Odds and Ends

It's been a while since I did a catch-all blog post, so here we go! Expect randomness!

• An interesting quote: "A mainstream film is one 10,000 people have seen 10 times. A cult film is one that 10 people have seen 10,000 times." Agree? Disagree? Pizza?
• Netflix (my DVD subscription of choice) now has a "Watch Now" feature on their site, allowing you to instantly stream one of hundreds of titles to your computer to view, in addition to your monthly rentals. There's an hour-per-month limit based on the amount of your subscription, but this is a cool bonus to get more bang for my buck!
• Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer now have a chance to raise money for charity by singing from the musical episode "Once More With Feeling".
• Lord of the Rings Online starts their Open Beta program April 6 (or March 30, if you're a preorder). Play a month for free!
• The Comics Curmudgeon won "blogger of the year" from The Week's magazine Opinion Awards. More zippers, mule!

As we turn into the fourth month of 2007, summer movie season is right around the corner (I swear that this year I will fulfill my desire to spend an entire day, start to close, in a movie theater) and it seems like we've already seen quite a few surprising hits so far. 300 stormed the gates of our hearts, TMNT got bad reviews but decent audiences, and four movies have topped the $100 "blockbuster" marker (300, Ghost Rider, Wild Hogs and Night at the Museum).

So what am I looking forward to in April? A quick rundown:

1. Grindhouse (April 6) - This "double feature" "b-movie" gimmick seems to be in capable hands, with Tarantino and Rodriguez at the helm. Few if any of the younger -- or middling -- generations even know what a double feature felt like, and these look sufficiently interesting (if trashy) to arrest attention. Question: is the girl with an assault rifle for a leg a perfect match for Evil Dead's Ash?

2. The Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters (April 13) - One of the most bizarre (and sometimes hilarious) cartoons of all-time... can they pull off a feature-length movie? I'm betting "no", but I'll still see it anyway.

3. Hot Fuzz (April 20) - To be honest, the trailer from the Shaun of the Dead team didn't leave me laughing much, but this could be a terrifically funny movie nonetheless. Plus? Awesome name.

4. Kickin' It Old Skool (April 27) - First I heard of this: a breakdancer from the 80's falls into a coma and awakes 20 years later to reform his dance posse and win back his girl, or somesuch. Jamie Kennedy stars, and the boy needs a good, solid hit.

5. Next (April 27) - Nicolas Cage in a Philip K. Dick tale about a man who can see into the future (all possibilities of it), and must try to prevent a horrible accident. The trailer seemed pretty nifty.

Heroes

So, like everyone, I've been hearing a lot about this new show "Heroes." Looks like it'd be right up my alley, but it's too late in the season for me to start; I figure I'll pick up the first season on DVD and start watching next season. Meanwhile, though, a lot of the things I've heard about it sound an awful lot like a comic that was published a few years back called "Rising Stars." So let me give a brief rundown of Rising Stars, and then any Heroes watchers can tell me if they're actually similar or not.

Rising Stars chronicled what happened when a strange mass of energy fell from the sky, striking down in Pederson, Illinois. All of the children who were in utero when the energy hit were affected, granting them all some level of superhuman abilities- some vast (Superman-level powers), some extremely minor (low-level telekinesis), some arcane (constantly appearing as the most beautiful person in the world to whoever sees her). After a brief prologue showing the children growing up together in a government facility, the series started with the 113 individuals ("Specials") in their late 20s or early 30s, when someone began murdering them. One of the Specials, Poet, investigated and eventually learned the truth: the energy that gave them their powers was finite, so whenever one Special died, their power was evenly distributed among the rest. Thus, the killer was murdering their old friends/classmates to increase their own power level. At one point, after enough of the Specials had died, the survivors went through a massive energy surge, all of them gaining high-level powers.

