2012 was a movie year so complicated I'm only just now getting around to it. A lot of very good films came out, to the extent that I wondered if I was being overly generous in my grading (something a critic, amateur or not, really needs to not fuss over.) But at the same time there are a couple of worrying trends that make me worry about the modern movie audience just a little. Still, the state of the industry isn't something to panic over just yet. Here's my Top 10.
You may have noticed the posting volume has declined a bit in recent weeks. My social calendar has been strangely full, and I'm trying to balance having a job finally and being in a relationship with setting aside the time to write for the blog- I can't pull all-nighters to get articles up anymore, and of course I have to have seen or read something in order to blog about it. On top of everything I do have other writing projects that I want to move forward, but I'm going to try and keep up some pace of substantive posts here.
This past week I've been at the National Audio Theater Festivals' 2011 Workshop, and tonight is performance night! Coming to you live from West Plains, Missouri, we bring you around 2 hours of original audio drama and comedy, featuring:
"Knocking on Heaven's Door", a stirring drama by comics legend J. M. DeMatteis, based on a script for a revived Twilight Zone which went unproduced when it went away again;
"The Son of West Branch, America's Great Humanitarian" by Dr. William Wayne Anderson, a historic recreation of vintage election propaganda for Herbert Hoover;
"Junk in the Trunk", a raucous comedy from this year's Freshman Class;
"TransMars Tango", an original science fiction adventure by comic writer Elaine Lee (of Stardust fame);
Music led by Dwight Frizzell, of the Kansas City Art Institute and KKFI's From Ark to Microchip;
Performances by The Firesign Theater'sPhilip Proctor, Audiobook star Robin Miles, Richard Fish, and yes, even yours truly.
The program begins at 7:30 Central Standard Time (that's 8:30 Eastern, 5:30 Pacific). If you're in West Plains you can either come in and watch us live, or follow on KKDY 102.5. Everyone else can listen along at the same time through a stream on KKDY's website or at NATF.org (a stream link should appear at 7:15.)
I feel bad about having taken too long to do this. Elisabeth Sladen's death took many people by surprise- it was not widely known that she had been struggling with cancer, and her sudden loss felt wrong, unjust, disorienting.
There's not a lot I can say, as a result. I will miss her despite never having met her, never having actually known a woman who from all accounts was as sweet and selfless in person as on television. On Doctor Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures, Sladen was a favorite aunt, a wonderful first grade teacher, a friendly and trustworthy guide into a world of wonder and danger. There will never be another person like her. In this context all I feel I can do is point to those accomplishments I have already noted, and hope I can do some form of justice.
The Time Warrior- The first appearance of Sarah Jane Smith on Doctor Who.
Genesis of the Daleks- Possibly the finest story of the show's original run, and arguably the best of the entire show.
There are, of course, other roles that Sladen filled, and I regret not knowing them. This is a terrible loss by any measure and I just hope that I can do her some justice- and I can only hope that somewhere she knows how much she was loved.
Welcome, one and all, to the blog's five year anniversary! Yes, on this day in 2006 I made my very first post, unsure of what I'd do with this place or whether I'd even spend much time on it.
Oh, to be innocent again. Keeping this place updated in the midst of creative writing and job searching hasn't always been easy, but it's worth the trouble to have a place to speak one's mind. I like to think of the Club (and I'm sentimental enough to picture it as a place instead an online journal) as a celebration of my various pop culture loves. I started with movies, then television, music, comics, books, audio theater, RPGs, live theater, pro wrestling, and of course, the eternal beauty of Julia Sawalha.
There's a lot I'd like to do still. Frasierquest continues rolling on. I've been thinking of starting a second blog solely to post some of my prose and creative work, but I need to figure out the best way to present that kind of content in blog form.
I'm gonna put this here because I'd still like people to see it if they haven't already, and I'd especially like some Youtube feedback. More machinima is on the horizon, but the next one will be a more complex undertaking, with voice actors and sound effects and the like.
New Doctor Who is on tonight, and I plan in the coming week to put up something as a tribute to the dear, recently departed Lis Sladen, taken from everyone far too soon.
