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"Michael Bay Finally Made An Art Movie"

This review is really long. After the first two paragraphs, I decided to read it aloud to my cousin. And I didn't stop. Seriously, this review should get an award or something.

So Kings is finally back. I just watched last week's episode online.

I love the character of Michelle Benjamin so much.

Well, next week's is about to start...

Cullen vs. Summers

As someone who's seen every single ep of BtVS, I have some thoughts on this, but I'll let you think about it on your own.

overheard:
"I would, of course, prefer that the taint of anime be kept out of my Thundercats..."

Um... you know...

SGR
Oh, no, not again! ( Read more... )

From the Edge of Heaven to a Robe of Feathers
A week ago I watched Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite). At least he tells you which characters he's going to kill. Seriously, though, the themes are melancholy but oddly--hopeful? Let's say forgiving. It's about compassion, I guess.

I realized a bit into the movie that I've seen another Fatih Akin film, Im Juli. Akin uses a couple of similar motifs in The Edge of Heaven, but to very different ends. Im Juli is a absurdist romantic comedy with at least one huge coincidence, & The Edge of Heaven is a melancholy story about human frailty & forgiveness--with one huge (but subtle) coincidence. Whatever, they're both neat movies, but one is a lot more fun than the other.

In the last 24 hours I read Tezuka's Phoenix: Civil War (& Robe of Feathers, which is much shorter & thrown into the second volume of Civil War). Civil War, the longest of the cycle I've read yet, is in the vein of the Phoenix stories in general; which is to say severely pessimistic. But the humanistic themes of The Edge of Heaven are still lurking in my head & I kept seeing it through that lens. But really, on its own, it's just pessimistic.

Oddly, The Edge of Heaven uses family as a means to a sort of forgiving humanism, while Phoenix: Civil War explicitly sees family obligation as leading to violence & death.

Tezuka was a dark guy, huh?

Civil War is set during the war between the Genpei War between the Taira (Heike) & Minamoto (Genji), & uses a lot of historical characters. It also skips over, or gives short shrift to, some significant parts, like the death of Shigemori, apparently expecting that Japanese readers would know the background. There was a scene that seemed familiar, so I pulled out my copy of Usagi Yojimbo: Grasscutter. Yep, same battle where the Grasscutting Sword was supposedly lost, not that Tezuka mentions it. When I got to the point in Sakai's retelling where the boy emperor's grandmother tells him, "In the depths of the sea you find a capital," I started to cry. Yeah, the Taira were vile, but he was, what, seven? Anyway, I think that was just the straw that broke the camel's back.

I read Robe of Feathers very quickly after finishing Civil War, & was struck by how this melancholy little story seemed quiet & less brutal--even if it's not really optimistic, it's not a long infuriating march to ruin. Which, if you've read any of the Phoenix stories, is saying a lot.

Kurt Nilsen
Kurt Nilsen has such an amazing voice.

No, seriously, I'm a big fan of female singers, but some male voices are just transcendent.

Well, now he has a group.

( With or Without You )

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2NEU6Xf7lM&feature=related

to the artist formerly known as Cissie King
I know there's a good chance you're reading this. Undelete your old LJ, please. I loved your snarky criticism.

Or at least archive it somewhere.

I'm not joking.

http://gos.sbc.edu/p/paglia.html

Just one of many provocative quotes:
You know, I'm really happy there wasn't all this talk about sex changes back then, since I probably would have gotten this fantasy that I was a man born wrongly in a woman's body, and I think I might very well have become obsessed with the idea of a sex change, which would have been a terrible mistake. Because I think I absolutely am a woman, but I was just a woman born ahead of my time.

Looking throught the flist
Quoth the ferrett:
As newspapers everywhere fail, I have my own personal take on why they're dying:

Comics. As in, "Not enough of 'em."

There was a time when the newspapers were packed with comics, because it was the best way of differentiating themselves from the other local papers. You had "Peanuts," they didn't, that meant something when subscription time came around. But these days, there isn't competition in all except for the biggest cities, and budgets are tight, so comics pages have been getting the shaft for years.

I've been told that a comic costs the newspaper about $20 per strip, though I can't find official confirmation of that. (I know it takes about 150 syndications for a comics creator to make it full-time.) If that's the case, I'm surprised that some national newspaper hasn't committed to snapping every strip possible up and positioning themselves as the comics leader. "Ten pages of comic strips!" the New York Post would say. "Every damn day!"

I agree with this.

* * *

The kam is ama on that guy I really think I need a rude nickname for in my tags

Yep. This leaves aside one of my beefs with said writer, that I read enough his stuff to say NOTHING WORKS THAT WAY a great & disturbing deal. And he really ruined an obscure 1980's character I liked to turn said character into something disturbingly like a pro mouthpiece.

I'm having a hard time pinning down a quote to distill quite what I like about this post:

http://www.factualopinion.com/the_factual_opinion/2009/05/the_virgin_read_power_girl_1.html

But yeah, why can't we have a big, busty flying brick superheroine in silly adventures? What's wrong with that?

merchandise
David Brothers on the production of replicas of Corto Maltese's jacket:
I’d rather see someone wearing a jacket designed like Hal Jordan’s Dad’s Bomber Jacket That He Almost Died In rather than a shirt with Hal Jordan in a circle. A gym shirt that says “PROPERTY OF XAVIER’S” is much better than something with the ’90s-era X-Men logo on it, or any X-Men logo, really.

