To my knowledge, I’ve never really had a genuine, honest-to-gosh nemesis, but I’m beginning to think it just might be Matthew McConaughey. Yes, that Matthew McConaughey, the naked-bongo-playing goodtime-funboy with the perfect six-pack abs and the spotty box-office record.
And why, you may ask, would I elevate this inoffensively goofy would-be movie star to the level of “nemesis”? Well, first, he brought his special kind of blandness to Dirk Pitt, the literary swashbuckler whose adventures I devoured as a youth. Now, according to ScreenRant.com, he may be in line to transform another of my puberty-era heroes into one of his signature sleepy-eyed slacker doofuses (doofi?): Thomas Magnum, a.k.a. Magnum, P.I., the Ferrari-driving, Hawaii-based TV detective played in the 1980s by Tom Selleck.
There’s been a new development in that story about the guy who was playing with the deadly toxin ricin in a Vegas hotel room, which I first wrote about here. The short version: an indictment has been issued in the case, but surprisingly not for Roger von Bergendorff, the man who was apparently brewing the stuff for god-only-knows-why and who fell into a coma after handling it. The indictment was actually for his cousin Thomas Tholen, the man who owns the house here in my hometown of Riverton where von Bergendorff lived for a time. Tholen is alleged to have known that his cousin was making the shit but he failed to report it and, further, made an “untruthful statement” in order to conceal it.
Authorities still won’t say what they found in the Riverton house, or what von Bergendorff was planning to do with the ricin.
I understand, of course, that they have to remain mum until charges are brought — if there are charges forthcoming, of course — but I’m feeling very frustrated by the silence. After all, this was going on right in my own back yard; I’d like to know what was happening and why. The media seems to have all the details — not to mention a conviction, at least as far as public opinion is concerned — within hours of some perv killing a little kid, but when it comes to something that could have potentially sickened or killed half a damn town, nobody’s saying a word. (That’s not to say the death of a child is insignificant, only that there’s a real disparity in what the public hears about and what it doesn’t, and I don’t really understand why. It seems like somebody’s priorities are out of whack to me.)
I’ll continue to impatiently monitor the news feeds for any new details on this… I don’t really have much choice, do I?
Man oh man… this photo of an 1983-vintage home computer desk, which I just spotted over at Boing Boing, brings back a lot of memories. A lot of memories. I didn’t have exactly this same set-up — I had the Atari 800XL instead of the 800 model pictured here; my peripherals were a bit more spread out around my bedroom; and I never had a set of those groovy Burger King Jedi glasses — but there’s an extremely familiar vibe emanating from this image. I don’t even have to close my eyes to journey back, to once again hear Sammy Hagar blasting from my old Fisher cassette deck as I bang away at the clickety-clackety keyboard (sometimes I miss the weirdly satisfying noise and effort associated with that old keyboard; modern ones are so mushy in comparison…), working on one of my embarrassing early short stories that all seemed to be ripped-off Doctor Who plots infused with some good old-fashioned teenage angst. The hard copies of those stories disappeared long ago, but I think there might still be electronic ghosts of them around, locked away on the dozen or so ancient five-inch floppy discs I know I’ve got somewhere in the Bennion Archives. If only I had a working five-inch drive and the know-how to capture the data to my modern PC! Embarrassing or not, I’d like to see them again…
I never bothered to learn Atari BASIC, and that mysterious activity known as hacking held no appeal for me. I didn’t have any idea what you could do with a computer, really, beyond writing lousy adolescent fiction. It wasn’t much more than a sophisticated toy, so far as I could see. (That attitude probably wasn’t helped by the fact that you used an ordinary television for a monitor; if you got bored with whatever you were working on, you could just change the channel and watch Gilligan’s Island or whatever. Which I guess isn’t much different from hopping online and seeing what’s shaking at Boing Boing, when you think about it…) I was savvy enough to recognize that the Atari Writer word processing program was far more convenient than the old portable typewriter I’d been using in my pre-computer days. I saved reams of paper by editing and perfecting — well, rewriting, anyway — my work before printing it out. But if someone had told me then that our entire economy and a pretty sizable chunk of our culture would one day revolve around these toys… well, people did try to tell me all this was coming and I didn’t believe them. I thought computers would never amount to much more than fancy typewriters. Some would-be science-fiction writer I was, eh?
