A very long weekend...

So this was a very busy Victoria Day long weekend for me, and it didn't even involve fireworks.

Friday evening some friends and I attempted to see the new Star Trek film again, this time in IMAX!!!--but the show was already sold out. So we opted for X-Men Origins: Wolverine instead. I'd heard bad and mediocre reviews, and wasn't expecting much, but it wasn't horrible. Not particularly great, but not horrible. Hugh Jackman did a great job with what he had to work with. Liev Schreiber also did a good job with even less to work with. Ryan Reynolds shone as Deadpool for the 5 minutes he had onscreen, even if they took a few liberties with the character. I choose to ignore what they did with him in the climax, and instead hope for an entertaining spin-off flick at some point. (I'm a fan of the "Merc with a Mouth", especially when he's in the hands of a good writer, and I think Ryan Reynolds is well-cast as the wise-cracking ass-kicker.) Gambit was okay, but he could have been removed from the story entirely with no effect (all he really does is get in the way).

The plot itself is pretty dumb: an early scene has a group of mutants, including Wolverine, doing black ops for the US military. They dismantle the private army of an African diamond trader within minutes, just to get the hunk of meteorite he's been using as a paperweight. Really, I think one guy with a suitcase full of $100,000 US could have done the job more easily and with less mess. Ah well, they can't all be Iron Man.

Saturday was a day spent in restaurants. I went for lunch with some friends from my undergrad D&D days whom I only see about twice a year (one of them, who lives in Calgary, was in town for the weekend). Then I went out for a friend's girlfriend's birthday at Ivanka's in downtown Burlington. A very classy, and intimate place. Afterward we hit a Tim Horton's, the only coffee place that was open.

Sunday was a day spent in costume. In the morning some friends and I attended a Promenade and Picnic with the Toronto Steampunk Appreciation Society. We browsed St. Lawrence Market in Toronto for antiques, and I found some interesting pins for my military-style jacket. One Russian dealer had a table full of old Soviet Red Army surplus, so I picked up some goggles and a KGB box-style flashlight. I also found an old Kodak folding camera. I'll post photos soon. The evening was the usual LARP thing.

Monday was a day of labour. I spent much of the morning weeding and mowing my lawn, and discovering the army of mosquitoes that have occupied my backyard fence. I've noticed several spiders have weaved webs all around the outside of my house. Although I almost tore them down, I realized that each web trapped several scores of mosquitoes. Whereupon I calculated that every mosquito the spiders get, is one less in my house. Thus I forged a verbal contract with the arachnids: stay outdoors and you are free to feast on as many mosquitoes as you wish.

Unfortunately, the spiders aren't able to deal with so many of them so I might be forced into drastic measures. Perhaps the use of Raid or some other weapon of mass insect destruction.

In the afternoon, some friends and I went hiking in Christie Lake Conservation Area in Dundas. We spent a lot of time exploring the ruins of Crooks Mill and the dam of Christie Reservoir. I'll put up photos of those soon as well.

They Fight Crime!

A common TV series pitch--or parody of one--is taking an "odd couple" and placing in them in situations where they solve mysteries and defeat criminals. This trope is called They Fight Crime, and examples include Numb3rs ("He's an FBI agent; he's a math professor. They Fight Crime!") and Blood Ties ("She's a Canadian police detective who is slowly losing her sight. He's a vampire. They fight crime!").

From Jaka, there's this neat meme:

1.) Go to TheyFightCrime! and find a crimefighting pair that makes you swoon.
2.) Go to the Hero Machine and illustrate your duo!
3.) Repeat as necessary or until your mom tells you it's time for bed.

I'll illustrate one I did, but first, guess this famous media property. You'll be surprised who it is--I certainly was! Answer after the images below:

"He's a battle-scarred veteran of the war in Afghanistan! He's a substance-abusing dilettante grad student! They Fight Crime!"

"He's a leather-clad guitar-strumming photographer who believes he can never love again. She's a virginal insomniac bounty hunter who hides her beauty behind a pair of thick-framed spectacles. They fight crime!"

And the odd couple mentioned above?

Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes.

Who am I supposed to root for?

Christian Bale's lame Batman	Heath Ledger's totally awesome Joker

I have a few confessions to make:

First of all, although I am a huge fan of comics, graphic novels, manga, or whatever pretty marketing terms are used to sell sequential art, I am largely ambiguous about superhero stories. I didn't like them as a child, when I preferred the exciting adventures of Donald Duck and his relatives in Disney comics. I didn't like them as a preteen and adolescent, when the extent of my comics reading were the G.I. Joe comic titles. My friends would be reading X-Men and telling me the storylines, and all I could think of was how overly complex and silly they sounded.

