It was a couple of years ago for the heck of it I bought a John Williams Greatest Hits collection off Amazon. It covered his most popular movie themes and such from the late 60s-1999 with The Phantom Menace. Which is pretty much his whole career since in the 21st Century I don't think he has done nearly as much, mostly just Spielberg and Lucas movies.
Anyway, it had a lot of really great themes from classic movies: Jaws, Star Wars, Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back, ET, Jurassic Park, etc. And I can't help thinking, geez, how did one guy make just about every great movie theme song for the last 50 years? Yeah, sure there are other good movie theme songs from that time period but Williams is like the New York Yankees of movie composers. Plus there's the Olympics theme song you hear every couple of years for Summer or Winter Games.
Listening to the album a few times I finally got what really makes his themes work: the hook. It's the same thing that separates the Beatles from lesser songwriters. You've got to have a catchy, memorable hook.
The thing about the themes Williams composed for all those movies above is that you can hum or whistle them pretty easily after a couple of listens. That's what allows them to stick in our heads and thus become memorable. Of course you can't hum or whistle the whole thing, but there's always that one part that hooks you.
In the 21st Century Hans Zimmer has pretty much picked up the mantle with Gladiator, the Nolan Batman movies, Inception, Man of Steel, and even The Simpsons Movie. Then there are Zimmer imitators like the guy who did the music for the Transformers movies. Anyway, I own Zimmer's scores to the Batman movies and Man of Steel, but while I like them, they're just something to listen to in the background. I mean I've listened to them probably a hundred times while I'm writing or editing (right now for instance) but if pressed I couldn't hum a single goddamned note. Whereas you ask me to hum Star Wars or Superman and boom, I can do it just like that.
That is the difference. The thing is, as Williams has gotten older, he hasn't really produced at the same level of quality or quantity. Don't get me wrong, I like "Duel of the Fates" from The Phantom Menace, but like a Hans Zimmer score you can't hum or whistle that. Does anyone (except maybe Tony Laplume) remember the scores to the other two prequel movies? I think he did at least some of the Harry Potter ones so maybe there was something from those but having not watched those I wouldn't know.
If you want, you can tie this into writing. I mean there are memorable stories and sentences and then there are those we forget almost the instant we finish reading them. If you're lucky you can craft something memorable, though most of us never will.
Monday, August 31, 2015
Friday, August 28, 2015
Stuff I Watched 8/28/15
Here's some stuff I watched in the last week or so:
Dumb & Dumber To: I wouldn't have paid to watch this, but it was on HBO so what the hell. The plot is similar to the first one where two idiots go on a road trip to find a hot girl. Only this time they're going to El Paso to find the daughter of Harry (Jeff Daniels) in order to ask her for a kidney. Her adopted father is a famous scientist whose wife is trying to poison him so she sends a guy along to kill Harry and Lloyd. And of course mayhem ensues. There were some decent gags though obviously it's not as good as the first one. At the beginning is a meta joke where Harry says, "Wouldn't this have been just as funny 10 years ago?" which is a reference to it taking 20 years to make the movie. There's another reference to that after the credits. Do you suppose since Jeff Daniels has had a more consistently good career in the last 20 years that's why it seems in this like Jim Carrey is more his sidekick? Ponder the mystery. (2/5)
Blunt Talk: This is a new show on Starz produced by Seth MacFarlane and starring Patrick Stewart. The first couple of episodes were free on demand, so I could actually watch them. It was OK. Stewart's character is a talk show host who is in decline thanks to too many drinks, drugs, and ex-wives. In the first episode he gets busted with a tranny hooker. As a penance he interviews himself on air. The second episode he misses a flight to Texas to cover a hurricane and tries to green screen it from a porn studio. Overall the show is OK but really I think the humor is based on this character is the complete opposite of how we think of Patrick Stewart, though actually it's pretty mild compared to his character on American Dad. I'd probably watch more if it weren't on Starz but maybe at some point I'll get a chance to watch future episodes. A couple of interesting factoids: Brent Spiner (Mr. Data) has a cameo in the first episode and both episodes are directed by Tristam Shapeero, who also directed a bunch of Community episodes I've watched recently. (2.5/5)
Wing Commander: Netflix said I might like this movie. Um, no, not really. I never played the video games so I had no idea what was going on. There are bad aliens and a Confederation and "Pilgrims" and stuff about jumping quasars...I have no fucking idea. The space fighters looked like crap. This is supposed to be the 27th Century so why do they look like 1950s airplanes? And why do they put oxygen masks on at times when they're flying? You're in space, so wouldn't you need the oxygen mask all the time? We can ignore the sounds in space because of Star Wars. As you might expect for 1999 the CGI was not great. The aliens especially looked like shit. Anyway, further proof that video game movies suck. (1/5)
The Theory of Everything: It basically felt like a far more boring version of A Beautiful Mind. (2/5)
Let's Be Cops: Amusing though overly long farce about two idiots who get mistaken for cops and end up taking on police corruption and drug dealers. (2.5/5)
Dumb & Dumber To: I wouldn't have paid to watch this, but it was on HBO so what the hell. The plot is similar to the first one where two idiots go on a road trip to find a hot girl. Only this time they're going to El Paso to find the daughter of Harry (Jeff Daniels) in order to ask her for a kidney. Her adopted father is a famous scientist whose wife is trying to poison him so she sends a guy along to kill Harry and Lloyd. And of course mayhem ensues. There were some decent gags though obviously it's not as good as the first one. At the beginning is a meta joke where Harry says, "Wouldn't this have been just as funny 10 years ago?" which is a reference to it taking 20 years to make the movie. There's another reference to that after the credits. Do you suppose since Jeff Daniels has had a more consistently good career in the last 20 years that's why it seems in this like Jim Carrey is more his sidekick? Ponder the mystery. (2/5)
Blunt Talk: This is a new show on Starz produced by Seth MacFarlane and starring Patrick Stewart. The first couple of episodes were free on demand, so I could actually watch them. It was OK. Stewart's character is a talk show host who is in decline thanks to too many drinks, drugs, and ex-wives. In the first episode he gets busted with a tranny hooker. As a penance he interviews himself on air. The second episode he misses a flight to Texas to cover a hurricane and tries to green screen it from a porn studio. Overall the show is OK but really I think the humor is based on this character is the complete opposite of how we think of Patrick Stewart, though actually it's pretty mild compared to his character on American Dad. I'd probably watch more if it weren't on Starz but maybe at some point I'll get a chance to watch future episodes. A couple of interesting factoids: Brent Spiner (Mr. Data) has a cameo in the first episode and both episodes are directed by Tristam Shapeero, who also directed a bunch of Community episodes I've watched recently. (2.5/5)
Wing Commander: Netflix said I might like this movie. Um, no, not really. I never played the video games so I had no idea what was going on. There are bad aliens and a Confederation and "Pilgrims" and stuff about jumping quasars...I have no fucking idea. The space fighters looked like crap. This is supposed to be the 27th Century so why do they look like 1950s airplanes? And why do they put oxygen masks on at times when they're flying? You're in space, so wouldn't you need the oxygen mask all the time? We can ignore the sounds in space because of Star Wars. As you might expect for 1999 the CGI was not great. The aliens especially looked like shit. Anyway, further proof that video game movies suck. (1/5)
The Theory of Everything: It basically felt like a far more boring version of A Beautiful Mind. (2/5)
Let's Be Cops: Amusing though overly long farce about two idiots who get mistaken for cops and end up taking on police corruption and drug dealers. (2.5/5)
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Writing Wednesday: If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say...Say Lots of It!
The Monday before last I wrote reviews of "Ant-Man" and "Fantastic Four" and you might have noticed that the review of the latter was a lot longer. Why is that? Because I didn't like it as much. That seems to be what happens, doesn't it? If you don't like something, you have a lot more to say about it than if you do like something.
Another example is someone on Goodreads read and rated the whole Scarlet Knight series. The five books he liked, he just gave 4 or 5 stars without saying anything. The three books he didn't like, those he could actually write something about.
I'm not really complaining because I do it too. In the case of the movies I reviewed, as I said about "Ant-Man" is another good-not-great Marvel movie. If I had written one I could have taken a review of "Thor 2" or "Iron Man 3" and swapped the names. Seriously you can do Mad Libs on most Marvel movies by now. Whereas with "Fantastic Four" people had been talking so much crap about it there was a lot meatier stuff to discuss.
You know what they say: conflict is essence of drama. Which is probably why things we don't like bring out our words a lot more than things we do like. Plus there's that need to vent, which is really what got me started posting customer reviews on Amazon.
And yet as an author it's nice to hear what someone does like about a book. I mean I know I'm not the only writer who's horribly insecure and needy about that stuff. You like me? WHY do you like me? Was it this? Was it that? TELL ME!!! (And then the person thinks you're a weirdo and no longer likes you.)
Of course I don't feel bad just giving a rating if for instance it's a really old book and the author is dead. I mean, it's not like Shakespeare probably gives a shit if I liked Hamlet or not. Or if it's someone really famous because again why does Stephen King give a shit if I liked The Green Mile? He's busy counting his money and ripping off Simpsons plots.
But with authors who are alive and not famous (like me for instance) it's nice to provide a few words at least. It's not the least you can do, but it's pretty close.
Another example is someone on Goodreads read and rated the whole Scarlet Knight series. The five books he liked, he just gave 4 or 5 stars without saying anything. The three books he didn't like, those he could actually write something about.
I'm not really complaining because I do it too. In the case of the movies I reviewed, as I said about "Ant-Man" is another good-not-great Marvel movie. If I had written one I could have taken a review of "Thor 2" or "Iron Man 3" and swapped the names. Seriously you can do Mad Libs on most Marvel movies by now. Whereas with "Fantastic Four" people had been talking so much crap about it there was a lot meatier stuff to discuss.
You know what they say: conflict is essence of drama. Which is probably why things we don't like bring out our words a lot more than things we do like. Plus there's that need to vent, which is really what got me started posting customer reviews on Amazon.
And yet as an author it's nice to hear what someone does like about a book. I mean I know I'm not the only writer who's horribly insecure and needy about that stuff. You like me? WHY do you like me? Was it this? Was it that? TELL ME!!! (And then the person thinks you're a weirdo and no longer likes you.)
Of course I don't feel bad just giving a rating if for instance it's a really old book and the author is dead. I mean, it's not like Shakespeare probably gives a shit if I liked Hamlet or not. Or if it's someone really famous because again why does Stephen King give a shit if I liked The Green Mile? He's busy counting his money and ripping off Simpsons plots.
But with authors who are alive and not famous (like me for instance) it's nice to provide a few words at least. It's not the least you can do, but it's pretty close.
Monday, August 24, 2015
An Animated Discussion
Recently I watched the old "Dilbert" cartoon on Crackle and "Bojack Horseman" on Netflix and it got me thinking of all the grown-up animated shows I've watched in the last 20 years. Here are as many as I can think of, excluding any for kids like when I was subjected to My Little Pony when visiting my nieces. The less said about that, the better.
The Simpsons: Any discussion of animated TV shows has to begin with The Simpsons. It is the one that brought grown-up cartoons back after "The Flintstones" and "The Jetsons" and so forth were cancelled. It's always funny to think of how violently people reacted to the show when it premiered, conservatives basically losing their shit the way conservatives do and railing that it was the beginning of the end, but maybe they were on to something. The first couple of seasons are hard to watch with the crappy animation and characters not having the right voices or skin color in the case of Smithers. By the 4th season it really hit its stride though by probably the 12th season it had turned on the cruise control and hasn't looked back. While it was a pasttime of mine from the 90s on, I finally stopped around the 22nd season. I just remember the guide on my TV said Selma was marrying Fat Tony and I thought, "Jesus Christ, another fucking Selma wedding?! If you're not going to bother trying then neither am I." So I stopped watching, though I caught one or two episodes since then. Despite me not watching it has continued to coast for another 4 years. I actually hoped Harry Shearer would leave the show because it might force their hand, but unfortunately they worked it out. I guess Matt Groening and company are content to just play out the string until the cast starts dropping off by old age. Which two regular guest stars (Marcia Wallace and Phil Hartman) have already died while numerous guest stars have also died like Rodney Dangerfield, George Harrison, Michael Jackson, George Plimpton, etc. It's interesting that I think one episode features Tom Clancy, Maya Angelou, and John Updike, all now deceased. But let's not forget all the really unforgettable episodes! I've sometimes thought I should try to write a whole short story just using Simpsons quotes. My favorite episode was the end of Season 7, "Summer of 4-Foot-2." Lisa doesn't get anyone to sign her yearbook and so decides to change her image during a summer vacation. The whole yearbook signing thing was something I greatly sympathized with; I always hated that to the point by 10th grade I pretty much stopped worrying about it.
Beavis & Butt-Head: I was a late comer to this series. I think like The Simpsons the first season probably isn't that good with crappy animation and such. Anyway, it's another that hit its stride later into the run. The bits featuring "the great Cornholio" were funny, though probably my favorite is the XMas episode that does a Bizarro version of "It's a Wonderful Life" where the angel tries to convince everyone that the world is better off without Butt-Head. Curiously while I thought the movie did good box office there was never a sequel and the show pretty much folded up after that. Sadly this show hasn't really lived into the streaming age because thanks to licensing issues you can't really recreate the actual episodes with the music videos between the episodes.
The Critic: This was the Simpsons team's first attempt at branching out. It didn't go well. It had one season on ABC, one on Fox (with an attempted boost by crossing it over with The Simpsons) and then was kaput except for some "webisodes" back in 2000 that were on the DVD set I bought a while back. Anyway, I liked the show, though in watching it again this year maybe they too often made jokes about old celebs like Jack Nicholson, Marlon Brando, and Al Pacino. Kind of dated stuff. Probably the most memorable episode was the "Sleepless in Seattle" parody featuring Siskel and Ebert, now both deceased. The quote I use most often is Jay has a cardboard cutout that keeps saying, "Buy My Book! Buy My Book!" I need one of those, though like Jay's it'd probably get beaten up a lot.
South Park: While a lot of animated shows start off not all that good and get better, South Park is actually better in the first couple of seasons. There are so many memorable episodes in the first three or four seasons, like the kaiju one where "MechaStreisand" threatens the world or where Cartman becomes a deputy and tells everyone to "respect his authoritaw!" or the boys get sucked into a Pokemon cult before their parents stop it by pretending they like Pokemon, thus making the boys think it's lame. Later on they seemed to forget what made the show work, which was the boys (Cartman, Kyle, Stan, and Kenny) getting sucked into some outrageous adventure. By the 8th and 9th seasons when I started tuning out they were focusing episodes on just one or two kids or worse yet on the parents. And they're still doing that. When I finally tuned out was I think the end of the 15th season (or the middle-end of the season) where Stan's parents were getting a divorce and there was this touching moment where they played "Landslide" by Fleetwood Mac and it just seemed a perfect time to say goodbye. And so I have. The kaiju episode I mentioned above is probably my favorite but the Scooby-Doo themed one with Korn is a close second. Like the Simpsons it doesn't seem this show will ever end, though it should have years ago. And the less said about the movie, the better.
King of the Hill: This show pretty much always seemed underrated. Except for a brief Tuesday stint it was nicely sandwiched between The Simpsons at 8 and Family Guy at 9. It made for a good bloc of TV so I didn't have to flip the channel. Anyway, this was from Mike Judge, the creator of Beavis and Butt-Head but was far more mature. Basically Hank Hill's character (and voice) was a younger version of Mr. Anderson from B&B. I always liked Hank because he was a Texas redneck and yet not the type who would fly a Confederate flag or sit on the border with Mexico with a shotgun. He was a Texas redneck even a liberal in Michigan could root for. Most of the series revolved around Hank's old-fashioned values conflicting with those of the modern world. My favorite episode was the first season one where Hank gets constipated and tries everything to get moving again. When he finally does go it's to the tune of "Ode to Joy" and if you've ever been constipated (really, really constipated) that's about how you feel when you do finally go.
Daria: This was technically a spin-off of Beavis & Butt-Head though completely different in tone, subject matter, and animation. Basically it focused on a nerdy teenage girl who cynically stood apart from all her vapid classmates. Like King of the Hill, it was mostly a conflict of values, though in this case cynicism/realism vs. idealism/political correctness. My favorite episode is one where Daria is stuck on writing a story and so her mom suggests she write more than "what she knows;" that she should write how she wants things to work out, which makes for a poignant story. I watched the whole series again last winter and it does still hold up pretty well even if it's from before all the kids had cell phones.
