Considering the news...

1) Is it tasteless for me to want to do a double feature of "Rosemary's Baby" and "Hard Candy?"

2) Do I care?

Vodka + avocado + brie + Krzysztof Kieslowski = maudlin lj post

Noted.

Happy Valentines day.

Fuck all y'all.

Instead of providing actual content, I will, instead, point to someone else's stuff and relate the sheer hilarity behind it.

I've never actually read any Green Lantern comics, but a podcast I listen to has been obsessed with it recently. Why? Because of the Rage of the Red Lanterns. They talked it up enough that I thumbed through a recent issue in the store. As implied by the title, rival lanterns sporting rings of a different color have turned up.

Yes, after 50? 60? odd years, someone thought to invent "lanterns" of colors other than green and yellow. The primary (heh) villains this time around are a corpse of rage-driven individuals who sport red rings.

Now, I know that Green Lantern has decades of nobility and sacrifice and epic, cosmic scope worked into their title.

However.

The Red Lanterns do not project force-shapes molded by their will into useful objects for battling their foes. Since they're all driven by rage, one suspects "focus" isn't really high on their attribute list.

Instead, when they attack? They vomit blood.

Which apparently dissolves through targets like "molecular acid."

I can see a few flaws with this attack, that they probably write around... 1) What kinda range do you suppose you get on a stream of vomited blood? 2) "Whoo... hold up guys. Kinda... kinda running out of rage. Whoo... Getting lightheaded..."

And that's not even the best part. No, not even that their leader is someone named "Atrocitus." (No one had better tell me he used to be a good guy. "Atrocitus to the rescue!")

No, the best part is that, one of the apparently original Red Lanterns, right there from the beginning is... uh... (scroll about 3/4 of the way down on this next link)a little blue housecat. With his own superhero outfit. And who wears his ring on his tail.

This is about 5/12 hilarious and 7/12 disturbing as fuck. Which is just about the proportion I love. If they make a statue of this cat, vomiting blood in a menacing manner, I will buy the hell outta that sucker. I might even settle for an action figure.

I hope to heaven above that this character used to be a member of the "Legion of Evil Super Cats" that used to battle the justice league's pets back in the golden age. That is by far the most reasonable explanation for a housecat to be so filled with rage as to manifest as a Red Lantern.

Why do I like horror? Because you never know what you're going to get.

Paul Sorvino
Bill Moseley
Paris Hilton
Anthony Head
Sarah Brightman

All in the same pit'cher.

SINGING.

I DARE you to make less sense!

Having finally seen the start of the new Dr. Who season (being one of the few fans who doesn't download torrents and actually waited for the SciFi screening) I have to say that I'm absolutely devastated that "Donna" doesn't become a new companion of the Doctor.

She would've been brilliant.

STOP HAILING ON MY CAR!

I was gonna post this over in lord_darkseid's journal in response to his post here, but, in my typical fashion, it became too long and rambling to clutter someone else's comments with. In the post, Darius is commenting on this post by Joss Whedon, relating the recent "Honor killing" of Dua Khalil.

"Honor" killings happen all the time in countries that live under Shiara (sp?) law. We only see them on the news and via the web now, because we're over there. There are these groups who call themselves "morality police" who are kind of self-appointed or church-organized vigilantes with the implicit but not the explicit help of the police. That way, when they go out and beat some woman to death for hanging out with the wrong group, the police don't interfere and it kinda ends there. The Government says "wasn't us" and the church claims it was a "social uprising" against the woman's immorality. (I remember reading about how a female US soldier in Iraq was driving a refueling tanker on the airport tarmac and stopped to hook up one of the jets, when one of these "morality police" assholes ran out and knocked her down with a club because "women aren't morally allowed to drive." Fortunately, being a US soldier, she then stood up and beat the everliving shit outta him.)

Joss is perfectly right to try and call more attention to these groups. And he's welcome to whatever philosophical pontificating he likes concerning the ramifications of gender differences around the world. (However ridiculous the tired, trite, inverse-Freudian "womb envy" theory may be.) On the issues of entertainment, however, I coincidentally ran across this post in connection with that famous bingo game that's making the rounds. I have issues with the "bingo game" itself and the motivation behind it, but that's not relevant to what I wanted to say here. What is relevant is the writer's feminist perspective on some of Joss's work:

Buffy Summers - how I loathe what was done to this character - ended up forcing oral sex on a male character over his repeated verbal objections. To a musical sting. The writers, I am fairly certain, did not actually realise they had written a rape, particularly as this same character later attempted to rape Buffy, which was not treated as at all amusing.

See also: Men forcing demonic power into the First Slayer = metaphysical rape and utterly despicable. Buffy using Willow to force demonic power into possibly thousands of young women = empowering!