Part of this stems from the nature of the media properties involved. When dealing with the two biggest American comics publishers, DC and Marvel, their most iconic characters may have up to seventy years of history, backstory, continuity and character development behind them. When you have well-detailed fictional worlds and settings in other media, they tend to ultimately be the brainchild of one man or woman: J.R.R. Tolkien, Joss Whedon, Frank Herbert, George Lucas, Tamora Pierce, Michael Moorcock. Even if other creators end up using the properties, the original rights tend to remain under the master's control--or at the very least, retain his or her original vision.

This isn't the case with superheroes. I would go so far to state that superheroes are not literary characters. They are mythic icons. Every generation and every writer has grafted their own take on these characters. In ancient Greece and Rome, every contemporary writer was aware of the same pantheon of gods and heroes and the same tales of their exploits, but each could reinterpret the details to fit his agenda.

Take, for example, the tale of how Hephaestus caught Aphrodite and Ares in a compromising position: Hephaestus, the club-footed, ugly god of blacksmiths and the forge, crafted so many fine instruments for the other gods that his father Zeus gave Aphrodite, the beautiful love goddess, to him as his bride. Aphrodite clearly detested this arrangment and soon began an affair with the war god Ares. Hephaestus learned of his wife's adultery from the sun god Apollo, and devised a clever trap under his wife's bed. The next time she and her lover had an amorous encounter, the net caught and held them both until Hephaestus could summon all the other gods and make the affair public.

Now, in The Odyssey, Homer uses this tale to demonstrate the cunning of Hephaestus to expose his wife's infidelity. But the Roman poet Ovid, in the Art of Love, uses this story to a different end. He contends that the other gods did not flock to Hephaestus' side, and in fact some came away from the scene with a newfound appreciation for Ares' skill in the boudoir. Ovid takes from the myth a different (almost Victorian) moral: if you learn your wife has been unfaithful, keep it secret. For if you expose her infidelity, she will now be open about what was hidden before, and you look like the fool.

Similarly, superhero characters are constantly re-evaluated for their time. Captain America started out as a moral crusader against the Nazis (over a year before the United States even entered World War II). During the Nixon era, Captain America would take umbrage at the corruption permeating the US government and hangs up his tights, becoming the wandering vigilante Nomad. A succession of government stooges take up the mantle of Captain America until Steve Rogers is shown he can support America's ideals without supporting its government, and he puts on the red, white and blue cowl again. Ultimate Captain America, a reimagining of the character for the post-9/11 world, was a two-dimensional strawman of neoconservative ideology, and despised by many longterm fans. While in the current Marvel continuity, Captain America launched a guerilla war against the forces of his government (led by long-time comrade, Iron Man) in opposition to a superhero registration act, and was assassinated in the aftermath. (I suspect Captain America will make a miraculous recovery in time for his live-action film due out next year.) Likewise, Superman's arch-nemesis Lex Luthor has evolved to represent the bogeymen of contemporary society: a mad scientist in the pulp and atomic era, a corrupt corporate raider in the 80s and 90s, and a power-hungry corrupt politician in the "President Luthor" stories of the early '00s.

I must confess my favourite superhero stories are those that deconstruct the genre; that attempt to show superheroes not as larger than life, ascended beings, but as people with hopes and fears and dreams and failings. These types of story became incredibly popular in the mid-80s due to two publications: Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. The former is continually cited as one of the best comic books ever written, and will be the subject of a live-action film due out soon (I'll discuss my feelings about that at a later date). The latter was a dark, social commentary on the politics of the day that set the tone for the Batman character from then on (no more campy 60s Adam West Batman--though to be fair, several writers of Batman in the 70s were already trending this way). Both masterpieces; both having the unfortunate consequence of ushering in a slew of "dark", "edgy" and "gritty" comics, most of which cashed in on the superficial sex, violence and corruption of Moore and Miller with very little of their depth, humanity or social commentary. Though this Dark Age dominated comics for most of the late 80s up to the mid 90s (and probably represented 90% of the output of Image Comics), some good deconstructions of superheroes came out of it. One of my favourites was Warren Ellis' The Authority, the comic that casts aside all those centre-right status quo supporting superheroes of yore in favour of a take-no-prisoners group of leftist anarchists who regularly execute dictators, rebuild destroyed cities, resettle refugees, and spit in the face of the military-industrial complex.

