Saturday, August 09, 2008

Obligatory Olympics Post - 1

Well, if you read Jamie's blog, you're going to know we watched the Olympic opening ceremonies, as well as an hour of Animal Planet's Puppy Games.

So we're in neck deep now. Woke up this morning to Dressage (or horsey dancing, as we call it). Then watched the Americans slightly beat Japan in 3 of four sets in Women's Volleyball. Japan was really good, and I don't understand how the US managed to pull it out in the three sets. Plus, seeing really tall Japanese women is sort of interesting.

The American women swept Sabre. Which is awesome (yes, I got a little misty when they showed the three medal winners together). We also watched a Chinese girl (I'd say woman, but she was really young) lift 250+ pounds clean over her head for a world record. That was... insane. Kudos to her.

Anyway, we're now onto Canada v. China in women's soccer. Not sure when the US women play, so I need to look that up.

The only men's sport I've seen has been badminton, which a Polish gentleman was winning.

Walsh & May-Treanor play this afternoon, so I need to stick by the TV. Keep your eyes peeled for volleyball.

Anyhow, the games are on multiple networks, so I'm considering trying using the Picture-in-Picture feature on my cable.

One of the funny things about watching sports is how you automatically, randomly pick a side. Well, probably not randomly. But when you don't have a dog in the fight, and you're watching, say, Poland play Uganda in Tiddlywinks, I'll still decide to cheer someone on. Usually whomever is losing on the off chance that if they come back from behind, I'll feel like I knew how to pick a winner.

Also, I frequently cheer for someone based on the cut of their jib.

I did wonder exactly what the conversation was with Putin and W sitting a few seats apart at the opening ceremonies. "So, Vlad. Couldn't wait to stir up some military action until the end of the Olympics, huh?" "Da."

By and large, I thought the opening ceremonies were some of the best ceremonies/ least embarrassing/ keeping the cheese to a minimum in a few years. And I'm including Atlanta in that, although we had Ali at Atlanta. But, yeah, it was all very well done and imaginative.

So, viva los Olympicos.
It's been a strange day.

So here's U2 and Arcade Fire joining up to play some Joy Division

Thursday, August 07, 2008

The Day the Earth Stood Still has been re-made

So a while back I heard a rumor that they'd cast Keanu Reeves as Klaatu in "The Day the Earth Stood Still", a remake of the 1951 classic of the same name.

It's the sort of casting rumors you hear, like "Mariah Carey wants to play Wonder Woman!" that really make you shudder. Michael Rennie's portrayal of Klaatu is memorable partly for its matter-of-factness about the whole business. I don't know if Reeves is the right man for the job. In fact, I'm positive he isn't, if "Constantine" is any indication.

From the trailer, I'm guessing they've changed a lot, including the landing spot of Klaatu's ship, sort of defanging what it means to land a spaceship in the middle of the seat of power for the free world.

And, no doubt, the message of the movie will be muddled with somewhat as today's reading of the 1951 movie would be met with cries of "Why do you hate freedom?" and "Why do you want to appease the terrorists?" We're still living in a world where we're constantly on the brink of nuclear armageddon, but we're not... at least nobody has really brought that up in a while. (Curious what things we just sort of forget about.) But that was certainly the world in which the original appeared.

I dunno... the hard truth is that I will probably see this. But I would be far more excited about this movie if they'd cast someone with a bit more... gravitas... in the role.

The remake



The original:



Keep in mind, the original was made by director Robert Wise. The new one is being made by... some guy.

Dodging a bullet (unless you're Ted Kord)

WHat the @#$% is wrong with Hollywood?

As you may recall me mentioning here, before the writer's strike last year Warner Bros. was working on a Justice League movie.

The plot was going to roughly follow, for reasons I cann't even begin to fathom, Rucka's "OMAC Project" mini-series, part of the Countdown to Infinite Crisis event from a few years back.

If I have to take a guess as to how this happened?

The screenwriters assigned weren't really familiar with DC Comics, but were savvy enough to know that they didn't know much about modern DC Comics. And so they poured over recent releases, finding the OMAC wing of the Infinite Crisis plotline kind of fascinating (it is), and went from there.

