Syfy to air a re-imagined ALICE miniseries

Monday, November 30, 2009

Beginning December 6th, SyFy will debut Alice, a two-part miniseries that offers a new take on Alice in Wonderland. (Do you think the timing of this has anything to do with Tim Burton's upcoming Alice reboot?)

This promo doesn't make it look too promising frankly, but I'll be curious enough to check it out. And hey, with Tim Curry and Matt Frewer in the cast, at least you're guaranteed plenty of splendidly hammy acting.




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Looking back at LEXX

Lexx was always a cult hit at best, and a decade on, the show's fanbase has scattered and its presence online is minimal. (Lexx doesn't even have an official website anymore, and www.lexx.com takes you to a very dodgy "analytic" site that I strongly suspect just loaded all kinds of spyware onto my PC.) But Lexx was a twisty delight, an unlikely crossbreed of Flash Gordon and Caligula that deserves to be rediscovered.

The premise: four luckless souls drift through space aboard a Manhattan-sized, talking spaceship that looks kind of like a wingless dragonfly and kind of like a flying phallus. The ship’s captain, Stanley Tweedle (the superb Brian Downey) is a wretch who is perfectly willing to let whole civilizations die to save his own skin. He’s madly in lust with the ass-kicking, drool-worthy Xev, but she has the major hots for the ice-cold Kai, a surprisingly talkative dead guy with a stylish bouffant. Last (and arguably least) we have 790, a caustic robot who has never let the fact that he’s a head without a body hinder his attempts to seduce Xev, or to bust Stanley’s nuts. Together our heroes face evil insects bent on eradicating humankind, armies of flying robot arms, cannibal women with forty-foot tongues, dangerously inbred space hillbillies, Rutger Hauer, and lots of really hot girls in rubber dresses.

At its best, Lexx was one of the most hilarious, sexy, scary, disgusting, perverse, wonderful things you will ever see. But the series was, to put it mildly, not always at its best. The show was just about as good as the original Star Trek, in the sense that one episode was dumb but fun, and the one after that was embarrassingly bad, and then the next episode was so great you couldn't believe it... And then the one after that was even better, except for the parts that were embarrassingly bad. (And most of the third season just bit.) But hey, Trek was also a wildly uneven, tiny cult hit that was canceled too soon, and look how that turned out. Here's hoping that 10 or 15 years from now we'll be watching Lexx: The Next Generation.

Youtube user BeataIzabelaMiller has uploaded a bunch of behind-the-scenes videos from the show's early days, and for fans this stuff is a big pile of fun. Shot on cruddy video, public access TV style, here is Lexx creator (and R. Crumb lookalike) Paul Donovan with co-writers (and sometime actors) Jeffrey Hirschfield and Lex Gigeroff, telling you how this wonderfully crazy show came to be.




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Former WHO star Eccleston to play John Lennon

Variety is reporting that former Doctor Who star Christopher Eccelston will portray the young John Lennon in Naked Lennon, a BBC Four biopic. Eccleston isn't the only Who-niverse star who will appear in the film; Torchwood's Naoko Mori will co-star as Yoko Ono.

This casting strikes me as sort of bizarre. If you squint Eccleston bears a vague resemblance to Lennon during one of the troubled Beatle's more gaunt periods, but Eccleston is in his mid-forties and frankly looks it, while this film would be following Lennon in his late twenties and early thirties. I suppose Eccelston has a bit of the young Lennon's smart-alecky, pugnacious quality, but this role will definitely be a stretch.

The article reports that the film will air in the UK next year.

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Nabokov's "lost" novel published as a collection of index cards

Shortly before Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he asked his family to destroy his last, unfinished novel. Following his death his family quarreled about whether to honor his dying wish. Finally they locked the book away in a Swiss bank vault for three decades. Until now. In a decision that's been very controversial among critics and scholars, Nabokov's son, Dmitri Nabokov, has allowed the book to be published by Knopf.

Nabokov wrote his novels on index cards, frequently changing the order of the cards as he worked. According to his diaries he had his last book finished in his mind, but then he died before he could complete his work. The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun) is now in stores, in an unusual format consisting of over 100 facsimile, removable index cards arranged in a tentative order by Dmitri Nabokov.

The Times of London summarized the book like this:

Philip Wild, an enormously corpulent scholar, is married to a slender, flighty and wildly promiscuous woman called Flora. Flora initially appealed to Wild because of another woman that he’d been in love with, Aurora Lee. Death and what lies beyond it, a theme which fascinated Nabokov from a very young age, are central. The book opens at a party and there follow four continuous scenes, after which the novel becomes more fragmented. It is not clear how old Wild is, but he is preoccupied with his own death and sets about obliterating himself from the toes upwards through meditation. A sort of deliberate self-inflicted self-erasure.