But that wasn't the end of it- further investigation revealed that while the killer was Jason Miller/Patriot (a corporate superhero), he was being controlled by another Special. Stephanie Maas was an incredibly shy, introverted girl who had been badly abused as a girl, and because of it now suffered multiple personality disorder. While Stephanie herself was low-powered, it turned out her "other" personality, which called itself Critical Maas, was not. Critical had taken over Jason's mind and made him kill their childhood friends, gaining immense power herself in the process; it took a covert team of other Specials to invade Chicago and eventually stop her.

There was more to the series, but I never got around to reading it. (It was told in 24 issues, I think I read the first 16 or so.) Nonetheless, there do seem to be some similarities between Rising Stars and what I've heard about Heroes. Am I misinformed, or is that the case?

Futurama-ama

An interesting update on the upcoming Futurama revival:

More Futurama In The Future

The Simpsons creator Matt Groening told IFmagazine.com that Fox will produce four direct-to-DVD movies of his Futurama show, with the first, Futurama: Bender's Big Score, due for release in December. The films will then be carved up into 16 episodes of the SF animated series, to begin appearing on Comedy Central starting in 2008, the site reported.

"We're doing four DVD movies, around 90 minutes [each], and then we're going to reconfigure those, and they'll be episodes on Comedy Central," Groening told the site. "The impolite way of saying it is we're chopping them up, and the polite way is to say we're reconfiguring, and we're going to add narration and more stuff. We're going to be doing some fun extras on the DVD show. There's going to be Everybody Loves Hypno-Toad, a whole show of it. The DVDs are going to be self-contained packages, but the episodes will also work, we hope. That's the goal."

And another thing!

I've just gone back and read the other mutants' reviews on Clockwork Orange and some of the remarks in the comments/Didja Notice? section.

I suppose what's found in this film could be called "phallic imagery," but usually when we use that phrase we mean it's symbolic or metaphorical - i.e., something in the film that resembles a phallus without actually depicting it. There's a LOT of this in another Kubrick film, Dr. Strangelove. What's in Clockwork Orange isn't that. What's in this movie is a whole bunch of very literal depictions of penises on popsicles, sculptures, paintings, and other objects. There's plenty of yonical imagery ditto.

And all of it more or less vanishes when Alex goes through the treatment he undergoes - not a really subtle way to indicate he's been emotionally neutered.

but then, it's not a really subtle movie.

A Clockwork Orange made of CHOCOLATE!

Mm. Chocolate.

I know we so far tend to pretend each of us is blogging in a vacuum here ("Ack! My lungs! But you can't hear me because there is no air to transmit sound!"), but I'm going to slightly respond to Justin's post and say I agree totally. It was the Happy Fuzzy Bunny view of the universe that originally turned me off on Star Trek after being a fan of it through much of my late childhood/early teen years. I mean, c'mon, Wrath of Khan is everybody's favorite movie, and it's certainly one of the grimmest of the franchise. Or so I hear. Bizarre as it seems, it's the only one I haven't actually seen other than Nemesis.

I'm watching A Clockwork Orange as a workout movie right now. I turned it off after about 3/4 of the way through last night. It's a fairly nauseating film. Not so much because of the content, which I suspect I am too desensitized to be shocked by, but because of the internal bombardment. Are we supposed to sympathize with this protagonist? Are we supposed to hate him? We can't distance ourselves from this sadistic little sociopath because he's the narrator and obviously the central character in the story. Should we pity his misfortunes when we've seen what he has done?

And the meditation on free will is more or less ruined for me by the giant codpieces Alex and his droogs wear, by the way. Gyaaaah. There's a reason why the pictures of Alex in his bowler - the iconic image of this film - always show him from the waist up.

Kubrick was an odd, odd man.

Star Trek: The Search For Coolness

As Star Trek: Nemesis tanked at the box office and Star Trek: Enterprise was unceremoniously yanked from the airwaves after four seasons, it wasn't a far stretch to pronounce the Trek franchise dead — or at least, gasping its last breaths. The scifi community was seeing bold new franchises excel where the bloated Trek failed, and a thought rippled around the world: maybe it's time to let go.

