Apparently aware that everyone was going to already know the big plot twist from the original 80's-era TV mini-series of the same name, the new V bypasses what could have been convincing plot and character development to jump right into the Rag-Tag Band of Misfit Rebels portion, which marked the original incarnation's climax and eventual decline.
There are significant issues to investigate were we met by a highly advanced alien race, and rather than unfold these issues, the producers insisted on blasting right past all that. It just seems like such a bad choice to never give the audience the opportunity to fall for the aliens the way the public does in the original movie (back when it was an analogy for the Nazis making friends of their European neighbors).
It wasn't entirely awful, and didn't feel quite as hollow as the pilot for ABC's "Flashforward", although it was certainly trying.
I dunno. It has Elizabeth Mitchell. I'll give it another two or three episodes.
Elizabeth Mitchell is commandeering my TV until I'm positive I can't watch anymore
Last night I read the last two weeks worth of Green Lantern and Superman titles, and...
I am enjoying the heck out of all of these books right now. Which is absolutely awful for my pocketbook, but makes being a DC fan a lot of fun at the moment.
Some of the Batman books are enjoyable, such as Morrison's "Batman & Robin" and Rucka and JH WIlliams III's stunning "Detective", but the line isn't holding in the same way here as it has been for me for the extended "New Krypton" storyline in Superman, and certainly not the way I have been grabbing every darn comic with a "Blackest Night" tie-in on the cover (I was "meh" on the Batman Blackest Night, but actually sort of enjoyed the Titans tie-in).
If you read the internets (and I do), then as a comic fan, you're not supposed to like anything that smacks of a tie-in/ cross-over/ event. The funny thing is, this sort of thing is more or less what's keeping the Big 2 alive right now. Fans have consolidated around a few core concepts, and they seem to be more than happy to keep pace with events either to know what's going on (and hate every minute of it), or because readers enjoy this kind of storytelling in numbers greater than what it takes to sustain individual titles.
My guess (and you know I've got one) is that it's nice to know that the story you're reading isn't filler or won't be ignored completely and has seemingly built out of something as part of the greater architecture of the shared universes that can sustain these sorts of events.
Whatever.
I'm not really supposed to say "I'm enjoying Blackest Night", but I am. It feels like its got gravity, there's a massive threat that seems undefeatable, its wrapping in characters I enjoy, and seems to be setting itself up as a watershed event that will affect things for years. Not just because its a big event, those get swept under the rug all the time, but because its not an arbitrary idea thrown into the middle of other ongoing stories, and which builds on what's been happening in the DCU for a while.
I might also point to the way the Superman books are handling the current storyline to create an environment in which events are building upon one another and each issue is a chapter in a larger story (and has been since 06 or so). Its practically unheard of in monthlies at the Big 2, and is usually only seen in book at Vertigo, etc...
So, walking to the garage with my co-workers this evening, Bill mentioned that on his way in, he'd seen a girl get hit by a car at one of the intersections. "She didn't cross at the wrong time," he said. "I have no idea what happened."
We talked a bit about how dodgy the intersections were, and I related a tale from when I'd seen a girl hit on campus, who sailed a dozen feet or so when co-eds were first pairing cell phones and SUVs.
Anyhow, I walked in the door about twenty-five minutes later to find Jamie on the phone.
"Nicole got hit by a car!" "That was her?" "How do you know?"
Anyway, sounds like Nicole, who is slightly larger than a breadbox, took on a car and lost, but is doing well. She's been to the hospital, and all her parts are where they're supposed to be. I don't have all the details yet, but she's home and chillaxing. So let's all be grateful that Nicole seems invulnerable to moving steel.
The great thing about everyone showing up as Green Lanterns? Until there's 7300 of you or so, there really aren't too many. That's Reed and Your Friendly Neighborhood League.
