Stop What Your are Doing Immediately!

And head on over to the King Kong Trailer. Like Kong, the trailer is huge and will take some time to download, but it is totally worth it.

I know, I know, you're saying, "But this is just the umpteenth remake, why should I watch this one?"

Good Question. Quick answer, Peter Jackson, and not because he directed Lord of the Rings, but because his has directed numerous exploitation films. Remember Meet the Feebles? You should. Dead Alive? Bad Taste? No?

Well get off your ass and stop watching that Mark Dornford-May (U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha ?)film you have been told you must see by your overly pretentious friends told you is a must see. After all Roland Emmerich, you know of Godzilla fame, was the jury president for the Berlin Film Festival, so Dornford-May's adaptation of Carmen can wait. (Anyone with any sense knows that King Kong beats Godzilla! Especially a giant iguana Godzilla!) And go to the video store to see these classics of true independant cinema.

Then come back and watch the Kong Trailer after which you can return to the intellectual story. But we do have to do things in the proper order now...dont' we?

Just Got Back From DC

Sorry that I haven't posted over the weekend, but work had me trapped in the nation's capitol. Thus I was unable to see my typical weekend movie dose. In fact, my review of Land of the Dead will have to wait until next week. So much for deadlines. At least the review will be in time for the DVD release.

On Thursday I promise to post about Herbie Fully Loaded and Bewitched both rehashes of longstanding franchises. I hope to like both, but don't expect to. We'll see.

In the meantime...

"Consider the relationship between Kant's Logic and Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs..." Discuss amongst yourselves.

Prepare to go insane!

Quick, but important news today.

Fantasy Flight Games will be shipping their resurrection of the classic Arkham Horror boardgame in the next few weeks. As soon as I get it I will write a review.

Attack of the Memes

Okay, I have been tagged by David Scott with a meme he was given by LYT. The questions relate to Books and Movies, but David Scott's wife has extended the meme to include CDs as well. So I will answer all three memes, which will take way too much time.
So here goes.

Books

1. The total number of books:

Well over 2000. But before you rebuke my claim as a mere fiction, or collapse in awe of my academician bibliophilia, understand that at least 130 of these books contain the adventures of one Man of Bronze.

2. The last book I bought:

Did I mention that I don't buy books "one at a time?"

Who the Hell's in It : Portraits and Conversations by Peter Bogdanovich. This book is a great read. Just enough insight into each of the featured personalities to make you want more.

and

Dungeon Master's Guide II. I have been playing D&D since 1980 and will continue for the forseeable future.

and ironically enough:

The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby. This is essentially a book long version of this meme.

3. The last book I read:

The Press edited by Kathleen Hall Jamieson. Actually, I am only about half way through the book right now, but that is only because I was reading The Cube and the Cathedral by George Weigel at the same time. I have finished Cube so should be finished with Press soon.

4. Five books that mean a lot to me, in no particular order:

a) The Republic by Plato. No Socrates...No Philosophy. No Republic...No Public Opinion, No Lord of the Rings (or at least the Ring of Geiges parts). Besides without this book, my bookshelves would be a bit more empty.

b) A Princess of Mars. Edgar Rice Burroughs made me want to read. If I never read this book, I would probably been a garbage man today.

c) Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. This is the book that helped me transition from "escapist" reading to "literature."

d) The Elfstones of Shannara by Terry Brooks. Sword of Shannara is just a retelling of Lord of the Rings with the "innovation" that evil, as external power, is an illusion, but Elfstones is a pretty innovative novel which took me for quite a ride as a young reader.

e) Lost in Place by Mark Salzman. While Mark's personal choices were different from my own, this memoir of his youth really touched me and helped me to understand myself a little better. Salzman is about a decade older than me, about the age of my friend Sean's older brothers, and the way he represents himself combined my image of myself and how I understood my friend's brothers to be. It was as if Salzman was writing a "what if", I had been a part of the "experimental" part of Gen X rather than the "pop cultural" part. Interestingly, many of the events I would have experienced were the same.

Honorable Mentions: The list would be too numerous, which is why these things are ridiculous. But the list would include Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Micheal Moorcock, Lord Dunsany, Robert Herbert, St. Augustine, Cicero, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Lester Dent, Robert E. Howard, Howard Philips Lovecraft, Manly Wade Wellman, Clark Ashton Smith...

Movies

1. The total number of Movies I own:

Well over 500, but that is just a guess. I own a lot of DVDs and still have some VHS hiding around the apartment as well.

2. The last movie I bought:

Boogeyman: I liked it in the theater and I still do.

