descended from Greek gods and has the strength of the Amazonians, or something like that. To the extent of my knowledge, she & a bunch of powerful women got exiled to an island by Hercules (who, it turns out, is kind of a douchebag), and Wonder Woman became a leader on that island, until a World War II pilot crashed down there and she became sucked into the world of normal mortals. I guess this could still work. Substitute World War II for...whatever we call the war that's happening right now, with the terror and whatnot. As for who could play her...we've all heard so many theories, and many of them could work, too. Again, like Aquaman, Wonder Woman should be attractive, but not in an unrealistic and distracting way *coughMichaelBaycough*. She's a ruler who's had to make a lot of tough decisions, and she carries quite the burden on those supple shoulders of hers: that burden should never be overshadowed by her looks. Anyone from Cobie Smulders to Natalie Portman to Elizabeth Hurley have been rumored for the role. Personally, I think Mila Kunis might work. Then stick Rhona Mitra in there as the Cheetah (her primary antagonist), and that's all you need. Wonder Woman herself already contains so many powerful themes to support a script and its sequel, that there's not much room for error as far as story is concerned.
And there you have it. Put together these last five movies, let them marinate for a year or so, then shake well and serve up an ice cold pitcher of Justice. It can be done, Warner Bros. You have the technology. You have the money. You have the rights. Go for it. But (and I leave you with this as my final thought, friends) just because someone can do something, doesn't mean they should. Warner Brothers shouldn't do a damn thing unless they're setting out to make a quality movie series with fun, engaging characters & plotlines. If they're gonna crank out 5 pieces of shit and one huge diarrhea crossover just so they can stand neck-and-neck with Marvel and chuckle, "Me too! Hyuck! Hyuck!", then they'll get a serious wake-up call once all the bad reviews come rolling in. Quality comes first, always.
Also, Warner Brothers, call me. I will totally write those six Green Lantern movies for FREE.
I'm not joking.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g9WjcGdxuM
The answer (or, I should say, my answer) to that question is a resounding "maybe". It would be a hell of a lot easier, that's for damn sure, considering EVERYTHING under the DC sun is owned by the good people at Warner Bros. Entertainment. So right off the bat, we'd have no problems with licensing/rights agreements or any of that bullshit. But can the almighty WB really get their act together and give us an epic Justice League crossover to rival the awesomeness that was Joss Whedon's The Avengers? Let's hypothesize! Which is a scientific way of saying, "I 'unno."
First things first: for those not "in the know" on comic book superhero jargon and whatnot, here's a crash course. DC and Marvel are the two major competing comic book publishers. There have been others, but Marvel and DC have been the Top 2 since comics started existing. As it was in the beginning, is now, and forever shall be. Amen. Marvel is the company who owns the characters you see in The Avengers (i.e. Iron Man, Captain America, The Hulk, Thor, etc.), as well as others like the X-Men and Spider-Man. DC, on the other hand, are the minds behind characters like Batman & Robin, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, and Superman. And the DC Universe has its own dream team of superheroes banding together to fight great evil, only they don't call themselves the Avengers. That would be copyright infringement, kids! Instead, they opt to go by the title of the Justice League of America.
The Justice League's revolving door policy has resulted in a roster of heroes that has gone through more men in tights than a slutty ballerina hanging around backstage to keep the male chorus occupied during scenes when they're not needed. But the mainstays of the Justice League usually tend to be the same 7 heroes: namely, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, and Martian Manhunter.
That's 7 heroes, 7 big stories, 7 movies to make to lead up to one ginormous big-screen Justice League extravaganza. And I think, with the proper nudging and motivation of certain parties, it can be done, and done well! Here's my take on it:
First off, we've already got Batman and Superman covered, so that's two down right there. I know Chris Nolan said he never wants to make another Batman film, and ditto Christian Bale. But you know what? Fuck them! We don't need them to have a good time! (Actually, I'm sorry for cursing at you, Mr. Bale. PLEASE don't yell at me!!!) Let's assume we've got Bale as Batman and the upcoming Henry Cavill reprising his role as Superman. And if Christian Bale absolutely, positively refuses to return, then we'll replace him with Jim Caviezel and make Bruce Wayne an older guy. Seriously, if you're not already watching Caviezel on Person of Interest, start watching! That show is literally Batman without costumes.
Alright. Let's try something a little more difficult: Green Lantern. We got that *snicker* "movie" last June starring Ryan Reynolds, which had great special effects and a pretty good cast, but...yeah. that's about all it had going for it. So let's delete that from our memory and start fresh. Break out a whole new Green Lantern film series, a big, epic, sprawling one, I'm talking 5 or 6 movies here. Remember, this is a sci-fi alien smorgasbord we're talking about here, there's PLENTY of room for 5 or 6 movies worth of stories to tell. Besides, there are actually four major Green Lantern characters: Hal Jordan (who we say Reynolds play), John Stewart, Guy Gardner, and Kyle Rayner. There you go, you have at least a trilogy's worth of stuff right there. Recast Hal Jordan: Nathan Fillion (of Castle fame to you non-geeks out there, of God fame to everyone else) can play him with his eyes closed. Or if you wanna go the John Stewart route and have him be African-American, no problemo. Leonard Roberts from Heroes could pull that off without a hitch, and either one of them would fit in just fine in the Justice League.