I want to thank so many of our friends for coming by on Halloween night! I know there are infinite options on such a night (and its one night that if you stayed in and watched horror movies rather than show up for a party, I might believe you weren't just blowing me off), so thanks to all for getting dressed up and joining us at League HQ.
We had a lot of trick-or-treaters, who started around 6:30 and wrapped it up around 9:00. Our first guest showed up to watch the game around 7:15, and so we were sort of dividing attention for a bit there. Happily, almost everyone wound up in a costume of one sort or another.
In the end we had:
Supergirl: Jamie Green Lantern: Ryan Zombie thing: Jason (Jason also helped hand out candy and gave the kids a spooky experience) Green Lantern: Reed Tippi Hedren from The Birds: Nicole Rod Taylor from The Birds: Matt Tippi Hedren from The Birds: Tania a cat burglar: Justin Cop: Bill Crook: Lynn Project Runway contestant: Jonathan Project Runway model: Billi Jo MadMen Don Draper: Steven MadMen Joan Holloway: Lauren Super Pat: Pat Knight from The Holy Grail: Juan G Punky Brewster: Letty Star Fleet Officer: Julia
Here are pictures by Julia that I swiped from Facebook
Julia actually worked out her Starfleet rank. She's a Chief Engineer.
Super Pat! His power? Cheering on the Horns, anytime, anywhere.
Green Lantern and Supergirl wish you a mighty Halloween.
Don Draper (Mr. Harms) and Joan Holloway (Ms. Roth) enjoy the festivities
Garcia forgot his Holy Hand Grenade
Look, I'll be honest. Jason's costume totally freaked me out.
Matt and Nicole deal with a Hitchcockian dilemma
Billie and Jonathan rock the Project Runway thing
I know in the current age that parents have decided that they can't let their kids trick-or-treat, but our street is always swarming with kids, whose parents, I guess, aren't afraid of the urban legends about poisoned candies.
That's kind of nice.
Its also the only time we talk to our neighbors, people all seem to be in a good mood, and the kids aren't creeped out when you talk to them.
In the spirit of both Jamie and I finishing "Dune", and now watching the Sci-Fi Channel's devoted but slightly goofy 2000-era mini-series, I wanted to point to a new web project by comic creators and fans which is devoted to Dune.
A couple of days ago I said something about comics on the iTablet (and thanks to TJeff for following up. I was traveling and failed to respond). Well, it seems that the next day, it was learned that Marvel has made its comics available via iPhone.
What's odd is that they have multiple distributors, each offering up something slightly different. I have to assume that Marvel is letting folks duke things out to see who will get this beyond the trial period, but I also am surprised that with the Disney merger happening (I guess), that Disney doesn't have a room full of software engineers who can handle things like building apps.
I swear I've been meaning to do this post for a couple of years, and always wanted to save it for Halloween.
Shortly after moving to Houston (just prior to the start of my sophomore year) I was renting a lot of movies. I hadn't really made friends yet, so my weekends had some time to fill, and I think my folks were just happy that I wasn't sitting around looking gloomy about having had moved if I was wearing out the heads on the VCR.
One fall weekend, I rented "The Rocky Horror Picture" show. I believe it had been an anniversary, and so there was a big to-do about the film's release on VHS.
I had been scheduled to see it at the Village with, I think, Carla G (Carla N, back then) before moving, but once KareBear caught wind of the shenanigans at the theater, I was informed I could wait until I could darn well drive myself.
It should also be noted that the theater at Northcross Mall in Austin (now gone) had been among the first in the country to have late-night screenings of Rocky Horror. So Austin was quite into the tradition back then.
I was already quite taken with the movie from the opening (featuring the lips of Patricia Quinn singing about "The Day the Earth Stood Still"), and was perfectly happy with the Time Warp prior to Columbia making her first appearance.
It was most likely Columbia's tap-dancing, glittered self that sparked my interest.