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. The soundtrack features acoustic cover versions of Bowie tunes from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and in Portuguese no less. Wow!

3. The last movie I saw:

Cromwell
Mr. and Mrs. Smith The Pitt/Jolie.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith The Hitchcock. No murder, no mystery, but plenty of suspense. If you consider romantic tension to be suspense. This Hitch romantic comedy displays Hitchcock ability to create wonderful human realationships at its best. You can see similar relations in Lady Vanishes and Stage Fright.
High Tension Picture Identity meets Texas Chainsaw Massacre and that's the vibe.

4. Five movies that mean a lot to me, in no particular order:

a) A Clockwork Orange This film made me re-evaluate everything I had ever thought. It is so shocking, not in the way you are thinking, and radical.

b) Ride the High Country Maybe, just maybe the greatest Western ever made. This film captures all the tropes and makes a truly realistic Western and shadows of Peckinpah's anger (which is best seen in Straw Dogs and The Wild Bunch) are everywhere. But Ride focuses on what it takes to become a hero in a lawless land, and it takes a great deal. Other great Westerns include, Red River, The Searchers, and Rio Bravo. In fact, a list of great westerns with reasons for their greatness could easily fill a small encyclopedia set.

c) Gallipoli. The first Australian "new wave" film I had ever seen. It was one of my grandfather's favorite war movies and he took me to see it in the theater. Peter Weir captures the horrors of war at the same time that he captures the hopeful spirit of the young man.

d) Five Million Years to Earth. Seeing this Hammer Production led me to two of my great entertainment loves, Dr. Who and the Cushing/Lee horror films. Lee will always be Count Dracula to me and not Count Dooku. He is the lord of the undead dammit!

e) Singin' in the Rain This film made me love musicals and Gene Kelly. It is a celebration of what films were once, were at the time of the film, and what they would become in the future. Stanley Donen directed this masterpiece, as well as one of my favorite Cary Grant films...Charade.

Honorable Mentions: Stagecoach, The Quiet Man, Brotherhood of the Wolf, Star Wars, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, Excalibur, Ladyhawke, Blade Runner, Tron, Ace in the Hole, Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, Swingers, The Breakfast Club, She's Having a Baby, The Lost Boys, Disney's Tarzan, Akira, Kill Bill vol. 1, Five Deadly Venoms, Hard Boiled, Zu: Warriors of Magic Mountain, Big Trouble in Little China, Elmer Gantry, The Music Man, The Blob, The Thing, Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, The Howling, Superman, The Wrong Man, The Hidden, Scanners, The Hills Have Eyes, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Permanent Midnight, Father Goose, An Affair to Remember, The Three Musketeers (w/Gene Kelly), Yankee Doodle Dandy, How Green Was My Valley, On the Waterfront, Barry Gordie's The Last Dragon...

CDs

1. The total number of CDs I own:

200+ and a 20 Gig Hard Drive of mp3s.

2. The last CD I bought:

Better Than Ezra: Before the Robots

T Rex: Electric Warrior

3. The last CD I listened too:

Toad the Wet Sprocket: Dulcinea

4. Five CDs that mean a lot to me, in no particular order:

a) Prince: Purple Rain

b) The Cure: Three Imaginary Boys. My friend Ron and I would listen to "Fire in Cairo" as we drove through Reno. We would sing along as Robert Smith belted "F-I-R-E-I-N-C-A-I-R-O" with our best "worst" English accents. After my friend Ron shot himself in the heart in the Spring of 1999, this song helped me focus on the happy times we had together rather than on the big "why" question.

c) Hotel California

d) Metallica: Ride the Lightning

e) Peter Gabriel

Yes!

From the unlinkable IMDB news...

Skywalker As The Joker? It's No Joke


Original Star Wars star Mark Hamill has joined the shortlist of favorites to play The Joker in the Batman Begins sequel. The actor, who played Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi, has become a fan favorite to play Batman's colorful foe. He joins Crispin Glover and Aussie actor Lachy Hulme on the three-strong internet shortlist. Hamill became an obvious choice for some Batman fans after voicing The Joker for the Batman cartoon series. A spokesman for top Batman website Darkhorizons.Com points out, "The net basically picked Christian Bale to play Batman, so who knows." Batman Begins opens across America and Europe this week.

Yes! Mark Hammil deserves another chance... it's been 20 years! Besides, he was an awesome Joker in the Animated Series. He's a talented guy... don't make him Luke Skywalker until he finally passes on.

Don't Call Them Zombies, Fool!