Like Queen Azura, I saw the new Batman film, The Dark Knight, recently. I had mixed feelings about it. It was very long. Heath Ledger was fantastic as The Joker, even if his plans were extremely Byzantine and over-the-top (I think I know why gas prices are so high in Gotham--the Joker keeps stockpiling hundreds of gallons in abandoned warehouses and ferry boats). Most of the minor characters (Lt. Gordon, Harvey Dent, Alfred, Rachel Daws, Lucien Fox) were well portrayed--in fact, most of the movie's best moments are when Batman isn't on screen.

The movie had the effect of reminding me of all the reasons I dislike the Batman character while barely displaying the few elements of the character I find appealing. A disturbing trend I find in many comics, and one of my main reasons for disliking superhero comics, is the nature of their enemies. Your typical superhero spends a few panels beating up on petty, blue-collar criminals before tussling with other weirdos in spandex. Superheroes beat down on burglars, muggers, purse-snatchers, rapists, drug-dealers, and gangbangers with regularity. Sure, these guys are criminals and it's a good thing they're off the streets. But invariably the comics reinforce two things about crime:

1. Criminals are bad people who have no other motivations for their actions.


2. Criminals are the cause of crime, not symptoms of society's failings.

In other words, costumed heroes beat up a lot of thieves and murderers, but never seem to address the environments that produce most criminal activity:

• Poverty


• Family Dysfunction


• Lack of Education


• Lack of Social Services


• Low Self-Esteem


• Racism


• Lack of Mental Health Treatment

The implied racism is palpable in the various mobs and gangs that prey on Gotham's streets. The Italian mobsters of Batman Begins have been joined in The Dark Knight by blacks, Russians and Hispanics, all brokering their services to Hollywood's bogeyman du jour--that's right, the Yellow Peril has returned!--the evil Chinese businessman. This plot was loosely borrowed from the Batman comics storyline "Batman: Evolution", a series that angered me professionally as well (but which I'll discuss some other time).

As an aside, in the "Introduction" to Volume 1 of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen graphic novels, Alan Moore writes in a parody of the late 19th century prose he apes throughout the books. One of his "important lessons" to "young English boys" is to remember that "the Chinese are brilliant, but evil", in a sendup of the Yellow Peril stereotypes of the day. And sadly, it appears our day as well.

Now, the saving grace of the Batman character in my mind is he's supposed to be the hero who thinks. Other heroes charge headlong into confrontation, but the Dark Knight thoughtfully puzzles out the situation before taking on his foe directly. Although like most heroes Batman spends a lot of time reacting to villainous plots, he's a lot more proactive in getting things done as well, though sometimes this is taken to extreme levels. The reason the Joker is Batman's nemesis is precisely because his chaotic, unpredictable behaviour resists Batman's efforts to catalogue, quantify and predict everything.

The review at Salon.com sums it up for me:

And it's Batman's mind that's at the core of the best stories about him. He's infinitely dangerous because he's infinitely clever: There's a sequence I still remember vividly from a decade-old Justice League story in which he holds off an invading alien fleet with nothing more than a box of matches and a brilliant plan. One disappointing thing about Nolan's interpretation is that his Batman is basically just a growling James Bond -- he relies on super-expensive gadgets and can beat down anyone in a fight, but any number of action-movie badasses can do that. We never see "The Dark Knight's" Batman doing anything particularly thoughtful, which is a hallmark of the comic book Batman. Not for nothing has he starred in a series called "Detective Comics" for close to 70 years.

WANTED...a plot that makes sense



I don't really review movies here at False Prophecy, but I saw one this weekend that compels me to discuss it. Wanted, starring Angelina Jolie, James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman, opened this Friday. And let me get it out of the way now: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS!!!

Wanted is based on the comic series by noted British comics scribe, Mark Millar. Like much of his work, it tends to be brutal, cynical and nihilistic (even though he's one of the only noteworthy Brits who still writes superheroes). However, this style is perfectly suited for Wanted, Millar's tale of a socety of supervillains who banded together in 1986 to take over the world, eliminate all the superheroes, and then convince the world that neither they nor the heroes ever existed (except in comic books), while secretly running things from behind the scenes. This Fraternity faces its first major upheaval when one of their luminaries, the assassin known as The Killer (who never misses his target) is himself slain. At this point, his estranged and ignorant son Wesley, an unassuming cubicle jockey, is made aware of his father's identity, the existence of the Fraternity, and his inheritance of his father's abilities.