But I knew two things: (a) Gold glittered hats now seemed like a much better idea and (b) My folks must never, ever see this movie
The movie itself is a love letter to a kind of science fiction I'd only begun to discover via Mystery Science Theater 3000, and with which I was quickly becoming enamored. As a consumer of genre fiction, I got the set up, but a lot of the rest of the territory was not covered particularly well in other material I consumed. Omni-sexual mad scientists, fetishizing muscle men, and even Meatloaf were all fairly new to me...
But I was focusing a bit on the girl with the nasally voice and tap shoes.
As we all know, Columbia wasn't the only one who got one of these outfits
Unlike a lot of other DITMTLOD, Columbia is a supporting role in a single movie, so there isn't a whole truck load to say. Her character has a somewhat interesting arc in the movie, and she gets to fawn over a rockin' Meatloaf in the role of Eddie. And I guess I thought Eddie was pretty cool, too.
In many ways, I'm not entirely clear on why Columbia rather than Magenta or Janet.
Like a lot of other DITMTLOD, I really didn't have any analog for Columbia. Certainly none who tap-danced and sang. But, in general, she seemed like a neat idea. I also suspect that, at age 15, my developing brain was feverishly trying to cram ideas and firing synapses into into the correct spots in my psyche in something analogous to the the old board game, Perfection.
Anyway, whether it was her natural charm, her joie devivre, that she looked good in glitter and tap shoes, I've no idea, but I still have a warm place in my heart for Columbia.
You see a lot of Columbia costumes come Halloween time, at least for sale. Aside from wandering 6th street, you don't see all that many of them. I assume they're sold for use at performances of Rocky Horror, which, I might note, 20 years on, I still haven't seen.
Little Nell herself has been in a few movies, including the late 90's version of "Great Expectations" and the little-discussed sequel to Rocky Horror, 1981's "Shock Treatment", which I've never even seen on a shelf to rent. I have little understanding of her career or trajectory post-Rocky Horror, but she turns up in VH1 docs about the movie and that sort of thing, and I believe may work in clubs or restaurants.
But a Halloween salute to Columbia, in the movie which has become a Halloween favorite.
Not just content to be terrifyingly headless, he's also got to have a flaming Jack O' Lantern. That Headless guy really knows how to turn it up a notch.
Halloween is tough when I think upon that which I'd like to post.
I do not find vampires frightening. If decades of cartoons and cartoonish post-Lugosi Dracula imitators didn't drain the idea of blood suckers of menace, then surely the post Anne Rice world of foppish emo-boys and the Xerox of a Xerox that's sprung since then, culminating in the glittering Foley's catalog models of Twilight, emasculating the horror of Dracula while simultaneously rewriting the narrative to suggest that the eternal damnation of being one of the undead was nothing but the modern day "bit by a radioactive spider".
Frankenstein is a tragedy, not horror. The most frightening thing about "The Mummy" is how dull the original movie is after the first ten minutes. Its tough to be scared of "Creature from the Black Lagoon" when its a movie that takes place almost entirely on sunny days in a nifty looking swimming whole, and Julie Adams' production value completely distracts you from the story.
The story of the Wolfman, however, is one I find intriguing, even if the original film starring Lon Chaney Jr. isn't going to hold up terribly well (especially the FX). Like Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, the concept itself explores the horror of the beast living inside, whether we put it there, its madness, or the beast was there all along. It doesn't matter.
Similarly, if I liked Paranormal Activity, it wasn't because of fine acting, but because it reminded me of a small budget version of "The Haunting", a movie in which There Is Something Out There, And it Is Evil, and It Is Going to Keep Coming Until We Are Dead.
There's nothing comforting about either evil, disembodied spirits or restless souls of the dead.
At least not in the laughable, let's-cheer-for-the-killer manner that's made franchises out of masked psychos. In the unknowable way that led to animism when turnip-eating peasants walked down the road in the dark and told themselves that the fear could only exist if there was, in fact, something out there.