The wisest movie, it seemed, would be to let the franchise lay fallow for a number of years, perhaps up to ten or even twenty, before attempting a resurrection.

Paramount decided four was enough. It's been announced that J.J. Abrams (Alias, Lost) will be helming the eleventh Star Trek movie, called, simply, "Star Trek". While few details have been released, it seems that Matt Damon is on board, probably to play Captain Kirk in his salad days. Abrams is quite excited about the project, as you can read here, but I have my severe doubts.

Obviously, they're attempting something of a "reboot" of the franchise, a la Batman Begins, but it doesn't quite seem like they're going to just wipe the slate clean of almost a half century of Trek shows and movies and lore just to make it "hip" and "cool" again. So what we'll probably end up with is a half-breed, trying to be new but still constrained in the old Star Trek formula, and there's an excellent chance it will fail and in so doing, bury any hopes of Trek continuing past this point.

Alarmist? I suppose, but let's face the facts. This might well be Trek's last shot at regaining its former glory, and a lot rides on Abram's shoulders. I have a few suggestions that might help out in avoiding the big mistakes here:

1. Distance yourself from the Trek timeline and mythos. The whole of filmed Trek stretches from Captain Archer to Captain Janeway, and in that period any movie or show would be buried under a mountain of established rules, histories, lore and technologies that constrain rather than free the storyteller to go to new places.

Since going back to the past proved disasterous for Star Trek: Enterprise, which was burdened by having to make sure it didn't break any of the continuity of "future" facts, the only conceivable option is to go in the future. Way, way in the future. Put the new Star Trek about five hundred or even a thousand years past Star Trek: Voyager, which might allow for all sorts of new storytelling possibilities. Wipe the slate somewhat clean, and start over.

2. Ditch Roddenberry's misguided idealistic humanism, and reintroduce complex characters and good drama. Good storytelling comes from conflict, and Star Trek always suffered from bright, shiny, perfect people with far too flaws — per Roddenberry's dictum. No, it's not a bad thing to shoot for the stars and strive for the best of what humanity has to offer, but trying to portray a society that's too gosh-darned perfected both distances yourself from the (unperfected) viewers and limits the conflict to external sources — the stale space anomalies and bumpy-headed aliens.

Starfleet was like the Boy Scouts, group therapy and Rainbow Brite rolled into one. Happy ideals and unfallable speeches. What we need is a Starfleet that actually functions the way a hybrid military/exploration/diplomatic branch would, and flawed humanity to inject into its veins.

3. If you haven't already, fire Berman and Braga. These two have run Star Trek into the ground, are in full denial of the fact, and only deserve a painful death.

4. Focus on what made Star Trek exciting: good stories, great action, humor, fun technology and exploration of the unknown.

5. It's essential to cater to both the faithful Star Trek core (to keep your loyal fans happy) AND the bulk of the mainstream who have long since given Trek the pass (Trek is in dire need of new viewers). A billion references to other shows or characters that the average moviegoer has no clue about will not help your cause, even if the Trekkies dig it.

More Gaming Nonsense

I know we should be talking about movies a bit more on the blog, but then again, this is here for stuff that doesn't quite fit in with MRFH's main site!

A few points of video gaming interest that has recently caught my attention:

BAD: Bioshock's been pushed to an August release. As awesome of a RPG/horror/FPS game as this looks, to wait is nearly intolerable. A scary underwater 30's art deco utopia gone awry? Yes, please!

GREAT: The Longest Journey/Dreamfall looks set to receive its third and final installment... sort of. Funcom is planning on releasing the last chapter of the trilogy in downloadable installments, to be later packaged and sold as a whole. Can't wait to finish the tale!

INTERESTING: THQ's announced that they'll be developing Warhammer 40K as a MMORPG (which was on my wish list not just a couple blog posts ago). Of course, with any announced MMO, it'll be a few years before we see squat.