Dmitri Nabokov has attracted a lot of criticism for his decision, but any decision he made would be controversial. We know that Vladimir Nabokov didn't want this book published. But Kafka wanted his own work destroyed, and the world would be a poorer place if that had happened.

Unfortunately, while The Original of Laura apparently offers plenty for serious Nabokov fans to chew on, reviews suggest that it doesn't really hold together as a story and offers little of the mind games and dazzling wordplay of Nabokov's earlier books.

"Where the action was intended to go remains elusive," Michael Dirda writes in his Washington Post review, "and without any serious editorial apparatus it's difficult even to speculate. In consequence, this book remains only a posthumous collection of rough drafts and authorial notes, more novelty than anything else."

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WONKA'S FEAR FACTORY!

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Some weeks back, the Quasi-Interesting Paraphernalia blog posted this ad for Wonka's Fear Factory, a haunted house attraction with a Willy Wonka theme. Apparently it took place in Michigan in 2001, but that's about all I know. There doesn't seem to be any other info online about this fascinating attraction. Were there demonic Oompa Loompas? Were guests turned into giant blueberries and then rolled away to be juiced? Did some guy in a top hat and zombie makeup do Gene Wilder's totally horrifying rap about how there's no way of knowing which direction we are going?

I would hardly believe this thing was real, but here's the ad, right here. Click to enlargenate.

























Sadly it seems we'll never get to visit Wonka's Fear Factory... But at least we have Marilyn Manson's twisted, Wonka-themed Dope Hat video to console us.

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SHATNER SUNDAY: Shatner raps about Julius Caesar

The 1998 indie movie Free Enterprise has a very cute premise: two geeky guys grow up worshiping their sci-fi hero William Shatner, until they meet him for real and discover that he is as flawed and insecure as they are. Essentially it's My Favorite Year, with Captain Kirk. The characters are likable and the performances are good - as we all know by now, Shatner excels at self-parody - but the story is sort of inert and shapeless.

But the hardcore Shatnerians who seek out the film and stick around for the final reel will be rewarded by the jaw-droppingly peculiar sequence below, where Shatner and Rated R rap about Julius Caesar. It's easily Shatner's finest musical moment since his Mr. Tambourine Man days. (By which I mean that's absolutely agonizing, but in a good way.)




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Basil Wolverton's divine madness

For many years, Mad Magazine hyped Don Martin as "Mad's maddest artist." Martin's work featured square-headed, dimwitted idiots who were forever doing gross, improbable things while accompanied by such sound effects as GAZOONT! and SPLOINK! It was gloriously goofy stuff, sure, but if true madness was what you looking for - nightmarish, squirm-inducing, sometimes even Naked Lunch-esque madness - well, Basil Wolverton was your guy. Wolverton's characters were hilarious nightmares, fleshy horrors with noodle hair, staring eyes and big, drooling mouths with cracked teeth going every which way. These were some of the greatest beasties to ever crawl out of the end of a pen.

There's something so hideously tactile about Wolverton's creations. The little hairs on their heads, each strand so distinct (they always have hairs, not hair) that they look like they would be springy to the touch and leave an oily film on your fingers. The flesh appears warm and clammy, like you could really reach into the page and grab hold of those saggy jowls and floppy noses. (Not that I'd recommend it.) And those nostrils! Lord almighty, you can practically hear the snorting laughter of these freaks and smell the garlic on their breath. You definitely wouldn't want to invite Wolverton's parade of grotesqueries into your home - even if you put down plastic, you just know they'd totally ruin your furniture.

It seems almost inevitable that Wolverton dabbled in vaudeville as a young man, but fans of his comedic work will be amazed to discover his crackling sci-fi adventure comics, depicting fat little rocket ships of the Buck Rogers school and faraway worlds that look like backgrounds from one of Dr. Seuss' crazier picture books.

It's even more startling to learn that the creator of all these cartoon ghouls was a deeply religious man; baptized into Herbert W. Armstrong's Radio Church of God in 1941, Wolverton became ordained as an elder in 1943. Wolverton illustrated some horrifying pamphlets that Armstrong gave away as part of his long-running radio show, The World Tomorrow (Wolverton's 1975 in Prophecy is even more grim than the real 1975 turned out to be). He also wrote and illustrated The Bible Story (a.k.a. The Story of Man), a six-volume series covering the entire Old Testament.