Futurama: This was the Simpsons team's second attempt to branch out and it was a little more successful. For a little while you had this on at 7:30 then the Simpsons at 8 and then King of the Hill at 8:30, so that was another good bloc of watching. It was a fun show if you liked sci-fi stuff mixed with a lot of pop culture references thanks to the heads in jars that allowed them to work in current celebrities. Most memorable was the episode where they had almost the whole cast of the original Star Trek. I think only James Doohan held out, except for DeForrest Kelley, who was dead by that point I'm pretty sure. That episode also features Shatner doing a spoken word version of Eminem. "How do you do a spoken word version of a rap song?" "He found a way." I didn't really like any of the straight-to-DVD movies, but they were enough to get the show back on Comedy Central for a few more years that were OK but probably not as good.
Dilbert: I remember watching this on UPN (when I think it was still UPN) and not really thinking all that much of it. Recently it was on Crackle and I found out there were actually two seasons, though I think I only watched the first one. I think my problem back in the day was the stories didn't necessarily make a lot of sense, like they got too surreal. For instance when Dilbert accidentally destroys a satellite and it leads to the fall of all civilization. Watching it again I still didn't like it all that much, though whenever Dogbert was involved it was a lot more watchable. Dogbert was like an amalgamation of Brian (being a dog) and Stewie (the Machiavellian schemes) from Family Guy. Really they should have made a spinoff all about Dogbert and I would have liked it much better. Anyway, co-creator Larry Charles worked on Seinfeld so Seinfeld stars Jason Alexander, Wayne Knight, and the big Sein himself all appear on the show. Just an interesting factoid to throw out there. Really I think the show should have grounded itself in more office humor, like the funniest bits from "Office Space;" that's what people could relate to.
Family Guy: You didn't think I'd leave this out, right? Like most of America I pretty much ignored the initial runs of the show in the late 90s, early 2000s. But like most of America I started tuning in when it came back in 2005. There were some good episodes, though by 2013 I was pretty much done with it. The comedy started to get a lot more mean-spirited, like the feud between Brian the dog and Quagmire, whom to that point had never seemed to have a problem but all the sudden they hated each other. Then there was the extremely unfunny 150th episode where Stewie and Brian are locked in a bank vault. And then they overused the time travel stuff; it was funny the first couple of times but really got to be too much. By the time they "killed" Brian I was done with the show. My favorite is from 2005 when Peter and Stewie go to Disney World. There are so many memorable bits in that, like when Brian does the "Peanut Butter & Jelly" song. Though my favorite quote is from an early episode where Peter says, "This will take some of my cunning...no, all my cunning." Like the Simpsons and South Park this show just seems destined to limp on forever. Probably a good idea since Seth MacFarlane's last two movies didn't do so hot and American Dad is on life support and The Cleveland Show is gone.
American Dad: I was a late comer to this series. Interestingly this was supposed to be Seth MacFarlane's comeback on Fox but then Family Guy rose from the ashes and this got shunted to the back-burner. Perhaps like much of America I just assumed it was more Family Guy but that couldn't be further from the truth. Really it's more like King of the Hill in how rabid conservative Stan Smith's values conflict with the world around him, including most of his family. Unlike Family Guy, where the humor is largely driven by "cutaway gags", the humor in American Dad spins out of the conflict between Stan and the world and the often completely ridiculous problems this creates, plus the alien Roger who puts on various "disguises" to create mayhem. The XMas episodes are really where they let it all hang out. One has Stan going back in time and accidentally getting Martin Scorcese off coke in the 70s, which leads to the USSR taking over the world. In another Stan and his wife are fucking in the church basement when the Rapture strikes and so they're "left below" to face a Mad Max-type dystopia. Another the Smith family faces off against Santa Claus in a LOTR-style epic battle. My favorite episode though is where Stan decides to toughen up his son Steve by bullying him, until Steve hires Stan's old bully to kick Stan's ass. The show got cut by Fox last year but was picked up off waivers by TBS for a season that I mostly had to watch on Amazon because I didn't have TBS a lot of the time it was on. It was an OK season but probably not the greatest. I think it's still on for next year, though again I'll probably have to watch on Amazon.
Archer: While ostensibly this was a secret agent spoof the first season of this was mostly "The Office" if the office were that of a spy agency. The best episodes are when dumb but extraordinarily lucky secret agent Sterling Archer and the gang get out of the office to attempt to foil sabotage on a blimp or obtain some blackmail information from the Grand Prix in Monaco. The episodes where they go into space, under the sea, and into a body are probably a little too much. The 5th season "Archer Vice" was mostly lame as the gang goes on the run and attempt to be first drug dealers and then arms merchants, neither of which went well. I was glad when the show got them back to doing more spy stuff this year, though now it seems we might be in for another "Vice"-type season. I hope not. My favorite is probably the end of the second season when Archer is going to marry a hot ex-KGB agent only for her to be killed by Cyborg Barry. I like when they occasionally let Archer have real feelings. I did like the beginning of the 4th season where Sterling Archer gets amnesia and thinks he's Bob of "Bob's Burgers" as of course H Jon Benjamin does both characters--in the same voice, which is pretty lame.
Chozen: This was an attempt by the creators of Archer to branch out and for for one season it followed "Archer Vice" and I often watched it because I was too lazy to change the channel. The setup is the titular character is a white guy who gets out of jail and attempts to resume his quest to become a famous rapper. Since he was in jail he found the company of men, so part of the wackiness of the setup is this gay white guy is trying to be a rapper. I'm not into rap so it really didn't sound interesting, but I gradually warmed to the show. The best episode I remember seeing was when he gets a job on a kid's show and then does this awesome rap telling kids to basically do the complete opposite of all that Sesame Street/Barney/Mr. Rogers Neighborhood stuff. I think my nieces embraced that philosophy. If they had brought this back for a second season after Archer I wouldn't have minded. But they didn't.
Robot Chicken: This is stop-motion animation not traditional animation, but so what? It's another show I was a later convert to after someone else mentioned it. The episodes are only about 11 minutes long and like any sketch comedy show there are hits and misses. A lot of the sketches revolve around old toys like He-Man, GI Joe, and Transformers, stuff I played with as well as toys my sisters played with like She-Ra, Strawberry Shortcake, and Jem. There have also been whole special episodes revolving around Star Wars and DC Comics heroes--a third one of those is airing sometime soon. There are original bits too, some that work better than others. It's fun when they do a sketch on really obscure toys that I remember like last year there was one about Visionaries. Remember those? They were kind of like GI Joe figures that had these hologram animals on their chests that were supposed to give them the power of that animal. In the sketch one guy gets stuck with some weird little fish that swims up people's urethra. My least favorite bit was one about some guy going around shooting monkeys for no reason; this was just after the Sandy Hook shootings so it felt pretty awkward. My most favorite sketch was the start of the 4th season. The creators of the show are trying to get work and first seek out Joss Whedon, who tries to kill Seth Green for leaving "the Whedonverse." Then they go to Ron Moore of "Battlestar Galactica" who tries to kill them, thinking they're Cylons in disguise. Finally they go to Seth MacFarlane, who uses the power of the cutaway gag to get Robot Chicken renewed. (These never sound as funny when you try to describe them.) The second best was the epic 100th episode, most of which is a video game-style fight between the titular robot chicken and like every other recurring character who has been on the show until the final Boss Battle with the mad scientist who created him. It was really how milestone episodes should be celebrated--by kicking a lot of ass! You can actually watch this on Hulu Plus now, though the first season isn't as good because like other shows the animation is crude by comparison to later on.
Titan Maximum: This was an attempt by the creators of Robot Chicken to branch out. It didn't really work out. It's a funny send-up of "Voltron" and "Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers" about an extremely dysfunctional giant robot team. When a former member of the team unveils a diabolical plan to take over the solar system the team has to acquire new members (the leader's nerdy little brother and a chimpanzee janitor who doesn't speak or make any facial movements really) and bring Titan Maximum out of retirement. I always wished the run-time were longer than 11 minutes because while that's fine for a sketch show like "Robot Chicken" it doesn't work as well for scripted shows, which is probably the problem I have watching most anything else on Adult Swim. I think you'd probably have to buy the DVD for this on Amazon or maybe you can find it online somewhere. There was not a season two and Season 1 ended about like how you should have expected it to. BTW, Lando Calrissian himself, Billy Dee Williams, voices the admiral who (reluctantly) manages the team. Another interesting factoid.
Mike Tyson Mysteries: This was one of the rare other Adult Swim shows I watched. It was really bizarre for the most part. The animation and general setup are supposed to be like Scooby-Doo but the plots really never seem to make a lot of sense. The premiere episode involved going to Cormac McCarthy's ranch to help him finish the end of his latest book, but then they're terrorized by a "ghost" and find out Cormac McCarthy is a centaur. Um, yeah. I really don't have any favorite episodes but I guess if you ever wanted to see Mike Tyson running around in a Mystery Machine van, this is for you!
Bojack Horseman: I talked about this on the 7th, so go read that! But I thought I should include it again. Overall I thought it was good, though I've only seen it once through so I'm not sure what a favorite or least favorite episode would be. As I said Friday it's a weirdly serious show about a horse-looking person who used to be a famous actor. Will Arnett is the titular Bojack while Aaron Paul is the slacker human Todd, who lives on Bojack's couch. There are cameos by Alan Arkin, JK Simmons, and Lisa Kudrow among others, though I don't think there's any real connections there. Just some more interesting factoids to pass along.
Other than The Cleveland Show, Bob's Burgers, and most everything not Robot Chicken-related on Adult Swim, I'm not sure how many others I missed. Well, I wouldn't say I missed them. Obviously. I suppose there were shows like "Capitol Critters" from when Simpsonsmania struck the nation and other networks thought they should try their hand at animated shows. But let's face it, no one saw those.
The Simpsons: Any discussion of animated TV shows has to begin with The Simpsons. It is the one that brought grown-up cartoons back after "The Flintstones" and "The Jetsons" and so forth were cancelled. It's always funny to think of how violently people reacted to the show when it premiered, conservatives basically losing their shit the way conservatives do and railing that it was the beginning of the end, but maybe they were on to something. The first couple of seasons are hard to watch with the crappy animation and characters not having the right voices or skin color in the case of Smithers. By the 4th season it really hit its stride though by probably the 12th season it had turned on the cruise control and hasn't looked back. While it was a pasttime of mine from the 90s on, I finally stopped around the 22nd season. I just remember the guide on my TV said Selma was marrying Fat Tony and I thought, "Jesus Christ, another fucking Selma wedding?! If you're not going to bother trying then neither am I." So I stopped watching, though I caught one or two episodes since then. Despite me not watching it has continued to coast for another 4 years. I actually hoped Harry Shearer would leave the show because it might force their hand, but unfortunately they worked it out. I guess Matt Groening and company are content to just play out the string until the cast starts dropping off by old age. Which two regular guest stars (Marcia Wallace and Phil Hartman) have already died while numerous guest stars have also died like Rodney Dangerfield, George Harrison, Michael Jackson, George Plimpton, etc. It's interesting that I think one episode features Tom Clancy, Maya Angelou, and John Updike, all now deceased. But let's not forget all the really unforgettable episodes! I've sometimes thought I should try to write a whole short story just using Simpsons quotes. My favorite episode was the end of Season 7, "Summer of 4-Foot-2." Lisa doesn't get anyone to sign her yearbook and so decides to change her image during a summer vacation. The whole yearbook signing thing was something I greatly sympathized with; I always hated that to the point by 10th grade I pretty much stopped worrying about it.
Beavis & Butt-Head: I was a late comer to this series. I think like The Simpsons the first season probably isn't that good with crappy animation and such. Anyway, it's another that hit its stride later into the run. The bits featuring "the great Cornholio" were funny, though probably my favorite is the XMas episode that does a Bizarro version of "It's a Wonderful Life" where the angel tries to convince everyone that the world is better off without Butt-Head. Curiously while I thought the movie did good box office there was never a sequel and the show pretty much folded up after that. Sadly this show hasn't really lived into the streaming age because thanks to licensing issues you can't really recreate the actual episodes with the music videos between the episodes.
The Critic: This was the Simpsons team's first attempt at branching out. It didn't go well. It had one season on ABC, one on Fox (with an attempted boost by crossing it over with The Simpsons) and then was kaput except for some "webisodes" back in 2000 that were on the DVD set I bought a while back. Anyway, I liked the show, though in watching it again this year maybe they too often made jokes about old celebs like Jack Nicholson, Marlon Brando, and Al Pacino. Kind of dated stuff. Probably the most memorable episode was the "Sleepless in Seattle" parody featuring Siskel and Ebert, now both deceased. The quote I use most often is Jay has a cardboard cutout that keeps saying, "Buy My Book! Buy My Book!" I need one of those, though like Jay's it'd probably get beaten up a lot.
South Park: While a lot of animated shows start off not all that good and get better, South Park is actually better in the first couple of seasons. There are so many memorable episodes in the first three or four seasons, like the kaiju one where "MechaStreisand" threatens the world or where Cartman becomes a deputy and tells everyone to "respect his authoritaw!" or the boys get sucked into a Pokemon cult before their parents stop it by pretending they like Pokemon, thus making the boys think it's lame. Later on they seemed to forget what made the show work, which was the boys (Cartman, Kyle, Stan, and Kenny) getting sucked into some outrageous adventure. By the 8th and 9th seasons when I started tuning out they were focusing episodes on just one or two kids or worse yet on the parents. And they're still doing that. When I finally tuned out was I think the end of the 15th season (or the middle-end of the season) where Stan's parents were getting a divorce and there was this touching moment where they played "Landslide" by Fleetwood Mac and it just seemed a perfect time to say goodbye. And so I have. The kaiju episode I mentioned above is probably my favorite but the Scooby-Doo themed one with Korn is a close second. Like the Simpsons it doesn't seem this show will ever end, though it should have years ago. And the less said about the movie, the better.
King of the Hill: This show pretty much always seemed underrated. Except for a brief Tuesday stint it was nicely sandwiched between The Simpsons at 8 and Family Guy at 9. It made for a good bloc of TV so I didn't have to flip the channel. Anyway, this was from Mike Judge, the creator of Beavis and Butt-Head but was far more mature. Basically Hank Hill's character (and voice) was a younger version of Mr. Anderson from B&B. I always liked Hank because he was a Texas redneck and yet not the type who would fly a Confederate flag or sit on the border with Mexico with a shotgun. He was a Texas redneck even a liberal in Michigan could root for. Most of the series revolved around Hank's old-fashioned values conflicting with those of the modern world. My favorite episode was the first season one where Hank gets constipated and tries everything to get moving again. When he finally does go it's to the tune of "Ode to Joy" and if you've ever been constipated (really, really constipated) that's about how you feel when you do finally go.
Daria: This was technically a spin-off of Beavis & Butt-Head though completely different in tone, subject matter, and animation. Basically it focused on a nerdy teenage girl who cynically stood apart from all her vapid classmates. Like King of the Hill, it was mostly a conflict of values, though in this case cynicism/realism vs. idealism/political correctness. My favorite episode is one where Daria is stuck on writing a story and so her mom suggests she write more than "what she knows;" that she should write how she wants things to work out, which makes for a poignant story. I watched the whole series again last winter and it does still hold up pretty well even if it's from before all the kids had cell phones.
Futurama: This was the Simpsons team's second attempt to branch out and it was a little more successful. For a little while you had this on at 7:30 then the Simpsons at 8 and then King of the Hill at 8:30, so that was another good bloc of watching. It was a fun show if you liked sci-fi stuff mixed with a lot of pop culture references thanks to the heads in jars that allowed them to work in current celebrities. Most memorable was the episode where they had almost the whole cast of the original Star Trek. I think only James Doohan held out, except for DeForrest Kelley, who was dead by that point I'm pretty sure. That episode also features Shatner doing a spoken word version of Eminem. "How do you do a spoken word version of a rap song?" "He found a way." I didn't really like any of the straight-to-DVD movies, but they were enough to get the show back on Comedy Central for a few more years that were OK but probably not as good.
Dilbert: I remember watching this on UPN (when I think it was still UPN) and not really thinking all that much of it. Recently it was on Crackle and I found out there were actually two seasons, though I think I only watched the first one. I think my problem back in the day was the stories didn't necessarily make a lot of sense, like they got too surreal. For instance when Dilbert accidentally destroys a satellite and it leads to the fall of all civilization. Watching it again I still didn't like it all that much, though whenever Dogbert was involved it was a lot more watchable. Dogbert was like an amalgamation of Brian (being a dog) and Stewie (the Machiavellian schemes) from Family Guy. Really they should have made a spinoff all about Dogbert and I would have liked it much better. Anyway, co-creator Larry Charles worked on Seinfeld so Seinfeld stars Jason Alexander, Wayne Knight, and the big Sein himself all appear on the show. Just an interesting factoid to throw out there. Really I think the show should have grounded itself in more office humor, like the funniest bits from "Office Space;" that's what people could relate to.
