Toys For Men

Just for kids? Doubtful. I hear the old folks complaining “kids” movies are more for adults these day. Good. I’m glad we adults get to have fun again.

America is still behind the times. I’m not talking about universal health care or acceptance of nudity, either. I’m talking about America’s habit of taking everything fun and giving it to kids. Toys. Cartoons. Games. What is the deal with that?

Don’t get me wrong. We’ve come a long way. But I think we all know there is still quite a disconnect between the growing population of young and middle-aged adults who still like the fun stuff, and the aging population. There are still a lot of people out there who think anybody past their mid-twenties who still watches “kids” movies, thinks super heroes are cool, and plays video games has something wrong with them. A lot of people still don’t consider people interested in these things “grown up”. This doesn’t make much sense to me for a very good reason.

These things weren’t originally meant  for kids, and a lot of them still aren’t exclusively for children.

230 Million Years of Cool

I can’t think of very many things that have been cool as long as dinosaurs have. Of course, they got a pretty good head start, and they were around a lot longer than the average band or popular television show. Still, I consider it quite a feat for something to captivate human interest for as long as dinosaurs have. Man first discovered their fossilized remains sometime in the early 1900’s, and we’ve been in love with them ever since.

Next time you go out, look for dinosaurs. If there isn’t a dinosaur or something with a dinosaur on it, I’ll bet there is nearby.

Zombify All the Things

Four mana really isn’t bad for this graveyard reanimation classic. But I digress.

How far are people willing to take any given “thing” in popular culture? Pretty far, it seems; especially if that “thing” is zombies. I don’t know when it happened or what prompted it,  but  zombies have  shambled out of the cult movie clubs and into practically everything.

You probably know that already. You probably already have your Zombie Survival Guide, a stockpile of zombie killing bullets, and after the recent face-eating bullp*ss, you might even be seriously building that survival kit.

If that is the case, you’re probably expecting a lot of down-time in the future. When you’re not trying to survive, that is. You might want to pack some zombie Lego sets in that backpack. Yes, zombie Lego play sets.

Book Report: Mars Trilogy

When I saw the commercial for John Carter during the Stuporbowl, it was pretty much settled; I had to finally read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars. I had to trek to the “local” BAM (Books A Million, dumbest name ever for a bookstore) to find a copy, and even then, I could only purchase the Mars Trilogy. This worked out great, considering all three books were pretty much the same story with cliffhanger endings.

She Must Break You (then suck out your love juices)

Until about two minutes before writing this, I did not know part of Sylvester Stallone’s face was paralyzed since birth due to a doctor’s misuse of forceps, explaining his unique visage.  This is probably the most interesting, and informative sentence you’re going to read in this post, and only loosely related to what I am about to present.

A while back, I decided to stop thinking about something and just do it. That something was a fun little music video in which I put scenes from the second season of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, to one of my favorite songs from Rocky IV; Robert Tepper’s “No Easy Way Out”.  It wasn’t just just a collection of random events, either.  I summarized the the phenomenal finale while also touching on the major conflicts from the rest of the season. I even did it in the style of the amazing montage where, after Apollo Creed’s death and subsequent fight with Adrian, Rocky drives off in his sporty little car and thinks about his fallen friend and his career as a fighter.

Oh yeah. Rocky IV  was my favorite Rocky. Rocky v.s. Communism. The American spirit against Russian science. He won the Cold War for us. Stallone did a lot of movies during the Regan era that helped push the national agenda. Rambo was also about the battle with communism, and a piece about how America “turned” on their soldiers in Nam.

What is my video about? Well, I suppose it could represent the current political climate. As a people, we’re more polarized than ever. I’ll tell you, nothing is scarier than seeing the “Take Back America” banners. Take it back from whom? We’re talking about the other half of the country that voted, not some sort of invading force.

So maybe Queen Chrysalis and her  changelings can represent the danger our fellow Americans pose to our way of life. They look like us, they may even love us, but God dammit, they just want to suck us dry until there is nothing left.

Maybe I’m over thinking things. Lets go a different route. This video was a lot of fun to make. It is the first video project I’ve done in a long, long time. I forgot I could make neat things like this, and how fun it is to create again. I kind of wish I had Youtube and digital media back in the day when I did cool stuff like this constantly. I used to be really cool, now I’m just boring. Work. Video games. Drink. Sleep. Woo!

Here is my video. Enjoy. Don’t forget to check out the link in the description to see the original Rocky IV source material. See you on the battlefield later this year.