Still too easy, you say? How about Aquaman? He's like a joke; if it weren't for Entourage, there'd probably be a whole slew of folks who don't even know that Aquaman exists. But he's a pretty hefty character, being the freaking King of Atlantis and all! Let's go with the older, grizzled version of Aquaman, the one with the beard and the Captain Hook hand. I know he's overused at this point, but I think Mr. Jolie himself, Brad Pitt, might be able to get Aquaman right, as long as they focus less on his "hunk factor" and more on his 'I'm an older guy with a big burden on my shoulders factor". One of Aquaman's biggest character traits that separates him from the rest is that he's a father. And if anybody knows about taking care of kids, it'd be the man who adopts foreign children like he's ordering take-out. Throw in Jamie Foxx as his archenemy Black Manta and you're good to go.
Martian Manhunter? Piece of cake. His story would make a great movie. He's essentially a Martian who gets teleported to Earth by a mad scientist. The scientist then dies before he has a chance to finish his experiments, and Manhunter escapes the lab. He's unable to return home, so he roams the Earth, assumes a human identity, and tries to fit in to avoid being experimented on whilst continuously searching for a means of getting back to Mars. Giancarlo Esposito (who plays Gustavo on Breaking Bad and the Magic Mirror on Once Upon A Time) certainly has a way of making humans seem inhuman, and vice versa. I think he could pull off the Manhunter very nicely. Boom. Done.
The Flash. He's trickier, yes, but not impossible. First of all, let's avoid the obvious dumb Hollywood route and NOT cast Ryan Reynolds again, for the fourteenth time, in a superhero picture. Flash is a redheaded fellow with a smart-ass attitude, so I'd like to see him played by Zack Ward. If you're a fan of A Christmas Story, you'll remember l'il Zack as the bully, Scut Farkas. I'm not too familiar with the Flash storylines, but considering there's been about 50 bjillion people to step into the red-and-yellow Flash spandex at one point or another, I'm sure there's gotta be some script fuel in there somewhere. I think his archenemy is a chubby guy with a snow theme named Captain Cold, so let's toss Phillip Seymour Hoffman into an oversized blue parka and Bob's your uncle.
That leaves Wonder Woman. Now she is tricky. Much like Thor of Marvel Comics fame, WW stands apart from the rest in that she's literally descended from Greek gods and has the strength of the Amazonians, or something like that. To the extent of my knowledge, she & a bunch of powerful women got exiled to an island by Hercules (who, it turns out, is kind of a douchebag), and Wonder Woman became a leader on that island, until a World War II pilot crashed down there and she became sucked into the world of normal mortals. I guess this could still work. Substitute World War II for...whatever we call the war that's happening right now, with the terror and whatnot. As for who could play her...we've all heard so many theories, and many of them could work, too. Again, like Aquaman, Wonder Woman should be attractive, but not in an unrealistic and distracting way *coughMichaelBaycough*. She's a ruler who's had to make a lot of tough decisions, and she carries quite the burden on those supple shoulders of hers: that burden should never be overshadowed by her looks. Anyone from Cobie Smulders to Natalie Portman to Elizabeth Hurley have been rumored for the role. Personally, I think Mila Kunis might work. Then stick Rhona Mitra in there as the Cheetah (her primary antagonist), and that's all you need. Wonder Woman herself already contains so many powerful themes to support a script and its sequel, that there's not much room for error as far as story is concerned.
And there you have it. Put together these last five movies, let them marinate for a year or so, then shake well and serve up an ice cold pitcher of Justice. It can be done, Warner Bros. You have the technology. You have the money. You have the rights. Go for it. But (and I leave you with this as my final thought, friends) just because someone can do something, doesn't mean they should. Warner Brothers shouldn't do a damn thing unless they're setting out to make a quality movie series with fun, engaging characters & plotlines. If they're gonna crank out 5 pieces of shit and one huge diarrhea crossover just so they can stand neck-and-neck with Marvel and chuckle, "Me too! Hyuck! Hyuck!", then they'll get a serious wake-up call once all the bad reviews come rolling in. Quality comes first, always.
Also, Warner Brothers, call me. I will totally write those six Green Lantern movies for FREE.
I'm not joking.
Monday, May 7, 2012
Super Fly
This post took a little longer than normal, because it involved a fair bit more research than I'm normally used to (that, and I just recently began a new job as a Starbucks barista, which is every bit as green and coffee-scented as it sounds).
