Scramblings & Ramblings

The problem might be that I have a "Catching Up" category, kind of implicitly accepting this kind of drop-out/come-back behavior. I don't mean to go off grid like that. Honest I don't. But its just as easy to get in the habit of NOT doing something as it is in doing something.

So I'm back. What happened in the last (almost) 2 months?

Someone raised this question at Big Planet this week in response to my Top 40 Movies list, and since it might here as well, I'll go ahead and put my response here.

Short Answer
The head-on collision of over-the-top camp with anthemic rock and Technicolor visuals, sold with such enthusiasm and abandon, hit my 5-year-old brain like cinematic crack. And I'm still addicted.

Long Answer 
Either the first or second movie we ever had on videotape, I watched FLASH so much growing up you'd have thought someone was paying me. The camp never registered then, the same way kids that age watching the Adam West BATMAN show thought it was completely straight. I took everything at face value. Flash and Dale meet Zarkov by crashing into his home right before taking off in his home-made rocket ship? OK. Flash holds off an alien police squad with football-shaped eggs and Heisman moves? Sure. And just what the hell was Mongo floating in: space, air, weird clouds? It didn't matter how long the head-scratchers list got, I never cared once I heard Max von Sydow say that great opening line, "Klytus, I'm bored. What plaything can you offer me today?"

FLASH actually has a lot going for it when you take the time to look. Although the two American leads, while visually well-cast, couldn't act their way out of a paper bag, the supporting cast hit the precise amount of over-acting their parts required to make them enjoyable and indelible to the viewer. Brian Blessed's maniacal turn as Vultan, King of the Hawk People always brings a smile to my face, just as Max von Sydow's Ming sends a chill down the spine. And how did they have Dr. Doom in the FANTASTIC FOUR movies not look like Peter Wyngarde's Klytus? Timothy Dalton shows some pre-Bond mettle, while Topol... well, I'm not sure what the hell he was thinking, but just go with it. The only thing more colorful than the Mingo sky was those who lived under it. And is watching Ornella Muti as Princess Aura really a bad way to spend a couple of hours? I think not.

As adaptations go, it's not the worst comic-to-film translation I've ever seen. For all those who decry FLASH as defiling a sci-fi classic, one read of the original strips (available from Checker Books) tells you it wasn't exactly high-brow entertainment to begin with. FLASH certainly didn't shy away from the 4-color palette of the original; if anything, it tried to be even MORE colorful. The designs seemed in line with the Alex Raymond art shown in the opening credit scene.

(* There's a very likely chance that I got into reading comics because of that art. Showing them linking the movie that I loved to comics, something I would seek out when I got a little older. The art itself was gorgeous, which certainly helped. One panel in particular had Flash standing on a mountain-top, hands on hips and surveying the land below. The way Raymond staged the panel, and drew Flash with his cape billowing around him, just said volumes about the scale and attitude of the strip. And as first impressions go, you can do a hell of a lot worse than Alex Raymond.) 

And then there's the music. This movie introduced me to Queen, and I've been a devoted fan ever since. By this stage of their career, Queen had mastered not only the theatricality ("Bohemian Rhapsody" from A NIGHT AT THE OPERA) but the anthem-making ("We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions" from NEWS OF THE WORLD) required to do the film justice. Everybody makes fun of that title song, but that's because it did it's job. The movie's not called ATTACK FROM MONGO or THE WRATH OF MING, it's FLASH freakin' GORDON! That song and that opening tells you all you need to know: we're in some serious shit, and the only chance we've got is Flash, but don't worry because he's the man. All that with the catchy tune and Roger Taylor's thundering beat that gets your heart pumping just a little faster every time it comes on. Sure it's as subtle as a boot to the head, but who watches FLASH GORDON for subtlety? It's "Saviour of the Universe" time, baby! A subtle guy would have just shot Ming; Flash crashes Ming's own war-rocket into his wedding ceremony and skewers him on it. Subtlety, thy name is not FLASH.

So because I can trace not only my love for Queen but also comics back to it, as well as just putting a smile on my face every time I see it, FLASH GORDON is on my Top 40 Movies list.

THE FORTY FLICKS

Jaws
Brazil
The Blues Brothers
L.A. Confidential
12 Angry Men (1957)
The Great Escape
Citizen Kane
Aliens
Almost Famous
This Is Spinal Tap

Jackie Brown
Starman
Die Hard
The Color of Money
The Princess Bride
The Man Who Would Be King
Lone Star
Rio Bravo
Double Indemnity
Glory

Big Trouble In Little China
High Fidelity
Heat
Spartacus
The Iron Giant
The Shawshank Redemption
The Empire Strikes Back
The Seven Samurai
Amadeus
Glengarry Glen Ross

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
John Carpenter's The Thing
Flash Gordon (1980)
Philadelphia
Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring
The Fisher King
Goodfellas
The Big Lebowski
Raising Arizona
Shaun of the Dead

Caught IRON MAN this weekend; my inner 9-year-old and my outer 31-year-old are both very happy.