I find it sad that I have no ghost stories of my own to share, and no other-worldly experience to relate for you to read at your desk (and shouldn't you be working?) on the day before Halloween. No tale of driving off and finding that a hook was hanging from my door handle, or that Jamie and I barely dodged sure doom if we hadn't left Make Out Point that one, eerie evening.
All of the stories I know are either made up, or are real and nobody wound up laughing at old Ichabod Crane as he fled from the Headless Horseman.
Even the one ghost story we thought we had when we were kids turned out to be a raccoon that had somehow gotten into a house that was for sale.
Instead, all I can relate is how I'm traveling, as I meet people, I'm making sure they don't ever have anything to worry about ever, ever again...
Jesus, people can be cruel. If it's not my build, its my personality.
But, ah... I think I've gone on enough for one post.
You won't hear me say it often, but I love Houston. If Austin is my tried and true lady, then Houston is the girl who is going to get me into trouble. Young, more money than brains, tarted up just enough to hide the scars and disguise the fact that all the drinking and cigarettes are causing her to decay in odd ways...
And like that girl who is nothing but trouble, you kind of love her all the more for it, even if she's probably going to mean your doom one of these days.
I was happy to consider Houston as a destination when we plotted our escape from Phoenix, but I had stipulations. Not in the suburbs. Nowhere that, when the storms blew in, our house would go beneath water, and hopefully in a place that had some trees.
This town has a lot to offer, and the change from burnt-out, post-80's-era decay to a usable downtown with places to live, sports, theater, what-have-you... I can see the appeal. If not for the 90% humidity year-round.
I'm staying in a phenomenal hotel near MinuteMaid Park, The Inn at the Ballpark. I have some questions about why they have, apparently, no parking. But I'm dealing with that. Someone else is going to pay the damn valet charge.
The waitress even expressed interest in the Jack Kirby war comic reprints I was reading. "Oh, comics," she said. "It's been a long time. I used to love 'Johnny the Homicidal Maniac'." I think I beamed a little too much.
Anyway, its raining and a front is coming in, and I'm downtown, which was where I always liked Houston best (although I'm not enamored with the George R. Brown Convention Center, which is what I can see from my window).
To UofH to see Michele in the AM. And then returning to Austin.
The basic gist of the article is that some comic geek pondered how their iTunes and other iPhone apps work, thought about the page size of a comic, added a dash of kindle, and said "hey, this could be neat for comics!"
Yes. Indeed, it could be.
I like my iPod, but I'm not a full-blooded Apple Acolyte. In fact, I've become so bored with the "I'm a PC and I'm a Mac" ads, I now dread new ones, as it means the campaign will NOT DIE. And I'm writing this post on a MacBook somebody decided I needed somewhere along the way.
Part of why I've not been quick to run out and get an iPhone (aside from the fact that everyone I know with an iPhone gets terrible coverage and refuses to believe its their network and device, and not bad juju, evil forces at work, lead-lined walls, etc...), s that, really... I'm just not that interested in working on a tiny screen.
But a tablet. Yessir... a tablet.
On a tablet, I could be reading, watching video, and reading comics. Or, if Apple played its cards right... drawing them, too. I'm just saying.
We've seen the willingness of companies like Boom! to adapt to the digital format as Simon tried out Irredeemable last month for us. My guess is that with Marvel under Disney's ownership and DC having a new boss (put in place to expand DC's reach), they'll be following Boom! to the digital format. Marvel has put some of its product online, but there are no real report about how that's going (I assume not very wel, or they'd be talking about it a lot more), as well as releasing original online content.
In any case, what is not happening is the release of current comics via an online distribution format. If I have to guess as to a "why", it would be that the Big 2 are aware that this could severely injure the comic shops that are the only place carrying their product at the moment in the periodical format (collected editions actually do quite well at bookstores, etc...).
