The death of death

By mostly happenstance, I read a bit of an interview with Greg Cox, author of The Eugenics Wars: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh. He said he manipulated the Eugenics Wars into a more covert X-Files type wars outside our notice, because it's important to him that Star Trek takes place in our future.

I understand the logic of that. I really do, but "Star Trek" already doesn't take place in our future. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home has scenes that take place in 1986, presumably, but anyone can tell its an alternate 1986, completely different from the 1986 I experienced.

How so? Well, in the 1986 that I lived through, if Spock had been walking down the street in Vulcan robes people would look at him like he was a acid casualty, but recognize him as Spock. If Chekov asked me where there were "nuclear wessels", I wouldn't have though he was a Soviet agent, I'd have been like "It's Mr. Chekov!"

By 1986, in this universe, "Star Trek" had was a cultural phenomenon. Everyone recognized the characters and knew the concepts, whether they wanted to or not. So that movie most decidedly takes place in an alternate 1986.

I mention this because ordinarily when I tell people this, they turn their heads to the side and stare at me blankly like frightened puppies, unable to comprehend or grasp exactly why this would be or what sense this means. No matter what else may be true, however, the "Star Trek" universe is, and shall remain, a strange alternate Universe in which Star Trek never aired.

I mention this, because despite the greater cultural influence of "Star Trek" compared to that of the flesh-eating ghoul styled-zombies, it seems to really confuse some people that Diary of the Dead takes place in a world in which Night of the Living Dead never happened.

I have to say, I thought this was actually blown away by the movie. I thought it was the scariest Romero movie since Martin and his best movie since at least Creepshow. And, mind you, I enjoy and admire the movies he's made between, despite their lesser reputations.

I also thought it made much better use of the subjective camera than Cloverfield, although possibly that's partially affected by it cheating more. It's more important even that I actually cared about and believed the characters in this much more.

Some part of me wants to think that I was just in the right place for it, and maybe I was.

However, I've not been in horror place recently. I've watch very few in recent weeks and months, and have been considering writing a post swearing off writing about the ones I do watch here. And for even longer than that, the rash of zombie movies has had me feeling like one of those pretentious dickweeds who stops like their favorite band after they sign to a major label, hard as I try to keep it in check.

This really caught me, however. Maybe it wasn't in spite of my lack of recent horror interest but because.

I will note that Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead both famously caught the zeitgeist of their time. I think both Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead missed it, despite being admirable works with many things to recommend them, and quite a few interesting things to say about their times.

Perhaps I'll be wrong and perhaps this blog won't last to hold onto my prediction, but despite the generally lukewarm reception it's gotten, I think it's reputation will grow considerably in years to come, more so that the previous two Dead movies.

And while I understand that "Diary of the Dead" was more marketable, I can't help thinking that calling it "The Death of Death", the title of the documentary inside the movie, wouldn't have helped separate this movie from the other four and make the "back to first night" more palatable and understandable.

Parker and Mary Sue

I finished Two For The Money by Max Allan Collins, which I mentioned in my book tag post.

Nearly anything one reads about this series, of which this book contains the first two novels, notes that Collins began them as homage to the Parker books by Richard Stark, which a pseudonym for Donald E. Westlake. This is noted several times in quotes by Collins himself, including in this editions afterword.

What everyone fails to note is that it seems suspiciously like a Mary Sue story.

Ok, not exactly. "Mary Sue" is one of those words that develops as a pejorative and, as such, lack some basic levels of functionality.

Mary Sue's are the characters, mostly in fan-fiction, in which a character is inserted into the story who is blatantly a stand-in for the stories author and, in the general pejorative sense, represents everything good and wonderful in the world.

Obviously Max Allan Collins is a much better writer than the average fan-fictionaire, and, in fact, these stories are wonderfully entertaining. They have well drawn characters and all the right twists and turns to make them absolute page-turners.

But you can't tell me that in writing Nolan as a Parker homage and then introducing a young comic book geek, with a particular affinity for Dick Tracy even, that is the one person who seems to warm the cold heart of his mentor, even if only a little, he wasn't giving himself a little wish-fulfillment fantasy.

In praise of "The Phantom Menace"

No, I haven't come to praise the whole of the movie Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. Mind you, I think its failings, such as they are more complex than most reviewers and fans have quite captured in their rants, but that's the exact reason I won't be dealing with that lengthy subject today.

Today, I merely want to make a not of the title, "The Phantom Menace".

There was quite a storm of absurd vitriol when the title was announced. Most fans, it seems, did they really understand the pulp and movie serial tradition from which George Lucas was drawing and many of the rest didn't quite grasp that he's clearly well beyond the kind of surface fan that so many modern writers, artists and directors are, using some bits and pieces of the look but not wholly buying into the tradition, lock, stock and barrel.

That, however, is a larger subject: "George Lucas and the love of pulp", which I expect to write this week and will explain some of my unholy love Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the pulpiest of that series, thus answering the call given to me by Jonathan Lapper in the But How Strange the Change From Major to Minor comments, and perhaps in conjunction with The Indiana Jones Blog-a-thon or at least my eventual thoughts on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

But more important than the pulp/serial tradition from which the style of the title comes is the story.