Normally, these Internet quizzes come about as close to describing “the real me” as my newspaper horoscope, i.e., they’re so ridiculously generalized that they could be about anybody, or they’re so far out in left field that they’re most assuredly not like me at all. But every once in a while…
What Your Pizza Reveals
People may tell you that you have a small appetite… but you aren’t under eating. You just aren’t a pig.You aren’t particularly picky about pizza. It’s so good… how could you be? You fit in best in the Western part of the US.
You like food that’s traditional and well crafted. You aren’t impressed with “gourmet” foods.
You are dependable, loyal, and conservative with your choices.
You are a flavorful and bold person. You should consider traveling to Spain.
The stereotype that best fits you is geek. You’re the type most likely to order pizza to avoid leaving your computer.
You may recall me mentioning a while back that Pixar is adapting Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fabulous pulp novels about John Carter of Mars into a mixed live-action/CGI film trilogy. Well, I’ve just learned they’re not the first animators to take a crack at ERB’s manly Virginia gentleman who becomes the warlord of an alien world. Another attempt was made to translate Carter to film way back in the 1930s by Bob Clampett, an alumnus of Warner Brothers’ famous Termite Terrace and the director of many well-known Looney Tunes shorts (including one of my favorites, Falling Hare, in which Bugs Bunny battles a gremlin).
According to this guy, the attempt never amounted to much, because Clampett and ERB had a different creative vision than the movie studios — unthinkable, I know! — but Clampett got as far as making some test footage, which I now present as a Fascinating Historical Curiosity:
I don’t know about you, but I think that stuff looks really cool, very much in the vein of the extremely nifty Superman shorts produced by Max Fleischer in the ’40s. The running thoat — the eight-legged animal — is especially impressive. Sigh. Yet another item for the “If Only” file…
(Hat tip to Chris Roberson for posting the video first.)
For the record, I answered “yes” to items 1 and 3 only. And I can rationalize that I noticed the missing apostrophe because I’m a proofreader, right? Right?
(I suppose I shouldn’t mention that, while I don’t have a bat’leth, I do own a replica of Duncan MacLeod’s katana. No, I really shouldn’t mention that at all…)
In an effort to cleanse my eyes of the filthy residue left over from Highlander: The Suck, er, The Source, I’ve begun re-watching my DVDs of Highlander: The Series. And considering that I haven’t done a TV Title Sequence entry in a while, well, you can probably guess where I’m going with this one…
It’s not uncommon for title sequences to evolve as the show goes along: the theme music changes, background visuals get updated with more recent footage, cast members come and go. But I can’t think of any other series that had as many distinct variants of their openings as Highlander. There were at least four major ones, and probably several minor ones as well if you obsessively cataloged every little tweak that was made over the show’s six-season run. The problem was the same one I always run into whenever I try to write or talk about the show, which is the need to somehow convey a lot of pretty far-out backstory for first-time viewers who don’t know a Quickening from a Kwik-E-Mart. The premise and formula of Highlander isn’t really that complicated once you’ve watched a couple of episodes, but I still remember how baffling it was to be thrown into the first movie with no prior knowledge of what the hell was going on, and the showrunners were surely aware of that newbie reaction.
The short version: The fifth Highlander feature film, recently released directly to DVD, wasn’t as bad as I expected.
It was worse.
Much, much, much worse.
It was worse than either Star Trek V or Highlander 2, long the benchmarks for movie sequel suckage.
It was so bad it left The Girlfriend curled into a fetal ball, whimpering inconsolably.
