Posts from — January 2008

Fledgling geek site Another Castle posted another one of my comics review columns, probably against their better judgment. I commit a gross grammatical error that I’m horribly ashamed of.

With Lost’s season premiere scant hours away, I’d planned to fill this space with a mock ’state of the island’ address in the voice of everyone’s favorite psycho doctor, Jack Shephard. I was planning to use the phrase “live together, die alone,” at least seven times, and post plenty of pictures of the phenomenon known only as Jack-face:

If you still want to celebrate the ancient art of yelling, Benjamin Birdie is counting down the best of Lost’s roughly ten billion shouts, screams, and yells.

Today, I’m going to talk about Star Wars again. Because I found this new character from the upcoming Clone Wars series:

Ahsoka Tano, here, is Anakin Skywalker’s Padawan apprentice.
Immediately after being knighted, Anakin participated in the Battle of Rendili, the Outer Rim Seiges, the Battle of Cato Neimoidia, had two major duels with Asajj Ventress and then finally took part in the Battle of Coruscant - the final battle of the war.

True, the Clone Wars lasted for years, but Anakin was only a full-fledged Jedi Knight for five months before falling to the dark side, five months that have been pretty well-documented in the pages of Star Wars: Republic, the original Clone Wars cartoon, and plenty of Expanded Universe novels, most notably Labyrinth of Evil.

In fact, and I can’t remember exactly where it occurs off the top of my head, I recall Anakin griping at least once about not having a Padawan.

One of the things that I kind of hold against George Lucas these days is his total lack of regard for any piece of the Star Wars franchise that he hasn’t directly contributed to. I don’t know the level of involvement GL has with this new show, but deciding to fly in the face of established, well-documented events seems to be a hallmark of it. And just to be clear, I’m not complaining about the character - though there’s still time for that! - just the way she’s been shoehorned in to a very tight timeline in what seems like a completely arbitrary manner.

Prediction: Ahsoka survives Order 66 and becomes one of the main characters of the live-action series. As prone to attachment as Vader is, I think he’d have a hard time killing his own Padawan. Of course, his brutal murder of an undisclosed number of small children isn’t really on my side here, if we’re talking evidence.

It’s been my long-held belief that the Internet alters the very laws of physics by some unknown property of its Internettiness. Internetosity. Whichever.

For instance, the less likely something is to exist in real life (IRL, as the youth calls it), the more inevitable it is that it exists online. Take, for instance, amulet wrestling. I was gaming earlier tonight, and one of the other players by some strange twist of fate, uttered - in character - that phrase. Amulet Wrestling. As we all chuckled at the absurdity of amulet wrestling, I challenged the GM to look for it on YouTube. There was only one result, but there was still a viable hit.

This is what amulet wrestling looks like:

Drink it in.

P.S. As funny as this is - and it is funny - that power bomb the editor of this video keeps showing is pretty impressively executed for a bunch of kids in a basement.

In the wake of the Legion of Super Villians story that kicked off the Legion’s Baxter run, a mess of new Legionnaires came on board, like Polar Boy, Quislet, Tellus, and Sensor Girl. Sensor Girl’s power - sensing things - was kind of useless and redundant with some of Quislet’s abilities. But SG’s real ability…was kicking ass:

Tales of the Legion #341, Levitz and Lightle

In the grim future of the 31st Century, there is only Bahlactus.

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Listening to: Elvis Costello - Big Tears

There were cries of “Too soon!” but I’ve decided to forge ahead and do another Ask A Futurist.

If you have a question for Tony Stark, Director of SHIELD, leave a comment or send me an email.

Christmas, 2007.

Every December, there’s a good run of birthdays in my family and the close circle of my friends that make up my extended family, so it always feels like Christmas is just kind of wedged into December somewhere. Chiefly, December is when my wife’s birthday falls, and this year she turned 30. I threw her a disco party, because I am a dutiful spouse who is attentive to his partner’s needs; it was made very clear to me that she needed Abba and a mirrorball in order to celebrate correctly. Although there was no disco in the game, we had a marathon session of four-player Rock Band. My belief that I can’t play the drums was confirmed, and the capstone of the session was my spouse and I playing “When You Were Young,” her on guitar and me on bass and vocals.

Because of the disco party, we didn’t really decorate for Christmas until after the festivities had ended. We were headed into the last week before the 25th, and realized we had no tree. A few days before the holiday, we’d made plans to drive out to the middle of nowhere and get a tree. It snowed, and we wrote the whole thing off as an exercise in futility. Besides, we rationalized, it was just the two of us, anyway. If the Rankin-Bass animated Jack Frost has taught me anything in life, it is that love and an empty box are the bare minimum requirements for having Christmas. Better than an empty box, we had real presents.