Who knows? Maybe it was a good script, but the best script in the hands of a director without a feel for the material is never a good thing.

I do know they were going to cast this guy (Maxwell Lord: 40ish billionaire sociopath)


With this guy (20ish Apatow nerdy utility player, Jay Baruchel):


No, seriously.

Keep in mind, director Miller's vision of the JLA was also 20ish, telegenic folk fresh from OC casting calls. My guess is he decided the ultimate foe for the JLA had to be a hacker of some stripe, and this guy looked like a hacker to Miller.

Anyway, the movie isn't anywhere close to actually being made, and is, in fact, moving the opposite direction. Which is a good thing. So very, very much of what they mentioned wanting to do sounded like the same awful JLA TV Pilot-style adaptations that turned people off from super hero movies until Spider-Man. Greater FX do not a greater movie make.

Hopefully the success of The Dark Knight is giving DC/ WB a serious rethink on how these properties can be handled.

Comic Fodder

I've got a post up at Comic Fodder.

This week I decide to go the opposite of comics criticism.

Luckily, as is becoming the new norm, Travis responds with his own post, creating a bit of a conversation.

And, we're off to the races.

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Wanted: Originally a Comic, not a Movie

Some spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk.


So I kind of thought the movie "Wanted" that came out this summer wasn't very good. It seemed like there was a movie in there somewhere, but it was neither funny enough, nor did I feel like I was seeing anything worth my 2 hours and $6.00 to make me think this was something to tell others to see.

I was recently recommended the comic, assured that it was different. Being the polite sort of League that I am, I did not inform the folks who recommended the book that I have a love/hate relationship with Mark Millar, the guy who wrote the original comic of "Wanted". He's sort of an over-caffeinated little troll in his interviews, and he has no problem hyping himself and completely making up whatever facts he feels will help his image, projects, etc... Example: artist of the comic of "Wanted" JG Jones, drew the original Wesley Gibson character to look a bit like Eminem. Millar later claimed Eminem's people wanted to cast the rapper in the part in the movie. This was never true, and Millar now plays it off as if it was the press which misunderstood, and not some posting he made online. Apparently Eminem's people asked Millar to quit saying Eminem was interested.

Whatever.

If I didn't care for the movie "Wanted", I found myself disliking the comic slightly less. At least it wasn't boring. It's just derivative and vulgar and was the sort of high-octane, high calorie, low-nutrition comics that tend to wear me out.

Most importantly for League readers: THE COMIC OF "WANTED" HAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH THE MOVIE "WANTED". AND THE TITLE MEANS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING IN THE CONTEXT OF EITHER WORK.



In fact, they make a point in both works that Gibson isn't going to be "wanted" by the law in either work, because they have such a super-awesome secret society of assassins and bad-guys, that the cops can't do anything about them.

Millar uses "Wanted" to tell a DC Elseworld's tale in which the super-villains have taken over Earth. As those of you who've seen the movie will attest: Que? How can Millar not just be embarrassed that the producers so soundly gutted his work? I've literally never seen such a departure from a comic's source material to the big screen. If Producers truly understood what happened there with "Wanted" I wonder if it wouldn't do more harm to Millar's Hollywood career than good...

The movie of Wanted roughly follows the first issue of the comic, and then wildly diverges from the source material to such a degree that I can't really figure out why the producers bothered to cite the comic as even an inspiration for the movie.

Millar's tin-ear for American, non-white bread dialog shines through, and he drops the f-bomb at least twice in every word balloon, robbing profanity of any potency or punctuation, and making his characters sound like mildly idiotic 8th graders trying to sound tough. Lifting from the Wildstorm/ Rick Veitch method of thinly disguising known characters, Millar sets up a somewhat intriguing scenario of a post-Crisis world reformed in which the villains have won the day, and are living in the shadows as the super-wealthy (which Millar seems to think $10 million means super-wealthy, which... come on. Maybe in 1955). Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to know what to do with the scenario once its in place, except tear it apart.