It was so abysmally, eye-gougingly, soul-grindingly bad, in fact, that this fanboy is now finished with the whole god-forsaken franchise, at least as far as new Highlander product goes. I’m not quite incensed enough to disavow the original movie and the TV series, both of which I still enjoy, but in the highly unlikely event any further Highlander movies get made, I won’t be wasting any more of my precious, limited, mortal lifespan on them. Because when it comes right down to it, I’m just not that masochistic.
The long version follows, if you’re interested in reading any more of my rantings on this subject, but I think the important point has been made…
Okay, so it seems that the hot new fad sweeping the InterWebs is “sweded” movies, i.e., ultra-cheap homemade re-creations of well-known films using cardboard, tin foil, and household items as props and costumes. The inspiration behind this phenomenon is apparently a Jack Black comedy called Be Kind, Rewind (which hasn’t even been released yet) in which a couple of dim-bulb video-store owners accidentally erase their entire inventory of VHS cassettes and then start replacing those movies with their own half-assed reproductions. Which of course their customers love more than the originals, causing the two to be elevated into folk heroes or something.
Yeah, I know, it doesn’t sound very funny to me either, but I guess this is the sort of thing the kids are going for these days. And to think our parents didn’t get Yahoo Serious! Oh, wait… neither did I.
Anyhow, the aesthetic at work in these “sweded” flicks — the term comes from one Be Kind, Rewind character’s BS explanation that the replacement movies are the Swedish versions — seems to be “the cheesier, the better.” And oh, god, is this stuff cheesy. Not just cheesy, but cheez-ee. I’ve seen a lot of amateur movies in my time, and even been in a few, but these things strike a new low in sheer painfulness. There is, for example, a sweded version of Star Wars that consists of people wearing cardboard X-wings and TIE-fighter panels chasing each other around a lawn while somebody hums the theme music. I couldn’t even finish that one, it was so embarrassing. Click that link at your own peril.
I’ll be honest, I think the whole sweding thing is just plain dumb. But for every rule, of course, there are exceptions. The following video, sent to me by my buddy Chenopup, is so audacious, so ambitious, so well-done, that I simply couldn’t help but sit in awe as it played for the first time. It’s the lightcycle scene from Tron, completely redone in cardboard, Saran Wrap, and stop-motion animation… and it is frakkin’ awesome:
I’m amazed at how close the sweders got their version to the original… of course, now I want to go watch the real Tron again. Look, it’s The Dude in a funny hat!
One element that has so far been missing from every major film derived from a comic book is the sense that the titular hero shares his world with a whole bunch of other superheroes. For example, Spider-Man-the-film gave no hint that Spider-Man-the-character was only one of a vast pantheon of characters who all live in the same world. Superhero movies to date have all been entirely self-contained and, so far as the novice viewer can tell, each tells of the only super-powered person on the planet.
That’s not how it is in the comics medium, where the world is lousy with super-powered people and creatures, and any character who is owned by a particular publisher is likely to show up in any other character’s book at some point. This is especially true in the case of the so-called Marvel Universe, the shared setting of all the titles published by Marvel Comics, so it is somewhat surprising that all the films based on Marvel titles — and that would be most of the superhero flicks of the last ten years or so, including X-Men, Daredevil, The Hulk, Ghost Rider, and The Fantastic Four — have not so far included any crossovers between them. (Actually, I guess it’s not that surprising, since crossovers would be meaningless — if not actually confusing — for the average viewer who sees only one of these films a year and doesn’t know anything about comics.)
But now, in a summer that’s going to see two major movie releases based on Marvel titles, it looks like the powers that be are going to throw in the sort of thing that comics fans have enjoyed for years: according to this blog, Robert Downey, Jr., who is playing the title role in the much-anticipated Iron Man, will have a cameo appearance in The Incredible Hulk. There is also some rumbling that another big name who is supposed to star in another upcoming Marvel-licensed flick — the rumor mill says that it will be Samuel L. Jackson playing the character Nick Fury — will appear briefly in Iron Man.
I think this brilliant, a nice gesture to comics fans and a good marketing ploy to promote the other movies based on the same universe that will be released around the same time. Now, if they could just somehow get all the movies to meet the same standard of quality…