And to send you all out with something inspirational, just remember that no matter what anyone tries to tell you, no matter how overwhelming the consensus is, no matter how you much you are made to feel you are objectively wrong,the 1998 Avengers is awesome.
I wanted to start this earlier, but getting the SOCIAL NETWORK review done took too long. But I’ve got most of October left, and I can’t think of any better way to get us into the Halloween spirit than to let loose the monsters.
You can do horror without monsters, but they’re something special in our culture, and vital for Halloween. So I’m going to cover monster stuff- lots of reviews of monster movies, comics, books, and maybe a monster-centric Doctor Who or two. I’ll be looking at the great and the unsung, Japanese and old world.
Now, this won’t be total, I don’t think. I want to get maybe a foothold on Season 3 of Frasierquest, and obviously that doesn’t fit, and of course if there’s any new movie that I feel compelled to review while it’s out, that’ll be up there as well. But it’s gonna be a monsterfest regardless. So get ready to lift a glass to the beastly and the strange, as the Club clears out some extra tables and secures the noise permits for what can only be described as our own personal Monsterthon.
I've mentioned THE MOVIES by Lionhead before, and the fact that I'm using it to dabble in the machinima arts. Over this summer I decided to do something a little more focused than my usual slapdash hope-the-subtitles-save-it approach, with a fully voiced (by myself) satirical filmstrip about certain moviemaking trends and how we need to reacquaint ourselves with the fundamentals of good camera work. Took me forever to finish, and I needed iMovie and a couple of game mods to make it, so I hope you enjoy. Comments are welcome.
It’s Julia Sawalha’s birthday! I’m sorry to say I kind of let this pass unnoticed in past years, but I decided she deserves the attention this time. After all, she’s 42 now, which means she’s officially the answer to the ultimate question about Life, the Universe, and Everything.
And it also means it’s as good a time as any to post this brilliant French & Saunders skit featuring her and Helen Mirren in what is both a nice reverse AbFab and a satire of twee British sitcoms.
Happy Birthday, Julia! You and Dame Helen need to collaborate more often.
So, I really should have prepared something for this, but a very busy week leaves me with little time. Suffice it to say that this marks the fourth anniversary of Club Parnassus' first post, and we're still around, and hoping to be around for at least four years more. (It'll take me at least that long just to finish Frasierquest.)
I want to thank everyone who's still reading. Hopefully I can continue to expand what I write about here, and maybe even spark some discussion. Seriously, you folks are quiet. It's an eternal struggle to try and keep my material fresh and interesting without just posting pictures of hot chicks (though I am not above that), and I feel I've kind of lost touch with the blogosphere (go and check how much of my blogroll is still active), so hopefully I can find some stuff to engage with and memes to keep things lively.
I've always got ideas, though, so look for a few things to be tried out in the year ahead. Keep reading, and have fun.
And so we come to the end of a decade (note: I was with the pedants on the milennium thing, but are you seriously trying to convince me that 1980 was part of the seventies, 1920 part of the teens, etc.?) Movie-wise, 2009 was, well, it was okay. There wasn’t a huge crop of great films released, and there were a lot of dry patches. On the other hand, the great films, when they did come out, were spectacular- some of the best work in their respective genres and of their filmmakers in a long time. In order to preserve some suspense I’ll be counting in ascending order this time.
10. MOON. A study in isolation that’s part puzzle and part psychological drama. Sam Rockwell has to play against himself and virtually no one else for the whole picture, and pulls it off against an artmospheric 2001-inspired backdrop. The picture is chilling without ever being cold, a strong script executed with style.
9. THE IMAGINARIUM OF DR. PARNASSUS. Terry Gilliam meditates on the nature of art and the passing of the traditional storyteller in an invitingly surreal and organic-feeling cascade of images. Heath Ledger’s final performance is energetic and expert, and while the story doesnt make the most sense, it works beautifully as a tone poem.
8. PONYO. A very sweet childhood friendship story, surrounded by disaster and the anger of nature. As with most all of MIyazaki’s work it’s a visual symphony, and almost unbearably cute at times. Just plain lovable.