You can sort of begin to see some of the differences between movie and comic here...

The comic winds up having the same problem as the movie, in that it seems to be challenging the reader to embrace... something. Chaos? Anarchy? Ignoring the fact that we generally aren't waking up one morning to find out we have super powers and millions in the bank. There's a last page with Gibson directly addressing the reader, and I felt the way he was describing, but not in the manner in which Millar intended. More in the "you've got to be @#$%ing kidding me" manner. Your plot was useless, your characters shallow stereotypes and interesting only in playing the "who is the analog for who?" game that he and others had already done for Wildstorm. And that ending made sense only in that it was on the page and we sort of had to go along with it, because that's what we had to do to finish the comic.

And it's sort of tough to differentiate between the casual racism/ homophobia of the book's narrator and the voice of Millar himself. One has hopes that Millar just really understood the mechanics of the soon-to-be villain, but given the evidence we get regarding Gibson's childhood and how he was raised, it doesn't seem in synch. Which is either Millar waffling, or Millar having a very weird idea about race relations/ LGBT issues in the US. There's just a lot of language that, maybe is intended to make things "gritty", but it doesn't seem to actually come from anywhere, other than a sense of bigotry ingrained prior to Gibson's transformation.

I just got really tired of it. Just as dealing with it in real life really wears me out.

I am aware that there's a class of comic reader out there who gets a small thrill from gratuitous violence, and I am occasionally part of that crowd. Especially when I'm reading anything by Garth Ennis (that dude knows how to push my "sweet lord, they did not just do that" button better than anyone). Millar's handling of the ultra-violence is so unsubtle and steady that at some point, its just a torrent of blood and death you can hop over to jump to the next plot point.

That said, JG Jones' art work is really, really nice throughout. His character designs interesting and familiar, while avoiding any copyright problems. I can see why Morrison had pegged him for "Final Crisis".

My difficulty comes in that: It may sound as if I'm picking on "Wanted" for spoofing DC material, but that isn't really the case. I wouldn't mind at all, if I felt there were a story here rather than just a bunch of things happening in some sort of sequence.

Mostly, knowing when this comic was originally released, it just seems like its about seven years behind the trend. Millar favors co-opted style over substance. The names of characters ("$#!T-head", etc...), all seem to have come from the Garth Ennis school of inappropriate hilarity, founded in the mid-90's. Pair that with the Warren Ellis school of bad-asses routinely declaring how bad-ass they are (founded, also, mid-90's) , an opening which, really, seems to have been taken from an early draft of "Fight Club", and you're left with the actual plot. Which is sort of nonsensical, and whose "twist" ending doesn't work. Even for a comic where the arch-villains are the protagonists.

I'm a little baffled by the huge audience for Wanted as a comic. I'm even more baffled how the movie and comic relate to one another.

I've had it mentioned to me that "Wanted" was optioned after the first issue, and a script cranked out before the comic series was done. And the producers must have liked their script much more than the comic itself (which, really, would make no sense to anyone but comic nerds, anyway). So they stripped the characters of their comic-book styled outfits, and nicknames. And put in some other plot about monks/ weavers (which, really...? how was nobody suspicious?). At any rate, its an interesting case study.

Title IX

Lauren, over at Carte Blanche, has posted a column on the perception of female athletes. Apparently market research is demonstrating that female athletes are mostly measured on their athletic prowess, versus a sexualized appeal. To sum up the sentiment, I'm pulling a quote from Lauren's quote:

Though there are a few notable exceptions — Anna Pornikova, Playboy covergirl/ tennis star Ashley Harkleroad among them — most Olympic caliber women are delightfully unsexualized. Which is not to say that they're not sexy, but that the press about them is about their athletic achievements as opposed to their finely toned backsides.


It is a shame that so few women's sports seem to make a go of entering into a televised professional capacity at the same level as the trinity of football, baseball and basketball. Scratch that: It's a shame that the televised events don't get the same media push that, say, the NFL enjoys. Now, I love the NFL and NCAA football, and I'm not sure if there's a chicken and egg effect... I'm just saying: The WNBA isn't on in prime time.