So, why are we here this week? I'm hoping we can talk about a little piece of pop culture that's on everybody's mind right now. A certain little movie that opened May 4th, went on to gross unfathomable amounts of money worldwide, and shattered opening-weekend box office records previously held by the likes of Harry Potter and The Dark Knight. The little movie in question has become something of a phenomenon, the fruits of labors that began way back in 2007 with five whole other movies to back it up. The film that's sure to go down in history as one of the most successful big-budget endeavors ever made by the industry. I'm referring, of course, to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. No, wait, it's the other one, the one where the superheroes punch things.
The Avengers is a shining example of how to do something ballsy, fun, and RIGHT. It's a culmination of almost a decade of work from some of the best Hollywood has to offer. Most people said it couldn't be done, and -in all honesty -they could very well have been proven right, had less capable hands been at work here. But instead, we've been treated to six solid movies that break the mold in terms of what the current film industry is capable of. It was a huge risk, and they pulled it off with A+s across the board on their very first attempt. Long story short, if you haven't seen The Avengers yet, please don't waste your time reading this rubbish. Go. Now. Enjoy.
I'm not going to write any detailed review or analysis of The Avengers, because I'm sure it's been articulated in much better ways already. Instead, I'd like to ruminate on how this is going to affect the movie world from now on. Namely, are long-term, multiple-movie crossovers going to become a new thing? Well, now that the numbers are rolling in for opening weekend (and I needn't remind you, these are some hefty numbers we're talking about here), I'm sure studio execs are coming to the slow realization of what everybody else has already always known: FAN SERVICE + BIG, GROUNDBREAKING CROSSOVER SERIES + QUALITY = MONEY! Wow! Who knew, right?! Once the whole "D-uh!" aspect of that kicks in, maybe producers will start being more open to adaptation ideas that are a little more comfortable with their source material.
Here's some dialogue from a pitch meeting. I'm fairly certain this is how it went, word-for-word:
EXECUTIVE #1: Let's make a movie called Wolverine.
EXECUTIVE #2: Sure! Should we add in some of the other famous Marvel superhero characters in there, too?
EXECUTIVE #1: Only one or two. Make the majority of them a bunch of unimportant, throwaway characters that absolutely nobody cares about. THAT'S what comic book fans are looking for!
EXECUTIVE #2: Okay! Should we make all of the characters look, act, and dress exactly like they do in the comics?
EXECUTIVE #1: No, that's for amateurs. We're Hollywood. We're the BIG boys. Comic book characters shouldn't look, act, or dress like comic book characters. That's not what all those legions of comic book fans want to see! The characters should be completely different, unrelatable, unlikable, and just wear black trenchcoats, because black trenchcoats are cool. THAT'S what'll put butts in the seats!
EXECUTIVE #2: That's such a good idea!
EXECUTIVE #1: I know, right?! I make $250,000 a year!
Now here's another pitch meeting. Let's spot the differences!
EXECUTIVE #1: Let's make a movie based off of the Avengers. But first, all of the individual characters will have their own solo movie series so they can grow on audiences and be more fleshed out, so that when the time comes for The Avengers we can focus on more action and plot development. Plus, the first five movies will make a TON of money, which we can use to fund The Avengers and make it one big, solid action blockbuster!
EXECUTIVE #2: Great idea! Should we add a bunch of other famous Marvel superhero characters in there, too?
EXECUTIVE #1: Yes, absolutely. As many big name heroes and villains as we can. The ones people love & remember from the comics.
EXECUTIVE #2: Speaking of the comics, should the characters dress like they do in the comics, too? Because we have about 3,000 black trenchcoats left over from the Wolverine set.
EXECUTIVE #1: No thanks. Let's get them in their genuine, colourful costumes. Fans will love that.
Wolverine's total box office gross? Approximately $180 million. Reviews range from poor to mediocre to poorly mediocre. The Avengers total box office gross? $207 million and counting. Reviews range from "two thumbs way up" to "that was so good I think I pooped my pants".
I really don't think there's anything else to say except let's hope and pray that Marvel Studios makes more of these (which they are, according to news websites everywhere). Also, to all of the people involved: to the talented actors and screenwriters, to the producers who believed in the project and took the chance, to the directors who brought it all to life on anamorphic wide screen: thank you. From all of us crazy comic book fans. Thank you very, very much.