7. STAR TREK. Something that could have gone very, very wrong, this modernized and testosterone-injected reboot of a beloved sci fi franchise instead holds up as a boisterous and fun entertainment. I coulda done with more sense of wonder, and the plot has a few cracks here and there, but some wonderfully enthusiastic acting, a strong visual sense, and an outright witty script make this the kick in the pants the TREK universe needed.
6. WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE. Some critics argued this radical embellishment of a beloved children’s book was too mopey for its own good, but then, the whole point of the book was that all Wild Rumpuses burn out after a while. Spike Jonze manages to speak to the strange rhythms of childhood imagination, and how happiness and sadness and anger can overpower a young mind who doesn’t know that such moods are a part of life. But it’s not a dry intellectual exercise, instead possessed of a sincerity and organic, intuitive imagination that makes the whole journey quite powerful.
5. THE HURT LOCKER. This may not be the most accurate depicition of the life of a military demolitionist you’ll find, but it definitely feels true and absorbing. Kathryn Bigelow’s expert action thriller, following in the vein of two-fisted postwar stories like THE WAGES OF FEAR and THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE, navigates around the politics of the Iraq war to present a picture of human compulsion and addiction and how we acclamate ourselves to the most inhuman of environments.
4. UP. Pixar decided to make things hard for themselves by making their latest children’s epic the story of an old man who wants to fulfill his dead wife’s ambition, with a message that you shouldn’t let the trappings of dreams overshadow the true needs they articulate. Fortunately they also had an overenthusiastic boy scout and a talking dog. In an age where children’s entertainments often seem very calculated, UP manages to hold together brilliantly as a story while seeming totally ramshackle. Oh, yeah, and there’s the perfect devastation of the opening sequence, which is basically the filmmakers saying “We know how to make you cry and we’re not afraid to do it.”
3. CORALINE. The old “girl gets what she wished for only to find out it’s not what she wanted at all” fantasy plot is given new life, with a gorgeous look, strong characterization, and a general off-kilter feel. It’s got a lot of personality, and a lot of imagination, and I think better of it now than when I first saw it.
2. FANTASTIC MR. FOX. As you can tell, there were some great children’s movies released last year, some outright masterpieces in fact. Somehow, this is the best. Wes Anderson’s unique adapatation of the Roald Dahl book is just fun, seemingly effortless in its charm despite being meticulously handcrafted from frame to frame. The dialogue sparkles, the visuals are warm and sensuous, the cast is in peak form, and a general good will pervades the enterprise. I’m speaking in generalities because I’m not even sure why this is as good as it is. Like THE WIZARD OF OZ, its parts are terrific, but the whole achieves something that can’t be explained.
1. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. I’m going to go and say this is Quentin Tarantino’s best film in over a decade, and this is coming from someone who loved the Hell out of DEATH PROOF and both volumes of KILL BILL. Those were loads of fun, but this is a true masterwork, one part Spaghetti Western/Nazi kill fest to two parts invocation of the power of narratives. As much carnage as there is, the most intense moments are conversations drawn out uncomfortably as participants seek to subtly leverage power over each other. Christoph Waltz’s ferociously intelligent Col. Landa is one of screendom’s great villains, all too easy to underestimate and deadly when he gets the upper hand. The film both satisfies a certain desire to see history’s monsters get what was coming to them and makes us feel a little ashamed of that, but just how much the film leans to the former or the latter is a matter that could be debated for years. Expertly made and calculated for full impact, this is a reminder that Tarantino actually can do things with the wealth of film references and techniques he’s borrowed over the years.