Watch this movie. Really, it’s okay. Don’t be a puss; your testicles won’t shrink. There is lots of fighting. Trust me

Presidential Candidates 2012: Leia Organa Solo

I think I speak for the vast majority of people in this country when I say our choices in presidential candidates are usually lacking. It always comes down to two guys, a republican and a democrat, who probably aren’t that much different. I also think I speak for the vast (silent, if you will) majority of people in this country when I say most people just end up voting for whoever they think with screw up the least, with the least vile past and most benign hidden agendas.

Wouldn’t it be nice to vote for somebody you really believed in?

Jack Kerouac Never Wrote About HIM

It is a beautiful December night outside. The moon is big and bright. The sky is clear. It’s not too cold. It is the kind of night meant for layers, bonfires and warm drinks outside. Instead, I am inside, trying to figure out how to write about a villainous cross-dressing lobster who shares the same name with a Finnish rock band, and why it might not be so strange, after all, that I enjoy a show about certain equines meant for “little girls”. It’s not easy. The hardest part was figuring out what kind of drink this writing requires. The mead I’ll save for Skyrim, and the wine is too civilized for this type of work. I’m going with Wild Turkey. On the rocks.

Scary Sh*t

Every station on television runs some sort of “scary movie” marathons in October. Most scary movies are awful, but if they’re done right, they can be a lot of fun to watch even if they are bad.   If they’re done wrong, however,  they’re just plain bad.

Mom! Cookies!

 

These are called, “thrillers”. Usually they try to be really serious and really scary. Usually they really fail.

While scary movies usually aren’t very scary, unless you are a total wuss, there are a few in my mind that stick out as being really creepy. These are those movies:

Invaders from Mars (1986)
I tried not to include anything from early childhood, because everything scared the crap out of me back then. However, this movie still counts because I can see how the concept of Invaders is still legitimately scary today.

The Invaders from Mars I saw was a remake of a 1953 film of the same name. A young boy sees something odd going on behind his house, and soon finds aliens have taken over the minds of his parents. He desperately tries to tell people what is going on, but of course nobody really believes him. Too bad. After everybody else starts to catch on, it is way too late, and the aliens have a stranglehold on the community that neither the cops, nor the military can break.

The end.

When I picked this movie out, I thought I was going to watch something with neat aliens in it. What I got, was a movie that told me that all of the people I looked to for protection can not stop an impending alien invasion and a month of sleepless nights.

Pumpkinhead (1988)
Pumpkinhead is not really that scary, but it is a damn good. A monster movie at its core, Pumpkinhead does something I’ve seen few monster movies do; character development.  The killings don’t start right away. Instead you get to watch a hard-working country man and his son bonding for about half an hour, right before the kid gets killed by some punks on vacation. It only makes sense that dad would want revenge, and that a scary-ass demon summoned by a swamp witch would be the best way to to get it.

It is also the first monster movie I saw in which there seems to be a reason the kids have to die, besides them being in the wrong place at the wrong time, touching the wrong thing.

Pet Cemetery (1989)
Pet Cemetery is scary because it was just a simple, almost believable story. No monsters. No aliens. Just a dead kid and an Indian burial ground. What could go wrong with that?

A lot. When a family moves into a nice house on the country, they find out that:

1. If you bury a dead cat in the back yard it comes back to life terribly ungrateful.
2. If your kids gets hit by a semi-truck and you also bury it in the back yard, it comes back to life terribly ungrateful.

Anybody who’s seen this movie knows why little kids will always be creepy, and why I jumped into my bed from a distance for quite a while after watching Pet Cemetery.

The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Paranormal, schmaranormal. The Blair Witch Project was the original “home movie” horror film, at least the first widely known one. It’s simple story and zero budget scares turned out to be pretty terrifying, actually.

Some film students go into a rural community looking to do a documentary on the Blair Witch. Naturally, they take to the woods and end up experiencing some very scary things first-hand. At first, they believe they are being tormented by “townies”, but they soon find themselves lost and dealing with some really scary stuff. They also go crazy.

I’m so sorry, Heather’s  mom. I threw that damn map in the river. I thought for sure she would put out on this trip.

I don’t know if this was scary because we all lived in the damn woods when this came out, or because we frequently went camping. Nobody believed that the story was actually true, as the movie would us believe, but everybody half expected ghost children to beat on the tents anyway.

It was a while before I was allowed to dress myself.

The Orphanage (2007)
The latest film I’ve found to be genuinely scary is The Orphanage. It is the story about a woman who brings her family back to her childhood home, an creepy seaside orphanage. Of course, there are plenty of ghostly children still about, which is great, because  her own eventually disappears. Mom realizes juniors imaginary friends might be real and might be the key to his disappearance, but then again, maybe not.

This movie was scary because it had scary kids in it. The atmosphere of the movie is very creepy, and so are the visuals. The mystery of the missing child adds a lot of intrigue, making it more than just the normal ghost story and it all ends in a very, very interesting way.

