We’re having a bit of a thing over at Alert Nerd in honor of the fictional marriage of Scott Summers and Jean Grey (in an issue of Uncanny X-Men that came out on March 30, 199whatever) and we’ve been asking our nerdy friends what their geek sacred cow (their “Scott and Jean are the best couple evar”) is.

Because I’m a contrarian, I talk about the Jean Grey/Wolverine romance.

Read all about it here.  And I encourage you to post your own, too.

I commented to a co-worker this morning that every iPhone owner is like a viral marketer on Apple’s payroll.  That’s hyperbole, but I stand by it.

iPhone users are like cultists.  The only difference between them and Branch Davidians or the anarchist weed farmers that pray to Glycon is that they think it’s the iPhone that can solve every one of their problems, not David Koresh or a made-up snake god.

Ask an iPhone user a question.  There’s probably one or two around you at this very second.  No matter what the question is, they’ll look the answer up on their iPhone and tell you while they’re doing it that the iPhone is great for looking up information on the go.

“Where should we eat tonight?” Let me check the iPhone.

“Have you seen the new Facebook layout?” Let me check the iPhone.

“How’s your cancer?” Let me check the iPhone.

“Are you being held hostage by the iPhone?” Let me check the …help me.

To be clear, it’s the cult of personality around the device that I loathe and not the functionality of it or the design of it.  It’s a pretty phone and, seriously, I wouldn’t say no to one if AT&T WANTS TO GIVE ME ONE, GUYS, JUST SAYING.

But I hate these people that think their phone is the pinnacle of civilization and not just a really neat phone.

Sent From My iPhone

I’ve been committing some more random mixtapery (and mix-cd-ery) and I’m starting to fall into that rut of relying a lot on a handful of artists that I’m really, really into right now to the neglect of the other gigs and gigs of great music at my disposal.  So I’m trying to come up with some handicaps, some hoops to jump through.

Like making a mixtape of nothing but instrumentals that cannot include classical music.

Which is your project.

Show your work in the comments.

As I watched the end of Fanboys last night (and there are SPOILERy things following hence), I thought to myself that The Phantom Menace was maybe what killed poor Linus, that maybe he’d have held on longer if he hadn’t seen it early and known what a departure from the Original Trilogy it was.

That musing aside, Fanboys isn’t a film about Star Wars.  Not really, though a comprehensive knowledge of both Star Wars and late-90s Internet culture are recommended to get maximum enjoyment out of the film.  It’s about a friendship between five people and the commonality that manages to bring them back together even when they’re scattered to the winds for months or years.  I have friends like that, who due to scheduling differences or distances don’t talk to me as often as I might like (and vice versa).  The movie’s not perfect, but it has some solid, geeky laughs and an emotional core that not many movies with its focus or budget successfully muster.  And Kristen Bell in a slave girl Leia outfit - that was pretty okay, too.

Last House On The Left is a pretty standard grindhouse remake - the film looks more attractive but is less impactful and I never find myself caring about that poor girl or what line the family is crossing.  Like When A Stranger Calls, the thing that gives the original power is the thing that everybody knows about already, and that really dilutes any attempt to recapture its vengeful goodness.  The sort of horror represented by Last House only really works when it has two key elements: empathy and catharsis.  This has neither.  There’s a glimmer of a cathartic moment, when John appears in the kitchen, claw hammer in hand, and helps his battered, terrified wife to her feet, but it’s too short and the audience has to wait too long for the payoff that inevitably comes from it.  Which is in fact my problem with most of the second half of the movie.  It should be twenty minutes shorter.

But that’s not what I want to talk about today.

In the theater last night, there were no fewer than 3 children that I estimated to be under 12 years of age, sitting dutifully with their parents.  This bothered me immediately, but really, really bothered me once I heard a little girl audibly ask “why the man was doing that” during the rape scene.  Which means the parents let her watch that scene without covering her eyes or removing her from the theater.

Seriously.

Fuck. You.

Is the world so desensitized to its own ugliness that any parent can walk into a theater with a little girl and think “She can handle the R-rated slasher movie.  Screw Hotel For Dogs or The Jonas Brothers.”  If that is your only viable choice for seeing a movie with your elementary-aged child, stay home and call Child goddamn Services to come pick the kids up.  Then you can watch whatever you want, you callous shits.