Millar intentionally structures this plot as the "anti-Spiderman": in both stories, a geeky nebbish finds out he has incredible powers. Peter Parker initially tries to profit from his powers only to have his beloved uncle die as a result of his inaction, whereupon he swears to use his spider powers to help people and fight for justice. Whereas Wesley Gibson uses his newfound talent at killing to turn his worthless life around: among other things, he kills his best friend for sleeping with his girlfriend. Basically, for the first part Wesley revels in the evil he can get away with as a result of his powers and position, and then has to deal with the supervillains who probably killed his father and are now gunning for him. As nihilistic, amoral adolescent power fantasies go, it's entertaining.

The film, directed by Timur Bekmambetov (Russian director of Night Watch fame), takes a lot of liberties with the comic. First thing thrown out the window: the Fraternity aren't supervillains, but a thousand-year-old secret society of assassins. They are trained in tricks like curving bullets around obstacles and knocking bullets out of the air with knives, and seeing the world in Matrix-style bullet-time.

The Fraternity obstensibly assassinates individuals to shape the course of history towards a better path: "Kill one; save a thousand". The targets the Fraternity knocks off are evidently bad people who will perpetuate great evil deeds later on.

This supposedly makes the actions of the protagonists more noble, a grand departure from the comic (although it brings up the same moral dilemmas that "pre-crime" did in The Minority Report). Apparently, the filmmakers told Millar (who otherwise is very supportive of the film--must be getting a percentage) it would be difficult for the audience to root for the protagonists if all the major characters were out-and-out villains. In an interview, Millar notes that The Godfather is such a film, and it's considered one of the greatest films of all time.

There's a lot of flashy action sequences that are well-executed, for the most part, although one wonders how this "secret society" stayed secret for a millennia when they're so recklessly destructive. The main plot is similar to the comic, wherein Wesley has to kill the man who killed his father or suffer his father's fate. There's a blatant "Luke I Am Your Father" moment. But little things like this I can forgive if the film otherwise entertains me. However, one glaring plothole just kept bugging me for the whole picture, and would not let go, and it deals with the method of how the Fraternity gets the names of its targets.

See, the Fraternity was born from a guild of weavers (ie, cloth weavers) a thousand years ago, who started seeing a binary code in their woven cloth. The present-day Fraternity still gets their marching orders from a giant loom, that renders names in a binary code that Sloan, head of the order, translates into the names of targets. And these hardened killers take it on faith (or rather Fate) that offing these people has to be done. Pro bono, since the Fraternity doesn't do paid hits, all kills are to advance the "mission"--ie, what the loom tells them. The Fraternity still participates in the always-reliable textile industry to pay for its exotic cars and unique weaponry. Alas, despite all the high-tech gadgetry, their archives are still a room full of leather and wood bound parchment texts.

I'm still trying to understand how you motivate a society of ruthless, can't-fail assassins based on a legend like this:

[SCENE: Somewhere in Europe, 1000 years ago]

WEAVER 1: Hey look, there's something weird in the cloth.
WEAVER 2: Let me see...(looks)...looks like the shuttle missed a few passes.
WEAVER 1: I think it's a code.
WEAVER 2: Get out!
WEAVER 1: No, really, it's a code in binary which we won't really develop for cryptographical purposes for another six centuries!
WEAVER 2: OK, assuming it is a code and not the more likely explanation that the shuttle occasionally misses given that we're using 11th century technology here...what's the code say?
WEAVER 1: Gimme a sec...(decrypts message)...look, it spells out names!
WEAVER 2: [Skeptically] Uh-huh. So what do we, humble weavers of cloth, do with these names?
WEAVER 1: Clearly Fate is telling us these people need to die!
WEAVER 2: Right. And by sheer coincidence the first name on the list is the guy who stiffed you over all that Persian silk last week?

Sigh.

Hasan-i Sabbah knew how to motivate a secret society of assassins: drug them up with hallucinogens, offer them willing and attractive sexual partners, then take it all away. Then, send them to kill your enemies promising them they will return to paradise if they die after completing their missions. Why mess with a proven formula?

Metal makes the world go 'round

There will be a further delay in bringing the world up to speed on my life as I found a story that set my heart aflutter:

Metal goes global, with some surprising riffs
GUY DIXON

Globe and Mail - June 18, 2008

This is a story dripping with irony - ghoulish, blood-red irony.

It turns out that heavy metal, anathema to the moral majority, has spread Western ideals of freedom of expression and democracy more effectively than some more conservative means.

And globalization? The devil's music seems to be the definition of globalization at work, yet with the added bonus of letting metal fans worldwide feel the music is their own, allowing indigenous metal scenes to flourish.

That's the message of Global Metal, a documentary-film tour of not-so-obvious metal hot spots such as Brazil, India, Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates, which opens Friday in theatres in Toronto and Vancouver.