The topic of Top 40 movies came up at Big Planet this week.

Seems while I was back in LA, a bunch of the regulars brought in their 'favorite movie' lists. These were the ones that, if you caught one while flipping channels, despite what time it was or what part of the movie you caught, you had to sit and watch the rest of it. The kind of movie you get lost in.

I was tasked to bring in my list my next time in, so I've been working on it in my head since. My rough draft, so-far list (IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER) after the break:

THE SPIRIT is to SIN CITY 2 as BLUE HARVEST is to RETURN OF THE JEDI -- true or false?

True.

Switched cell phone to 443 area code. Officially a Balti-moron again according to sister-in-law. Only took 18 months.

Looking forward to watching BLAST OF SILENCE and BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD tonight or tomorrow night

• Clever: wearing concert dress to avoid going home & changing pre-concert; not clever: forgetting my stand and having to drive back anyway.
  
• In the Might-Have-Been category: an animated John Carter of Mars movie back in the 1930's: http://tinyurl.com/6ffxxs.
  
• Trapped in an elevator for 41 hours: http://tinyurl.com/4qu7aj.

Halfway thru re-reading JACK STAFF: EVERYTHING USED TO BE BLACK & WHITE. Reorganizing office.

• Cheesesteak'ed it instead. Tried a place a few doors down from the shop; not bad. But not Maria's. The search continues...
  
• Hitler commissioned the first Olympic torch-bearing relay run. Huh; did not know that.
  
• First no-jacket-all-day day in a long time. The sun's even out.
  
• @Nightcrawler13: They might not be labeled SE's, but I can think of decent DVDs for FIRE&ICE, WIZARDS, and AMERICAN POP off top of my head.

Greek or Korean dinner tonight; can't remember last time I had either. Should be fun.

Went to Best Buy Tuesday night and burned through some birthday giftcard cash. Picked up: THE MIST and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA SEASON 3 on DVD, and RAINBOW SIX VEGAS 2 on XBox 360.

R6V2 (what little I've played of it) is not a whole lot different from R6V1. Not that I was expecting a quantum leap or anything, but it feels more like an expansion pack of the first game than a sequel. I'm alternating between that and CALL OF DUTY 4 for scratching my FPS itch.

BSG3 was purchased with the idea that I watch at least the last half to catch up for Season 4 starting...next week? Wow, that popped up quick. If I'll get to it or not is another matter. Probably not. But it will be there to watch the whole series again after this season caps the run. It's a good show; not a great one but certainly worth watching every now and again for the occasional brilliance shining through. Although I don't know what it says about a show when a lot of people's favorite episode was their first: "33". Not that the series has jumped the shark by any means, but those early episodes might have set the bar a TAD high.

Stephen King's (by way of Frank Darabont) THE MIST was one of the best horror movies I've seen in a while. Someone online pegged it as this generation's JOHN CARPENTER'S THE THING, which I don't necessarily agree with but can definitely concur with the general sentiment. Darabont makes excellent use of the limited budget. Aside from some occasional VFX hiccups, the film looks great (especially in the director-preferred B&W version on Disc 2 of the 2-disc DVD). Strongly recommended.

I've got about six or seven posts rolling around in various stages of mental development; hopefully I'll shoot them out over the next few days. For now:

• California Dave sent me this link for the blog Stuff White People Like, a funny anthropological skewering of Whitey across a broad range of topics. They're up to about 100 entries so far, ranging from The Wire and Netflix to Knowing What's Good For Poor People and Threating To Move To Canada. Best laugh I'd had in the past week.
  
  
• Dave Stevens, of THE ROCKETEER fame, passed away of leukemia a few weeks ago. He was only 52 years old; another comic creator like Mike Wieringo and Steve Gerber who left us far before their time. It got me thinking about how this might spur more people to go looking for his artwork and how great that would be. Then I realized there's very little of Stevens' work in print. There's certainly no collected ROCKETEER volume like Wieringo's TELLOS hardcover for people to grab. And that's a shame, because his work on those stories is gorgeous and should be available just as a public service. Someone needs to jump on that immediately.
  
  
• The Fialkov/Fleecs/Dauberman joint THE SANDWICH KINGS got around to reviewing the Pasadena Sandwich Company (with a little shout-out to yours truly). My only complaint about the place was their hours; really only a lunch eatery, so I could never grab a dinner sandwich on my way home from work. You can read about it in all its goodness here.