Next week: let's take what we learned here, and see if we can put it to good use somewhere else. Namely, the flip side of the comic book world. I'm going to theorize and (if you'll indulge me) geek out a little bit on where I think a certain company should take their film projects next. I'll be looking at it through the eyes of a writer, an actor, and (most importantly) a fan who just wants to go out and have a good time at the movies. So if any of you out there happen to have some pull over at the offices of Warner Brothers Studios...this next song's for you, baby. ;)
So, why are we here this week? I'm hoping we can talk about a little piece of pop culture that's on everybody's mind right now. A certain little movie that opened May 4th, went on to gross unfathomable amounts of money worldwide, and shattered opening-weekend box office records previously held by the likes of Harry Potter and The Dark Knight. The little movie in question has become something of a phenomenon, the fruits of labors that began way back in 2007 with five whole other movies to back it up. The film that's sure to go down in history as one of the most successful big-budget endeavors ever made by the industry. I'm referring, of course, to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. No, wait, it's the other one, the one where the superheroes punch things.
The Avengers is a shining example of how to do something ballsy, fun, and RIGHT. It's a culmination of almost a decade of work from some of the best Hollywood has to offer. Most people said it couldn't be done, and -in all honesty -they could very well have been proven right, had less capable hands been at work here. But instead, we've been treated to six solid movies that break the mold in terms of what the current film industry is capable of. It was a huge risk, and they pulled it off with A+s across the board on their very first attempt. Long story short, if you haven't seen The Avengers yet, please don't waste your time reading this rubbish. Go. Now. Enjoy.
I'm not going to write any detailed review or analysis of The Avengers, because I'm sure it's been articulated in much better ways already. Instead, I'd like to ruminate on how this is going to affect the movie world from now on. Namely, are long-term, multiple-movie crossovers going to become a new thing? Well, now that the numbers are rolling in for opening weekend (and I needn't remind you, these are some hefty numbers we're talking about here), I'm sure studio execs are coming to the slow realization of what everybody else has already always known: FAN SERVICE + BIG, GROUNDBREAKING CROSSOVER SERIES + QUALITY = MONEY! Wow! Who knew, right?! Once the whole "D-uh!" aspect of that kicks in, maybe producers will start being more open to adaptation ideas that are a little more comfortable with their source material.
Here's some dialogue from a pitch meeting. I'm fairly certain this is how it went, word-for-word:
EXECUTIVE #1: Let's make a movie called Wolverine.
EXECUTIVE #2: Sure! Should we add in some of the other famous Marvel superhero characters in there, too?
EXECUTIVE #1: Only one or two. Make the majority of them a bunch of unimportant, throwaway characters that absolutely nobody cares about. THAT'S what comic book fans are looking for!
EXECUTIVE #2: Okay! Should we make all of the characters look, act, and dress exactly like they do in the comics?
EXECUTIVE #1: No, that's for amateurs. We're Hollywood. We're the BIG boys. Comic book characters shouldn't look, act, or dress like comic book characters. That's not what all those legions of comic book fans want to see! The characters should be completely different, unrelatable, unlikable, and just wear black trenchcoats, because black trenchcoats are cool. THAT'S what'll put butts in the seats!
EXECUTIVE #2: That's such a good idea!
EXECUTIVE #1: I know, right?! I make $250,000 a year!
Now here's another pitch meeting. Let's spot the differences!
EXECUTIVE #1: Let's make a movie based off of the Avengers. But first, all of the individual characters will have their own solo movie series so they can grow on audiences and be more fleshed out, so that when the time comes for The Avengers we can focus on more action and plot development. Plus, the first five movies will make a TON of money, which we can use to fund The Avengers and make it one big, solid action blockbuster!
EXECUTIVE #2: Great idea! Should we add a bunch of other famous Marvel superhero characters in there, too?
EXECUTIVE #1: Yes, absolutely. As many big name heroes and villains as we can. The ones people love & remember from the comics.
EXECUTIVE #2: Speaking of the comics, should the characters dress like they do in the comics, too? Because we have about 3,000 black trenchcoats left over from the Wolverine set.
EXECUTIVE #1: No thanks. Let's get them in their genuine, colourful costumes. Fans will love that.
Wolverine's total box office gross? Approximately $180 million. Reviews range from poor to mediocre to poorly mediocre. The Avengers total box office gross? $207 million and counting. Reviews range from "two thumbs way up" to "that was so good I think I pooped my pants".
I really don't think there's anything else to say except let's hope and pray that Marvel Studios makes more of these (which they are, according to news websites everywhere). Also, to all of the people involved: to the talented actors and screenwriters, to the producers who believed in the project and took the chance, to the directors who brought it all to life on anamorphic wide screen: thank you. From all of us crazy comic book fans. Thank you very, very much.
Next week: let's take what we learned here, and see if we can put it to good use somewhere else. Namely, the flip side of the comic book world. I'm going to theorize and (if you'll indulge me) geek out a little bit on where I think a certain company should take their film projects next. I'll be looking at it through the eyes of a writer, an actor, and (most importantly) a fan who just wants to go out and have a good time at the movies. So if any of you out there happen to have some pull over at the offices of Warner Brothers Studios...this next song's for you, baby. ;)
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