"No one's telling you that you should be a fan of Slayer or Morbid Angel. In fact, most people are telling you you shouldn't! But how does that thinking apply for kids coming from different cultures around the world?" film director Sam Dunn said.

He and fellow Canadian filmmaker Scot McFadyen skipped the usual German, Scandinavian and suburban North American centres, which they had already visited in their 2005 documentary Metal: A Headbanger's Journey. That film served both as a general tutorial and as a defence against the usual criticisms of metal, ranging from its antisocial controversies to its perceived head-pounding dopiness.

The popularity of that first film allowed Dunn and McFadyen to continue their highly enviable ability to match their fondness for metal with burgeoning careers in film. And Global Metal, no longer bound by having to justify the music and its black T-shirted fans, thus has enough room to uncover a fascinating side story on the hidden quirks of globalization.

Take China. It hasn't been known for its metalheads. But metal has migrated there in an unusual way.

As a tax writeoff, record companies can destroy their inventory of remaindered CDs, particularly discs by bands no longer signed to the label. Often these are metal bands coming in and out (mostly out) of fashion. But instead of actually destroying the discs, the CDs are shipped through middlemen to China and dumped on the market there.

As Kaiser Kuo, a Chinese American who lives in Beijing and a founder of pioneering Chinese metal band Tang Dynasty, notes in the film, most of these CDs were worthless. But some were real gems and helped to get metal into the hands of Chinese kids.

Dunn adds that this "had, you could almost say, a random impact, where you could be walking down the street in Beijing, and there would be a street merchant. He or she would have a Madonna CD and a Slayer CD, and the person looking at it wouldn't have any reference points for either. So it enters on this equal footing, which is unusual."

And from that beginning, homegrown metal took on a distinct Chinese flavour. Tang Dynasty, the band started by Kuo, who was born in upstate New York and now works in digital marketing, incorporated ancient battle references and historical poems. A Chinese metal scene known for its particularly dark music was born.

"They created a metal which obviously had some relevance and meaning to Chinese people," Dunn says. And yet, although Western headbangers may get into Chinese thrash metal, there are other international metal offshoots that Western fans might simple declare dead wrong. The Japanese glam metal known as "visual kei" trades in thrashing speed metal, but then bands like X Japan will suddenly break into the schmaltziest ballad imaginable. Or there's the Israeli band Orphaned Land, which will suddenly shift from guttural vocals to traditional Middle Eastern singing.

"I think metal is being redefined by virtue of its spread. For the longest time, it was very much defined by the rules that you and I associate with metal, that it has to have certain hallmarks to be real metal," Dunn says.

"What's interesting is that the fringes of that core are starting to change. Introducing Israeli folk melody into metal may not be metal to some kids in the West; in fact, it may be something they feel quite opposed to. But in Israel and maybe in the [whole] region, there is something which to them still is metal," Dunn adds.

Then there's the rise of metal in countries emerging from dictatorships. The first Rock in Rio festival in 1985 was attended by nearly 1.4 million fans and prominently featured such era-defining metal acts as Ozzy Osbourne, Scorpions and Iron Maiden. As guitarist Rafael Bittencourt of Brazilian metal band Angra notes, it's not as if heavy metal helped to free Brazil. But metal became a vehicle for joyous self-expression after the military dictatorship fell. (Global Metal, however, makes it seem as if the first Rock in Rio was a metal-only mega-show: The Go-Gos, the B-52s, Nina Hagen and Queen were also headliners. But we're on the topic of metal here, and Dunn is an avowed Iron Maiden fan.)

With the new documentary, Dunn and McFadyen, who have been friends for the past 15 years since attending British Columbia's University of Victoria, have planted their stake deep in the heart of the rock-doc niche. (Although the downtown west-side Toronto office of Banger Productions looks like a lot of start-up film and new-media offices around the city in some ways, the mounted horns outside the office door are a giveaway as to its specialty, as are the books of metal lore lining the shelves next to the Lonely Planet travel guides and Didi, McFadyen's black, metal-appropriate bulldog puppy, who makes her home most days in the spacious editing suite.

Banger Productions is now much in demand. On the office white boards are long to-do lists for upcoming major documentaries on Iron Maiden and Rush. In fact, Dunn and McFadyen's Rush film is said to be the first cinematic documentary of the publicity-shy band, rather than simply a typical concert DVD or a video-music channel profile. The members of Slayer also want to make a doc with the filmmakers.

Groups themselves want to work with the pair. After Headbanger's Journey, members of Metallica told the filmmakers something to the effect of, "Don't you dare make another film without us in it."