GOOD: I might have to eat my words about Lord of the Rings Online. I expressed doubts in my upcoming MMO blog, which was before the NDA on this game was lifted and incredible press started surfacing. While it doesn't contain the look or exact feel of the films (the game is based off the books), LOTRO is starting to make big waves in the gaming community as a very polished MMO that plays like WOW, but with a few twists and changes. The more I've read about this, the more excited I've gotten over the low-magic classes and the very interesting deeds/accomplishments/traits systems. I like ways to advance a character more than just waiting for the *ding* every level -- to earn a new skill or upgrade in the middle of a level, just for accomplishing a task, seems awesome. LOTRO also rolled out their Founders program, which I guess I'll try out. You preorder the game, and you not only get a week head start on the open beta, but you get to keep your characters from open beta *after launch* (up to level 15), get a few cool items, and be offered discounted pricing ($10/month or $200/lifetime). Open beta starts in early April, so it might be worth checking out if you're a Tolkein or MMO fan.

Oscars and Razzies

It's Big Award Season in Hollywood, and although we're in the time of year where some of the absolute worst movies are being slapped up on theater screens, Tinsel Town is all about self-congratulation and ego-stroking.

Okay, I won't try to be too cynical, but it comes naturally when this topic arises. Now, I'm all for the celebration of movies as art and storytelling, but you cannot look me in the eye and tell me that the Academy Awards was purely about movies -- it's always about the people, the preening actors and directors who couldn't let their work stand on their own recognition, and craved a greater award by their peers.

I'm sure many fine films got the awards they deserved this year, but what always burns me are the many other movies, just as deserving, that didn't get so much as a peep. The Oscars limit themselves with their awkward categories and designations: why can their only be ONE best picture? What makes an actor a "supporting" actor, versus a "main" one or a "cameo"? And is it remotely fair that pretty much any animated movie released in the past year gets nominated for an award due to a lack of entries, whereas dozens of other deserving films go unmentioned? And why are comedies, fantasies and science fiction flicks eschewed as "mere" entertainment?

Happy Feet sucked. Really. Oscar my Italian posterior.

So I pretty much don't watch the Academy Awards any more. I was very much hurt that two of the most incredible films of last year -- The Prestige and Children of Men -- were given the brush off. The Departed won, but of course. It's an ensemble, it's a drama, and Hollywood is giving Scorsese his award out of seniority. BEST picture? No more than Shakespeare In Love, or Kramer vs. Kramer or The English Patient.

I also found myself grumbling a bit when I read The Razzies this year. The Razzies are a sort of anti-Oscar award show, "awarding" the worst of movies in the past year. I'm all for that, but having been a voting member of this group in the past, I know that the award ballot is largely stacked in favor of the award show runners' wishes. They outright ignore films or actors, even hideously attrocious ones, and then try to set up one movie for a landside sweep, by posting it in pretty much every category they list. I think they love it when they can claim a movie won like, 8 or 20 Razzies, versus 2. The ballot also mocks the movies by deliberately misspelling the titles and names, just to draw attention to those entries in hopes you'll vote for them. So, Razzies? Enjoy your piddly attention. You've become just as much of a joke as the movies you lambast.

At least it's all over, and when the dust settles what does an award really do for my -- or your -- enjoyment of a movie? It doesn't magically make a movie better or worse, and we'll go on enjoying what we like, whether it be mainstream or high concept drama or trashy comfort movies, and Hollywood will go hibernate until the Golden Globes rev back up.

Shalen's Review of Webcomics II

I generally find that most of my favorite webcomics are updated slowly, such as www.goblinscomic.com, so I tend to read several at once and am always looking for new ones. First, here is a good source site:

http://www.belfry.com/comics/

A lot of my favorites are on here, and while it might seem like a furry area at first, it also has such staples as Ctrl+Alt+Delete and Sluggy Freelance. Speaking of which:

1. http://www.cad-comic.com/ Ctrl+Alt+Delete

The wacky video-game-mocking adventures of two guys, one tall quiet one and one skinny insane one. Sound familiar? It probably is. Eventually developed an actual plot and characterization, somewhat to the detriment of what originally attracted me to the strip, but video game parodies continue to occur at intervals and are uniformly hilarious.