Family Guy: You didn't think I'd leave this out, right? Like most of America I pretty much ignored the initial runs of the show in the late 90s, early 2000s. But like most of America I started tuning in when it came back in 2005. There were some good episodes, though by 2013 I was pretty much done with it. The comedy started to get a lot more mean-spirited, like the feud between Brian the dog and Quagmire, whom to that point had never seemed to have a problem but all the sudden they hated each other. Then there was the extremely unfunny 150th episode where Stewie and Brian are locked in a bank vault. And then they overused the time travel stuff; it was funny the first couple of times but really got to be too much. By the time they "killed" Brian I was done with the show. My favorite is from 2005 when Peter and Stewie go to Disney World. There are so many memorable bits in that, like when Brian does the "Peanut Butter & Jelly" song. Though my favorite quote is from an early episode where Peter says, "This will take some of my cunning...no, all my cunning." Like the Simpsons and South Park this show just seems destined to limp on forever. Probably a good idea since Seth MacFarlane's last two movies didn't do so hot and American Dad is on life support and The Cleveland Show is gone.
American Dad: I was a late comer to this series. Interestingly this was supposed to be Seth MacFarlane's comeback on Fox but then Family Guy rose from the ashes and this got shunted to the back-burner. Perhaps like much of America I just assumed it was more Family Guy but that couldn't be further from the truth. Really it's more like King of the Hill in how rabid conservative Stan Smith's values conflict with the world around him, including most of his family. Unlike Family Guy, where the humor is largely driven by "cutaway gags", the humor in American Dad spins out of the conflict between Stan and the world and the often completely ridiculous problems this creates, plus the alien Roger who puts on various "disguises" to create mayhem. The XMas episodes are really where they let it all hang out. One has Stan going back in time and accidentally getting Martin Scorcese off coke in the 70s, which leads to the USSR taking over the world. In another Stan and his wife are fucking in the church basement when the Rapture strikes and so they're "left below" to face a Mad Max-type dystopia. Another the Smith family faces off against Santa Claus in a LOTR-style epic battle. My favorite episode though is where Stan decides to toughen up his son Steve by bullying him, until Steve hires Stan's old bully to kick Stan's ass. The show got cut by Fox last year but was picked up off waivers by TBS for a season that I mostly had to watch on Amazon because I didn't have TBS a lot of the time it was on. It was an OK season but probably not the greatest. I think it's still on for next year, though again I'll probably have to watch on Amazon.
Archer: While ostensibly this was a secret agent spoof the first season of this was mostly "The Office" if the office were that of a spy agency. The best episodes are when dumb but extraordinarily lucky secret agent Sterling Archer and the gang get out of the office to attempt to foil sabotage on a blimp or obtain some blackmail information from the Grand Prix in Monaco. The episodes where they go into space, under the sea, and into a body are probably a little too much. The 5th season "Archer Vice" was mostly lame as the gang goes on the run and attempt to be first drug dealers and then arms merchants, neither of which went well. I was glad when the show got them back to doing more spy stuff this year, though now it seems we might be in for another "Vice"-type season. I hope not. My favorite is probably the end of the second season when Archer is going to marry a hot ex-KGB agent only for her to be killed by Cyborg Barry. I like when they occasionally let Archer have real feelings. I did like the beginning of the 4th season where Sterling Archer gets amnesia and thinks he's Bob of "Bob's Burgers" as of course H Jon Benjamin does both characters--in the same voice, which is pretty lame.
Chozen: This was an attempt by the creators of Archer to branch out and for for one season it followed "Archer Vice" and I often watched it because I was too lazy to change the channel. The setup is the titular character is a white guy who gets out of jail and attempts to resume his quest to become a famous rapper. Since he was in jail he found the company of men, so part of the wackiness of the setup is this gay white guy is trying to be a rapper. I'm not into rap so it really didn't sound interesting, but I gradually warmed to the show. The best episode I remember seeing was when he gets a job on a kid's show and then does this awesome rap telling kids to basically do the complete opposite of all that Sesame Street/Barney/Mr. Rogers Neighborhood stuff. I think my nieces embraced that philosophy. If they had brought this back for a second season after Archer I wouldn't have minded. But they didn't.
Robot Chicken: This is stop-motion animation not traditional animation, but so what? It's another show I was a later convert to after someone else mentioned it. The episodes are only about 11 minutes long and like any sketch comedy show there are hits and misses. A lot of the sketches revolve around old toys like He-Man, GI Joe, and Transformers, stuff I played with as well as toys my sisters played with like She-Ra, Strawberry Shortcake, and Jem. There have also been whole special episodes revolving around Star Wars and DC Comics heroes--a third one of those is airing sometime soon. There are original bits too, some that work better than others. It's fun when they do a sketch on really obscure toys that I remember like last year there was one about Visionaries. Remember those? They were kind of like GI Joe figures that had these hologram animals on their chests that were supposed to give them the power of that animal. In the sketch one guy gets stuck with some weird little fish that swims up people's urethra. My least favorite bit was one about some guy going around shooting monkeys for no reason; this was just after the Sandy Hook shootings so it felt pretty awkward. My most favorite sketch was the start of the 4th season. The creators of the show are trying to get work and first seek out Joss Whedon, who tries to kill Seth Green for leaving "the Whedonverse." Then they go to Ron Moore of "Battlestar Galactica" who tries to kill them, thinking they're Cylons in disguise. Finally they go to Seth MacFarlane, who uses the power of the cutaway gag to get Robot Chicken renewed. (These never sound as funny when you try to describe them.) The second best was the epic 100th episode, most of which is a video game-style fight between the titular robot chicken and like every other recurring character who has been on the show until the final Boss Battle with the mad scientist who created him. It was really how milestone episodes should be celebrated--by kicking a lot of ass! You can actually watch this on Hulu Plus now, though the first season isn't as good because like other shows the animation is crude by comparison to later on.
Titan Maximum: This was an attempt by the creators of Robot Chicken to branch out. It didn't really work out. It's a funny send-up of "Voltron" and "Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers" about an extremely dysfunctional giant robot team. When a former member of the team unveils a diabolical plan to take over the solar system the team has to acquire new members (the leader's nerdy little brother and a chimpanzee janitor who doesn't speak or make any facial movements really) and bring Titan Maximum out of retirement. I always wished the run-time were longer than 11 minutes because while that's fine for a sketch show like "Robot Chicken" it doesn't work as well for scripted shows, which is probably the problem I have watching most anything else on Adult Swim. I think you'd probably have to buy the DVD for this on Amazon or maybe you can find it online somewhere. There was not a season two and Season 1 ended about like how you should have expected it to. BTW, Lando Calrissian himself, Billy Dee Williams, voices the admiral who (reluctantly) manages the team. Another interesting factoid.
Mike Tyson Mysteries: This was one of the rare other Adult Swim shows I watched. It was really bizarre for the most part. The animation and general setup are supposed to be like Scooby-Doo but the plots really never seem to make a lot of sense. The premiere episode involved going to Cormac McCarthy's ranch to help him finish the end of his latest book, but then they're terrorized by a "ghost" and find out Cormac McCarthy is a centaur. Um, yeah. I really don't have any favorite episodes but I guess if you ever wanted to see Mike Tyson running around in a Mystery Machine van, this is for you!
Bojack Horseman: I talked about this on the 7th, so go read that! But I thought I should include it again. Overall I thought it was good, though I've only seen it once through so I'm not sure what a favorite or least favorite episode would be. As I said Friday it's a weirdly serious show about a horse-looking person who used to be a famous actor. Will Arnett is the titular Bojack while Aaron Paul is the slacker human Todd, who lives on Bojack's couch. There are cameos by Alan Arkin, JK Simmons, and Lisa Kudrow among others, though I don't think there's any real connections there. Just some more interesting factoids to pass along.
Other than The Cleveland Show, Bob's Burgers, and most everything not Robot Chicken-related on Adult Swim, I'm not sure how many others I missed. Well, I wouldn't say I missed them. Obviously. I suppose there were shows like "Capitol Critters" from when Simpsonsmania struck the nation and other networks thought they should try their hand at animated shows. But let's face it, no one saw those.
Friday, August 21, 2015
Movies! 8/21/15 Plus More Stuff I Watched
Last week proved that people liked Straight Outta Compton a lot more than Man From UNCLE, which doesn't really matter to me since I'll wait to watch them on DVD or streaming. (Meanwhile, Fantastic Four continued its fantastic demise, losing almost 80% of its audience. Look for it in the second-run theaters in about two weeks.)
Another movie to watch on DVD or streaming comes out this week: American Ultra. I keep seeing ads for it on my Roku, which doesn't really make me want to watch it. Jesse Eisenberg is some kind of stoner Jason Bourne and Kristen Stewart is involved, though the two look like brother and sister. And Topher Grace is after them for whatever reason. I seriously doubt anyone will care. Of the three stars really I think only Eisenberg is still relevant.
In a similar vein there's Hitman: Agent 47, which is based on a video game series. I have Hitman: Absolution on my computer from Steam, though I don't think I ever bothered to play it. Since pretty much every video game movie ever in the history of the universe has stunk like rotten eggs, I wouldn't hope for much. But hey, maybe this will be the first, right?
Maybe there's some other stuff, but I think we've had all the real blockbuster stuff now. I'll probably just retire this feature for a while. On to November with the last Hunger Games and then of course Star Wars at XMas! In the meantime, well, maybe it's time to catch up on stuff on Netflix or Hulu or Amazon.
With that in mind, stuff I watched!
The Gunman: speaking of movies I waited to watch on DVD, this is one of them. This is from the Luc Besson action movie factory and while it follows the same formula as Taken or other recent movies from Besson's people, this really lacks the frenetic action of the Taken series. Though there are some OK set pieces, the last involving a bull ring. In the credits the city of Barcelona stresses they have not hosted bullfighting since 2011, but let's not let that get in the way of the story, right? Hollywood. Anyway, Sean Penn is a former assassin whose handlers are facing an investigation and so try to wrap up some loose ends, ie him. Pretty standard action movie plot. The main wrinkle is that the girl Sean Penn loved ended up marrying one of his former bosses in Javier Bardem. Besides those guys and Ray Winstone you also have Idris Elba cashing a paycheck as an Interpol agent who does almost nothing. Overall it wasn't really that great. As I said, it's kind of slow. This is why I wait to watch certain movies, so I only spend $1.50 instead of $5 or more. BTW, if you're a fan of Fast Times at Ridgemont High there's a scene where Sean Penn is surfing in the Congo. (2/5)
Community: Like "My Name is Earl" and "Parks & Recreation" this was an NBC show I figured I'd probably like if I ever bothered to watch it. I did watch the first couple episodes when they originally aired, but I could never remember to watch it when it was on, so now I can catch up on Hulu, except for season 6 which was only on Yahoo. Anyway, like I said, I figured I'd like it and I have, mostly. The problem as always with a show like this is romantic entanglements usually stop the humor dead in its tracks. That got to be annoying on "Friends" and it's why I stopped watching "Pscyh" when they hooked the main character up with the female cop. Like Abed says in the show, I'd rather watch far out adventures than relationship stuff. The first couple of seasons flirt with that, but at least don't make it the whole show. I'm not sure if they'll ever get around to making a movie or not, but this was a good show. An interesting factoid is that besides creator Dan Harmon as executive producers you have the Russo brothers who have now been handed the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Neil Goldman and Garrett Donovan who originally wrote on Family Guy and then worked on Scrubs, which this show resembles in some ways--and not just because it aired on NBC except for a final season that aired somewhere else. (3/5)
Blue Mountain State: Speaking of college, there's this show that some years ago aired on Spike TV. Does Spike still exist or is it something else now? I don't have cable so I don't know. Anyway, since Spike billed itself as TV for Men (basically a gender swapped Lifetime) this show is a male-centric parody of college life that's mostly sex, drinking, drugs, and occasional football practices. It focuses on three college freshmen who go to the eponymous school, a football powerhouse. One is a star running back, one is a backup quarterback who wants to play as little football as possible while reaping the football team benefits (ie booze and broads), and the other is his nerdy friend who deposes the school mascot--a guy in a goat costume, not a lovable bulldog. It's some raunchy fun though not Shakespeare by any stretch. BTW, in the 4th episode Stephen Ammell of "Arrow" has a cameo as the starting quarterback. He's also in the final episode of the first season, where his big contribution is throwing up. But it makes you wonder how good Oliver Queen would be at quarterback. He ought to have good arm strength at least. (2/5)
The Lost Boys: Another cheesy 80s movie I had somehow neglected watching up to this point. And I mean it's totally 80s cheesy. They probably went through a couple cases of hairspray a day on the set. The Coreys (which one of them is dead now? I always forget) fight vampire Kiefer Sutherland and Bill S Preston, Esquire. And also there's Jason Patric. Honestly it's so cheesy that it's just cringe-worthy. It's not really a surprise Joel Schumacher directed it. Has this been remade yet? Seems like a perfect subject for an even lamer remake. (2/5)
War: This starts off as a typical Jason Statham action movie. His partner is killed by an Asian assasin named Rogue while they're investigating a war between the yakuza and Triads, basically the Japanese vs. Chinese Mafia in San Francisco. Three years later Rogue returns and blah blah blah fighting, gunplay, etc. I started tuning out. Then it takes a couple of twists at the end that might not be extremely plausible but at least save it from being too predictable. An interesting factoid is a couple of years later, Jason Statham and Jet Li would join forces as part of Sly Stallone's Expendables. (2/5)
Magician: This was a biography of Orson Welles I watched on Amazon. It didn't seem particularly insightful. I mean you could probably get just as much reading his Wikipedia page. At least I assume he has one of those. BTW, it's disappointing they never mention Transformers the Movie which was probably his last role since it aired a year after he died. It was my first encounter with his work because you know I was 9 at the time so obviously I wasn't watching "Citizen Kane" yet. (2/5)
Another movie to watch on DVD or streaming comes out this week: American Ultra. I keep seeing ads for it on my Roku, which doesn't really make me want to watch it. Jesse Eisenberg is some kind of stoner Jason Bourne and Kristen Stewart is involved, though the two look like brother and sister. And Topher Grace is after them for whatever reason. I seriously doubt anyone will care. Of the three stars really I think only Eisenberg is still relevant.
In a similar vein there's Hitman: Agent 47, which is based on a video game series. I have Hitman: Absolution on my computer from Steam, though I don't think I ever bothered to play it. Since pretty much every video game movie ever in the history of the universe has stunk like rotten eggs, I wouldn't hope for much. But hey, maybe this will be the first, right?
Maybe there's some other stuff, but I think we've had all the real blockbuster stuff now. I'll probably just retire this feature for a while. On to November with the last Hunger Games and then of course Star Wars at XMas! In the meantime, well, maybe it's time to catch up on stuff on Netflix or Hulu or Amazon.
With that in mind, stuff I watched!