I don’t know that I’d ever wear this jacket, but it’s nice to see some comic fashion that actually tries to be fashion, instead of a twenty dollar t-shirt with a logo on it.

Yeah.

Little Green Lantern rings? (I used to have one. It glowed in the dark.) Neat.

Ray Terrill's jacket? DC should have been marketing that in lieu of more Batman jive.

The Phantom Stranger's cloak? Drool....

What actually nifty merchandise ideas do you have?

draaama
OK, out in the open.

I am not interested enough in the internal squabbles of (lj comm=doesn't even have images anymore) to read all the links here, so yeah, conceivably there's something damning.

But previous experience tells me that it's more a case of Kali's tendency to flame anyone for their supposed bigotry or "privilege" on any excuse for provocation running up against Cissie King's Morrison fandom. Cissie got defensive & verbally lashed out in a sardonic fashion, using words in exactly the way that Kali has been trained to see as OMGBIGOTRY!!111, & Kali then of course did just that. Of course, Kali is pretty good at pushing people to the point where they want to curse at or offend her, & then when they do, she will get all huffy & curse at them. Because, ostensibly, they're evil, & they pushed her. Apparently.

If Kali wants to use her blog to flame & vent, fine. I keep this LJ mainly separate from my politics & RL blog so people there aren't subjected to me ranting about obscure comix figures, & people here aren't subjected to whatever rant my evolving political viewpoint spits out. And I may end up splitting RL from politix for the same kind of reason.

But I'm pretty sure that our resident fictitious archer isn't really a menace to a just & colorblind society. She's just a big-time fan who hates her favorite writer being attacked.

And let's note that Cissie has a certain connection to PAD, who of course Kali just had to flip out at a little while back. Bad blood is already there.

Words are said, life goes on. Let's all just relax.

Characters from the Handbook of the Marvel Universe Appendix
Oh, these two are so cute! Kanu & Bala, from before Marvel decided (flying in the face of previous stories) that its undersea humans were all blue.

And this guy--man I want to read this story now. Black Brother from Savage Tales.

Sometimes I think I should be an editor.
I'm perhaps better suited to being an editor than a writer. I have story ideas, sometimes, but fleshing them out myself, oh no, that really doesn't happen.

I read stuff like this, & I think I'd like to kibitz on the project. http://looking2dastars.livejournal.com/111486.html

But maybe I shouldn't be in an editorial position on Green Arrow Black Canary, because I have some rather odd & definite ideas about how to deal with those two franchises. Yes, two.

On the other hand, something like MGK's "I should write Dr Strange" gets me thinking, I would be pretty happy as Dr Strange editor, because I really don't think I can write Dr Strange, but I like the character & want to see him decently. So I could basically let someone else do it & occasionally rein them in or help them refine an element.

Like here. The comment section had several nitpicks & suggestions on why a taco stand in New Jersey is "the single least magical place on Earth." I read those, thought about it, & here's what I'd recommend as an explanation:

It’s not that Herbert’s is really devoid of magic. It is away from most of the ley lines, & seems to have an inhibitor of most conjuration. But what makes it so good as a meeting place is that while offensive magic & divination mostly don’t work there; there is one intermittent flash line that runs nearby, allowing a mage to teleport out but not for his destination to be consistently trackable.
Finding another spot with such a low magical potential isn’t that hard. Finding one with this particular combination of restrictions is quite rare, & neither the interior of an avionics factory in Wichita nor an auto body shop in the Shi’Ar galaxy, to give a couple of known examples in temperate climes, is as appealing as a place where they expect human customers.

Sometimes it's holding back on a story until someone can convince me we should publish it or I can convince them to change it. The death of Cytorrak pitch has some red flags for me, one being that it disrupts something in Strange's canonical bag of tricks, & that can be problematic.

Or here: I can get on Chris's case until he writes a Dormammu story that works, because this? This is too formula, too predictable, as it is.

In fact, I could see taking a page from Julius Schwartz & having a stable of Strange writers. Alternate Christopher Bird & this guy.

"17: A doomed romance between a boy and a ghost." That could be golden.

But much of the time, it's getting out of the way & letting the genius spin its tales.

(Which is a hint that you should read "I should write Dr Strange" if you have the time. Yow.)

Fillion images used in Green Lantern fanvid
Has anyone shown this to Captain Tightpants yet?

Hence.

Put your money where your mouth is, Disney
OK, I dunno if you've heard about this, but Disney is doing a sort of green awareness initiative.

http://www.ecorazzi.com/2009/05/15/jonas-brothers-miley-cyrus-help-launch-disneys-friends-for-change-effort/
Called “Friends for Change“, the year-long campaign will give kids practical ways to preserve the planet, track each participant’s collective impact and have the opportunity to vote on how $1 million in donations from Disney will be divided and invested in various environmental causes over the course of a year.

http://disney.go.com/disneygroups/friendsforchange/#/disneygroups/friendsforchange/

To which I say, only $1 million?

Put your money where your mouth is, Disney. Make it $ 500 million total. Let kids vote on a million in their neck of the woods.

I may be the only person on my flist to like this

Watson telling off Holmes? Holmes being an ass? Holmes getting physical? I like it. Definitely not a couple of men in black coats standing around vaguely on the BBC.

Adaptations are generally imperfect, & at least this isn't all worshipful & stodgy, like the Watchmen movie.