But... with things kicking off this weekend in Beijing for the 2008 Summer Olympics, it's a firm reminder to us folks in the general public that sport is captivating, not necessarily just the sport of one gender or another. And I think that's something young female AND male athletes need to see. When you get past the marketing and hoopla of pro sports, its about who plays the game well.

If the market researchers are looking for a particular reason why female athletes are being seen as athletes first, I would point to Title IX. We're now 36 years after the institution of Title IX, and into a generation of adults who never knew life without female athletes. And a generation of children who, thankfully, take it for granted that either gender can participate.*

Add in role-model athletes like the US Women's Soccer Team, May-Treanor and Walsh of the beach volleyball circuit, Diana Taurasi or Cheryl Miller of the WNBA, softball players like Cat Osterman... and while the athletes may not be as high profile as Terrell Owens or Shaq, they somehow manage to be just as stunning as athletes as the guys with all the advertising deals.

When the Brandy Chastain's of the world score a World Cup winning goal, it was only the pundits with need of something for the news cycle who missed the celebratory moment for what it was. The rest of us were jumping up and down in our living rooms and screaming at the TV (and, yes, maybe tearing up a little). It was a moment of sport at its finest.



Geez, that team was amazing.

Anyway, it was a moment when those who understood the implications of Title IX seemed at odds with those who sort of think a girl looks like a tramp unless she's got her ankles and wrists covered. And, honestly, there's no damn room for that in sport.

So, yeah. I might make cracks that I'm going to watch Walsh and Treanor-May in the beach Volleyball competition, but that's for teasing Jamie. Have you ever seen those two play? They're inhuman. And that's what I'm looking for in my sports, Olympics or otherwise. I'm looking for my few weeks every four years in which I get to see the most amazing athletes on the planet compete.

Man, now I'm kind of excited about the Olympics.

I just hope I don't spend my time following another doping athlete the way I did the summer Marion Jones was breaking records.



Whoo-hoo!

*It's worth noting that the actual Educational Amendment, Title IX, while routinely applied to athletics, was not specifically written about athletics. In fact, the wording is about academic access and discrimination based on gender. This happened to expand out to athletics where the differences in available activities were greatly unequal.

Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Gorilla City?

Barry Allen, take heed...

whole mess of Gorillas found in jungle.

Animated Wonder Woman in February

hey, Leaguers!

here's a link Randy sent me for a trailer to an upcoming animated Wonder Woman movie.

Linkety Link.

I am very excited about new Wonder Woman media, and this looks like its as much fun as I'd hope an animated Wonder Woman film could be. And because longtime DCU animators and DC Comics writers are involved, it looks like they're getting the character down pretty well. At least what see looks familair to the spirit of the comics, even if I can't tell what the story is about, per se.

Also, here's the movie's official website.

D-War = The League on Crazy Pills

So, this weekend Jason and I watched the 2007 film "Dragon War" off the ol' DVR. The movie was in theaters only last summer, and already its made its way from theatrical release, through DVD and onto basic cable (most likely bypassing HBO, etc... en route).

One should enter into watching any movie with a raised eye-brow when one cannot determine if a movie is called "Dragon Wars" or "D-War". Even when the movie begins and both titles share equal importance during the credits.

Opening in modern day Los Angeles, the movie quickly goes through a flashback, wrapped in a flashback, wrapped in Robert Forester dumping a lot of exposition and Korean words with which you can't possibly keep pace.

The story to the movie is probably not that complex, but the writer/ director's inability to simply get out of the way of device and tell a story is mind-boggling. Let alone his refusal to provide characters with story-arcs, growth, and dialog that doesn't sound like it came from a Babelfish translation. Also, the director's idea for a black character is mostly an amalgamation of other black sidekick buddies who tend to say things like "That's whack!" and "Say whaaat?" Unfortunately, he cast Craig Robinson of "The Office" and Apatow film fame, who is making a career out of not being the black-guy stand-in character. The whole thing reminded me of this scene from Clone High.