Christmas Eve. As the clock ticked closer to Santa’s arrival, I looked at my living room and felt that something just wasn’t right. Where, I wondered, would the presents go? I was home alone, wrapping gifts, and I felt compelled to take decisive action. My grandmother had an artificial tree in her basement, but I can’t go down there without getting a concussion. I decided to pass on an ER trip. There were probably still some places that would sell me a tree, but by the 24th, nothing worthwhile would be left. I’d have to rig up lights and put ornaments on it, and I only had a few hours to do it in. I was also going to turn around and toss the tree out a few days later, and that seemed like a waste of my thirty or so bucks.

And then I saw it: the coat rack. I grabbed my coat from it and raced out the door, headed out to buy some essentials - garland, lights, and a handful of ornaments (the garland, lights, and ornaments we already had still being in storage). I dragged the rack into the living room, spread a Christmas blanket out over the base, and stacked all the presents up around it. Only the milk and cookies were missing.

I think that the coat rack tree is something I want to continue to do each year. It has a quirky, Charlie Brown aesthetic to it that I dig on. One of the things I lament in our family unit is that we don’t have traditions. This can be the first.

New Year’s was nice and quiet. We stayed in, we drank, we watched an awesome motorcycle stunt. Next year, I want to see someone jump a motorcycle over a pool of burning sharks. I demand it.

For yet another week, my comic review column All My Issues is up at Another Castle. I’m letting you know just so I can use that ‘Shameless Self-Promotion’ tag again.

Regular readers here might be able to tell that my sensibilities on what makes horror and suspense effective have been very heavily informed by the psychological sort of manipulations that Alfred Hitchcock was perpetrating in that period between Rope and Frenzy and the stunt marketing that William Castle (and Hitchcock himself, at least in the case of Pyscho) used to make going to the movies an event. In that vein, I’ve openly declared my affections for The Blair Witch Project several times, and I think that it manages to capture that same spirit, even if it loses its carbonation very, very quickly. It built a new media juggernaut that made the finished product better for the viewer’s having participated in it.

While I’ve certainly followed the ARG attached to Cloverfield, it’s not as immersive or engrossing as Blair’s ancillary material was. In fact, with the exception of this:

it’s been a big dud for me.

The movie is a totally different story.

Not only was Cloverfield an awesome spectacle of an event movie, it’s one that I could bear to watch more than once. Which might be part of the magic behind its lavish opening weekend numbers. Yes, most of the characters are boring and/or stock characters, but it’s okay - it’s a fast-paced movie and none of the human characters are important for very long. Well, except for maybe Rob and Beth. And Hud.

Putting Hud (and you have to love the pun in that name) - a luckless dork without direction or confidence - in control of the audience’s eyes is a great choice. Think of those first, fumbling shots of his, his fitful, stumbling narration, his inability to focus the camera on Marlena and hold a conversation with her. In the first half of the film, the camera’s a bit of an albatross for Hud, something he doesn’t particularly want because someone else he had the bad luck to be in the line of sight of didn’t want it, either. But the attack (and I’m going to try not to spoil too much, but I won’t be coy - I did wait a week) changes his role almost instantly. By the film’s end, Hud - a character who we see very little of and hear comparatively little out of - has undergone a demonstrable change, one that the audience can perceive simply by watching what he does with the camera.

One of the real marvels of the way Cloverfield is made, though, is the way director Matt Reeves handles the monster. The natural school of thought is that the monster needs to stay occluded for as long as possible, because the monster is only scary until it’s fully revealed. That’s not what happens here; well, not exactly. What the filmmakers manage to do is make seeing Clover - as they’re calling him - as scary in the latter half of the film as not seeing him is in the early half. By the end of the film, knowing that it’s coming at you, it being close enough that you can see it, it makes you nervous. It’s engrossing.

Cloverfield is at least as good as Peter Jackson’s King Kong and there’s no contest between it and Emmerich’s Godzilla travesty. It’s very blatantly informed by September 11, but not in a brash and pandering way (every Spider-Man film, I’m looking at you), and also our human desire to indulge in social networking, to own gadgets. It’s a modern fable - a dark, violent fable - and it makes sense for those to be its cultural touchstones.

Go and see it. It might make you a bit nauseous, and if it does, I apologize, but Cloverfield is a note-perfect example of how to make a movie fun again.

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Listening to: Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins - 01/11/2008 Rigorous Scholarship

If your first response to Heath Ledger’s death is “How does this affect Batman?” you need to put your life in goddamn perspective.

If that is all you care about, filming on The Dark Knight is already finished. Assholes.

More 30th century fistifcuffs! Keith Giffen never liked Karate Kid much, and that is one point on which Giffen and I can disagree forever. I mean, he’s Karate Kid. Seriously.

From Legion of Super-Heroes #37, courtesy Mssrs. Shooter and Manapul.

In the 30th century, the real Great Darkness is Bahlactus.