The Gunman: speaking of movies I waited to watch on DVD, this is one of them. This is from the Luc Besson action movie factory and while it follows the same formula as Taken or other recent movies from Besson's people, this really lacks the frenetic action of the Taken series. Though there are some OK set pieces, the last involving a bull ring. In the credits the city of Barcelona stresses they have not hosted bullfighting since 2011, but let's not let that get in the way of the story, right? Hollywood. Anyway, Sean Penn is a former assassin whose handlers are facing an investigation and so try to wrap up some loose ends, ie him. Pretty standard action movie plot. The main wrinkle is that the girl Sean Penn loved ended up marrying one of his former bosses in Javier Bardem. Besides those guys and Ray Winstone you also have Idris Elba cashing a paycheck as an Interpol agent who does almost nothing. Overall it wasn't really that great. As I said, it's kind of slow. This is why I wait to watch certain movies, so I only spend $1.50 instead of $5 or more. BTW, if you're a fan of Fast Times at Ridgemont High there's a scene where Sean Penn is surfing in the Congo. (2/5)
Community: Like "My Name is Earl" and "Parks & Recreation" this was an NBC show I figured I'd probably like if I ever bothered to watch it. I did watch the first couple episodes when they originally aired, but I could never remember to watch it when it was on, so now I can catch up on Hulu, except for season 6 which was only on Yahoo. Anyway, like I said, I figured I'd like it and I have, mostly. The problem as always with a show like this is romantic entanglements usually stop the humor dead in its tracks. That got to be annoying on "Friends" and it's why I stopped watching "Pscyh" when they hooked the main character up with the female cop. Like Abed says in the show, I'd rather watch far out adventures than relationship stuff. The first couple of seasons flirt with that, but at least don't make it the whole show. I'm not sure if they'll ever get around to making a movie or not, but this was a good show. An interesting factoid is that besides creator Dan Harmon as executive producers you have the Russo brothers who have now been handed the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Neil Goldman and Garrett Donovan who originally wrote on Family Guy and then worked on Scrubs, which this show resembles in some ways--and not just because it aired on NBC except for a final season that aired somewhere else. (3/5)
Blue Mountain State: Speaking of college, there's this show that some years ago aired on Spike TV. Does Spike still exist or is it something else now? I don't have cable so I don't know. Anyway, since Spike billed itself as TV for Men (basically a gender swapped Lifetime) this show is a male-centric parody of college life that's mostly sex, drinking, drugs, and occasional football practices. It focuses on three college freshmen who go to the eponymous school, a football powerhouse. One is a star running back, one is a backup quarterback who wants to play as little football as possible while reaping the football team benefits (ie booze and broads), and the other is his nerdy friend who deposes the school mascot--a guy in a goat costume, not a lovable bulldog. It's some raunchy fun though not Shakespeare by any stretch. BTW, in the 4th episode Stephen Ammell of "Arrow" has a cameo as the starting quarterback. He's also in the final episode of the first season, where his big contribution is throwing up. But it makes you wonder how good Oliver Queen would be at quarterback. He ought to have good arm strength at least. (2/5)
The Lost Boys: Another cheesy 80s movie I had somehow neglected watching up to this point. And I mean it's totally 80s cheesy. They probably went through a couple cases of hairspray a day on the set. The Coreys (which one of them is dead now? I always forget) fight vampire Kiefer Sutherland and Bill S Preston, Esquire. And also there's Jason Patric. Honestly it's so cheesy that it's just cringe-worthy. It's not really a surprise Joel Schumacher directed it. Has this been remade yet? Seems like a perfect subject for an even lamer remake. (2/5)
War: This starts off as a typical Jason Statham action movie. His partner is killed by an Asian assasin named Rogue while they're investigating a war between the yakuza and Triads, basically the Japanese vs. Chinese Mafia in San Francisco. Three years later Rogue returns and blah blah blah fighting, gunplay, etc. I started tuning out. Then it takes a couple of twists at the end that might not be extremely plausible but at least save it from being too predictable. An interesting factoid is a couple of years later, Jason Statham and Jet Li would join forces as part of Sly Stallone's Expendables. (2/5)
Magician: This was a biography of Orson Welles I watched on Amazon. It didn't seem particularly insightful. I mean you could probably get just as much reading his Wikipedia page. At least I assume he has one of those. BTW, it's disappointing they never mention Transformers the Movie which was probably his last role since it aired a year after he died. It was my first encounter with his work because you know I was 9 at the time so obviously I wasn't watching "Citizen Kane" yet. (2/5)
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
Writing Wednesday: Art is Hard
It was probably about a month ago now when I read Tony Laplume's, The Song Remains the Same. It's a roman a clef about a young man growing up in rural Maine who likes Colin Farrell, Russell Crowe, Joel Schumacher movies, and WWE wrestling. All of which are things the author is into, which is why I refer to it as a roman a clef because it seems largely pulled from real life. That is what made the book interesting for me because it felt like I was learning something about the author through this fictionalized story.
Pretty much that same night I watched the documentary "American Movie" which was about a guy in Wisconsin in the 90s trying to make a horror movie called "Coven" (pronounced Coh-ven) so he could finance his magna opus "Northwestern." It takes years to make the short movie with budget problems and so forth. In the end I don't think he was really successful.
Then at the beginning of the month I watched "Birdman" again on HBO. That's the story of a washed-up Hollywood actor (Michael Keaton playing a fictionalized version of himself for the most part) who writes, directs, and stars in a play of Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." It's meant to be the actor's big comeback, but the play ends up driving him off the deep end, to the point he shoots his nose off trying to kill himself and then finishes the job by jumping out a hospital window.
Then like the next night I watched "Lost in la Mancha" which chronicles Terry Gilliam's attempts to make a Don Quixote movie. It took him years just to get the financing and then on the first day of shooting in Spain NATO jets are flying around to ruin the sound, a thunderstorm rolls in, and the 70-year-old French lead gets a couple of herniated discs and is out for weeks. Despite that, Gilliam still tried to plug along, which tells you just how committed he was, though he has never gotten the movie off the ground. I think now with CGI and stuff he probably could do it easier if he wanted, but that's neither here nor there.
Recently I watched "Magician" a documentary on Orson Welles. He faced a lot of obstacles in making his movies from "Citizen Kane" on to the last ones he made. It's funny that after "Citizen Kane" which was severely frowned upon by the studio system Welles was pretty much blacklisted from directing another movie so for the next few years he was in movies that listed other directors and yet he apparently was still doing a lot of the directing uncredited. That either makes you really passionate or a huge control freak--or both.
After watching those movies, all this stuff congealed in my brain to come out with that profound message in the title: Art is Hard. If you really think about it, artists of any stripe put so much effort into trying to create something. It's more than just raw effort; they often put themselves into it. They pour their hearts and souls into something and in the former two cases it didn't necessarily amount to a lot and the last case it only led to a sad documentary.
I have a book sort of like Tony's called The Changing Seasons. Though it's not entirely a roman a clef because there are some significant differences, but it's probably the closest to that I've come. I was trying out that old axiom "write what you know" almost literally. Anyway, I'm not sure I ever bothered trying to shop it to agents or publishers. I think I never got up the nerve when I wrote it in 2003 and by the time I self-published it I realized no one was going to care anyway because it wasn't the type of story with vampires or werewolves or wizards in it. I was dismayed to see that since I had published it on Amazon it had a grand total of 0 sales. So I bought a copy myself just so it would have a sales ranking. (Though I had originally published it under another name so maybe it sold a copy or two under that other name.)
Again it's an example of putting a lot of hard work and heart and soul into a project to the collective yawn of the world. That's one of the hardest parts of art of any type. You put hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades of work into something and then you show it off and people go, "Meh." If they bother to notice it at all.
I should probably say to keep your chin up and keep trying and maybe someday things will pan out, but does that sound like me at all? Actually that's what I tell myself about my job search: keep trying because the next job you interview for might be "the one." That's probably delusional, but it's the only way you can keep from giving up.
I do have to respect and admire when people do put their heart and soul into something. It's different from what I was talking about in my "About the Author" post where an author makes their main character look exactly like them and have their exact same interests. I'm talking about more than superficial details, about really putting your personal stamp on something. It can be a lot of effort and personal tragedy for quite possibly no return on investment.
Or maybe I'm talking out of my ass. That happens a lot, right?
Pretty much that same night I watched the documentary "American Movie" which was about a guy in Wisconsin in the 90s trying to make a horror movie called "Coven" (pronounced Coh-ven) so he could finance his magna opus "Northwestern." It takes years to make the short movie with budget problems and so forth. In the end I don't think he was really successful.
Then at the beginning of the month I watched "Birdman" again on HBO. That's the story of a washed-up Hollywood actor (Michael Keaton playing a fictionalized version of himself for the most part) who writes, directs, and stars in a play of Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." It's meant to be the actor's big comeback, but the play ends up driving him off the deep end, to the point he shoots his nose off trying to kill himself and then finishes the job by jumping out a hospital window.
Then like the next night I watched "Lost in la Mancha" which chronicles Terry Gilliam's attempts to make a Don Quixote movie. It took him years just to get the financing and then on the first day of shooting in Spain NATO jets are flying around to ruin the sound, a thunderstorm rolls in, and the 70-year-old French lead gets a couple of herniated discs and is out for weeks. Despite that, Gilliam still tried to plug along, which tells you just how committed he was, though he has never gotten the movie off the ground. I think now with CGI and stuff he probably could do it easier if he wanted, but that's neither here nor there.
Recently I watched "Magician" a documentary on Orson Welles. He faced a lot of obstacles in making his movies from "Citizen Kane" on to the last ones he made. It's funny that after "Citizen Kane" which was severely frowned upon by the studio system Welles was pretty much blacklisted from directing another movie so for the next few years he was in movies that listed other directors and yet he apparently was still doing a lot of the directing uncredited. That either makes you really passionate or a huge control freak--or both.
After watching those movies, all this stuff congealed in my brain to come out with that profound message in the title: Art is Hard. If you really think about it, artists of any stripe put so much effort into trying to create something. It's more than just raw effort; they often put themselves into it. They pour their hearts and souls into something and in the former two cases it didn't necessarily amount to a lot and the last case it only led to a sad documentary.
I have a book sort of like Tony's called The Changing Seasons. Though it's not entirely a roman a clef because there are some significant differences, but it's probably the closest to that I've come. I was trying out that old axiom "write what you know" almost literally. Anyway, I'm not sure I ever bothered trying to shop it to agents or publishers. I think I never got up the nerve when I wrote it in 2003 and by the time I self-published it I realized no one was going to care anyway because it wasn't the type of story with vampires or werewolves or wizards in it. I was dismayed to see that since I had published it on Amazon it had a grand total of 0 sales. So I bought a copy myself just so it would have a sales ranking. (Though I had originally published it under another name so maybe it sold a copy or two under that other name.)
Again it's an example of putting a lot of hard work and heart and soul into a project to the collective yawn of the world. That's one of the hardest parts of art of any type. You put hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades of work into something and then you show it off and people go, "Meh." If they bother to notice it at all.
I should probably say to keep your chin up and keep trying and maybe someday things will pan out, but does that sound like me at all? Actually that's what I tell myself about my job search: keep trying because the next job you interview for might be "the one." That's probably delusional, but it's the only way you can keep from giving up.
I do have to respect and admire when people do put their heart and soul into something. It's different from what I was talking about in my "About the Author" post where an author makes their main character look exactly like them and have their exact same interests. I'm talking about more than superficial details, about really putting your personal stamp on something. It can be a lot of effort and personal tragedy for quite possibly no return on investment.
Or maybe I'm talking out of my ass. That happens a lot, right?
Monday, August 17, 2015
Superhero Movie Team-Up: Ant-Man & Fantastic Four
As I did last year and some other years before that, I decided to catch up on a couple of movies by doing a double feature. There's always some planning that goes into that to coordinate which movie to see at which time in which theater. Last year I watched "Godzilla" and "X-Men Days of Future Past." This year it was two more superhero movies: "Ant-Man" and "Fantastic Four."
As luck would have it, I did this chronologically, mostly because "Ant-Man" was showing the earlier of the two at 10:10. You may have guessed that a movie that's been out for nearly a month isn't a huge draw at 10:10 on a Thursday morning. There was literally no one else in the theater. At first I thought, "Awesome!" Because it meant when my foot fell asleep I could walk around and later I could put up the cupholders and lounge on a couple of chairs.
The downside is that at the scene when Corey Stoll goes to Michael Douglas's house, the screen suddenly went black. At first I sat there and thought, "Is this part of the movie?" Then I realized there wasn't any sound. I guess the theater people didn't see me and so thought there was no one in the theater and why play a movie no one's watching? Except I was watching! So I went out and told the "concierge" and she got the movie started again. They had to fast forward it back to about the part where I left off, at which point it's probably good they're using digital stuff not real film, right?
I wasn't really mad because I get why they did it, though maybe they should have turned on the lights to actually look in the theater for anyone--and so I could easily find my way out of there. But on the plus side I got a free pass, so it's like the movie was free.
That's actually a lot more than I have to say about the movie itself. I mean you've already seen it, right? To sum up the movie it's another Marvel movie. This is a good and bad thing. It's like Pixar (another Disney division) where sure their movies are good (those I've seen) and as sort of a consequence of being good consistently there's not much to say because you've already said it before. "Ant-Man" is another slick, easily-forgettable Marvel confection like Thor 2 or the Iron Man sequels that's not a bad addition, but isn't really great either. I'd buy the DVD, but it's not the first one I'd put on to watch.
The only bad thing to say about it is the Michael Pena character seemed to drop in from a Michael Bay movie. I mean the broad, borderline racist stereotype character. A "La Cucaracha" horn? Really? I'm sure that was Adam McKay's writing, not Edgar Wright's. I mean the former wrote "Anchorman" while the latter writes slightly more subtle British humor. And if you've seen movies like "End of Watch" you know Pena's better than that crap material. Try a little harder next time, guys. I was glad to see at the end Edgar Wright got writing/story credits and an executive producer credit, so at least they didn't totally shaft him after all the work he put into it.
Anyway, like I said it was good, a Marvel superhero movie with a little "Ocean's Eleven." (2.5/5)
Here's a completely useless fact I thought of. Since Michael Douglas was in this movie, it got me thinking that pretty much all the main cast in 2000's "Wonder Boys" has been in a superhero movie. It starred Michael Douglas (Ant-Man), Robert Downey Jr (Iron Man), Tobey Maguire (Spider-Man), Frances McDormand (Darkman) and Katie Holmes (Batman Begins). It's also probably the only chance you'll ever have to see Iron Man sleep with Spider-Man and Hank Pym with Batman's girlfriend and Darkman's girlfriend. Go impress people at a cocktail party or something with that useless trivia.
After lunch I went to see the much-maligned "Fantastic Four." It was not fantastic. (Hacky headline!) A couple of months ago I talked about how a movie can be doomed by something fundamental early on in its creation. A lot of people would point to hiring (and not firing) director Josh Trank. You know who's actually to blame: Marvel!
Not the Marvel studio arm; Marvel the comic book group. Before going to see the movie I read the first volume of Ultimate Fantastic Four (which was neither ultimate nor fantastic--hacky zinger!) on which the movie was based. That's the version that tried to come up with a more realistic way for the Fantastic Four to get their powers. It was different, but it was no less asinine than Stan Lee's "cosmic rays" origin.
In the comic book, Reed Richards is recruited as a teenager by Franklin Storm to help build a matter teleporter dealie at this school for super-gifted kids. Like the mutant school in X-Men if it were actually a school for geniuses and not a front to hide mutants. There Reed meets Franklin's daughter Sue and son Johnny and he starts to work with Victor van Damme (aka von Doom). They set up the teleporter prototype in Mexico and Reed's buddy Ben Grimm just so happens to be walking by when they're about to do the test. (I shit you not. That's the lame way they get Ben there. What a coinckydinck, right?) The teleporter explodes and the soon-to-be Fantastic Four and Doom are scattered around the world and brought back by the Army only to find they have superpowers now. I think I mentioned on the 7th that the powers are like the four elements: Fire (Human Torch--duh), Earth (Thing), Air (Sue Storm), Water (Mr. Fantastic). I'm not sure what happens to Doom because that's covered in Volume 2, which was not on sale thus I didn't buy it, though now I want to.
This is largely the origin story the movie uses. Does any of that really make any fucking sense? I don't think so. The problem then is basing your whole story on that is going to lead to a story that's overly convoluted. That's the word I thought of after seeing this movie: convoluted. It's entirely too much of a process to get them their superpowers. Can you think of any of the big Marvel franchises where getting powers is so complicated? I mean Tony Stark is captured and makes a suit, Thor is a god, Captain America gets injected with steroids, Scott Lang gets a shrinking suit from Hank Pym. The Hulk has failed twice because especially in the first case they got way too convoluted on the origin, but that was pre-"Cinematic universe" so it doesn't really count. Anyway, those are all pretty damned easy to explain. You don't need to be versed in quantum mechanics to get what's going on. Some studio exec should have asked the writers, "Um, guys, what the fuck are you talking about? Parallel universes and teleporters? Huh?"
One of the things you notice when watching "The Twilight Zone" marathons on Syfy is that the writers didn't come up with any convoluted ways for things to happen. Why's this guy walking into the desert in 1876 and suddenly transported to 1959? Who gives a shit!? We don't have time for lengthy explanations! So if you want a writing lesson out of all this: simplify, man. That's something I usually do in my gender swap books. How does this guy turn into a woman? Magic or a lab accident or...who really gives a fuck?! You're not reading it for explanations, just like you're not watching superhero movies for sciencey stuff. Honestly, as goofy as "cosmic rays" sounds, it's better to just go with that and move on than spend an hour on bullshit no one understands or cares about. Plus then there was actually a reason for Ben Grimm to be around.
Anyway, despite all that, I don't think this was nearly as bad as many people claimed. I think it's one of those cases like 2003's "Daredevil" where it became a cause celebre to hate on the movie. I'm not saying it's a great movie either, but it's not anywhere as terrible as "Batman & Robin" or "The Spirit." It's not even as bad as Ang Lee's "Hulk." If you can pretend to understand why teleporting to another dimension gives people superpowers, then it's a reasonably OK story.