It should also be said that Dunn looks the part. With shoulder-length hair and wearing the perennial black metal T-shirt, he has appeared in both Headbanger's Journey and Global Metal as our guide to metal fandom. And yet, although he's as approachable in person as he seems on film, what's that look in his eye? A piercing clarity? And what's that he mentions, with his toothy grin, about possibly doing a documentary about Satan?...!

"We're even talking to Telefilm about it," adds McFadyen, also grinning, as he notes Bill C-10, which proposes to allow Ottawa to deny tax credits for films it doesn't like. Canadian Christian leader Charles McVety has been among those supporting the controversial bill. McFadyen and Dunn, even though they are serious about a Satan doc, both break into ironic laughter. It's the same laugh coming from the metalheads around the world in their documentary.

I loved Dunn and McFadyen's first documentary on metal, Metal: A Headbanger's Journey. Although, as Dunn notes in the interview below with George Stroumboulopoulos, it was basically a metal primer that didn't really teach veteran metal fans anything new, it was a serious and thoughtful take on a major subculture by an academic who is also an insider (Dunn has a Ph.D in cultural anthropology and is a lifelong metalhead).

Dunn and McFadyen are interviewed on CBC's "The Hour".

I've recently become aware just how wide the world of metal is. Although I like the metal that hails from the genre's "traditional" homes of England, Northern Europe and the USA, I'm also a big fan of a few Italian metal bands. But in more recent years I've grown to like some of the following:



Sepultura is Brazil's best-known metal band, rising to prominence in the early 1990s opening for Ozzy Osbourne. Although their earlier albums were faithful to the forms of American thrash and hardcore music, 1996's Roots album incorporated elements of music from Brazil's indigenous peoples, notably the Xavante tribe.



Israel's Orphaned Land combine elements of thrash, death and progressive metal with traditional musical forms from North Africa and the Middle East. Lyrically, they express a desire for understanding and brotherhood between the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), warning of dire consequences for all if peace is not achieved (most eloquently in their 2004 release, Mabool, or "Flood"). This distinguishes them from the earlier major Israeli metal band, Salem, who memorialize the victims of the Holocaust while railing against Israel's enemies.



Mainland China's Tang Dynasty sets legends from early Chinese history to heavy riffs, making them soulmates with the metal sword-and-sorcery epics of the European power-metal scene.



Much like the Scandanavian black metal bands of the early 1990s embraced an anti-Christian image to stand against a culture they considered oppressive, Taiwanese black-metal band Chthonic embraces myths from Taiwan's history to speak in favour of Taiwanese independence from mainland China. This has been a highly controversial political stance in their native land and has attracted criticism from the People's Republic of China. They are also noteworthy for the incorporation of the erhu, a traditional 2-stringed bowed instrument much like a violin, into their music. And bassist Doris "Thunder" Yeh is totally hot.



Eluveitie is a Swiss folk-metal band incorporating bagpipes, fiddles, and even a hurdy-gurdy into their heavy sound. Lyrically they derive from legends of pre-Roman pagan Europe.

Which only goes to show that Tenacious D are right: You can't kill The Metal!

More fun with film editing

So a while ago I posted the "Ten Things I Hate About Commandments" fake trailer, which claims to be from the creators of "Must Love Jaws":



They also did "Glen & Gary & Glen & Ross" (warning--language!):

There and Back Again...

Squeal with delight, fanboys and fangirls! Peter Jackson has signed up to direct the film version of The Hobbit:

December 18, 2007

ACADEMY AWARD-WINNER PETER JACKSON AND NEW LINE CINEMA JOIN WITH MGM TO PRODUCE “THE HOBBIT,” EAGERLY-ANTICIPATED FANTASY ADVENTURE EPIC

NEW LINE AND MGM TO CO-PRODUCE AND SHARE WORLDWIDE DISTRIBUTION RIGHTS

PETER JACKSON AND FRAN WALSH TO EXECUTIVE PRODUCE TWO FILMS BASED ON “THE HOBBIT”

Looks like Jackson and New Line sorted out their legal differences.

More on the Writers' Strike

A Daily Show writer covers the strike in Daily Show style:

Caught in a web

MadJenny posted this video from the Writers Guild of America explaining the reasons for the Hollywood writers' strike. It succinctly explains their side of the issue:



Go to her site for more.

New Golden Compass Trailer!

Right here.

I can't wait!

You can have my action figure when you pry it from my cold dead hands

Figures that the event that would end my dry spell on this blog would be the profaning of one of my childhood icons:

Paramount has confirmed that in the movie, the name G.I. Joe will become an acronym for "Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity" — an international, coed task force charged with defeating bad guys. It will no longer stand for government issued, as in issued by the American government.