And there's a really weird scene where Robinson's character is attacked by one of the villains with a magic sword, and our two heroes abandon him as soon as its convenient. Bad enough, but in the next scene they comment on how "he's probably fine", though they left him for dead.

Say, whaaaaat?


The appropriate reaction to this picture is to click on it, which will blow it up to a much larger size. You will then want to perform a face melting air guitar solo in front of your computer.

Several times during the movie, I turned to Jason and said "I have no idea what's going on". It's always a little bizarre to watch a movie and get that same feeling I used to get in college watching a movie after a few drinks, and that's why you can't keep up. But when your only substance of abuse is a Starbucks Frappucino and a pack of Willy Wonka "Shockers", well... you begin to feel a bit like you've been taking crazy pills.

Which is always a sure sign that you're in for a treat of a movie.

I don't know if I was supposed to be making inferences about how Point A was tied to Point G, skipping all points between. Or, in fact, what was going on for huge chunks of the movie. Such as, where was the good-guy Dragon larvae? What was this Grand Cave they referred to frequently, but which never shows up in the film? And why had nobody but one sad sack zoo keeper noticed the 200 yard-long snake (which must have weighed several thousand tons) zipping through the streets of LA? And why would the cops believe the five dead and mutilated elephants (tossed around like rag dolls) were the work of the zoo keeper?

Inexplicably, there's a ten minute stretch in the middle of the film that's suddenly and jarringly pretty good. 16th Century Korean Magical knights and their reptilian steeds take to the streets of Los Angeles, and the effect is lot more rewarding than the jumbled mess of a street brawl from Transformers (which I think used the same streets for their climactic battle).


You may do the air guitar riff thing once again. This $#!& is totally rad.

What's most disturbing about the movie is that they hired some actors you'll recognize, such as the lovely and underappreciated Elizabeth Pena, and then stick them in thankless supporting roles. Its just bizarre casting. And I could understand "The snakes are the stars of the show" pitch for casting unknowns as leads, but neither is able to do anything with their part. My gut reaction is: hey, these guys can't act. When I'm pretty sure the reality is: hey, I think the director is awful and Meryl Streep couldn't do anything with this dialog.

That doesn't mean anything about the final scenes of the movie makes any sense, but it's staged well, and you can see the money right up there on the screen. Until they shift to the end at some mystical castle which appears to be in Apache Junction, Arizona. And I don't feel like I'm giving anything away, because... really.

I have to recommend "D-War: Dragon Wars" or "Dragon War: D-War", or whatever its called. It will blow your mind.

Monday, August 04, 2008

Lollapalooza 1991

I would say Lollapalooza seems safely back as one of the premier music festivals, seemingly leaving ACL Fest (at least this year) pretty far in the dust.

When I was 16, my parents gave me a strange taste of freedom. It was not the usual for Karebear and The Admiral to hear out a plan, and just agree to it. But it was also an unspoken indicator that my folks recognized Jason and I were now older (he'd just graduated high school, so perhaps no big a deal to him after living on his own for a year as he wrapped high school in Austin while the rest of us had zipped off to Spring), but somehow I landed permission to attend that first tour of Lollapalooza, back in 1991.

This was, for our younger readers, before Nirvana and Pearl Jam and that awkwardly affixed title of "alternative music". The show was at the then-titled "Dallas StarPlex Amphitheater", and I think we attended the show they scheduled after the first show sold out (but which wound up scheduled for the previous night). Which means the line-up that's listed on Wikipedia isn't actually the line-up I saw in 1991.

They have:
Jane's Addiction, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Living Colour, Nine Inch Nails, Ice-T & Body Count, Butthole Surfers, Rollins Band, Violent Femmes, Emergency Broadcast Network

I saw:
Jane's Addiction, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Living Colour, Ice-T & Body Count, Fishbone, Butthole Surfers and Rollins Band.

Jason is going to need to correct me if I'm wrong about that line-up. I mostly recall that the sun was very high in the sky to have to come face-to-face with the Rollins Band, which I'd never heard of at the time. And we thought Butthole Surfers were just great, but probably needed rehab.