Runners Up: The Hangover, Sherlock Holmes, Up in the Air
Not Seen Yet: Precious Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, A Serious Man, An Education
Performances that impressed me:
Christoph Waltz, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS Sam Rockwell, MOON Kevin Spacey, MOON Anna Kendricks, UP IN THE AIR Karl Urban, STAR TREK Tina Fey, PONYO Woody Harrelson, ZOMBIELAND Sharlto Copley, DISTRICT 9 Alison Lohman, DRAG ME TO HELL Jeffrey Dean Morgan, WATCHMEN The Entire Goddamn Cast, FANTASTIC MR. FOX
Most Underrated Film of the Year:
This Space Reserved
This is kind of embarassing. Just about every film I enjoyed this year was, on some level or another, well received. WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE was maybe a bit polarizing, it bears watching in the event that a SUPERMAN RETURNS situation develops, but apart from that, I didn’t find myself going against the tide that much. Obviously a number of films on my list could have done better than they did, but I don’t feel comfortable putting a merely-mildly-received picture up here. So I’m going to wait. I haven’t seen every film released in 2009, and I may eventually find one that got an undeserved bad rep. I’m keeping my eye on some prospects. Will update when I find a deserving entry.
Worst Title of the Year: PRECIOUS BASED ON THE NOVEL PUSH BY SAPPHIRE. This is what happens when you let lawyers decide movie titles.
Saul Bass Memorial Award for Best Opening Credits Sequence: WATCHMEN. This was actually a fairly good year for the endangered opening credits sequence, and I had a lot of entries to choose from: WOLVERINE, CORALINE, DRAG ME TO HELL, ZOMBIELAND, etc. Ultimately, though, the brilliant condensation of pages worth of key backstory into a simple musical montage is something that even people who disliked the WATCHMEN movie thought it did well.
Speaking of which:
Sweet Home Alabama Award for Song We Never Need to Hear in a Movie Ever Again Ever Goddamn It: “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen (includes all covers.) Cohen is a great songwriter. He has written other songs. Where the Hell is “Suzanne”, people?
I haven't really disguised my political beliefs in the past, you may have already gathered I lean to the lefty side, but I try to keep the really polarizing and un-fun stuff out of here. It's a club, we like not being too serious. But right now, with a special election in Massachusetts meaning potentially very bad things for a concern of mine, I have to vent a little. It's kind of useless, but I have no choice. In retrospect, I'm putting this behind a cut, because srsly. This thing would clutter up the front page somethin' fierce. At 13 I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. I'd previously been considered as having ADD, but that didn't quite encapsulate the weird stuff my brain was doing. I'm basically just explaining this to make clear that I'm not one of those people who self-diagnosed myself with the syndrome to explain my lack of social skills.
It's a condition I've more or less made my peace with, and I've got it under control with medication. The problem is that it also makes me uninsurable. When I became ineligible for my family's insurance, and then graduated and became ineligible for student insurance, I decided to apply on my own. I was rejected, because Asperger's is a pre-existing condition. I was screwed.
Now, the current health bill is nowhere near perfect. But one thing it does do is make it illegal for insurance companies to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions. This is in both versions that have been passed so far, it'll almost certainly be in any final version. So I kind of need this. I can afford to pay, I just need to be allowed to give them my money so I can not worry about being in an accident and paying off medical bills very slowly for the rest of my life.
The GOP, for whatever reason, has continually refused to put this very simple clause in any alternate health care bill they've proposed. I can't have the slightest confidence that Scott Brown or anyone in that party cares about people like me- or rather, if they do, the whips have convinced them that unity in opposition is more important. I admire the discipline, but guys, seriously.
So there's the chance this could be killed after all, thanks to a Mass. special election that, as a Missourian, I didn't have the slightest say in. I do appreciate that the Democratic candidate ran the worst campaign possible and all, but...
I'm through equivocating. A majority of people now apparently don't care about giving people like me a chance at health care, and that apparently includes a majority of voters in Massachusetts. I don't care how badly this bill was presented or what your utopian ideal is, I can't afford for you to say "Let's start over and do it right this time", I need the ability to buy insurance like yesterday. If you want this bill to die, you're saying I don't matter. So, in other words, go. Leave. Get out. Don't want your business. I can no longer abide the company of people who think that it's okay to let the status quo continue, whether it's because they want single payer instead (and that would be great, but seriously, how long am I supposed to hold out?), or they just think of themselves as Randian supermen.
I've got the free clinics for now, am volunteering in hopes of eventually landing a job that would provide benefits, I've written my representative, I'm looking at homes in countries that aren't quite so fucked in this department, I can hold out. Other people with the same pesky conditions don't have my support network. We can't let this end for them. This is going to be our last shot at the problem for a while, in all likelihood. We make it, or people continue to suffer.