The first hour is fine, as they do all that sciencey bullshit I mentioned above. They could have sold the Reed-Sue love thing better. And as the Geek Twins pointed out, there was really no point to the black Johnny Storm. There was no real time where you thought him and Sue were siblings. And what relevance was there to her being adopted from Kosovo? For as much as that contributed to the plot she could have been from Walla Walla or Anchorage or Whogivesafuck. While they were starting off showing Ben and Reed becoming friends in fifth grade, why didn't they have a scene showing Dr. Storm adopting Sue or something? It could have been like when Idris Elba rescues the Asian girl in "Pacific Rim" after a monster attack; Dr. Storm could have been over there and found little Sue with no parents and decided to take her home with him to America. Maybe that's in Trank's "fantastic" version that didn't air. It makes sense actually if she were originally from Latveria, like Doom. So in the beginning you have war-ravaged Latveria and Dr. Storm saves little Sue while Victor von Doom remains there for some time. That adds to Doom's interest in Sue later on after they meet.
The last half-hour or so is where people say it really got off the rails. I think the fight with Doom was OK, though it could have been bigger. But then if they'd fought Doom in New York and smashed it up I suppose people would have bitched like with "Man of Steel" right? Even Doom's crappy look made sense--from a certain point of view.
But again, part of the problem here goes back to the source material. As I said, Doom doesn't even show up in Ultimate Fantastic Four until Volume 2, which is at least 7 issues in. What happens in the first volume? After they get their powers, they fight a weird monster and then rescue Sue from Moleman and his mold people underground. (I shit you not. That is what happens. And yes they are people made of mold--or some plant material.) Now ask yourself, does that sound like a better ending to you? It sounds completely asinine to me. Mark Millar and Brian Michael Bendis have written some great comic books, but this really wasn't one of them.
You know, when you think about it, this movie did pretty much use the Marvel Movie Formula. Pretty much Every Marvel Origin Movie: Hero(es) is a screw-up, gets powers, decides to fight evil, faces dark mirror image of himself, cookie scenes. It's just between the convoluted science crap, a lack of decent jokes, and Kate Mara's bad hairpieces, the formula didn't add up to success this time.
I guess being a superhero story underdog myself, I have a soft spot for superhero movies that tried and didn't entirely pan out like "Daredevil" or "Darkman." This is another to add to the list. (2/5)
Fox might go ahead with a sequel despite low sales (or is using this as a negotiating ploy with Marvel) and I think that could work. Obviously you have to get a new director, but now that the convoluted origin story is done, they're a little more free with what they can do. I'd suggest finding better source material, though.
Both of these movies were plagued by production problems, Ant-Man losing its director and Fantastic Four's director pretty much going nuts if the rumors are true. That's a perfect lead-in to Wednesday's blog post: Art is Hard.
As luck would have it, I did this chronologically, mostly because "Ant-Man" was showing the earlier of the two at 10:10. You may have guessed that a movie that's been out for nearly a month isn't a huge draw at 10:10 on a Thursday morning. There was literally no one else in the theater. At first I thought, "Awesome!" Because it meant when my foot fell asleep I could walk around and later I could put up the cupholders and lounge on a couple of chairs.
The downside is that at the scene when Corey Stoll goes to Michael Douglas's house, the screen suddenly went black. At first I sat there and thought, "Is this part of the movie?" Then I realized there wasn't any sound. I guess the theater people didn't see me and so thought there was no one in the theater and why play a movie no one's watching? Except I was watching! So I went out and told the "concierge" and she got the movie started again. They had to fast forward it back to about the part where I left off, at which point it's probably good they're using digital stuff not real film, right?
I wasn't really mad because I get why they did it, though maybe they should have turned on the lights to actually look in the theater for anyone--and so I could easily find my way out of there. But on the plus side I got a free pass, so it's like the movie was free.
That's actually a lot more than I have to say about the movie itself. I mean you've already seen it, right? To sum up the movie it's another Marvel movie. This is a good and bad thing. It's like Pixar (another Disney division) where sure their movies are good (those I've seen) and as sort of a consequence of being good consistently there's not much to say because you've already said it before. "Ant-Man" is another slick, easily-forgettable Marvel confection like Thor 2 or the Iron Man sequels that's not a bad addition, but isn't really great either. I'd buy the DVD, but it's not the first one I'd put on to watch.
The only bad thing to say about it is the Michael Pena character seemed to drop in from a Michael Bay movie. I mean the broad, borderline racist stereotype character. A "La Cucaracha" horn? Really? I'm sure that was Adam McKay's writing, not Edgar Wright's. I mean the former wrote "Anchorman" while the latter writes slightly more subtle British humor. And if you've seen movies like "End of Watch" you know Pena's better than that crap material. Try a little harder next time, guys. I was glad to see at the end Edgar Wright got writing/story credits and an executive producer credit, so at least they didn't totally shaft him after all the work he put into it.
Anyway, like I said it was good, a Marvel superhero movie with a little "Ocean's Eleven." (2.5/5)
Here's a completely useless fact I thought of. Since Michael Douglas was in this movie, it got me thinking that pretty much all the main cast in 2000's "Wonder Boys" has been in a superhero movie. It starred Michael Douglas (Ant-Man), Robert Downey Jr (Iron Man), Tobey Maguire (Spider-Man), Frances McDormand (Darkman) and Katie Holmes (Batman Begins). It's also probably the only chance you'll ever have to see Iron Man sleep with Spider-Man and Hank Pym with Batman's girlfriend and Darkman's girlfriend. Go impress people at a cocktail party or something with that useless trivia.
After lunch I went to see the much-maligned "Fantastic Four." It was not fantastic. (Hacky headline!) A couple of months ago I talked about how a movie can be doomed by something fundamental early on in its creation. A lot of people would point to hiring (and not firing) director Josh Trank. You know who's actually to blame: Marvel!
Not the Marvel studio arm; Marvel the comic book group. Before going to see the movie I read the first volume of Ultimate Fantastic Four (which was neither ultimate nor fantastic--hacky zinger!) on which the movie was based. That's the version that tried to come up with a more realistic way for the Fantastic Four to get their powers. It was different, but it was no less asinine than Stan Lee's "cosmic rays" origin.
In the comic book, Reed Richards is recruited as a teenager by Franklin Storm to help build a matter teleporter dealie at this school for super-gifted kids. Like the mutant school in X-Men if it were actually a school for geniuses and not a front to hide mutants. There Reed meets Franklin's daughter Sue and son Johnny and he starts to work with Victor van Damme (aka von Doom). They set up the teleporter prototype in Mexico and Reed's buddy Ben Grimm just so happens to be walking by when they're about to do the test. (I shit you not. That's the lame way they get Ben there. What a coinckydinck, right?) The teleporter explodes and the soon-to-be Fantastic Four and Doom are scattered around the world and brought back by the Army only to find they have superpowers now. I think I mentioned on the 7th that the powers are like the four elements: Fire (Human Torch--duh), Earth (Thing), Air (Sue Storm), Water (Mr. Fantastic). I'm not sure what happens to Doom because that's covered in Volume 2, which was not on sale thus I didn't buy it, though now I want to.
This is largely the origin story the movie uses. Does any of that really make any fucking sense? I don't think so. The problem then is basing your whole story on that is going to lead to a story that's overly convoluted. That's the word I thought of after seeing this movie: convoluted. It's entirely too much of a process to get them their superpowers. Can you think of any of the big Marvel franchises where getting powers is so complicated? I mean Tony Stark is captured and makes a suit, Thor is a god, Captain America gets injected with steroids, Scott Lang gets a shrinking suit from Hank Pym. The Hulk has failed twice because especially in the first case they got way too convoluted on the origin, but that was pre-"Cinematic universe" so it doesn't really count. Anyway, those are all pretty damned easy to explain. You don't need to be versed in quantum mechanics to get what's going on. Some studio exec should have asked the writers, "Um, guys, what the fuck are you talking about? Parallel universes and teleporters? Huh?"
One of the things you notice when watching "The Twilight Zone" marathons on Syfy is that the writers didn't come up with any convoluted ways for things to happen. Why's this guy walking into the desert in 1876 and suddenly transported to 1959? Who gives a shit!? We don't have time for lengthy explanations! So if you want a writing lesson out of all this: simplify, man. That's something I usually do in my gender swap books. How does this guy turn into a woman? Magic or a lab accident or...who really gives a fuck?! You're not reading it for explanations, just like you're not watching superhero movies for sciencey stuff. Honestly, as goofy as "cosmic rays" sounds, it's better to just go with that and move on than spend an hour on bullshit no one understands or cares about. Plus then there was actually a reason for Ben Grimm to be around.
Anyway, despite all that, I don't think this was nearly as bad as many people claimed. I think it's one of those cases like 2003's "Daredevil" where it became a cause celebre to hate on the movie. I'm not saying it's a great movie either, but it's not anywhere as terrible as "Batman & Robin" or "The Spirit." It's not even as bad as Ang Lee's "Hulk." If you can pretend to understand why teleporting to another dimension gives people superpowers, then it's a reasonably OK story.
The first hour is fine, as they do all that sciencey bullshit I mentioned above. They could have sold the Reed-Sue love thing better. And as the Geek Twins pointed out, there was really no point to the black Johnny Storm. There was no real time where you thought him and Sue were siblings. And what relevance was there to her being adopted from Kosovo? For as much as that contributed to the plot she could have been from Walla Walla or Anchorage or Whogivesafuck. While they were starting off showing Ben and Reed becoming friends in fifth grade, why didn't they have a scene showing Dr. Storm adopting Sue or something? It could have been like when Idris Elba rescues the Asian girl in "Pacific Rim" after a monster attack; Dr. Storm could have been over there and found little Sue with no parents and decided to take her home with him to America. Maybe that's in Trank's "fantastic" version that didn't air. It makes sense actually if she were originally from Latveria, like Doom. So in the beginning you have war-ravaged Latveria and Dr. Storm saves little Sue while Victor von Doom remains there for some time. That adds to Doom's interest in Sue later on after they meet.
The last half-hour or so is where people say it really got off the rails. I think the fight with Doom was OK, though it could have been bigger. But then if they'd fought Doom in New York and smashed it up I suppose people would have bitched like with "Man of Steel" right? Even Doom's crappy look made sense--from a certain point of view.
But again, part of the problem here goes back to the source material. As I said, Doom doesn't even show up in Ultimate Fantastic Four until Volume 2, which is at least 7 issues in. What happens in the first volume? After they get their powers, they fight a weird monster and then rescue Sue from Moleman and his mold people underground. (I shit you not. That is what happens. And yes they are people made of mold--or some plant material.) Now ask yourself, does that sound like a better ending to you? It sounds completely asinine to me. Mark Millar and Brian Michael Bendis have written some great comic books, but this really wasn't one of them.
You know, when you think about it, this movie did pretty much use the Marvel Movie Formula. Pretty much Every Marvel Origin Movie: Hero(es) is a screw-up, gets powers, decides to fight evil, faces dark mirror image of himself, cookie scenes. It's just between the convoluted science crap, a lack of decent jokes, and Kate Mara's bad hairpieces, the formula didn't add up to success this time.
I guess being a superhero story underdog myself, I have a soft spot for superhero movies that tried and didn't entirely pan out like "Daredevil" or "Darkman." This is another to add to the list. (2/5)
Fox might go ahead with a sequel despite low sales (or is using this as a negotiating ploy with Marvel) and I think that could work. Obviously you have to get a new director, but now that the convoluted origin story is done, they're a little more free with what they can do. I'd suggest finding better source material, though.
Both of these movies were plagued by production problems, Ant-Man losing its director and Fantastic Four's director pretty much going nuts if the rumors are true. That's a perfect lead-in to Wednesday's blog post: Art is Hard.
Friday, August 14, 2015
Movies! 8/14/15
Fantastic Four Was a Fantastic Failure--I'm sure a hacky headline like that has probably appeared in many places.
This week to challenge Mission: Impossible is "The Man from UNCLE" where in the 60s Superman faces off against that guy from the crappy Lone Ranger movie and his bad Russian accent. (Doesn't Russia have any actors they could hire so we don't have to hear the same lame Chekov from Star Trek/Boris & Natasha accent every time?) Like Mission: Impossible it's based on an old TV show that not being 60-something I never watched. I'm sure most people are the same. Since Henry Cavill isn't hanging off airplanes I'm not sure this has much of a future. Plus airing two weeks after Mission: Impossible, people might not be ready for another spy thriller.
Of course timing is everything in the movie business. Especially in recent years everyone's jockeying to get the first big blockbuster of the year. Used to be like when Star Wars came out in 1977 it wasn't until around Memorial Day that the big movies would come out. Then Marvel pushed it to the first week of May with Iron Man and Avengers. Now we've seen studios pushing it back even more like when Captain America 2 came out in April 2014 or Fast & Furious 7 came out in April 2015. Sometimes you even get March like the first Hunger Games movie or Batman v Superman next year.
Anyway, a lot of times you get movies that come out when they really shouldn't. Like say the Ryan Reynolds/Ben Kingsley thriller "Selfless" that came out July 10. Do you remember it? No, because it got lost in the shuffle with far more prominent movies like "Minions" and "Jurassic World." Movies like that are more September or October fare, in between the big "summer" and "holiday" seasons. Or January/February when they just dump all their shit out.
You think a movie studio would hire me? I hear Relativity Media is bankrupt; maybe I could help them turn it around. I literally can't do worse, right?
The other major release this week is "Straight Outta Compton." This movie focusing on Dr. Dre and Ice Cube (not Ice-T, right? and sure as hell not Vanilla Ice) in their early career could quite possibly win the weekend. It has already "broken the Internet" with a bunch of memes. So even if it doesn't make a bunch of money it has that going for it, which isn't a lot.
BTW, my plan was to do a double feature on Thursday to see "Ant-Man" (finally) and "Fantastic Four." How did it go? Find out Monday!
This week to challenge Mission: Impossible is "The Man from UNCLE" where in the 60s Superman faces off against that guy from the crappy Lone Ranger movie and his bad Russian accent. (Doesn't Russia have any actors they could hire so we don't have to hear the same lame Chekov from Star Trek/Boris & Natasha accent every time?) Like Mission: Impossible it's based on an old TV show that not being 60-something I never watched. I'm sure most people are the same. Since Henry Cavill isn't hanging off airplanes I'm not sure this has much of a future. Plus airing two weeks after Mission: Impossible, people might not be ready for another spy thriller.
Of course timing is everything in the movie business. Especially in recent years everyone's jockeying to get the first big blockbuster of the year. Used to be like when Star Wars came out in 1977 it wasn't until around Memorial Day that the big movies would come out. Then Marvel pushed it to the first week of May with Iron Man and Avengers. Now we've seen studios pushing it back even more like when Captain America 2 came out in April 2014 or Fast & Furious 7 came out in April 2015. Sometimes you even get March like the first Hunger Games movie or Batman v Superman next year.
Anyway, a lot of times you get movies that come out when they really shouldn't. Like say the Ryan Reynolds/Ben Kingsley thriller "Selfless" that came out July 10. Do you remember it? No, because it got lost in the shuffle with far more prominent movies like "Minions" and "Jurassic World." Movies like that are more September or October fare, in between the big "summer" and "holiday" seasons. Or January/February when they just dump all their shit out.
You think a movie studio would hire me? I hear Relativity Media is bankrupt; maybe I could help them turn it around. I literally can't do worse, right?
The other major release this week is "Straight Outta Compton." This movie focusing on Dr. Dre and Ice Cube (not Ice-T, right? and sure as hell not Vanilla Ice) in their early career could quite possibly win the weekend. It has already "broken the Internet" with a bunch of memes. So even if it doesn't make a bunch of money it has that going for it, which isn't a lot.
BTW, my plan was to do a double feature on Thursday to see "Ant-Man" (finally) and "Fantastic Four." How did it go? Find out Monday!
Wednesday, August 12, 2015
Writing Wednesday: Addition By Subtraction
This is another post relating to mine and Cindy Borgne's favorite online writing group person, whom we'll call JayG. I got into one of my epic flame wars with him on writers.net last month (continuing into this month) when he told someone "You shouldn't be describing anything." Which to me sounded like the most asinine advice ever. I mean if the author isn't describing anything, then who will? It's not like some magic fairy will come in and sprinkle description into your manuscript.