Mostly, I remember the first roadtrip. For some reason we'd included a friend of Jason's from Austin, so our travel was a jump from Spring to N. Austin, to Dallas. Which, despite the breakneck speed of Jason's champagne colored '84 Camaro, was a lot of miles. Especially when we had a moment of panic, realizing that our directions to crash at Cousin Sue's house were coming in on I-45 from Houston, not I-35 from Austin.

So, sometime before it got too dark, we picked out a two lane farm road on a map to make the jump from I-35 to I-45, adding on more time to our drive, but getting lost in Dallas in the dark seemed even diceyer. Keep in mind, this is all pre-cellphone. And I have this memory of us driving west-to-east down this two lane road between corn stalks and wheat and sorghum an hour or so before dark, driving just way too fast, and probably doing exactly what Karebear was hoping we wouldn't do, playing freeway tag with two cars with the sun coming in over the head of the crops in this lovely amber light.

Anyhow, Sue let us crash on her wood floors in urban Dallas.

Lollapalooza itself was never the same after that first year. After the first year, when it got all the good (and well deserved press) in SPIN, Rolling Stone and the MTV, the festival which had been one stage with regular beer concession and a few tents selling art and hemp bags and whatnot turned into a corporate sponsored alternative event. Any of the feeling of "we're gonna do this ourselves, because it sounds like a good idea" was gone. And looking back, it seems so very strange that the press was initially skeptical of this "festival" idea. And that Perry Ferrel (a man prone to believe his own BS) had given it this whimsical nonsense name that in itself somehow stewed up controversy. Within two years, the "Palooza" suffix would be universally attached to any event, but at the time...

The next year Houston had its own stop on the tour, and the thing had quadrupled in size, along with creating a traffic nightmare that lasted hours (I missed Lush and part of Pearl Jam). And while I enjoyed it, partially because my group of friends ballooned from 4 of us in total to two cars full of people, you could see the places where the MTV's and Budweisers were getting their hooks in.

Another year later, and the conversion was mostly complete. The term"'Alternative Music" had been coined, thanks to the press's inability to categorize Soundgarden and Alice in Chains, and the Sorority Girls had started showing up to see Arrested Development.

By '95 I'd lost interest in the bands they were putting in the line-up, and I'm not sure Perry Ferrell was involved anymore. But the point is: I didn't show up. Mostly, honestly, because I was so poor that summer, that I made the decision to make money instead of spend it.

And by 96', despite the fact the Ramones were going to be included, the thought of Metallica fronting a music fest that had been inititally set up for overlooked and somewhat underground acts seemed preposterous. It was moving towads the "Monsters of Rock", and I just wasn't interested. And I could see the Ramones any time. They weren't going anywhere any time soon...

Although, looking at he '97 line-up, one can only wonder about the ephemeral nature of rock stardom. One day you're Orbital and almost unknown, next you're pretty much headlining Lollapalooza. By 2001, you're forgotten.

And yet Goo Goo Dolls and Blink 182 are still around. There's no @#$%ing justice, I tell you.

But I guess my point is: It's tough to share what it was like to be at the StarPlex on that balmy day in 1991. Being the second show, it hadn't sold out, and so while there were a lot of tickets sold and folks there, it wasn't the crushing thing that Lollapalooza became. It was just a few thousand people. And like all good, fun things, it wasn't something everyone knew about. Not yet.

And certainly before marketing agencies had pegged the audience for non-Top 40 music as a demographic to be marketed to (we'd have the rest of the 90's to suffer through before they finally figured out how to reach that audience with Hot Topic and Suicide Girl chic). And I think for a lot of the kids like me from our bedroom communities, and the kids who were the ones who got beat up living in Hogstick, Texas for their refusal to sport a mullet... it was a revelation to see you and the four pals you hung out with weren't the only ones who liked this album or that band. That, though "Color Me Badd", Amy Grant and "C+C Music Factory" were burning up the charts, if there were enough folks into the same thing, this could be a good thing, even if you had to jump cities to see a show.

Mostly, I remember an odd bit of crying when the last band left the stage and those harsh flood lights were turned on the audience and the Star Plex had to beg people to leave. Who knows? Those crazy kids were probably just having a teen angsty moment, but I can read into it what I want.