And because you've been good and patient enough to at least scroll down, here's Julia Sawalha to lighten the mood:
More self-promotion time! I've gone and written another piece for The Agony Booth, this time recapping the legendarily dull and crappy Dungeons & Dragons movie. For some reason this ten page epic took me about a year to write and revise, so enjoy!
Today's the day "You Have Five Minutes...", a radio theatre anthology containing one short play by yours truly, airs on KUNM in Albuquerque. For locals, that's 89.9 on your dial.
Everyone else, click HERE to listen to their online stream. The show starts at 6:05 Mountain Time, and will be archived for about two weeks.
Despite this blog being mostly reviews, I still do creative writing, and a good deal of my recent work has been writing radio scripts. This past June, a very short work of mine was actually performed and recorded as part of a larger performance at the Filling Station in Albuquerque, NM, entitled "You Have Five Minutes", under the direction of Lance Roger Axt (friend of the blog) and Linda Lopez McAlister.
On Sunday, November 29, at 6:05 Mountain Time, KUNM in Albuquerque will broadcast the final edited show. The full schedule will feature plays by myself, Algernon D' Ammassa, Lance Roger Axt, Frederick Greenhalgh, and Butch D' Ambrosio. I'm still working on finding full program information, but my play is entitled "On the Outskirts."
Now, I know what you're thinking. "I don't live in Albuquerque! And neither do you!" Well, KUNM streams all its material live. Simply click Here at the appropriate time (I'll put a new thing up on the day in question, but still) and you can listen to their stream.
What is the appropriate time, you may ask? Well, you can probably figure it out, but just to be clear, it's 6:05 MT, which means 5:05 for those on the East Coast, 7:05 for us Midwesterners, and 8:05 for all you Eastern Timezoners. (Also 1:05 AM for the UK, 4:05 AM for Madagascar, and 9:05 AM for Irkutsk.)
This will actually be the first time I've heard this, so it'll be fun for everyone. It says they have shows up for 2 weeks after but I'll check and see if that includes us, and I've heard nothing about any permanent MP3 or whatever access but I'll keep you posted. (I'm still trying to find a way to get a copy of that comedy sketch I was in during the NATF 2007 show.)
But anyway, I hope you listen and enjoy. Back to business as usual.
I love Halloween, and each year I try to do something nice and Halloween-y here at the club. Honestly, I got caught unprepared this year, so what you'll be seeing now is the result of some random scrambling for material. Hope you enjoy it. To start things off, let's have another entry in opening credits sequence theater, with the simple but powerful start to John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN. This one's mostly about the music; the swift pace of the theme song sets up a momentum that carries through the film's first scenes.
And for those in our audience who are planning to complete major Jewish rites of passage on this day, a word on what you can expect, from Tracy Jordan and an intrepid Sims 2 player:
A good scary story is always appropriate, and Kevin Church and Paul Horn are offering us a particularly spooky webcomic for the holiday, known as Copy Protection.
For something text-only, pretty much all of the works of H.P. Lovecraft have been made available for free online. One of his best stories is Dreams in the Witch House, at least in my opinion, and you can go from there to everywhere on HPLovecraft.com, and wade through all his material, losing sanity as you go.
And finally, for audiophiles wanting to take a listen to probably the most famous radio drama ever, Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre production of The War of the Worlds is frequently revived by local public radio stations, and if you want to listen to it now, head on over to the Internet Archive for a free and legal download.
Hope this is all enough to make your Halloween a teeny bit more awesome. Have fun out there!
40 years ago today, the human race did the most awesome thing it has done to date. Some very brave people went further than anyone ever had, and placed their feet on the surface of somewhere that was not Earth. That we haven't gone further since is disappointing, but I hope we will in my lifetime, because exploration is just something we do, and this world won't hold all of us forever.
Commenters beware: conspiracy theorists will be sent to Mr. Aldrin.