As a reader, I'd still like access to DC's backlog of comics, and can see myself paying for collected editions online, or numbered runs on a series of older comics. Perhaps more for recent or current comics. I can also see opportunity for indie comic creators, etc... to tie into the iTunes or iPhone App format to keep readers engaged and returning.
But mostly... big, glowing comic pages sounds like a darn good idea.
I met with some good folks here at the UT Medical Branch Moody Library today, and it was interesting to see what their ideas, concerns, etc... are.
Digital Librarianship is different from the librarianship of the past, oh, 2000 years, and one can expect that by the time your grandkids are rolling their eyes at you over the Thanksgiving Protein-Turk-o-Form, they will wonder in amazement that people used to actually have to go to a big building with lots of books in it and not just think about whatever information they want to access. Also, bellbottoms will be in again.
Galveston itself was hit incredibly hard by Hurricane Ike last year, but being less populated and coming after the Katrina/ Rita one-two punch, and the press almost morbidly more interested in the 1900 storm, I am sort of wondering about the reconstruction of Texas's once prosperous gate to the southwest. Its clear that much of the city is not recovered, and while not exactly Omega-Man in effect, there just doesn't seem to be all that many people here at all.
In fact, I had lunch at a bistro in town, and before dinner this evening, I stopped at Target to pick a few things up, and ran into one of the waitresses in the aisle, four miles from the bistro (no, she didn't recognize me, but I wasn't wearing my tie and sport coat, either). And, truthfully, the Target felt sort of deserted anyway, before I started thinking maybe I'd seen everybody who lived in Galveston.
That said, there's still history in every corner of the place, with impressive Victorian houses on Broadway and large, old brick buildings which are likely 100 years old if they're a day, left over from Galveston's heyday as a port. But there's no doubt that the place is barely a whisper of the prosperity of 110 years ago.
I've suggested to Jamie that she and I take a few days and come back this spring. In addition to the beaches, there are museums, I'd like to take her on a tour of the Moody Mansion, and I think there's a place you can hire to take you up in a B-25, but I'd need to check the price on that. Oops. Just found the price. Never mind!
But there's still an airplane museum, and I know that Jamie would like nothing more than to spend a day looking at WWII vintage craft. Yessir.
I'm traveling this week for work, visiting some universities on the Texas coast who are members of the organization I work for. I actually really like this part of the job, if you don't include the "being away from Jamie for several days" bit.
Spent yesterday driving to Corpus Christi, today presenting at Texas A&M Corpus Christi, then driving across the Gulf Plains to Galveston by way of GPS. I'm now in Galveston, where I'll be for two days meeting with UT Medical Branch and Texas A&M Galveston. Friday, I'll be visiting Univ. of Houston, and then home.
Texas is a big place, and I love that its geography and flora change every 30 minutes when you're driving at a good clip. I'd not driven up the coast, crossing bridges over bays, driving through towns with no seeming point in existing, watching the flat of the coast turn into the East Texas swamps of Brazoria and Angleton, and back into the coastal flats outside of Galveston.
I'm hoping UT El Paso joins up so I can do that drive again (there's a lot of changes between Austin and El Paso).
But I also like getting out and seeing people where they work and live. Its great when they come to conferences, etc... but I find they're a lot more relaxed and talkative in their own offices. Its kind of nice.
Anyway, it's going to be a good couple of days, pending any technical difficulties.
I'm also reading "Moby Dick" in spurts, and listening to "Dracula" as an audio book. This is my first reading, which i decided to do to get it checked off the list and do it in time for Halloween. I'll be honest, that's a pretty scary book, thus far. I'm finally beginning to see the appeal, and why its been imitated so often. But, man, have people screwed that thing up in all the plays, movies, adaptations that we've seen.
I can say I finally understand why adapatations seem to reverse the roles of Lucy and Mina now that I'm fairly far into the book. I always found that decision baffling.
Anyhow, its great to get out and about, but I also know I wasn't exactly cut out for the Willie Loman lifestyle.