Women are entirely capable of stupid or evil decisions. But those decisions should be treated as such by the text, not lauded as a turning of the sexism tables.

This is an issue because Joss spends a good deal of time in a "holier than thou" approach, grinding after this new "Captivity" movie, and, for all I know, he may have a solid point. I haven't seen the ad campaign but... well, let's break it down.

1a) Traditionally, in movies, the horror genre has been excoriated as universally misogynistic because of its preferrential obsession with women as victims. (Even setting aside the borderline porn obsession that's becoming universal across all genres.) However, this overlooks the "final girl" factor in which a designated woman turns, self-empowers, and takes out the slasher/monster that's effortlessly killed everyone else. The trend is noticeably absent in many foreign genres (giallo), but is nearly universal in stateside films, the particular industry that Joss seems to be concentrating his scorn on. (See: every damn "slasher" ever.)

1b) The new trend of "torture horror" (which I, personally, dislike intensely) however, seems to be stepping things up significantly in the trauma department, concentrating on increasingly creative and shocking ways of gouging, cutting, piercing, or otherwise killing its targets, and using that as its principle advertising hook. For someone concerned with the the societal effect of entertainment trends, it's obvious that these new trends warrant examination.

1c) Yet, even within these new films, the old trends remain. The "Saw" movies in total could be seen as the story arc of the new twisted "hero"... Jigsaw's apprentice stepping up to replace her ailing mentor, and "Hostel" 's violence was primarily man-on-man. I think (heard, didn't see) that even "Turistas" follows the "final girl" trend.

2) Whether the "final girl" or the twisted new versions of it counteract the apparent misogyny that preceeds it is an issue that's been batted around academia for years, and frequently open to debate on a case-by-case fashion. I think there'd be little debate that "Ripley" from the Alien movies or Sarah Conner from the first "Terminator" are empowered female figures, nor that "House of 1000 Corpses" is, at its least, violently misogynistic. (The latter could be argued as just straight misanthropic, but that's a bigger argument.)


My point is, as much as I may enjoy many of Mr. Whedon's stories, if he's going to speak from the mount to us on the nature of gender relations in the modern world, specifically on the topics he's objecting to in "Captivity, then he really needs to take a close look at his own work. He's used the "rape trick" in Buffy more than a couple times. 1) Woman force sex on men = empowering/funny, man force sex on woman = deplorable. 2) Rape attempt used to denigrate & weaken main female character (look again at Spike's attempted rape of Buffy) 3) Rape attempt used to demonstrate evilness of main baddie (in the "three geeks" storyline).

And that's not even detailing the pieces specifically germain here. Do I even have to list the number of times that Buffy gets tied up, chained down, or caged in the course of the series? (The occasion when Ethan Rain tied her down to carve symbols into her skin leaps immediately to mind.) Or how about objectification with the "Buffy bot"? Yes, Buffy always escapes, empowers, and beats the crap out of the baddie, but so do the other "final girls" in the horror genre. Why does he get a pass, and "Captivity" not? Is it due to the severity of the situations in "Captivity"? I know nothing of the story or the advertising campaign, but After Dark's quote that it's "...also about female empowerment" tells me we're dealing with another "final girl" story, just one within the "torture horror" genre.

In short, Joss has a good point about the way in which the world in general has ignored things like "honor killings" in the name of tolerating inherently sexist cultures. Further, Joss's concern with parallels between the honor killings and modern entertainment may be a truly important issue. That in mind, however, he really needs to re-think his own attitude of blamelessness about his own contributions before speaking down to the rest of the world. Things he's done in his own stories would seem, by his own standards to be beyond the pale.


Ohhh... I'm gonna get mail on this one...

Well, hell. The events at VT on Monday have pretty much overshadowed any trivial little thing I have to say.

I'll just say that my prayers were with the dead and dying all day, and I'll avoid saying anything more. I'm enraged to incoherence over some of the factors involved, but to begin that polemic would be to attempt to focus attention on me and my thoughts when they so plainly belong elsewhere, and I'm not one to strike the iron in the midst of grief in order to make a point.

I'm gonna move along and talk on other stuff now in an attempt to distract the simmering anger.

In more death-related news, Kurt Vonnegut passed away recently, and I have absolutely nothing to say about that. I should have something to say, but the truth is that I've never read one of his books. This pretty much defines the reason that I have a "I should have read this by now" list, and refutes anyone who ever snickers at my possession of said list. Now an (apparently, by reputation) great American writer has died, and I have not one word to say about it. Hmmm.... he had good hair, I guess. Sort of a tighter-curled Einstein thing going on there.

(Man, I hate being ignorant.)