The studio won't elaborate, saying filming hasn't begun and details are still in the works, but the behind-the-scenes rumblings are that the producers have decided to change the nature of G.I. Joe in order to appeal to a wider, more international audience.

At first I thought this was typical Fox News propaganda, but there seems to be independent confirmation.

I'm reminded of this Penny Arcade strip for some reason.

I'm hardly a big fan of American imperialism, but the essential fantasy of GI Joe was the "Real American Hero" who recalled the morally upright American soldier of the post-Second World War era, and stood in contrast to the sins of Vietnam. Obviously, this involves a lot of mythology: the Korean War US soldier was no angel, nor were most serving in Vietnam baby-killing devils.

It should be noted, however, that while G.I. Joe was an anti-terrorist unit, their arch-foe, COBRA, was a domestic terrorist group. COBRA was a bunch of malcontented Americans sick of the system that had "screwed" them (Cobra Commander himself being a failed used-car salesman who became a millionaire through pyramid schemes), living secret lives alongside their fellow citizens. In the comics, COBRA had tanks hiding in auto shops all over the USA, and had even taken over a small Midwestern town, Springfield, and turned it into a fully-indoctrinated home for COBRA personnel, complete with their version of the Boy Scouts (but more like the Hitler Youth). The upper ranks were bolstered with some Eurotrash mercenaries like Destro, the Baroness, and Major Bludd, but COBRA was largely a domestic terrorist group. That's why G.I. Joe was a secret unit in the comics--the U.S. military is not supposed to operate on American soil without an emergency declaration.

G.I. Joe was never really a propaganda tool for the U.S. armed forces, given that their enemies were completely over-the-top James Bond villains (in the cartoon, COBRA destroyed the Golden Gate bridge like 5 times). There's no need to change the basic concept of the show and comic out of some sort of marketing agenda: foreigners will watch any American action-film that isn't too oppressive with the flag-waving.

For the Republic of Heaven!

OK, so from a Facebook note from IM, I was directed to the website for the upcoming Golden Compass movie. I took the "Find your Daemon" test and got this result:

Shining Happy People

A couple of months ago I linked to a YouTube video of a trailer for Mary Poppins as a horror movie. I guess this would be the exact opposite:

Here's funny!

Long ago, in a retcon far, far away...

This probably occurred to a lot of people who had the misfortune of watching Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith:

If we accept all the Star Wars films as the same canon, then a lot that happens in the original films has to be reinterpreted in the light of the prequels. As we now know, the rebel Alliance was founded by Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Bail Organa. What can readily be deduced is that their first recruit, who soon became their top field agent, was R2-D2.

Hanks. Tom Hanks.

This was too funny not to pass along:



I am a huge Bond fan. Some of my fondest childhood memories are staying up late to watch Bond movies with my dad (CityTV in Toronto used to have a Bond movie marathon every 3 months or so). By no means is the franchise what you would call "artistic" movies, but they sure are fun, even if some entries in the series are lacking.

I was one of those skeptical of Daniel Craig's ability to pull off the title role, but those thoughts were pleasantly dispelled when I saw Casino Royale. Apparently a lot of people had their skepticism challenged by Craig's role in Layercake, which now that I've seen, I agree with wholeheartedly.

Lord of the Quiz

So, after a discussion where I compared Deranged Squirrel to Pippin from Lord of the Rings, Mad Jenny found an online quiz to determine which Lord of the Rings character you are:

You scored as Arwen. You're Arwen Evenstar! This elven princess may not get in on too much action, but she's always optimistic and hopeful for the future. She does what she can to help her love, Aragorn, who is off fighting, and is always supportive of him. "I would rather spend one lifetime with you than face all the ages of this world alone." Arwen 81% Gandalf 75% Aragorn 75% Frodo 69% Eowyn 69% Samwise 56% Gollum 44% Pippin 38% Faramir 31% Which LOTR character are you? created with QuizFarm.com

Really, Arwen? One of my least favourite characters in the trilogy (though she was improved upon in the movies). I would have thought Gandalf or Eowyn, but Arwen?

Aural Kombat

Via Penny Arcade, I've learned of a new documentary on video games called Moral Kombat. Here's the trailer:




This is utter bullshit on so many levels, I can't name them all. But I highly recommend Harold Schechter's book, Savage Pastimes, for a revealing look at just how violent our culture and society is compared to ages past. A bit of a spoiler--are first-person shooter games really worse than the bear-baiting of the Renaissance era? There's a big stink about the video of Saddam Hussein's lynching execution making the rounds on YouTube and the like, but up until about a hundred years ago hangings were public events that families went to for weekend picnics. In the carnival-like atmosphere of a public hanging, all the townspeople would gather round, with their young children, to watch these criminals drop a short length, and twitch for a bit at the end of the gibbet, and being cut down. Meanwhile, buskers, entertainers, food vendors and prostitutes would be making brisk business. Death has always been associated with entertainment, food and sex--probably because proximity to it makes the living value pleasures of the flesh that much more.