Yes I understand he meant it as a metaphor or whatever. You the author aren't supposed to describe things; you're supposed to let the character describe them. But when you're saying something like that to a new writer they might actually think you mean it literally. Plus JayG has this habit of talking down to everyone, basically saying anyone who hasn't read Dwight Swain can't write. (Yet I'm sure Stephen King, JK Rowling, etc. did just fine without the late Mr. Swain.)
Anyway, he said, "I'd take your crap a lot more seriously if your writing was selling." So of course I had to educate him on that point. Sure I'm not making Stephen King or JK Rowling money, but I'm selling a lot more than him. I mean, my latest book (by me I mean PT Dilloway not my other names) Another Chance sold like three-dozen copies in the US in July. Again, not huge numbers but consider that JayG's last four books have a combined 0 sales on Amazon.
I mentioned that my book was ranked 30,000-ish on Amazon while his buddy Dwight Swain's was at 62,000-ish. So then he tells me that 30,000 "sucks" because a real publisher's book would be doing so much better. Again this is someone who probably hasn't sold a book all year and he's telling me that my sales suck. When that didn't work he just took to lying, trying to say Chance of a Lifetime and Last Chance had no sales ranking. That was hilarious since those are my most-reviewed books. He literally couldn't have picked worse books to lie about. I went all Ross Perot with the charts and graphs:
He of course couldn't admit he was wrong and predictably said, "Fourteen books in ninety days. And you hold that up as an example of great sales? Kid, that's awful." Never mind that I never said it was great sales; I was just showing there were SOME sales when he said there were no sales EVER. And note the use "Kid" to try to belittle me even though as someone who's almost 38 I'm pretty far from a kid. (Though compared to him most people would be kids yet.)
The problem is people like JayG are that sort who are so immature they can't be happy for the success of others. They're so stunted emotionally that they take anyone else's success as a personal insult. Like it's a zero-sum game where only one person is allowed to be successful and that's JayG. If anyone else is even slightly more successful (and by definition almost anyone else is) then he has to find a way to bring that person down to his level. You know, so I say my book is 30,000 (out of however many billion) and well, that's not as good as Harper Lee's latest book.
What I mean by the title of this post "Addition By Subtraction" is that the only way some people can add to their self-esteem is by subtracting it from others. If they can't feel successful then no one else should be allowed to feel that either. I know someone else who probably fits that definition; you can use your imaginations to supply that name.
Not to say that I'm not guilty for thinking that sometimes. I try not to act like too much of an ass when other people have success. I also try not to brag too much about my minor successes, except in backhand ways like this.
Another amusing part of that flame war was JayG would get senile or something and act like I'm the one who brought up sales when anyone who looked at the message board thread could see he's the one who attacked my sales. Then being the small man that he is, he couldn't deal with the reality so he had to flip the script in his mind so I was some braggart who came swaggering in crowing about my success. Because otherwise he would just look like a real jackass for picking on the sales of someone who sells more books than him, right?
Like someone else who is older than me and claimed to be so much more mature, JayG was content to let the battle go on to Doomsday. I was the one who decided to walk away. Of course in his last post he had to take a couple of wild swings, insinuating I'm a transvestite (I don't think he knows the difference transvestite and transgender, BTW) and that someone else who previously attacked him was my sock puppet, though that person had been around for years. By that point I'm just shaking my head sadly and walking away. Leave the pitiful little man to his delusions.
Anyway, should you encounter a JayG, just remember what your mom probably said when people made fun of you as a kid: they're only doing that because they're jealous. Maybe that wasn't entirely true, but in the case of someone like JayG it certainly is.
It's a much better way to live to celebrate the small successes of others, or at least not to demean them. That's part of what it means to be a grown-up.
(I recognize the irony in me demeaning JayG in a post saying not to demean people, but as Cindy Borgne can attest to, the guy certainly has it coming.)
BTW, a couple of times he said, "You can't make me angry" which inspired me to make a little meme:
Yes I understand he meant it as a metaphor or whatever. You the author aren't supposed to describe things; you're supposed to let the character describe them. But when you're saying something like that to a new writer they might actually think you mean it literally. Plus JayG has this habit of talking down to everyone, basically saying anyone who hasn't read Dwight Swain can't write. (Yet I'm sure Stephen King, JK Rowling, etc. did just fine without the late Mr. Swain.)
Anyway, he said, "I'd take your crap a lot more seriously if your writing was selling." So of course I had to educate him on that point. Sure I'm not making Stephen King or JK Rowling money, but I'm selling a lot more than him. I mean, my latest book (by me I mean PT Dilloway not my other names) Another Chance sold like three-dozen copies in the US in July. Again, not huge numbers but consider that JayG's last four books have a combined 0 sales on Amazon.
I mentioned that my book was ranked 30,000-ish on Amazon while his buddy Dwight Swain's was at 62,000-ish. So then he tells me that 30,000 "sucks" because a real publisher's book would be doing so much better. Again this is someone who probably hasn't sold a book all year and he's telling me that my sales suck. When that didn't work he just took to lying, trying to say Chance of a Lifetime and Last Chance had no sales ranking. That was hilarious since those are my most-reviewed books. He literally couldn't have picked worse books to lie about. I went all Ross Perot with the charts and graphs:
He of course couldn't admit he was wrong and predictably said, "Fourteen books in ninety days. And you hold that up as an example of great sales? Kid, that's awful." Never mind that I never said it was great sales; I was just showing there were SOME sales when he said there were no sales EVER. And note the use "Kid" to try to belittle me even though as someone who's almost 38 I'm pretty far from a kid. (Though compared to him most people would be kids yet.)
The problem is people like JayG are that sort who are so immature they can't be happy for the success of others. They're so stunted emotionally that they take anyone else's success as a personal insult. Like it's a zero-sum game where only one person is allowed to be successful and that's JayG. If anyone else is even slightly more successful (and by definition almost anyone else is) then he has to find a way to bring that person down to his level. You know, so I say my book is 30,000 (out of however many billion) and well, that's not as good as Harper Lee's latest book.
What I mean by the title of this post "Addition By Subtraction" is that the only way some people can add to their self-esteem is by subtracting it from others. If they can't feel successful then no one else should be allowed to feel that either. I know someone else who probably fits that definition; you can use your imaginations to supply that name.
Not to say that I'm not guilty for thinking that sometimes. I try not to act like too much of an ass when other people have success. I also try not to brag too much about my minor successes, except in backhand ways like this.
Another amusing part of that flame war was JayG would get senile or something and act like I'm the one who brought up sales when anyone who looked at the message board thread could see he's the one who attacked my sales. Then being the small man that he is, he couldn't deal with the reality so he had to flip the script in his mind so I was some braggart who came swaggering in crowing about my success. Because otherwise he would just look like a real jackass for picking on the sales of someone who sells more books than him, right?
Like someone else who is older than me and claimed to be so much more mature, JayG was content to let the battle go on to Doomsday. I was the one who decided to walk away. Of course in his last post he had to take a couple of wild swings, insinuating I'm a transvestite (I don't think he knows the difference transvestite and transgender, BTW) and that someone else who previously attacked him was my sock puppet, though that person had been around for years. By that point I'm just shaking my head sadly and walking away. Leave the pitiful little man to his delusions.
Anyway, should you encounter a JayG, just remember what your mom probably said when people made fun of you as a kid: they're only doing that because they're jealous. Maybe that wasn't entirely true, but in the case of someone like JayG it certainly is.
It's a much better way to live to celebrate the small successes of others, or at least not to demean them. That's part of what it means to be a grown-up.
(I recognize the irony in me demeaning JayG in a post saying not to demean people, but as Cindy Borgne can attest to, the guy certainly has it coming.)
BTW, a couple of times he said, "You can't make me angry" which inspired me to make a little meme:
 |
| JayG SMASH Your Writing! |
Monday, August 10, 2015
Price War, Plus 7 Free Books, and Three New Ones!!!
I guess it was almost two months ago that Cindy Borgne turned me on to this Reader Magnets book about how to (supposedly) get more sales and stuff. Why it mainly intrigued me was the idea of not just getting sales so much as actually creating fans you could connect with. What Eric Filler is really lacking is a real audience. I mean the closest he has is this one jerk who keeps buying books and giving them bad reviews. So it'd be nice if I could actually maybe get people to stop being so faceless and then maybe they'd write some reviews that would hopefully not be terrible.
The thing is, the strategy he employs requires a lot of setting up. First you have to have a website, which Eric Filler did not really have, so I went and really quick set one up on Wordpress, which is what he recommended, though he doesn't really say how you can set up the flipbook thingy on there; Wix would have been a lot easier on that score. I mean that's what I pretty much have as the opening on my Planet 99 Publishing site. Unfortunately I'd already bought the domain from Wordpress before I realized that, so I guess I'll just make do.
Then as you can see if you go to those sites you need a carrot to offer people in the way of a free book if they sign up for your email newsletter. Since I had just finished Transformed Into a Whore Too, I figured that would be my carrot because it was something new that loyal (or disloyal) readers hadn't already read. I did what I could to make my graphic look sort of like the one the author used for his.
To get the word out then I didn't want to just rely on the websites, so I put pretty much that same picture in all my Eric Filler gender swap books. Do you have any idea how annoying it is to go put that in like 40 books and then upload them to Amazon? Argh, it took a couple of days to do all that. But I did also take the chance to update some of the back material like the list of books and stuff.
The next step then is that besides the carrot (to mix metaphors) you need some free books to bait your hook with. Therein lay a problem. The first six Transformed books were all up for renewal on KDP Select in July so I went in and cancelled the auto renewal on them. Then gradually I transferred them to Draft2Digital. Except I ran into a problem with an uptight bitch named "Tara." For some reason Apple had one of my books locked in "Needs Review" so I asked Draft2Digital's support how I could fix that and got this response instead:
I don't know what crawled into her panties that day, but good Lord. I mean just read all that "I" crap. "I found content" and "I will be performing a more thorough review." Who died and made her the freaking queen of Sheba? Fortunately Tara's censoring did not extend to Barnes & Noble and Page Foundry, so the books are still free there.
So now in early August I had all the six books on B&N and decided to do what the Reader Magnets guy said and email Amazon directly instead of trying the price match link on the book's page that rarely ever works. He said in 24-48 hours they'd change it. No problem, right? Yeah, not so much. Instead I got this snotty response from "Roshan":
Besides the six Transformed books I sent the other books I have free on Smashwords/Draft2Digital like Chance of a Lifetime, Girl Power, A Hero's Journey, First Contact, and Forever Young. A couple days later they made only one of those 11 books free: Chance of a Lifetime, which was like midway on my list, so I don't know why they picked that one except maybe they had already matched it once.
I decided not to take this lying down and so I emailed them a second time with just the six Transformed books. Someone named "Clifford" gave me the same spiel but a couple days later, finally all six books were free! So now I've got my hooks or carrots or whatever.
I only have 10 subscribers to my newsletter, one of them being me. At some point I have to actually send out a "campaign" with MailChimp but I was hoping to get a few more names first. But anyway, things are finally starting to come together and you know I love it when a plan comes together. Just couldn't it come together with less hassle?
Anyway, if you were ever curious about my pseudonym's gender swap books you can get the first six all free from Amazon, B&N, or Page Foundry--whatever that is. Those are:
Plus Chance of a Lifetime is free on Amazon, B&N, and wherever all Smashwords publishes too because no Tara has come along to suspend it...yet.
When I put the Transformed ones on Draft2Digital it made a PDF to format it for CreateSpace, but you can't really load the book to CreateSpace from there unless you want to make the whole cover in PhotoShop, which I didn't feel like screwing with. But I did save the PDFs and for the hell of it loaded them through CreateSpace's site. So now you can buy those books in paperback. Personally I think it'd be stupid since they're $5.99-$6.99 without shipping and most are less than 100 pages. They're so small CreateSpace didn't even put text on the spines! So it seems like a ripoff when they're free in digital format, but maybe you have money to burn. Not that I make much profit off those even if I do sell any.
OK, so now the last part of the title: Three New Books! And not Eric Filler books either. Early in the year I had ideas for three P.T. Dilloway books. So in April I started to work on them when I had a few Eric Filler books saved up so as not to completely drain the money pool. You might already know the first book:
It's a spin-off of Chance of a Lifetime where a con man is injected by a shady government agency with the same stuff Steve took to become Stacey--and just like Steve it's obviously not by choice. The shady government people want the con man to use his skills to get a very special (and lucrative) medical research project from a scientist.
Unlike Chance of a Lifetime, I decided to actually let the guy who becomes a girl fall in love with a dude so it wouldn't be so threatening to people. Someone on B&N actually called Girl Power "gay porn" just because there are a couple of gay love scenes in it--and despite that there are straight love scenes too. Anyway, plus it might be a little more thriller-y than Chance of a Lifetime with chase scenes and gun play and stuff blowing up at the end. I'm a sell-out, so what?
The second book I started writing in mid-May on a trip to Louisville with my brother and sister-in-law. It basically takes a character I created at the end of the third Girl Power book and creates a new story that doesn't involve gender swapping or age regression or any trippy weird bullshit because again I don't want to threaten people with weird stuff.
And actually that became kind of the theme-like substance of the book. A teenage girl's police captain father is murdered right in front of her by a mobster (indirectly), so the girl spends the next year training to take revenge. Except she ends up nearly getting killed and so her sister and a cop friend give her a new identity and sneak her up to a Catholic boarding school in New Hampshire--an all girl's school too.
Again while I could easily have done it I resisted any lesbian stuff because, you know, the non-threatening thing. Which when I decided it should be an all girl's school made that difficult because where the hell do I find a boy then? But then I remembered that hey it's New Hampshire and it's winter, so I brought in a boy who helps his dad plow the snow and stuff and the girl falls madly in love with him. But complicating things is that the mobster who killed her father has a daughter attending the school. That girl is also a snobby bitch who picks on the main character even though she has no idea who she is.
Originally the story was supposed to be that the mobster's daughter was going to have a lab accident or something and develop wicked telekinesis or something and at first she and our hero would fight but then work together. As I got into writing the book though I began to think:
Anyway, the first draft ended really short at like 70,000 words. I decided to go back and write more about her transition from a sorta-nerdy, fairly normal kid to a sorta-Goth mopey kid who is going to go all Batgirl on some mobsters. That boosted it up to 83,000 words though it made me think that maybe I should just rewrite the whole thing since I kind of changed the premise in midstream and stuff. So I'm not sure I'll even get around to releasing that...yet.
But what do you think of the cover above? I studied a few YA covers and thought that looked kinda YA-y.
Speaking of rewriting books, the third one was actually a rewrite of a 2013 project called Sky Ghost: Army of the Damned.
This was a passion project for me. Back in late 80s/early 90s I loved this series of books by "Mack Maloney" called the Wingman series. It's kind of a Mad Max-type universe only with fighter planes instead of cars. Since it started in the Reagan era there was a nuclear war and afterwards society is in ruins but this one awesome pilot starts bringing people together.
In the 2000s they tried a sci-fi reboot that I haven't read but which sounds really dumb. I thought that space is just goofy and nuclear war is too 80s. Instead of a nuclear war, why not go to that 21st Century staple: zombies!?
So in 2013 I set out to do my reboot, only obviously not with the same characters. Except for some reason I decided to write it from the POV of a teenage girl the hero pilot saves. The story turned out OK but I never released it because it wasn't what I really wanted to do with it.
This time I decided to do it the right way by writing it 3rd person and focusing on the pilot. The first part and half the second part I basically use the same story structure as the first Wingman book. Not to say I'm copying it, but I just used the same basic structure for the events, wherein this hero pilot has been living like a hermit until his old commander lures him out of hiding to try to make a go of it in some little community. But just as things are working out they run afoul of a bigger, nastier group that wipes them out, except obviously the hero pilot escapes. He hooks up with some other people and eventually gets revenge on the big, nasty group that wiped his friends out.
In the Wingman book the bad guys were backed by the commies because again it was the Reagan era. In my reboot it's a religious nutjob who wants to basically wipe the Earth clean and repopulate it with his followers. He actually uses zombies as a weapon by airdropping cages of them on his enemies. Because in this world there are settlements scattered around with planes being used to connect them for supplies and stuff. Which also creates a cottage industry of "air pirates" who hijack the planes to steal their booty.
Anyway, this actually turned out to be the longest individual novel I've written since I think Second Chance in 2011. And when I thought about it, I think it was my first book focusing mostly on a dude, not a dude who becomes a chick even, since Chet Finley vs. The Machines of Fate in 2010, so getting out of some ruts there.
The cover I displayed above is modeled after the Wingman book covers, like this one:
It's really hard though to find a background. The one I used is actually a Battlefield 3 wallpaper I found on Google. If I can I'd like to find something better but that's not really something a stock photo site carries. I'd probably have to look on Deviant Art or something.