As has been mentioned before, next week will see the release of George A. Romero's Land of the Dead. Let me restate that...the eagerly awaited release of George A. Romero's Land of the Dead. In celebration of this occasion, I have previously posted a review of the Zombies! Boardgame with the promise of more to come.

Well...now is the time for the more. In preparation for this year's film production George Romero teamed up with Tommy Castillo and Rodney Ramos on the comic book release of Toe Tags, the cover of issue #6 (by the awe inspiring Bernie Wrightson) is featured below.



Sadly, this post isn't about Toe Tags. Typical of any comic fan, I am about 6 months behind on my reading. So I haven't gotten around to Toe Tags yet, but that doesn't mean that we are not going to talk about Zombie comic books, because we are. Sadly, (since it takes place in my alma mater city Reno) we won't be talking about Remains. To be honest, it is in the same stack as Toe Tags. You know the stack, the "to be read" stack. The stack that keeps growing.

Instead I would like to introduce you to a wonderful little book called The Walking Dead (read down the interview to get a description).

So why did this book make it off the "to be read" stack and into my hands? Because Robert Kirkman wrote it and Robert Kirkman is a comic book genius, as his recent agreement with Universal makes perfectly clear. You see, Kirkman is a dying breed in the comic book industry. He is a writer with a sense of humor. I wouldn't be surprised to hear he actually has fun crafting comic book stories, whether Superhero or narrative fiction. So when Kirkman is writing a book, I read it immediately and with no delay. Want a sample? As with all things addictive the first time is free. You can read the first issue of Kirkman's ongoing Supers title Invincible at the Image Website. Scroll down to Invincible click on the cover and read away.

But The Walking Dead is a very different book from Invincible. The humor and smart writing is still there, but Dead is a serious piece of zombie entertainment. Maybe the best piece of Zombie media I have seen to date. What makes Dead so remarkable is the manner in which it uses the virtues of its medium. Kirkman understands that he isn't limited by the filmic time constraint of 90 minutes. There is no need to shock us and pull us out. Instead we can explore what it would really mean to live in a world during a Zombie Holocaust. To quote the back cover:

How many hours are in a day when you don't spend half of them watching television?
When is the last time any of us REALLY worked to get something that we WANTED?
The world we knew is gone.
The world of commerce and frivolous necessity has been replaced by a world of survival and responsibility...
In a world ruled by the dead, we are forced to finally start living.

Kirkman captures what is the most terrifying part of any good horror film. What scares us in the long run isn't the brief "gotcha" moments with corresponding "stings." What scares us most is when we see what people can become under certain circumstances. It is in the bleakest of situations that human character is really revealed, and it is often shown to be lacking. Kirkman understands this and is able in his exploration of human behavior in a "dead" world. Kirkman is telling a people story, not a slasher tale, and it is the comic medium which allows for this to happen. But don't take my word that was his intention, let Kirkman speak for himself:

What you now hold in your hands is the most serious piece of work I've done so far in my career...

To me the best zombie movies aren't the splatter fests of gore and violence with goofy characters and tongue in cheek antics. Good zombie movies show us how messed up we are, they make us question our station in society...and our society's station in the world...

With The Walking Dead I want to explore how people deal with extreme situations and how these events CHANGE them.

It looks to me that Kirkman is doing for the Zombie story, what he did for the Superhero comic book. Here is a guy who can write meaningfully without being a trite reactionary or counter-reactionary. He is writing for our enjoyment and for us to think.

Leave your house this very moment and purchase The Walking Dead, or if you are afraid zombies will kill you on the way to the comic shop, you can also buy the first two trades on amazon. In a just world, you would buy them straight from the source at this year's San Diego Comic Con.

Surprise, surprise...

Cinderella Man's not doing so good. Gee, it's as if people don't want to see a movie with Russell Crowe called Cinderella Man. I'm cross-pollinating a bit... I posted on my main blog about this awhile ago, but it seemed better to put my follow-up on here.

Anyway, Hollywood studios need to hire me. Are they really lacking people to say stuff like 'No, Godzilla movies shouldn't be about non-radioactive iguanas that hide instead of smashing stuff' and 'Don't do two puff movies before putting all important information for the prequels in one single, good movie?' What about 'No, gamers aren't idiots; calling the worst movie ever the DND movie will not assure success...' Oh, and 'Stop making the white Christians (you know, the majority of American movie-watchers) the bad guys.'


These are not hard things to figure out, but tens or hundreds of millions of dollars are lost due to a lack of understanding them every year...