I'm old and decrepit, and I probably know less about what the kids are listening to than other folks my age. I'm routinely baffled by the popularity of bands like "My Chemical Romance", forgetting that this is some 15 year-old kid's first time. And that my bands were, no doubt, just as ridiculous to some 30 year-old at the time. And I'm now more than twice as old as I was when we hit the road that summer morning to head out for our three city tour.

And I'm a lot more at ease these days with sponsorship deals, and how you fund a festival like Lollapalooza 2008. And I'd probably feel worse for these kids, not seeing this stuff untouched, but I'm pretty sure that clubs haven't changed that much, and even the kids in Hogstick, Texas are going to wind up in a city as soon as they graduate. And they'll wind up at some bar not too different from where I was trying to get into (if they hadn't closed Liberty Lunch).

It was just fun to be there that first summer.

Contest for NBC's "Heroes"

Hey, Leaguers!

I've watched some "Heroes", but I know Jamie has watched the whole series (to this point). And I know a bunch of you guys are nuts for The Heroes television program.

I was contacted by BJ at M80 marketing, and I thought this was actually pretty cool.

Apparently, there's a contest going on, sponsored by Sprint. Here's some language:

In November 2007, Sprint & the NBC television show Heroes partnered on the “Create Your Hero” contest, putting viewers in control of creating the next Hero from scratch. Over 4 weeks, viewers were able to choose the specific attributes that make up a “Hero” (with a unique question each week exclusive for Sprint users only).

As the third season of “Heroes” approaches, Sprint & the creators of the show compiled all the attributes based on America’s answers, creating two new potential “Heroes.” Now it is time to vote! Will it be Audrey, or will it be Santiago? The winning character will appear as the subject of a brand new Live Action web series written by the creators of Heroes, debuting around the November sweeps week.

As part of our partnership with Heroes, “Create Your Hero” will be live at the NBC booth at Comi-con promoting the voting for phase II of “Create Your Hero” with giveaways and exclusive comic books with an illustration by the late Michael Turner.


Here's a link to vote: LINK



And here's some info on that Michael Turner comic:

Heroes the comic book, illustrated by the late Michael Turner is an exclusive comic for the 2008 San Diego Comic Con. The comic includes 4 stories that reveal more about the Heroes Universe. The stories focus on the back stories of Mohinder Suresh, Echo De Mille (the main character of the new Heroes webisode series), and Adam Monroe (Takezo Kensei).

Sunday, August 03, 2008

Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes

I was planning to really hit you guys over the head with a review of the Trade Paperback release of Geoff Johns' recent run on Action Comics.

But I just read BeaucoupKevin's review, and its spot on. Comic readers should be reading BeaucoupKevin, anyway.

I may review this myself, anyway. But, here's a first shot.

Tron 2 Apparently a Reality (TR2N)

Back around 2000, there were a lot of rumors about a sequel to Tron. I believe it eventually boiled down to an updated Tron videogame, and that was about it.

I'm not a drooling Tron fan, but I do own a Collector's Edition on DVD. Well worth seeing, especially for the mind-blowing effort that went into the movie.

Last night Steven mentioned to me something about some very authentic looking Tron 2 footage. Having monitored ComicCon pretty closely online, I was surprised I'd missed it, but, hey... I'm a comic nerd, not the Oracle.

Anyhoo... I'm linking to several sites with illegally captured video that was shown at ComicCon in case any get pulled, which I don't think will happen.

It's my theory that despite the NDA they were trying to enforce regarding no footage being leaked, or even descriptions... they knew footage would get out (this is ComicCon, for the love of mike). And they knew that this is how you work a viral campaign. Camera-phone, shaky footage from a top-secret panel at ComicCon is how you start. And, in fact, they may have placed the footage themselves. I'll believe anything when it comes to marketing.

Whatever. I'll be their pawn in their little viral campaign. Why? Because TR2N looks totally rad.

Here. Here. Here. Here.

And embedded:


TR2N. Awesome.