2. http://www.carpediemcomic.com/ Carpe Diem

Very good art, decent writing, interesting characters, no yiffy grossness (so far). The only thing is that it's about gay furry bodybuilders, so it's sort of a niche market audiencewise. I don't think I'll continue with it, but if you've always wanted to see a shy, overweight cheetah guy hook up with a muscular rhinoceros construction worker, this one is probably for you.

3. http://www.vgcats.com/ VG Cats

Another game-oriented one, but this one doesn't really have a plot/storyline to the characters the way #1 up there does. The only thing that distinguishes it from others of the two-guys-play-videogames type is that the characters are anime-style cat boys. Also, every single joke seems to be about pretty much the same thing. If you think constantly about sex while playing combat games, you might enjoy this.

4. http://yafgc.shipsinker.com/ Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic

No, that's really the title. This D&D monster-oriented strip is often hilarious and frequently darn cute as well. Drawing improves as time goes on. Only shortcoming is that the author is b00b-obsessed, so it's not exactly worksafe. Has some mature content that is non-graphic (other than occasional nudity) and mostly played for laughs. Major plot points include the lesbian man-hating Drow, Arachne, and Mrs. Bloodhand's illegitimate half-orc son.

5. http://www.elgoonishshive.com/ El Goonish Shive

Just ignore the title. The author's name is Dan Shive and he couldn't think of a name. ;) This is sort of an anime/quasi-furry sort of comic, featuring sci fi plots, genetic engineering, anime martial arts and a squirrel girl. I haven't read it in a while because I don't share the author's transformation fetish. Characters keep turning into each other or different forms of themselves. Comics are a very visual medium, and character appearance has a lot to do with character personality. Having character appearance, gender, and sexual orientation constantly in flux interferes with readers' ability to really engage with them. It does mine, at least. Nice drawing, and the writing is more grammatical than some others I've seen.

6. http://www.lfgcomic.com/ Looking For Group

This is a WoW/D&D sort of fantasy comic based, yet again, from the point of view of evil characters - an important difference being that in this one they actually ACT evil. Excellent art, but as usual with the well-drawn and colored comics, updates can be intermittent. Frequently hilarious, especially the warlock/Undead character of Richard. (Yes, Richard.) Not much of an archive yet, but I'm hoping this one continues.

A COUPLE OF BRIEF NOTES ON TRENDS:

This only affects the one I've actually been reading, but I've noticed a couple of things:

1. Fantasy webcomics that are humorous are generally from villain/creature points of view. This was funny and original the first couple of them I read. Gradually I begin to wonder why every single paladin everywhere is actually evil, stupid, or both. I think it might have something to do with the fact that the few non-evil-oriented comics I've glanced at tend to take themselves far too seriously.

2. I've seen quite a few furry comics that appear to be set in essentially the real world. The only difference is that all the characters are animals. Some even omit any real characteristics of said animals other than their appearances (though the degree of HOW animal-like characters are varies widely). Plots then become essentially about relationships, and it feels as if I'm reading a soap opera wherein all the characters have been mysteriously transmuted into foxes and cats. You'd think it would be impossible to make a strip about cat and fox-people dull, but you'd be wrong.

Let's Talk MMOs

As I get older, my available gaming time has decreased somewhat, and my gaming dollars are not as overflowing as they once were. The result? I've become more or less a big fan of MMORPGs -- online role-playing games, which offer a great combination of dollar-to-value ratio over constantly buying new games. The sense of community, the freedom of exploration, and the pseudo-achievement of character development all appeal to the Inner Justin.

So let's talk MMOs for a bit. 2006 was, to say the least, a really sad year for MMO releases. Guild Wars released Factions, which was pretty, but really more of the same excellent PVP, poor solo PVE play. It's nice that it's free, but Guild Wars never held my attention for long.