In other hair-related news, I've bowed to the wishes of no-one in particular and have decided to try and grow a moustache. New ground for me. At 4.5 days in, it's going pretty well, having reached beyond the "no one mentions it because it's unnoticeable" to the "everyone studiously ignores it because, I mean, what are you gonna say?" stage. By late afternoon, though, my 5 o'clock shadow disguises its presence almost entirely since I have such a heavy beard anyway. I was tempted to go for the full goatee, so that I could attend AWA as "mirrorverse Matt Wagner," but my natural shyness outweighed my ambition, and I'll have to settle for "half evil Matt." (Or possibly "half apathetic Matt.")

On the con front, I'm getting materials together for the coming year. Gotta assemble the guest list for this time around (AMVers! Someone always missing that you know or would like to see? Lemme know! Nothing guaranteed, though, several slots already filled.), get the rules finalized and posted, etc. etc. As was fairly obvious, I didn't make it up to MTAC this year. Finances are so thin this year that I could never consider attending both MTAC and JACON, and if I can only make one, I'd like that one to be JACON. (Can't really afford JACON either, but I'm gonna do my damndest to make it anyway.)

Money has essentially plateau-ed. I'm finally starting to get a few unsolicited e-mails from companies, and my very, very few contacts with any leverage at all are trying to snake my resume into a few more prominent hands, but there's nothing resembling a solid job offer on my plate. It's starting to get really depressing, frankly.

A bright point, though, was sneaking out to the North River Tavern to participate in the Guitar Hero II tournament held there Friday nights. I was lucky in that it was a particularly low turnout, and the only real competition (as I saw it) was eliminated by someone else one round before me, but I still made a pretty impressive showing in all rounds and won the finals by a good 10% notes hit (and over doubling the other guy's score) on "monkeywrench." Prize was just a shirt, but it was pretty fun, and actually winning something was a bit of an ego boost. (Especially considering I was three Guinness in, and some idiot had spread talcum powder all over the damn controller, making it feel slimy.)

One last thing before I move on to reviews: I won't be reachable this coming weekend via anything other than cell phone... and I'm not likely to be all that coherent even if you do reach me that way. CampCon is running this weekend and I will be way WAY outta town for that. I've been ordered back for a repeat performance of my CoC gamemastery by the crew out there and they've assured sufficient intoxicants to kill at least a few of my weaker, lazier brain cells.

Reviews! First up, a book; ( Bodies We've Buried ) a book with some interesting facts and a unique perspective on crime detection with a handful of fun anecdotes, but so badly and distractedly written as to really make it difficult to recommend. Only the greenest forensic studiers will find it informative. Not worth the time of anyone else.


The movie of the week on my own little desktop theater has been Bakshi and Frazetta's ( Fire and Ice, ) essentially an exquisite time capsule of both indie animation studio efforts and the high-fantasy obsession of the early 80's following on the heels of Schwartzenegger's "Conan" and Coscarelli's "The Beastmaster." Unfortunately, most of its (considerable) flaws can be traced to those lineages as well. While I enjoy experimenting with different techniques in animation, this final product has a much rougher, uneven, and occasionally rushed feel to the work than similar portions of "Heavy Metal" released two years earlier. Further, the fantasy world is particularly thinly defined and little more than an excuse for fight scene after fight scene or a little cheap titillation. Though fun and occasionally worth trudging through, the movie is largely empty film calories.


The extensive biography of Frank Frazetta included on a second disc was easily just as interesting, if not more so, than the film itself. Frazetta's a fairly remarkable man, entirely because he'd determined to make himself so. The standard cliché about people who extol the virtues of Conan-like figures or drool over the ever-present fawning nudes in fantasy art is that they, themselves, are pudgy, socially inept momma's boys who've never left home. Frank Frazetta is about as far away from that cliché as is physically possible. Despite decades of a career in art and being a child prodigy who almost toured Europe to study under the masters, Frazetta always valued his own athleticism and sportsmanship far above his artistic skill. In his youth (born 1928) he was even courted by professional Baseball leagues, but eventually turned them down (something he still regrets). Starting out in comics, working his way up to film posters and other higher-paying jobs (turning away repeated offers from Disney in later years), he didn't even start working in oils (his most famous pieces) until he was in his 40's, but has dabbled and almost casually mastered watercolors and sculpture as well. The variety of his work is almost ridiculous, ranging from his fantasy covers to funny animal stories, one wonders what it would take to even slow him down.

Well, as it turned out, what it would take is eight years of an undiagnosed thyroid condition, the aftereffects of which resulted in a series of seven strokes (two major). Battling his way back with physical therapy each time only left him with a profound numbness and slight tremor in his drawing hand, effectively preventing him from painting or drawing. So what did he do?

He taught himself to draw left-handed, and went right back to work.