Does anyone have a better name for that story? Forget your opinion of whether the movie itself told the story successfully. Frankly, the title pretty much is a nice distillation of a very important element of that story, and would seem appropriate to any telling of it, at least assuming an audience understands the various shades of meaning the word phantom carries with it, a place where Lucas may have actually overestimated his audience.

Speed Racer

I have a theory on why Speed Racer, the new $100,000,000 by Andy and Larry Wachowski seems to be underperforming.

Have you watched an episode of Speed Racer? Have you ever watched an episode of "Speed Racer" and wished it had only five times as long? Have you ever even really wanted to watch another episode immediately afterward?

I know there are "Speed Racer" fans and they can undoubtedly watch huge marathons of them, but I think the big mistake here is thinking that represents anything even similar to mainstream feelings. Frankly, I think most people like the idea and the iconography of the show a lot more than they even like watching it for a single episode, even those who kind of think of themselves as fans, but then I'm being presumptuous...

I think the Wachowski's may have been presumptuous in thinking there are that many people who even nominally think of themselves as fans, though.

News, memorials and worries

I haven't been keeping up, as I noted, but I felt the need to note a couple of recent passings and a continuing concern.

Addio, Diabolik and More on JPL by Tim Lucas offer tribute to John Phillip Law, who just passed away.

Will Elder, RIP by Mark Evanier pays tribute to Will Elder, who also just passed away.

I'm touched greatly by both of these losses and, while, I'm not sure I have any special insight, I wanted to take this opportunity to acknowledge both them for this moment.

I also wanted to not that Gene Colan is in poor health. Gene Colan needs our help and the continually updated Let's help Gene Colan by Clifford Meth have more details.

I've paid tribute to Gene Colan before, Happy Birthday, Gene Colan, and many other have undoutedly written more eloquent tributes elsewhere, but I certainly hope this call for help through the Internet and the comic book industry will be a success.

Made... of honor!

Ignore the rather pitiful (and seemingly nonsensical) play-on-words, and say the title of Made of Honor aloud thinking only of what the words mean.

It sounds like a straight-to-video Steven Seagal movie, doesn't it?

Now, returning to the pun, I'd actually watch a movie in which Mr. Seagal has to serve as his best girlfriend's maid of honor and also kick ass all over town. Why did no one think of that first?

Wanted

I really do love Wanted, the comic book by Mark Millar - and someday I should really give a huge shout-out to how fabulously his run on The Ultimates is - and J.G. Jones.

So, I'm excited and wary about the new Timur Bekmambetov movie, Wanted. Mind you, I loved Night Watch, and only a peculiar set of circumstances related to my strange year has kept me from seeinng Day Watch.

Some people are jumping to complain about the lack of costumed supervillains. I can't say I see that as being terribly important actually, and taken out of a medium where that is something like expected, it reasonably makes sense, actually.

But the ending... Can it be pulled off? Will they even try? And is there any real point to the story without it?

Tagged

I've been tagged by Marty McKee at Johnny LaRue's Crane Shot. I'm to do the following...

1) Pick up the nearest book.
2) Open to page 123.
3) Locate the fifth sentence.
4) Post the next three sentences on your blog and in so doing...
5) Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

I grabbed this before while at the library and, oddly, had no random book handy. There were, of course, books everywhere, but none next to me and any I grabbed would hardly have been random. Today, I have the book I am currently reading, Two For The Money by Max Allan Collins, "Because Werner's usual reaction would have been bitch bitch bitch. He was such a fucking pussy, anyway, always afraid somebody was after him, always bitching to Calder to make sure nobody got near the house. Such a big man, Werner."


I'm not going to tag anyone. Hell, who knows who is still popping by this little nook enough to catch my tag! Anyone interested in playing is invited, however, to pretend I tagged them. How is that?

Where have I been?

There are a number of explanations, all a little bit add up to something. The last year, by which I mean something like the 365 days that precede this one, rather than the year 2008, has been a particularly difficult one for me, with illness, death, a forced move under difficult circumstances, the loss of my job, etc. For the last while I've also been trying to get back to screenwriting, which always slows my blogging to one extent or another. My creative endeavors not only occupy much of my mind, they also occupy a great deal of how I view the movies I view. They become less something I ponder intellectually and more a part of the stew in my brain from which I draw ideas.

And with my current state of mind all of my has also been difficult.

I had, last year, been writing kind of fairy tale/noir/Eurotrash hybrid last year that I still quite like. It bogged down in its own complexity, not to mention my general realization that it wasn't a exceptionally saleable commodity and I'd be wise right now to take at least a step or two toward the middle of the road.

So, I've been struggling with that. I've moved to a cork board with 3x5 cards... a technique I've toyed with using previously, but never seriously. Thus far, it has helped me map out some of my story and what I need and some things I needed to get rid of. But it hasn't disciplined me to sit down and just do more typing.

I'll try to stop in more regularly in the future. I hope all of my circle of bloggers are well. Right now, I have a copy of Navajo Joe burning a hole in my pocket.

Have fun, kids!