Now then, since I've written those 3 it's back to writing some Eric Filler books for a little while. Whether I do sequels to any of those three books depends on sales. I don't want to get stuck writing 8 books and then no one buys them like a certain other series. I don't have time to waste like that these days. So yeah, we'll let the consumer decide! Adam Smith would be proud.
The thing is, the strategy he employs requires a lot of setting up. First you have to have a website, which Eric Filler did not really have, so I went and really quick set one up on Wordpress, which is what he recommended, though he doesn't really say how you can set up the flipbook thingy on there; Wix would have been a lot easier on that score. I mean that's what I pretty much have as the opening on my Planet 99 Publishing site. Unfortunately I'd already bought the domain from Wordpress before I realized that, so I guess I'll just make do.
Then as you can see if you go to those sites you need a carrot to offer people in the way of a free book if they sign up for your email newsletter. Since I had just finished Transformed Into a Whore Too, I figured that would be my carrot because it was something new that loyal (or disloyal) readers hadn't already read. I did what I could to make my graphic look sort of like the one the author used for his.
To get the word out then I didn't want to just rely on the websites, so I put pretty much that same picture in all my Eric Filler gender swap books. Do you have any idea how annoying it is to go put that in like 40 books and then upload them to Amazon? Argh, it took a couple of days to do all that. But I did also take the chance to update some of the back material like the list of books and stuff.
The next step then is that besides the carrot (to mix metaphors) you need some free books to bait your hook with. Therein lay a problem. The first six Transformed books were all up for renewal on KDP Select in July so I went in and cancelled the auto renewal on them. Then gradually I transferred them to Draft2Digital. Except I ran into a problem with an uptight bitch named "Tara." For some reason Apple had one of my books locked in "Needs Review" so I asked Draft2Digital's support how I could fix that and got this response instead:
Hello,After reviewing the book in question, I found the content to include prohibited and objectionable content that we believe has the potential to lead to customer and vendor complaints. Content that includes bestiality, rape, incest, pseudo-incest, and books that include excessively objectionable or crude content are not permitted according to our vendors content guidelines. I have delisted Transformed into a Whore 3 and Transformed Collection from the vendors that prohibit this type of content. Please review all of your listings and if any of your other material contains bestiality, rape (for erotic purposes), incest, pseudo-incest, or material that could be classified as excessively objectionable or crude content, delist it immediately. I will be performing a more thorough review of your titles over the next few weeks and delisting anything that falls into this category.If you have any questions regarding these requirements, please get in touch with me at support@draft2digital.com.Regards,TaraDraft2Digital
I don't know what crawled into her panties that day, but good Lord. I mean just read all that "I" crap. "I found content" and "I will be performing a more thorough review." Who died and made her the freaking queen of Sheba? Fortunately Tara's censoring did not extend to Barnes & Noble and Page Foundry, so the books are still free there.
So now in early August I had all the six books on B&N and decided to do what the Reader Magnets guy said and email Amazon directly instead of trying the price match link on the book's page that rarely ever works. He said in 24-48 hours they'd change it. No problem, right? Yeah, not so much. Instead I got this snotty response from "Roshan":
Hello,
Thanks for the pricing information. While we retain discretion over our retail prices, I've passed your feedback on for consideration.
We'll contact you with more information by the end of the day on August 6, 2015.
Thanks for using Amazon KDP.
Regards,
Roshan K
Kindle Direct Publishing
http://kdp.amazon.com
Besides the six Transformed books I sent the other books I have free on Smashwords/Draft2Digital like Chance of a Lifetime, Girl Power, A Hero's Journey, First Contact, and Forever Young. A couple days later they made only one of those 11 books free: Chance of a Lifetime, which was like midway on my list, so I don't know why they picked that one except maybe they had already matched it once.
I decided not to take this lying down and so I emailed them a second time with just the six Transformed books. Someone named "Clifford" gave me the same spiel but a couple days later, finally all six books were free! So now I've got my hooks or carrots or whatever.
I only have 10 subscribers to my newsletter, one of them being me. At some point I have to actually send out a "campaign" with MailChimp but I was hoping to get a few more names first. But anyway, things are finally starting to come together and you know I love it when a plan comes together. Just couldn't it come together with less hassle?
Anyway, if you were ever curious about my pseudonym's gender swap books you can get the first six all free from Amazon, B&N, or Page Foundry--whatever that is. Those are:
When I put the Transformed ones on Draft2Digital it made a PDF to format it for CreateSpace, but you can't really load the book to CreateSpace from there unless you want to make the whole cover in PhotoShop, which I didn't feel like screwing with. But I did save the PDFs and for the hell of it loaded them through CreateSpace's site. So now you can buy those books in paperback. Personally I think it'd be stupid since they're $5.99-$6.99 without shipping and most are less than 100 pages. They're so small CreateSpace didn't even put text on the spines! So it seems like a ripoff when they're free in digital format, but maybe you have money to burn. Not that I make much profit off those even if I do sell any.
OK, so now the last part of the title: Three New Books! And not Eric Filler books either. Early in the year I had ideas for three P.T. Dilloway books. So in April I started to work on them when I had a few Eric Filler books saved up so as not to completely drain the money pool. You might already know the first book:
It's a spin-off of Chance of a Lifetime where a con man is injected by a shady government agency with the same stuff Steve took to become Stacey--and just like Steve it's obviously not by choice. The shady government people want the con man to use his skills to get a very special (and lucrative) medical research project from a scientist.
Unlike Chance of a Lifetime, I decided to actually let the guy who becomes a girl fall in love with a dude so it wouldn't be so threatening to people. Someone on B&N actually called Girl Power "gay porn" just because there are a couple of gay love scenes in it--and despite that there are straight love scenes too. Anyway, plus it might be a little more thriller-y than Chance of a Lifetime with chase scenes and gun play and stuff blowing up at the end. I'm a sell-out, so what?
The second book I started writing in mid-May on a trip to Louisville with my brother and sister-in-law. It basically takes a character I created at the end of the third Girl Power book and creates a new story that doesn't involve gender swapping or age regression or any trippy weird bullshit because again I don't want to threaten people with weird stuff.
And actually that became kind of the theme-like substance of the book. A teenage girl's police captain father is murdered right in front of her by a mobster (indirectly), so the girl spends the next year training to take revenge. Except she ends up nearly getting killed and so her sister and a cop friend give her a new identity and sneak her up to a Catholic boarding school in New Hampshire--an all girl's school too.
Again while I could easily have done it I resisted any lesbian stuff because, you know, the non-threatening thing. Which when I decided it should be an all girl's school made that difficult because where the hell do I find a boy then? But then I remembered that hey it's New Hampshire and it's winter, so I brought in a boy who helps his dad plow the snow and stuff and the girl falls madly in love with him. But complicating things is that the mobster who killed her father has a daughter attending the school. That girl is also a snobby bitch who picks on the main character even though she has no idea who she is.
Originally the story was supposed to be that the mobster's daughter was going to have a lab accident or something and develop wicked telekinesis or something and at first she and our hero would fight but then work together. As I got into writing the book though I began to think:
A. How do you have a lab experiment or whatever to develop telekinesis in a Catholic boarding school? It's not like they have particle accelerators there.So I decided that instead our hero, who if you remember wants revenge on the mean girl's mobster mommy, has to decide to save the mean girl when some rival gangsters come to kidnap and/or kill her. The title comes from that as our hero decides that justice should be for everyone, not just people we like.
B. It really goes against the whole no powers, no magic, yadda yadda yadda
Anyway, the first draft ended really short at like 70,000 words. I decided to go back and write more about her transition from a sorta-nerdy, fairly normal kid to a sorta-Goth mopey kid who is going to go all Batgirl on some mobsters. That boosted it up to 83,000 words though it made me think that maybe I should just rewrite the whole thing since I kind of changed the premise in midstream and stuff. So I'm not sure I'll even get around to releasing that...yet.
But what do you think of the cover above? I studied a few YA covers and thought that looked kinda YA-y.
Speaking of rewriting books, the third one was actually a rewrite of a 2013 project called Sky Ghost: Army of the Damned.
This was a passion project for me. Back in late 80s/early 90s I loved this series of books by "Mack Maloney" called the Wingman series. It's kind of a Mad Max-type universe only with fighter planes instead of cars. Since it started in the Reagan era there was a nuclear war and afterwards society is in ruins but this one awesome pilot starts bringing people together.
In the 2000s they tried a sci-fi reboot that I haven't read but which sounds really dumb. I thought that space is just goofy and nuclear war is too 80s. Instead of a nuclear war, why not go to that 21st Century staple: zombies!?
So in 2013 I set out to do my reboot, only obviously not with the same characters. Except for some reason I decided to write it from the POV of a teenage girl the hero pilot saves. The story turned out OK but I never released it because it wasn't what I really wanted to do with it.
This time I decided to do it the right way by writing it 3rd person and focusing on the pilot. The first part and half the second part I basically use the same story structure as the first Wingman book. Not to say I'm copying it, but I just used the same basic structure for the events, wherein this hero pilot has been living like a hermit until his old commander lures him out of hiding to try to make a go of it in some little community. But just as things are working out they run afoul of a bigger, nastier group that wipes them out, except obviously the hero pilot escapes. He hooks up with some other people and eventually gets revenge on the big, nasty group that wiped his friends out.
In the Wingman book the bad guys were backed by the commies because again it was the Reagan era. In my reboot it's a religious nutjob who wants to basically wipe the Earth clean and repopulate it with his followers. He actually uses zombies as a weapon by airdropping cages of them on his enemies. Because in this world there are settlements scattered around with planes being used to connect them for supplies and stuff. Which also creates a cottage industry of "air pirates" who hijack the planes to steal their booty.
Anyway, this actually turned out to be the longest individual novel I've written since I think Second Chance in 2011. And when I thought about it, I think it was my first book focusing mostly on a dude, not a dude who becomes a chick even, since Chet Finley vs. The Machines of Fate in 2010, so getting out of some ruts there.
The cover I displayed above is modeled after the Wingman book covers, like this one:
It's really hard though to find a background. The one I used is actually a Battlefield 3 wallpaper I found on Google. If I can I'd like to find something better but that's not really something a stock photo site carries. I'd probably have to look on Deviant Art or something.
Now then, since I've written those 3 it's back to writing some Eric Filler books for a little while. Whether I do sequels to any of those three books depends on sales. I don't want to get stuck writing 8 books and then no one buys them like a certain other series. I don't have time to waste like that these days. So yeah, we'll let the consumer decide! Adam Smith would be proud.
Friday, August 7, 2015
Movies! 8/7/15 Plus More Stuff I Watched!
Last week Tom Cruise disposed of Ant-Man at the top of the leaderboard. It's time now for another Marvel superhero movie to challenge Mission: Impossible, though this is actually from Fox so it's not part of the "cinematic universe" though it might combine with the X-Men cinematic universe if it does well enough. I'm of course talking about the "controversial" "Fantasic Four" reboot. The controversy being that Johnny Storm (Human Torch) is black and his sister Sue Storm (Invisible Woman) is white! OMG, let's all riot like it's the fucking 50s even though, hello, we've had a mixed-race president since 2008.
Personally I think the first real "Fantastic Four" movie (not counting the 1994 one) got a bad rap because it came out at the wrong time. It came out in about 2005 on the heels of "Spider-Man 2" and "Batman Begins" which were heavier movies whereas it was a lot lighter in tone. If they were releasing that now on the heels of "Ant-Man" and "Guardians of the Galaxy" it would probably play better.
Instead this version is I guess supposed to be darker, which is not a pun about Human Torch's skin color. It takes from the Ultimate version, which they put on sale before the movie so I got a chance to read it. Did you ever realize that the Fantastic Four can represent the four main elements? Human Torch is obviously fire and the Thing is Earth, then you have to stretch (pun intended) so that Mr. Fantastic equals water and Invisible Woman is Air, like she vanished into thin air! I hadn't really thought of that before. Though in the comics it's kind of lame how Ben Grimm just happens to show up when they're testing this dimensional portal dealie to get turned into Thing. And why was Johnny Storm at a school for geniuses? Just because his dad taught there and his sister went there? Nepotism! I guess it's better than the old version where they flew into space to beat the commies and were changed by "cosmic rays."
Anyway, I'll probably watch it at some point. I'm a little behind on movie watching. I still haven't watched "Ant-Man" yet.
It'll be interesting to see the reaction to the new Fantastic Four. No matter what, get ready for a lot of "fantastic" puns. If it's successful then, "A Fantastic Debut!" Or if it fails then, "Fantastic Four is Anything But!" Just like "Ant-Man" had to have all the size-related puns because media people are hacks.
For little kids you can also go watch "Shaun the Sheep." It's by the people who made that "Wallace and Grommet" show in the UK. I'm sure my nieces are clamoring to watch that...not. (90s burn!)