Warning: The post that follows contains spoilers for DOLLHOUSE, the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA finale, and INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL. It is also a rant, and thus poorly structured and vague in its intent. Feel free to skip it. However, to prevent this from being a complete waste of time, and also to conduct an experiment in site traffic, here's a photo of Jennifer Connelly.
I’ve developed a kind of precogniscence that I’d rather do without. (Now I know how Christopher Walken felt.) It seems that after years of discussing media on the internet, as well as enjoying unpopular examples of said media, I now know when people on the internet will hate something well out of proportion to its actual flaws. I’m not sure whether I’m becoming more perceptive or if fandom, in the broad sense of the word, has become that predictable.
Last night I saw an episode of DOLLHOUSE, Joss Whedon’s latest series, set in a creepy facility where “actives”, people who’ve had their personalities wiped, are implanted with different personalities and skill sets to do jobs for wealthy clients. It’s a decent show, took a while to get going and will probably be canceled sooner rather than later, but never mind that. The episode in question involved a bunch of actives remembering who they were and trying to escape the facility. In the end, it was revealed that this was a psychological experiment to deal with some of the repressed baggage these particular actives had, that had been surfacing in prior missions. It was a fun episode which deepened some of the characters, expanded on the setting, and moved at a good clip. But I knew the final twist, and the fact that this episode had not demolished the status quo as the network promos had hinted, would in fact piss a lot of people off, and so it did. I was enjoying the episode but dreading the inevitable blowback.
I’m getting repetitive but I’d like to go back even further, to May of last year and INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL. My positive review of this film is a matter of public record, and at some point opinion on the film went from polarized to profoundly negative, as seems to be the fate of anything George Lucas has his name even remotely attached to. (I’m sure he doesn’t care, having enough money to start his own country, but the way his name is spoken like a curse annoys me. Price of success I suppose.) Now, the film definitely had flaws. But more unpleasant than the actual bad parts of the movie (the overly abrupt ending, John Hurt having nothing to do, etc.) was watching the parts that I knew fanboys on the Internet would lose their shit over. The early scenes in the desert have a lot of prairie dogs popping up, and they’re obviously CG and sort of a passive Greek chorus to the high-action absurdity going on, which is weird but funny. But because it’s so cartoony, it was once again evidence of Lucas’ sinister immaturity tainting a formerly dignified franchise. And then there’s the nuked fridge. Indy rides out an A-bomb test in a lead-lined refrigerator, which I found amusing and it set up a great shot of him looking up at a mushroom cloud signifying the passing of an era. It’s blatantly impossible, so lo and behold, “Nuking the Fridge” is now common Internet parlance for ruining a franchise.
And it’s not like this only happens with moments I otherwise don’t mind. I do think the business with Mutt leading a bunch of monkeys to mess with the Nazis was kind of stupid. Emphasis on “kind of”, because it’s an obvious Tarzan homage and this is a pulp movie and seriously, have you seen some of the crap they get away with over in the Mummy series? But of course, if there is one thing fans cannot stand it is a series not being taken as seriously as they themselves take it, so this movie ends up on worst-of-the-year lists and anything wrong with it is the fault of you-know-who.
Objectively I shouldn’t care. If you enjoy something, the fact that others don’t shouldn’t give you pause. If you think it’s actually objectively good and others think it is terrible, you are not necessarily wrong. But sometimes the sheer level of vitriol makes a reasonable give-and-take over something harder to engage in- the con side defines the terms of the argument and you end up having to defend monkeys and fridge-nukes before you get to talk about the things you actually liked. On this blog, at least, I can structure an argument without going into defense mode, but I enjoy actually having a give and take with people as well.
If you’re not sure what point I’m making, welcome to the club. Obviously people will disagree on things, and such is the Internet. I wish debates like this took place on more fundamental levels- story and character and aesthetics rather than individual weird moments- but at the same time I suspect that a lot of the complaints you hear are shorthand. BATMAN AND ROBIN isn’t a terrible film solely or even primarily because there are nipples on the batsuit, but “nipples on the batsuit” is sort of a code for the film’s campy attitude and aesthetic, which doesn’t work because the performers don’t sell it like they did on the Adam West series, etc. DIE ANOTHER DAY’s problem is not that James Bond windsurfs down an iceberg but that the film seems to ricochet between absurd madness like that and attempts at low-key geopolitical intrigue like two scripts were shoved together at random.