This issue hits my hot button because I'm a roleplayer, and my hobby went through this same bullshit over 20 years ago. (I'm also a video-gamer, though I'm not on top of every latest development in that industry.) The line from the trailer that really set me off was "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." What?! Are they saying there is no boundary between imagination and reality? Puh-lease. Over the last two decades, I've "pretended" to be an evil knight in service to a dark god (in Dungeons & Dragons), a drug-dealing black market surgeon (in the Cyberpunk 2020 game), a Terminator-like killer cyborg (in the Mage: the Ascension game), a backstabbing, treacherous vampire (in live-action Vampire games), and a raging werewolf warrior (in a live-action Werewolf game). In real life, I've never been in a fight, never committed an act of violence on someone, never been charged with any crime (except exceeding the speed limit by 30 km/h), never drank anyone's blood, and never barked at the moon (OK, the last one I did, but in my defense I was singing along with Ozzy Osbourne).

If we were what we pretended to be, George W. Bush would be an effective president and warleader, Canada would be respected and envied the world over (newsflash: we're not), and Paris Hilton would be a paragon of moral virtue.

Fun with Film Editing

Thanks to MadJenny for this one:



Funniest thing I've seen in a while. In fact, maybe funnier than this one:

Throwing the book at them

Ursula K. LeGuin goes to town on the Sci-Fi channel for raping her book. To edify Ms. LeGuin, for many years in interviews she's stated the same line: Caucasians are a minority in the real world, and thus they're a minority in her books. So this is no new rant for LeGuin, this is a philosophy she's cleaved to her breast for decades, and thus rants like the following:

My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn't see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn't see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had "violet eyes"). It didn't even make sense. Whites are a minority on Earth now—why wouldn't they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?

...are more than justified.

But what most stood out for me was this statement (my emphasis):

When I looked over the script, I realized the producers had no understanding of what the books are about and no interest in finding out. All they intended was to use the name Earthsea, and some of the scenes from the books, in a generic Magic movie with a meaningless plot based on sex and violence.

Basically, all they wanted was Ms. LeGuin's brand to sell a largely unrelated product.

Oh look,

...half this post was lost in the posting process. Damn Blogger!

Beware of Greeks bearing litigation

The Greeks are angry because the new Oliver Stone film on Alexander the Great portrays the Macedonian conqueror as bisexual. And the rest of the world tries very hard to keep from laughing. Come on, guys! Do you read about your own history? Plato, the teacher of Aristotle (who was Alexander the Great's tutor for a time), wrote a whole freakin' dialogue on gay love called the Symposium. It was an accepted practice of the time, and should be accepted in our time as well. I recommend William Percy Armstrong III's Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece for a far more convincing argument than I could ever express here.

I had high hopes for this film. Stone's primary inspiration for the film is Robin Lane Fox's seminal biography of the conqueror, and he secured Fox's services as consultant on set. I did a book report on Fox's Alexander the Great in my first-year classics class and really enjoyed it.

Fox's book takes the form of a historical narrative that will have you turning pages. Right from the first chapter, Fox draws you in with the mystery of Philip II of Macedon's assassination? Who killed the king at the celebration of his wedding to his seventh wife? Was it his jealous first wife, Olympias? Was it his wrathful half-brother, pushed aside in his quest for the throne? Was his son Alexander involved at all? And that's just the murder mystery at the beginning, folks! Wait until he gets to the war...

...unfortunately, the film was not nearly as compelling as Fox's book. It had potential, but ultimately was laid low by four things:

1. It was too freakin' long.
2. The dialogue was extremely clunky.
3. The action sequences in the film suffer from "Braveheart syndrome," i.e. big battles are filmed as blurs of colour and action, with lots of shaky-cam work and motion-blurring. While this might be a realistic depiction of pre-modern warfare, it sure as hell isn't compelling from a dramatic standpoint.
4. It was too freakin' long.

Someone remarked to me that, recently anyway, period dramas are very good at doing their research and making everything historically accurate, every costume and set checked and rechecked down to the last detail. But they emphasize the superficial elements so much, the filmmakers forget we're there to watch a movie. An accurate depiction of an historical setting does not absolve you of the task of writing a compelling story.