Because after nearly 8 years of listening to someone whose command of the English language is filled with mumblings, malapropisms, and a general ineptitude that makes ESL speakers slap their foreheads in disbelief, it's a light at the end of the tunnel to listen to one of the most refreshing and eloquent speeches given on one of the most important topics of our times, I give you: Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union".

I'm back from my conference on the coast last week. I survived and had a pretty good time overall. The worst thing I can think of that happened was one of the concierges of the San Francisco Marriot was a complete dick to me when I tried asking him if his hotel had a coffee shop or something I could meet by boss at for breakfast.

"I don't know what that term means, sir," said the snooty bastard.

Really? How about 'asskicking'? You familiar with that? (OK, we all know I didn't say that but damn if I didn't have to actively hold it back)

"We have a restaurant, sir. If that is what you are looking for," the snoot continued.

And this was after I'd already had two very pleasant direction-giving experiences from San Franciscans that same morning.

*sigh*

Still haven't watched the series finale of THE WIRE yet. Our area had a big thunder/windstorm on Saturday night that knocked out our cable. Linda's positive that despite Comcast's assurances to the contrary, no one was out trying to fix it until Monday morning. So we had to wait until last night to DVR a repeat to watch tonight. Yes, I know I could have done it On Demand on Monday, but I didn't get back til late and then had band til late last night.

So tonight it all comes to an end...

 

 

I'd hit an almost steady pace of updating this thing. Now I've slacked back to what would be generous to call a crawl. But there has been a reason, believe it or not.

On the work front I've been busting my hump getting ready for a conference this Friday in San Francisco. The wife and I are flying out tomorrow, and we've got some face-time with the family planned for the trip as well. It does mean I'm most likely not seeing THE WIRE finale until Monday, maybe Tuesday, but I'm reticent to have that show end on me, so I'm not feeling as bad about that as I would any other episode.

I've been spending my nights either doing more work or typing some other things. I'm not going to say anything more about it now, but there's an addition to the linklog at the right that eagle-eye readers might be able to piece together.

See both of you next week!

• I'm not sure how the hell this happened, but I managed to win last week's Comic Cover Challenge over at Steven Grant's PERMANENT DAMAGE column up at CBR. Click here for the challenge in question, and here to see that I'm not making this up. As is customary, the winner gets to pimp a website of their choice, and since I didn't want to bring too many new people into this little party we've got going on here, I chose John Siuntres' Wordballoon site. Always worth a look...
  
   
• Also over at CBR is a couple of Sean Phillips articles: one on the new volume of CRIMINAL hitting stands this week, and another on his studio space. Both are also worth a look...

My reaction about 30 minutes into tonight's episode:

An ice storm is currently hitting the area and coating all roads and surfaces in sheets of sleet and ice. Not wanting to drive on the ice-rink, I decide to fire up the laptop and crank out some work at home. I walk away to the kitchen for no more than 3 minutes and come back to this:

Like my iPod, apparently, Electro-Zoe needed to recharge.

May solicitations for Marvel and DC Comics came out today, so if I can get around to it after band practice I'll put up my picks on both sides. But for now:

• Josh Fialkov's CYBLADE revamp for Top Cow was voted as one of the two winners of Top Cow's Pilot Season contest. They commissioned five 'pilot' issues of new series starring characters from Top Cow's Cyberforce books that each could have gone on to their own series, and had MySpacers vote on which two should be given that chance. Joining Josh's book is the Joe Casey/Kevin Maguire VELOCITY series. You can check out all the pilot issues here. 
  
  Never gave Cyblade much of a thought before all this, and Mays' usually kinetic art felt kinda flat in the pilot. But Josh did a pretty good job of making me want to read more of his take on her, so congratulations to him for getting the chance to continue!
  
  
• Via BoingBoing, check out these woodcuts of science-fiction films done in vintage Russian style.  

FREAKANGELS, the new free and weekly online strip from Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield, is now live and available at www.freakangels.com.

Six pages a week and in roughly the same proportions as a regular comic, the story revolves around a group of twenty-somethings surviving in a post-disaster London where the waters have risen to flood everything under a few stories tall.

From William Christensen, Avatar Press publisher, described it in this CBR interview:

"FreakAngels" takes place in an imaginative future world in which something has gone horribly wrong. In this case, the "something" is the fault of the FreakAngels themselves, a group Ellis described in a "Bad Signal" email blast as "a clan of unrelated young people with purple hair and purple eyes." The trouble, Ellis goes on to say, comes when "a girl called Alice from Manchester turns up with a shotgun and a grievance, having met the lost, prodigal last Freakangel, who had very different ideas about what they should do with themselves and this flooded future England."

Ellis talks about the series here.

Duffield's art is a really nice blend of manga and European influences, as you can probably tell from the pic to the right. It's too early to really get a good handle on the story and where it's going, but right off the bat it reads like classic Ellis, so I'll be around to watch it go from here.