That is the power of determination. Pretty inspiring, actually. Frazetta is apparently very self-conscious about the damage the strokes have done to his ability to speak clearly, but the documentary starts by interviewing him now (2003), and, had they not included interview material from before the strokes, I would've put the entire thing down to a medium-thickness Italian-American accent. A bit of a "goombah" like practically anyone on "The Sopranos." Coming up on 80, and the man is still painting and helping maintain a museum of his works (with considerable assistance from his wife).

Agape. Spent.

Someone call Hollywood. Tell 'em they're done.

They've finished.

They've made all the movie.

THAT'S it? ( Secrets what man was not meant to know )In all seriousness, this best resembles "From Hell," the assembly of a whole squadron of old conspiracy theories around a single fictional concept to tell a fun, historically-coherent "wouldn't it be neat if" story behind unknown fragments of history. The difference, from what I can tell in this movie, is that Alan Moore is a much better writer. Instead of the intensely mystical, convoluted plotting and motivation of "From Hell," this is more like a dull Indiana Jones story where Indy is neither an action hero nor funny. In fact, isn't this the same story as "The Last Crusade?"

(And yet, neither film accounted for the fact that the grail was originally supposed to be a PLATTER.)

It's all settled now, I'm going to JACON.

The only question is... what the HELL am I doing? I've never managed something this off-the-cuff in my life before...

OK, let's say, just for the sake of argument, that I was to blow off all my responsibilities, rent a car, and drive down to JACON this coming weekend.

Would I be able to find, once I got there,

1) crash space?
2) comp badge?

(This is idle 1:00 in the morning thought. It may not come to anything.)

Fandom pop quiz! New icon!
Question 1: Where'd I get the image? No, really. Look close. Where'd I get it?
Question 2: Where'd I get the quote?

No partial credit!

Heh.

So, the big news is that my ( thesis )

Eh. Forgive my maudlin ways. I'm scared to be too encouraged or happy before the thesis defense itself, lest it go abysmally. And God knows I don't know what comes next. I have to get my act together and put together the thesis defense... which is turning out to be far too easily assembled from previous presentations. Frighteningly easily assembled. What the hell am I forgetting? I've been working myself into such a lather over this that I've started getting nausious over it.

At least I hope that's the worry. Or the Krystals. I can't afford to catch the flu right now (which, short of hard lemonades, is the only reason I vomit anymore).

Speaking of rising gorge, on to your regularly scheduled horror flick!

Eli Roth has recently contributed his ire to what passes for the forefront of horror with his film "Hostel," apparently an excoriation of the "ugly American" in the latest addition to the painfully birthed subgenre of "torture horror," the subgenre better known to the casual observer as the gritty fingernails-on-chalkboard pieces like Saw, Saw II, and imports from Takashi Miike famed for their amplification of Clockwork-Orange-style "ultra-violence." As has recently been remarked, it is no longer the fear of the public to die in a gruesome way at the hands of a serial killer, but rather to be tortured for hours on end and live through it all, awaiting only the next session, retaining a shattered psyche as though first cousin to a rape victim. I'm uncertain exactly what has led to this recent development. It's hardly unique, and has been touched upon cyclically before, most directly in pieces like Last House on the Left, but at first blush, and to speak plainly, I don't like it. True, it's necessary to shock the viewing public out of their complacency... to really get in there and hurt the audience at a basal level, but if these films are all that they advertise themselves as being (and the Japanese ones rarely disappoint in that capacity), it strikes me as too far, too fast. But that's just my first impression, and I haven't the time or cash to properly investigate.

All this is rather beside the point, however, as I'm not planning on reviewing any of those flicks. Instead, I'm gonna be looking at Eli Roth's first major outing, with his flick from 2002 ( Cabin Fever )In conclusion, a nasty, gory, frathouse-style flick that actually makes the gorge rise in the back of your throat. It avoids Eli’s apparent current obsession with torture-horror by not having a real villain. Better than you really expect it to be, but nothing profoundly groundbreaking and not a non-stop gorefest. Do not eat while watching.

Incidentally, if you haven't been paying attention to what's going on in Belarus, you should be.

Digging through the latest issue of Rue Morgue, I encountered a review that reminded me why I love this genre.

Apparently there's a recent cheezeball horror flick release called "Santa's Slay".

In the first ten minutes Bill Goldberg (yes, the wrestler), bursts in wearing a Santa suit...

...and kills Fran Drescher.

It's like BIZARRO-WORLD entertainment.

(Ed: Previous Ed removed for gross inaccuracy.)

Again, I never do this. But while listening to director's commentaries on my Invader Zim discs, I found out something profound.

Ms. Bitters was voiced by Lucille Bliss.

Lucille Bliss, who was 85 years old at the time, has been doing voices for TV animation since 1949, where she did the voice for Crusader Rabbit, and is currently voicing for "Avatar: the Last Airbender."

Her most famous role?

( Behind a cut for the big reveal )

Wow.

But this very nearly had me spill my coffee...