Dungeons & Dragons Online released in Feb 2006, which was a relief as I was looking to take a break from World of Warcraft anyway. While DDO had great ideas -- the dozens of instanced , narrated dungeons that required group teamwork on the top of the list -- it immediately suffered from a lack of end game play, the sheer repetativeness of the dungeons, the clunky interface and absolutely horrible shopping options. Turbine lately consolodated DDO servers down to a mere handful, which all but spells doom for this game. Pity.

2007

As high quality MMO titles take years and millions of dollars to develop, there's a long anticipatory period where the potential fan community bites their nails searching for any information about the product, worries crop up about whether it will succeed or fail in its promises, and overall anxiety that the project might be axed in the middle of development (which has happened MANY times).

So while MMOs have taken off into the mainstream and grown into a large chunk of computer gamers' living rooms -- mostly thanks to World of Warcraft -- 2006 was mainly a development year in which we had to wait for the next batch of AAA titles coming down the pipeline.

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade - Released in January 2007, TBC broke first-day computer game sales of ALL TIME. It helped matters that the expansion to the 8 million-plus MMO juggernaut received glowing reviews. I've been playing through this, and vastly enjoyed the new content over the old. The art direction is superb, the new races interesting, and the dungeons a blast. Blizzard's announced that they'll be trying to get an expansion pack out for WoW about once a year, so we might even see another expansion by December.

Vanguard: Saga of Heroes - Vanguard's rocky history was no smoother as it released around the same time as TBC. While I followed this "hard core" "old school" MMORPG for a while with interest, somewhere along the line it just lost me. Maybe because it was trying to go back to old game styles that the gaming public really doesn't want any more (harsh death penalties, non-instanced dungeons), maybe the realistic look was honestly too bland. I dunno. Vanguard's gotten some cautiously optimistic reviews, but nothing spectacular -- and the game's incredibly high system requirements are another obstacle to the average gamer in picking it up.

Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Agmar - LOTRO will see release in March, but it needs to build up a lot of steam quickly or else it will be buried by TBC and other fantasy-related titles coming later this year. LOTRO's gotten some good pre-release reviews after its NDA was lifted, but if you ask me, it's more or less doomed to a very low sales count. Why? Well, first of all, Turbine is doing it. Turbine's been in a major slump with DDO and the cancellation of Asheron's Call 2, and they can't quite seem to crawl their way out of it. Second, while the LOTR property is a terrific one, they have no connections to the hit movies, and thus won't be picking up a lot of casual LOTR fans who, say, bought Battle for Middle Earth-type games. Third, it just seems... bland. I mean, I love the idea of Virtues (special skills that you get from accomplishing in game tasks, versus just getting them on levels) and Monster Play (a PVP mode where you get to play a monster against the heroes), but the world is a big "eh" and the lack of glitzy magic (however true to the source material) will hurt them.

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning - Okay, I need to get this out of the way: they really, really should have done Warhammer 40,000 as a MMO instead. We have too many fantasy MMOs as it is, and the Warhammer 40k universe would've been a blast to explore. That said, WAR has gotten some of the best advance press out of the developing MMOs right now. While it looks stylistically similar to WOW (not surprising, since WOW borrowed liberally from WAR's looks), Mythic knows how to do PVP (with Dark Age of Camelot) and they're crafting an entire MMO around this. The classes look fun and very unique, and the quests try to be very different from the solo "collect X things and kill Y critters" of past games.

Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures - October 2007 is when this puppy hits, and I will be there at the door. Conan will launch with a lot of wind to its back: it's a recognized and beloved IP, Microsoft is touting it as one of their DX10 launch titles (although it works just fine on DX9), and it will be also released for XBOX 360. I love the look and feel of this low fantasy world, where grit and blood and grime are all a part of the setting. Plus, drunken brawling! This is the MMO I'm most excited about right now.

And that's not even mentioning smaller titles, and possible future titles under development, such as:

- Bioware's so-far unmentioned MMO title
- Fallout Online
- Firefly MMO
- Another Blizzard MMO (World of Starcraft?)
- Star Trek Online
- Interplay's $75 million MMO