I suppose my problem is perspective and a lack thereof. We’re talking about things that represent individual whims and choices on the part of writers/directors/etc., conceptual decisions that in and of themselves are neither good nor bad. It’s all in the execution, and examining why something works or doesn’t is a lot more interesting than just pointing to it. I suppose all of us, myself included, could also stand to be more open to disagreement and the idea that the opposing side may in fact have valid points. Too often I hear these points espoused as geek gospel, something that’s been decided on, and someone who challenges them is an apologist- a Whedonite, a Morrison whorrison (though that’s actually kind of clever), an undiscerning fanboy who refuses to recognize the truth. It hate it when these situations occur, and that’s why I hate being able to see them coming. There’s no way for creators to avoid it because fans are impossible to uniformly please, and catering solely to them means losing your own voice, a fate I would not wish on Whedon, Ron Moore, George Lucas, or frankly even Michael Bay. Not that they’re paying attention.
It’s been 2009 for some time now, but I think now’s as good a time as any to post some resolutions. Some of these are personal, though not too much so. Others are more relevant to youse guys. So, without further ado. 1. Get to Britain by any means necessary. In 2001-2002 I spent a Junior Year Abroad in Cambridge and it was a life-changing experience. I felt more at home there than anywhere else, for some reason- getting to know people at the pub, biking anywhere I could, being a train ride away from London, it just clicked.
I’ve been planning to emigrate for some time, and though it is not easy to land a job in another country, I honestly don’t think I’ve been trying hard enough often enough. I need to get in a habit of sending applications so frequently that by the time one is rejected I’ve already got others pending. I’ll be 28 on the 13th, and I understand it gets much much harder to get in legally when you hit 30.
It’s not that I dislike living in America, it’s just that this is a dream of mine and over the past year I’ve started to gain a certain amount of dread that it would go unfulfilled, which shouldn’t happen for something as elemental as changing physical location.
So, any British employers looking to hire someone with a Library Science degree from overseas, or for that matter anyone who can provide any advice or assistance, if you’re reading this, my e-mail’s in the profile.
2. More comic posts. I’ve drifted away from comics blogging as of late, and though I still buy a lot of monthlies I’ve never found a good context to start writing. (The last trade I bought came square in the middle of a series so that would have been weird.) However, I am still listed in many places as a comics blog and shouldn’t completely disappoint everyone on that front. I’ll look for opportunities to write about this, and maybe dig out collections and graphic novels that I haven’t reviewed yet.
3. More of my favorites. You know what? PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE was on TV Friday night, and I love that movie. I wrote a review once but it was for a site that’s not there anymore. I’d like to write on it again. But most of the time when I do a Random Movie Report, it’s a film I’m just now seeing, and I try to work films I’ve already seen into Academy of the Underrated or a series (like the Matrix or Star Wars posts). But I want to write about my favorite movies, and maybe go over a few favorite books and TV shows as well. There’ll probably be a new category.
4. More gaming! I was last in an RPG group in 2007, just before I moved to KC, and amidst the business of doing nothing I’ve yet to find anyone around here. Not sure what, but I want to play/run something, dammit. I’m feeling like a collector.
5. This is a subset of the “favorite” thing, but- FRASIER. I goddamn love this show, as much as MST3K and WHO, but I’ve yet to find the right context to post about it. I don’t wanna steal Mightygodking’s thing of just posting clips, so I dunno. I’m thinking.
6. Get readership up. Posting more frequently would help, I know, but I’m still getting the hang of the “short post” thingy. It’s not really important to me that the site become popular, but readership seems to have eroded slightly over the past several months and I’d like to reverse that if at all possible.
7. Film & Discussion. It still exists and my crossposting to it is piss-easy. Why am I not doing it? I don’t even know. So there you go.
8. More THE MOVIES movies released. Ironically the closure of the official online site has gotten me interested in really diving in again.
9. I have owned METROID PRIME for over 4 years now. That final boss fight ain’t gonna finish itself.