I’m not posting the playlist yet because I delivered it to its intended recipient with no playlist written on the cover.  In part because I did it last-minute, yeah, but it’s a mix of stuff that I know she knows and stuff that I know she doesn’t, and I want to see how she reacts to the mix as an aggregate and not just on a song-by-song basis. And so, in the spirit of that, I’m going to wait until I know she’s listened to it.

I think that Watchmen may be impossible to review.  I’ve read reviews praising what other reviews panned and damning what others deified.  I have friends who have seen it and loved it, loved it except for the ending, hated the whole thing, and a few who refuse to see the movie because they feel that making a film adaptation of Watchmen is misguided.

After having seen Watchmen myself, I have to cast my vote with the latter.  At least in the sense that the movie, as good as frequently is and as faithful to the text as it can be, is ultimately a gutless retelling of the comic’s plot that pares out the things that make Watchmen really resonate as a ‘graphic novel’ (or ‘maxi-series’, depending on when you first read it and in what format).

The sleek cinematography, complete with director Zack Snyder’s trademark fetishistic slo-mo, blood, violence and nudity are all present on film.  The pirate comic, the streetcorner, the backing material are mostly gone or severely diminished.  The first group are the things that I loved about Watchmen when I was ten years old.  The second are the things I like about the comic now.  I like the control and complexity in Moore’s script and in Gibbons’ layouts and pencils, things that are by the very dint of being filmed absent from the film.

Watchmen the film is ultimately a very slick looking, very bombastic presentation of all the things I loved when I was ten.  As a film adaptation of the main plot, it is entertaining; I don’t hate it.  The acting is mostly solid (with Malin Akerman being the weak link in that chain and Jackie Earle Haley and Billy Crudup both doing an particularly great job of bringing two very difficult characters to life), the action looks nice (and I’ve always secretly been a bit of a sucker for Snyder’s slow motion antics), but it’s hollow in comparison to its source - very much like the bulk of the Harry Potter films in a lot of ways.    I liked it.  I’ll watch it again.  It was entertaining.  But it doesn’t hold a candle to the original.

Today is new comic day, and I’m going to actually post some comics-related content in celebration of the event.

Age of the Sentry #6 comes out today, which is going to put an endcap on the best representation of the character that Marvel’s published since the original Paul Jenkins/Jae Lee event (The Sentry and the same team’s Inhumans are two series that really got me invested back into the Marvel U after years of only reading X-stuff).  If you don’t like The Sentry because he’s a basketcase who throws people into the sun and rips womens’ heads off, I’d strongly suggest giving this book a look.

Occasional reader of The Axe Jim McCann has his New Avengers: The Reunion #1 on stands today and as someone who likes Jim a lot and loves Hawkeye and Mockingbird, I am incredibly excited.  The 9 page preview over at IGN promises some good stuff from this mini.  The Clint/Bucky confrontation alone is maybe worth buying the book for.

Okay, so finding an actual cassette tape?  It’s goddamn impossible.  I have a pack of blank cassettes that it took me literally forever to find (I traveled back in time to when I emerged from the womb and have been hunting relentlessly ever since), and gotten the dust off the tape recorder.  But still not so much with the tape-making.  I haven’t been home a lot, haven’t been seriously thinking about playlists.

Remember how I said that making a tape for a girl you didn’t want to sleep with was harder?  Well, now that I’m right in the midst of doing it, making a mixtape for a girl that you want to sleep with who has the exact same musical taste is maybe the hardest thing in the world.  I luckily got to spend part of Saturday night paging through the girl’s My Music folder, so I know exactly where we don’t Venn.

But then, the right tape isn’t just “this is music that’s new to you.”  It tells a story.  It communicates feelings.  A good mixtape is a like a kiss you experience with your ears.  Some of it should be new and exciting, but part of it needs to be timeless and familiar.

I should have the list finalized soon, and I’ll post it in its entirety then.

So, now that Pride and Prejudice is apparently public domain, we’re seeing some exciting projects come about: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which I’ve already pre-ordered, and the space-alien horror flick Pride and Predator.  The movie, it’s going to be horrid, because there’s no way that it’s going to be the actual Predator.  Which got me thinking about what would be even better.

Are you ready?

ALIENS VS. PREDATOR VS. PRIDE VS. PREJUDICE