So, if you’re not out chasing zombies tonight or looking to see if some other poor nerd dressed as a pony for Halloween, load up, rent or steal a few of these flicks. If you don’t want sleep, that is.

Borderline Racist

Recently, I had an interesting conversation about this Ms. Magazine article by Kathleen Richter. We were talking about how difficult it must be to create something for the any screen, big or small,  in a society where everything is completely over-analyzed by a million watchdog groups and individuals representing every race and creed  under the sun.

Things went bad when I mentioned how I always get annoyed when a character’s race is arbitrarily changed just to placate these groups. By “bad”, I mean I realized how much of a racist I am when it comes to this sort of thing.

My argument is this;  Hollywood “race lifts” are done for a variety of reasons, and none of them good, unless you count the studio not getting sued by some special interest group “good”. The counter-argument; race lifts are done to include different races when they might not otherwise be represented, and if it doesn’t change the character, what difference does it make.

Sooo bad.

I can concede that if a race-lift doesn’t change a character, it shouldn’t matter at all, and most of the time they don’t change. Kingpin was still Kingpin in the Daredevil movie. Nick Fury is still Nick Fury, even though Samuel L. Jackson is now sporting “the patch”. Sokka and Katara were still Sokka and Katara in the awful  The Last Airbender movie, which I will never watch.

However, even if its only on a visual level, race-changes still bug me. As a very visual person, a race-lifted character just doesn’t seem quite right.  In the case of the The Last Airbender and the Spawn movies,  it was downright horrendous. Dear God, is it awful when Caucasians replace non-Caucasians.

Also, as somebody who has created a lot of characters (who will likely never see light of day), I think it is unbelievable to change a character’s race and not change anything else about them. All but the most one-dimensional characters are changed simply by changing their race. Color doesn’t matter, but culture does, and people of different races have different cultures. People from different cultures experience life in different ways. It is a fact. It makes people who they are. I know we all love the melting pot idea, but it is very unrealistic to think we’re all ever going to think as one.

I think my biggest “beef”, though, is creators create characters the way they are for a reason. If  a character was meant to be Caucasian, they would have been written Caucasian. If a characters was meant to be African-American, Hispanic, Asian or undead, they would have been written as such.

Now, this is where it gets sticky. Does this mean I adhere to stereotypes?  Does taking in account of a races traditional culture and subsequent behavior when creating a character mean the author is painting said race into a corner or accurately portraying reality?

Either way, I don’t think it is doing anybody any favors by arbitrarily changing colors to “reflect reality”  or encourage cultural diversity.  Not being a racist dick, not excluding or not representing people simply because you don’t like them and realizing different people have different cultures and respecting them does far more for that cause.

Extra Credit:  I would like to know where the line on race-changing is drawn. When is it applicable? Does it have to be a major motion picture or does it affect lesser films? Are books and other written media subject to race changes?

You’ve Got to be Fricking Kidding Me: Spy Kids 4 goddang D.

Because I live under a rock, sometimes I miss things, like how director Robert Rodriguez had decided what cinema needs now is a revival of one of the sh*ttiest movie theater gimmicks ever.

I say cinema, but I’m really talking about another Spy Kids movie here. While perhaps the other Spy Kids movies may have had an element of cleverness to them, the latest installment, Spy Kids 4: All the Time in the World, looks really bad. Maybe it is the cheesy computer animation sequence I saw where an infant throws a grown man over its shoulder. Maybe it is the scene in which a talking dog fires a volley of fart-balls out of its anus. Maybe it is because the movie is supposedly filmed in 4-D.

What is the fourth D? Well, if you’re not like me and you’ve been paying attention, you already know it is smell. If you are like me, then you put your hand through a glass while doing the dishes when you heard the word “aromavision” in the movie’s  trailer.

Horrific.

I’m already a little annoyed whenever I have to pay more for a ticket because a movie is filmed in 3-D. No, I don’t think watching a fish spit a penis at the screen is any better when the penis pops out at me. I can’t imagine smelling a dog’s “fart bombs” will make my movie going experience any better either. Like 3-D, Smell-O-Vision will mostl likely suck just as bad as it did when it was first invented, except it is worse because we already know better.

I’m curious, though; how far with this bullp*ss go? Will we have special machines bumping the bottom of the theater seats during a theater scene like in The Tingler? In the future, will I emerge from the theater drenched in fake blood looking like I just attended a Gwar concert? Will the jackass texting on his cellphone and telling his friends about everything he writes get shot during battle scenes using special jerkoff tracking technology? The sky is the limit.

Enjoy sniffing a dog’s butthole, moviegoers.