#
And here's some stuff I watched:
Cake: Jennifer Aniston is a woman suffering from chronic pain after an incident that was all too easy to figure out. She becomes obsessed with a woman in her support group who committed suicide. That and obtaining pain medication. It was good but like I said the whole tragic incident that laid her low was pretty easy to figure out. At least there are no instances where they have to change camera angles so she can get naked. (3/5)
Cemetery Junction: Ricky Gervais co-wrote, co-directed, and co-starred in this coming-of-age drama about three friends in early 70s England. One is just starting out selling life insurance and dreams of settling down. Another works in a factory and picks a lot of fights. Their geeky third friend works at the train station. They all want to get out or at least think they do. Most of this was pretty good but not to be too spoilery it's a little too happy of an ending. It reminded me of "Garden State" which I liked except for the ending where they kiss in the airport because that's a Hollywood ending, not a real life ending. This suffers from the same problem. And I probably should mention that just because Ricky Gervais is in it does not mean it's a funny movie, OK? (3/5)
Road Hard: Comedian Adam Corrolla basically plays himself as a washed-up stand-up comic who used to be on a mencentric show with another comic who became a successful late night talk show host. I'm not sure what the real Adam Corrolla does but his character in this goes around the country to various gigs, most of which kind of suck. Though if he thinks flying to all these cities and staying at 3-star hotels is bad, he should have done my road trip last fall. Anyway, he does a few things trying to get off the road and in the process meets a chick and falls in love. It's kind of like "Up in the Air" only without the depressing twist at the end. Still, like the previous movie it's a little too happy. The most annoying part was the credits go on for like 10 minutes because of the Kickstarter contributors who have to be thanked. I mean the list was as long as the phone book for a small city. I guess we have to get used to that, huh? (3/5)
These Final Hours: This is kind of like a shorter, Australian version of "The Road" or "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World." Basically Earth is in the process of being destroyed and so this Australian guy decides to go find his old girlfriend. In the process he sees a couple of scumbags abduct a little girl and decides to save her. Then they go on the road to find her dad, though the Australian guy is mostly just looking to ditch the girl. It's pretty good for a low-budget type movie. It begs that old question of what you would do if it were your last day on Earth. (3/5)
The Homesman: This is a Western starring Tommy Lee Jones and Hillary Swank. Swank is the spinster who has to transport three women who have lost their minds from a plains town to Iowa so they can be taken to the loony bin. Before she leaves, Swank finds Tommy Lee Jones with a noose around his neck after he ran afoul of some people in town. She frees him so he can help her transport the crazy women. Of course along the way they run into trouble like Native Americans and a hunter who wants to take one of the crazy women and a hotel owner who refuses them service. 3/4 through the movie one of the main characters dies, which is kind of depressing. Overall if you like modern Westerns that aren't a bunch of gunfights this is a good addition. (3/5)
Plastic Galaxy: This is a documentary on the creation of Kenner's Star Wars action figures from 1978-1985, with a little about the new batch in 1997. I mostly enjoyed it, especially when they talked to people from Kenner back then about how the toys were made and some of the ideas they had that never got made. Less interesting was talking to the collectors. I guess it's because as a child of the 80s I grew up with the toys so I don't need to hear some other person saying the same stuff I already felt. Anyway, it was interesting how no one thought Star Wars had a chance so Hasbro, Mattel, and other big toy companies passed on buying the rights back in 1976. Not even Kenner thought the movie would succeed the way it did so they didn't even have figures ready until 1978. They did have an ingenious idea where for XMas in 1977 you could buy an empty box for a playset and then send in a card to get a set of figures when they were available. That would be easier now with the Internet. Unfortunately for Kenner Lucas stopped making movies for 20 years so after the 1985 set bombed the Star Wars line was pretty well done until the mid-90s with the first batch of He-Man looking toys. Seriously, Luke looked Ahh-nold Schwarzeneggger; it was ridiculous! If you played with Star Wars figures in the 70s/80s then you should totally watch this! (2.5/5)
The Zero Theorem: I put this on one night expressly because I thought it'd be really boring and put me to sleep. I think I had that idea because I confused Terry Gilliam with Terrence Malick. It wasn't really boring, just weird. In a strange "Blade Runner"-type future Christoph Waltz works at some company processing data which for some reason requires pedaling like a bike and using what looks like a big video game control pad. He's kind of agoraphobic and wants to stay home to wait for "his call" so finally Management (ie Matt Damon looking like that Tim Gunn guy I think it is from Project Runway) assigns him to work at home on "the zero theorem" which is...you got me. It's like supposed to prove that everything equals 0 or something. To help him keep working Management assigns him a hooker who takes him to kind of a holodeck and so on and so forth. I don't know what the whole point was, but I'm sure Tony Laplume would think it's brilliant. (And I guess he did on his blog back in February, though with his reviews it's hard to tell sometimes.) (2/5)
Java Heat: Hacky review headline: 'Java Heat' Has None! It's a pretty boring action movie about terrorists in Indonesia who kidnap the sultan's daughter for some reason. An ex-Marine and a local cop have to track them down, like "Rush Hour" without being funny. A lot of it is just boring and the action is mostly cliche. It stars Kellan Lutz from that lame Hercules movie that didn't star The Rock. Mickey Rourke wears bad clothes and mumbles a lot as the bad guy. I guess his comeback after "The Wrestler" is officially over now. (1/5)
Wet Hot American Summer: I kept seeing ads for the new prequel series so I thought I'd watch the original movie. It wasn't really that funny. I just can't watch anything about summer camp unless it involves a serial killer slaughtering everyone. That certainly would have improved it. (1/5)
Eraserhead: This is a David Lynch movie so you know it's got to be weird. Ostensibly it's about a guy who knocks up a girl who gives birth to a very weird-looking baby. The closest example I can think of is like a miniature ET. When the woman takes off, the guy is left alone with the "baby" and then a lot of trippy stuff ensues before he does what probably any of us would have done. As far as David Lynch goes, it's one of those where I think critics just pretend to get it so they can feel superior to the rest of us who have no fucking clue what's going on in his movies. (2/5)
Noah: As a non-religious person I had no interest in watching this but finally I was bored and so put it on Netflix. I really didn't miss much. The way it starts out with magic stones, swords, and rock giants made me think this was a Bible story if it had been written by L. Ron Hubbard. It has been a while since I read the Bible, but I'm pretty sure there wasn't anything about rock giants helping Noah construct the Ark. Once the rest of civilization gets wiped away it gets awkward as Noah decides he has to kill his daughter-in-law's baby once it's born to ensure that Man dies. But I'm sure it's not a spoiler to say he doesn't because well otherwise there'd be none of us here, right? Though like Adam and Eve it's creepy to think we're all descendants of eons of inbreeding. Anyway, like Darren Arronovsky's "The Fountain" you kind of have to wonder if any studio execs ever bothered watching the dailies and wondered, WTF? How a piece of shit like this gets out the door is beyond me. (-5/5)
Bojack Horseman: Netflix kept advertising this on Crackle so I decided to watch this show. It's kind of weird. It takes place in a world with anamorphic animals, you know animals who are like people but still animals. Anyway, the titular character is a horse who starred in a 90s Full House-type show and is now a has-been. From the premise of the show you'd think it would be a really goofy funny show, but oddly it isn't. It's actually more of a dramedy than a comedy as Bojack struggles with his many demons as he attempts his comeback by hiring a Vietnamese human woman to ghostwrite his memoirs. It just seems odd that someone would think up a cartoon with animal characters and then decide that this show should tackle like serious issues and stuff. I'm just not sure how to take that. But hell I did binge all 25 episodes (2 12-episode seasons and 1 XMas special) in three days so I can't say I hated it either. (3/5)
Impastor: While I was watching Seinfeld reruns they kept advertising this new show on TV Land so I decided to watch it on Hulu. It stars Michael Rosenbaum, formerly Lex Luthor on "Smallville;" it's still weird to see him with hair, but unlike Corey Stoll on "The Strain" I think his is real. He's a small-time grifter named Buddy who is going to jump to his death to escape some guys after him and because his girlfriend dumped him. But this gay pastor on his way to start a new job tries to talk him out of it and in the process slips to his death. So Buddy decides to seize the opportunity to steal the guy's identity as a Lutheran pastor in a small town. Which of course he's not the small town pastor type, and definitely not gay, so it's kind of awkward. It's pretty decent so far though there are only 3 episodes. And it gives you a whole new use for cantaloupe; think "American Pie." (3/5)
The Brink: This is on HBO and I think the first season is done so now I can watch the whole thing. Anyway, it's kind of a modern "Dr. Strangelove" mixed with "Homeland" where a crazy general takes over Pakistan and claims US drones are spreading electromagnetic rays to de-man Pakistanis. Jack Black is a low-level staffer at the American embassy who gets captures but ends up as a go-between with the Pakistani general's half-brother in charge of their secret service and the secretary of state played by Tim Robbins. The third part of the show involves a couple of Navy pilots on a carrier, one who has two kids with a woman back home and has gotten a woman on the ship pregnant while also dealing uppers to people on board. Which is all fine but the parts where they're flying around are ludicrous. First off, the only two-seat Hornet fighter-bombers are trainers. Second, you don't send planes like that by themselves on missions. And there are specially-equipped reconnaissance planes so you wouldn't have an ordinary fighter doing that. F**king Google it creators of the show! That aside it's funny 4 episodes in and shows just how ludicrous geopolitical theater can be. (3/5)
Personally I think the first real "Fantastic Four" movie (not counting the 1994 one) got a bad rap because it came out at the wrong time. It came out in about 2005 on the heels of "Spider-Man 2" and "Batman Begins" which were heavier movies whereas it was a lot lighter in tone. If they were releasing that now on the heels of "Ant-Man" and "Guardians of the Galaxy" it would probably play better.
Instead this version is I guess supposed to be darker, which is not a pun about Human Torch's skin color. It takes from the Ultimate version, which they put on sale before the movie so I got a chance to read it. Did you ever realize that the Fantastic Four can represent the four main elements? Human Torch is obviously fire and the Thing is Earth, then you have to stretch (pun intended) so that Mr. Fantastic equals water and Invisible Woman is Air, like she vanished into thin air! I hadn't really thought of that before. Though in the comics it's kind of lame how Ben Grimm just happens to show up when they're testing this dimensional portal dealie to get turned into Thing. And why was Johnny Storm at a school for geniuses? Just because his dad taught there and his sister went there? Nepotism! I guess it's better than the old version where they flew into space to beat the commies and were changed by "cosmic rays."
Anyway, I'll probably watch it at some point. I'm a little behind on movie watching. I still haven't watched "Ant-Man" yet.
It'll be interesting to see the reaction to the new Fantastic Four. No matter what, get ready for a lot of "fantastic" puns. If it's successful then, "A Fantastic Debut!" Or if it fails then, "Fantastic Four is Anything But!" Just like "Ant-Man" had to have all the size-related puns because media people are hacks.
For little kids you can also go watch "Shaun the Sheep." It's by the people who made that "Wallace and Grommet" show in the UK. I'm sure my nieces are clamoring to watch that...not. (90s burn!)
#
And here's some stuff I watched:
Cake: Jennifer Aniston is a woman suffering from chronic pain after an incident that was all too easy to figure out. She becomes obsessed with a woman in her support group who committed suicide. That and obtaining pain medication. It was good but like I said the whole tragic incident that laid her low was pretty easy to figure out. At least there are no instances where they have to change camera angles so she can get naked. (3/5)
Cemetery Junction: Ricky Gervais co-wrote, co-directed, and co-starred in this coming-of-age drama about three friends in early 70s England. One is just starting out selling life insurance and dreams of settling down. Another works in a factory and picks a lot of fights. Their geeky third friend works at the train station. They all want to get out or at least think they do. Most of this was pretty good but not to be too spoilery it's a little too happy of an ending. It reminded me of "Garden State" which I liked except for the ending where they kiss in the airport because that's a Hollywood ending, not a real life ending. This suffers from the same problem. And I probably should mention that just because Ricky Gervais is in it does not mean it's a funny movie, OK? (3/5)
Road Hard: Comedian Adam Corrolla basically plays himself as a washed-up stand-up comic who used to be on a mencentric show with another comic who became a successful late night talk show host. I'm not sure what the real Adam Corrolla does but his character in this goes around the country to various gigs, most of which kind of suck. Though if he thinks flying to all these cities and staying at 3-star hotels is bad, he should have done my road trip last fall. Anyway, he does a few things trying to get off the road and in the process meets a chick and falls in love. It's kind of like "Up in the Air" only without the depressing twist at the end. Still, like the previous movie it's a little too happy. The most annoying part was the credits go on for like 10 minutes because of the Kickstarter contributors who have to be thanked. I mean the list was as long as the phone book for a small city. I guess we have to get used to that, huh? (3/5)
These Final Hours: This is kind of like a shorter, Australian version of "The Road" or "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World." Basically Earth is in the process of being destroyed and so this Australian guy decides to go find his old girlfriend. In the process he sees a couple of scumbags abduct a little girl and decides to save her. Then they go on the road to find her dad, though the Australian guy is mostly just looking to ditch the girl. It's pretty good for a low-budget type movie. It begs that old question of what you would do if it were your last day on Earth. (3/5)
The Homesman: This is a Western starring Tommy Lee Jones and Hillary Swank. Swank is the spinster who has to transport three women who have lost their minds from a plains town to Iowa so they can be taken to the loony bin. Before she leaves, Swank finds Tommy Lee Jones with a noose around his neck after he ran afoul of some people in town. She frees him so he can help her transport the crazy women. Of course along the way they run into trouble like Native Americans and a hunter who wants to take one of the crazy women and a hotel owner who refuses them service. 3/4 through the movie one of the main characters dies, which is kind of depressing. Overall if you like modern Westerns that aren't a bunch of gunfights this is a good addition. (3/5)
Plastic Galaxy: This is a documentary on the creation of Kenner's Star Wars action figures from 1978-1985, with a little about the new batch in 1997. I mostly enjoyed it, especially when they talked to people from Kenner back then about how the toys were made and some of the ideas they had that never got made. Less interesting was talking to the collectors. I guess it's because as a child of the 80s I grew up with the toys so I don't need to hear some other person saying the same stuff I already felt. Anyway, it was interesting how no one thought Star Wars had a chance so Hasbro, Mattel, and other big toy companies passed on buying the rights back in 1976. Not even Kenner thought the movie would succeed the way it did so they didn't even have figures ready until 1978. They did have an ingenious idea where for XMas in 1977 you could buy an empty box for a playset and then send in a card to get a set of figures when they were available. That would be easier now with the Internet. Unfortunately for Kenner Lucas stopped making movies for 20 years so after the 1985 set bombed the Star Wars line was pretty well done until the mid-90s with the first batch of He-Man looking toys. Seriously, Luke looked Ahh-nold Schwarzeneggger; it was ridiculous! If you played with Star Wars figures in the 70s/80s then you should totally watch this! (2.5/5)
The Zero Theorem: I put this on one night expressly because I thought it'd be really boring and put me to sleep. I think I had that idea because I confused Terry Gilliam with Terrence Malick. It wasn't really boring, just weird. In a strange "Blade Runner"-type future Christoph Waltz works at some company processing data which for some reason requires pedaling like a bike and using what looks like a big video game control pad. He's kind of agoraphobic and wants to stay home to wait for "his call" so finally Management (ie Matt Damon looking like that Tim Gunn guy I think it is from Project Runway) assigns him to work at home on "the zero theorem" which is...you got me. It's like supposed to prove that everything equals 0 or something. To help him keep working Management assigns him a hooker who takes him to kind of a holodeck and so on and so forth. I don't know what the whole point was, but I'm sure Tony Laplume would think it's brilliant. (And I guess he did on his blog back in February, though with his reviews it's hard to tell sometimes.) (2/5)
Java Heat: Hacky review headline: 'Java Heat' Has None! It's a pretty boring action movie about terrorists in Indonesia who kidnap the sultan's daughter for some reason. An ex-Marine and a local cop have to track them down, like "Rush Hour" without being funny. A lot of it is just boring and the action is mostly cliche. It stars Kellan Lutz from that lame Hercules movie that didn't star The Rock. Mickey Rourke wears bad clothes and mumbles a lot as the bad guy. I guess his comeback after "The Wrestler" is officially over now. (1/5)
Wet Hot American Summer: I kept seeing ads for the new prequel series so I thought I'd watch the original movie. It wasn't really that funny. I just can't watch anything about summer camp unless it involves a serial killer slaughtering everyone. That certainly would have improved it. (1/5)
Eraserhead: This is a David Lynch movie so you know it's got to be weird. Ostensibly it's about a guy who knocks up a girl who gives birth to a very weird-looking baby. The closest example I can think of is like a miniature ET. When the woman takes off, the guy is left alone with the "baby" and then a lot of trippy stuff ensues before he does what probably any of us would have done. As far as David Lynch goes, it's one of those where I think critics just pretend to get it so they can feel superior to the rest of us who have no fucking clue what's going on in his movies. (2/5)
Noah: As a non-religious person I had no interest in watching this but finally I was bored and so put it on Netflix. I really didn't miss much. The way it starts out with magic stones, swords, and rock giants made me think this was a Bible story if it had been written by L. Ron Hubbard. It has been a while since I read the Bible, but I'm pretty sure there wasn't anything about rock giants helping Noah construct the Ark. Once the rest of civilization gets wiped away it gets awkward as Noah decides he has to kill his daughter-in-law's baby once it's born to ensure that Man dies. But I'm sure it's not a spoiler to say he doesn't because well otherwise there'd be none of us here, right? Though like Adam and Eve it's creepy to think we're all descendants of eons of inbreeding. Anyway, like Darren Arronovsky's "The Fountain" you kind of have to wonder if any studio execs ever bothered watching the dailies and wondered, WTF? How a piece of shit like this gets out the door is beyond me. (-5/5)
Bojack Horseman: Netflix kept advertising this on Crackle so I decided to watch this show. It's kind of weird. It takes place in a world with anamorphic animals, you know animals who are like people but still animals. Anyway, the titular character is a horse who starred in a 90s Full House-type show and is now a has-been. From the premise of the show you'd think it would be a really goofy funny show, but oddly it isn't. It's actually more of a dramedy than a comedy as Bojack struggles with his many demons as he attempts his comeback by hiring a Vietnamese human woman to ghostwrite his memoirs. It just seems odd that someone would think up a cartoon with animal characters and then decide that this show should tackle like serious issues and stuff. I'm just not sure how to take that. But hell I did binge all 25 episodes (2 12-episode seasons and 1 XMas special) in three days so I can't say I hated it either. (3/5)
Impastor: While I was watching Seinfeld reruns they kept advertising this new show on TV Land so I decided to watch it on Hulu. It stars Michael Rosenbaum, formerly Lex Luthor on "Smallville;" it's still weird to see him with hair, but unlike Corey Stoll on "The Strain" I think his is real. He's a small-time grifter named Buddy who is going to jump to his death to escape some guys after him and because his girlfriend dumped him. But this gay pastor on his way to start a new job tries to talk him out of it and in the process slips to his death. So Buddy decides to seize the opportunity to steal the guy's identity as a Lutheran pastor in a small town. Which of course he's not the small town pastor type, and definitely not gay, so it's kind of awkward. It's pretty decent so far though there are only 3 episodes. And it gives you a whole new use for cantaloupe; think "American Pie." (3/5)
The Brink: This is on HBO and I think the first season is done so now I can watch the whole thing. Anyway, it's kind of a modern "Dr. Strangelove" mixed with "Homeland" where a crazy general takes over Pakistan and claims US drones are spreading electromagnetic rays to de-man Pakistanis. Jack Black is a low-level staffer at the American embassy who gets captures but ends up as a go-between with the Pakistani general's half-brother in charge of their secret service and the secretary of state played by Tim Robbins. The third part of the show involves a couple of Navy pilots on a carrier, one who has two kids with a woman back home and has gotten a woman on the ship pregnant while also dealing uppers to people on board. Which is all fine but the parts where they're flying around are ludicrous. First off, the only two-seat Hornet fighter-bombers are trainers. Second, you don't send planes like that by themselves on missions. And there are specially-equipped reconnaissance planes so you wouldn't have an ordinary fighter doing that. F**king Google it creators of the show! That aside it's funny 4 episodes in and shows just how ludicrous geopolitical theater can be. (3/5)
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