BTW, the site is hosted by Avatar Press, which carries a range of non-corporate Ellis books ranging from BLACK SUMMER to DOKTOR SLEEPLESS and GRAVEL, in addition to last year's great historical one-shot CRECY. So you could do worse than throw some extra love their way by checking out their books if you end up liking FREAKANGELS.

(It turns out my post title is the go-to phrase for all the FREAKANGEL launch articles. Screw it; I'm too tired to change it. Just imagine I made up something punchier or wittier. Share it in the comments if you feel like.)

(Postscript: it was eventually knocked loose by another soda)

Teh bits, tehy shur r teh skrambld 2day:

• The Around Comics podcasters are going on extended hiatus. Sal, Chris, Tom, and Skottie are putting down the microphones for a while to rest & recharge. The feel from the announcement post is that this isn't the end of AC, but we might have a bit of a wait ahead of us for new episodes.
  
  I'd actually been skipping the Monday shows and sticking with the Thursday roundtables recently, so this won't be a total system shock for me. Things have been a little ... ragged with the show lately. Not in a bad way, necessarily, but I could see how they would want a break from the weekly grind.
  
  Hopefully the return won't be too much of a wait...

Roy Scheider passed away yesterday.

Yeah, I could have gone with a non-JAWS title. Probably should have. But JAWS is one of my all-time top 5 favorite movies, and Roy will always be Chief Brody to me. Oh, he may have wanted the bigger boat (and really, who wouldn't have?). But when it came time to man up, the hydrophobic everyman sheriff blew up a great white shark with an impossible shot while two seconds away from having his boat SINK OUT FROM UNDER HIM.  
"Smile, you son of a BOOM!" (that's how I heard it for years from a TV-taped copy until getting the DVD a while back)

Roy was also the narrator of THE SHARK IS STILL WORKING, a documentary on JAWS and its impact on fans and culture. It still hasn't been released yet, but you can find out more about it here.

He brought a real down-to-earth quality to everything he did, both as leading man and character actor. I may have been disappointed in some of the movies he did, but I was never disappointed in his performance. And when he was in a film that worked, oh man. Watch out.

Here are some other Roy movies you should see:

• The French Connection (1971)  
• Marathon Man (1976)
• Sorcerer (1977)
• All That Jazz (1979)  
• 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984)
• RKO 281 (1999)

He's made other great (and not-so-great) movies, but these are the ones I can recommend because I've seen them. I'll be Netflixing some others, so stick to getting these so I don't see all the ones I want show up with LONG WAIT next to them in my queue.

Farewell and adieu, Roy.

Meant to get to this earlier in the week but things have been hectic. Better late than never, right?

From BoingBoing in the past week or so:

Haven't had a new playlist in a while, so here 'tis. It's been tough coming up with a new playlist because I've been listening to the ROCK BAND soundtrack so much for the past few months. A few of those tracks have bled over to this list, but I tried to keep things a little fresh. It's actually a little longer than I'd normally have made it, but since I'm probably not going to make a new one for at least a month or so, this'll keep it from getting too stale too quickly.

(No relation to last year's Groundhoggin' aside from the name.)

Good for the Giants. As impressive as the 18-0 record was going into the Super Bowl, the Patriots were certainly not as ironclad of an opponent as you might think. Hell, the Ravens were one misplaced timeout call from beating them back in November. So anyone who thought a Giants win was impossible was smoking something. Improbably? Sure. Impossible? Not so fast....

No, I didn't stutter. Just finally saw the AMAZING SCREW-ON HEAD cartoon based on the Mike Mignola one-shot of the same name. ASOH is the best Mignola-to-screen translation I've ever seen, and that's including this short-but-sweet Hellboy beauty someone did a few years back.

But not only that, the voice cast is a hoot-and-a-half. Paul Giamatti and David Hyde Pierce have so much fun with their roles I dare you to watch this without laughing. It can't be done.

It's a shame only one 22-minute episode was produced. But that episode does such a great job of capturing that manic lightning in a bottle, you can't help but simply appreciate the good fortune of having anything at all.

Seems like directions to a building called that should go something like this: "Head down thattaway, hang a left at the Ministry of Love, past Miniplenty, and keep going til you run into Minipax. Hang another left and it's right there."

It came from this article on today's BoingBoing on how the Chinese aren't letting a little thing like Mother Nature possibly screw up their big coming out party to the rest of the world (otherwise known as this year's Olympics). And it turns out they aren't the only ones in the weather-modding business: the Russians had a chance to put their system to the test in 1986. Read the article for more on that, and check out some other nifty (or hare-brained, depending on your point of view) ideas to stave off storms and the like here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_modification