Wolverton's apocalyptic visions of people suffering from sickly boils and wretched famine don't exactly put the fear of God into you; they put the fear of everything into you. Spend enough time with Wolverton's art, and you don't even want to have a body anymore. You just want to be a nice, safe brain in a nice, clean jar on a nice, quiet shelf.

But while Wolverton excelled at sci-fi and holy terror and pretty much everything else he did with his pen, he will perhaps be most fondly remembered for his "beautiful girls"—who were, of course, anything but. He first got noticed in a big way when he won a 1946 Li'L Abner contest to depict Lena Hyena, the ugliest girl in the world. The judges were Boris Karloff, Frank Sinatra and Salvador Dali (and man, don't you wish you could've heard those three fumbling to make small talk), and they rightly proclaimed Wolverton's Lena the most unattractive female in all the land. With her H.R. Giger teeth protruding from a vulture-like face, Lena was a punk-band mascot 30 years ahead of her time.

As brilliantly twisted as Wolverton's art was, he had a way with words that was equally inventive. His comics assaulted you with relentless wordplay—murderous puns, groan-worthy rhymes, thumping alliteration. One moment, Wolverton's mutant boxer Powerhouse Pepper is getting sweet-talked by a pretty girl, and he has a "lush blush on his mush." Then he's encountering a belligerent monster and threatens to dish out "a clout on your snout." Wolverton once described himself as a "Producer of Preposterous Pictures of Peculiar People Who Prowl This Perplexing Planet." (And that's all well and good, of course, but we wish we could have asked him: Which planet?)

(This post originally appeared in an altered form as an article for OC Weekly.)

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VISIONS - a Christian MMORG

Visions is an upcoming indie online roleplaying game, set in biblical times. They have a page up on Kickstarter.com, and to fund the project they're trying to raise $58,692 by December 2nd. (That's right, $58,692. I don't know what that last $2 is for. Maybe it's for parking.) At this writing, they've raised $107.

I'm not sure what else I can say about the Visions project, other than you need to see their promo video right now.




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Jackie Gleason's LONESOME ECHO, featuring a Dali cover

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Walt Disney wasn't the only unlikely American entertainer that Salvador Dali collaborated with. Dali also illustrated the cover for Jackie Gleason's record album Lonesome Echo.

Yes, the Honeymooners star had a sideline as a musician... And a surprisingly successful one. He wrote the theme for The Honeymooners, among other songs, and recorded over 20 albums, with Music for Lovers Only selling over 500,000 copies.

I have no idea how Gleason hooked up with Dali, but this cover strikes me as a rather indifferent Dali composition, about as close as the famed surrealist came to "hacking it out".

The back cover features a photo of a grinning Gleason and a grim-looking Dali shaking hands. How is this image not for sale on a t-shirt already?

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Modern movie posters are all orange and blue

Slashfilm has a fascinating post that points out how modern movie posters are all in shades of orange and blue, and they offer lots of examples to illustrate the point. Once you realize it, you notice it everywhere. And it's not just the posters using these colors, it happens in the actual movies too. Almost every blockbuster these days features orange-people and washed-out blue-ish backgrounds. A few decades from now, people will probably think the movies we see today, with their weird colors, crude CGI effects and bewildering ubiquity of Shia LaBeuof, are really tough to watch.

If you want to learn more about this peculiar graphic phenomenon, and learn to apply the technique to your own home movies, Stu Maschwitz has a tutorial on the subject.

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Patrick Stewart: the legacy of domestic violence


In a very well-written and bravely honest article in the London Guardian, Star Trek: The Next Generation star Patrick Stewart describes the domestic violence he grew up with, and how it has effected his life as an actor and a man.

(Via Metafilter.)

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STRANGE TOONS: Émile Cohl's FANTASMAGORIE

Émile Cohl is largely forgotten today, but he was an animation pioneer and his disorientingly odd cartoons deserve to be remembered.

His 1908 short Fantasmagorie is generally regarded as the first entirely animated film. It was shot with black lines on white paper and then the film contrast was reversed, giving the animation an interesting look, sort of like glow-in-the-dark chalk drawings.

With its fast-paced, stream of consciousness non-plot and weird visuals, it actual looks a lot like artsy animation from the '80s. Doesn't this clip look like a video for Tom Tom Club?





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WTF Gloves

Rbelluso's commercial dubs are full of NSFW language and seething misanthropy, but darned if they ain't funny as all heck. Here, he introduces us to the wonders of WTF Gloves.




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I pity the fool

Friday, November 27, 2009

Yeah, that title is pretty mean, but I'm afraid it's kind of irresistible. Maybe you thought you could never have too much Mr. T in your life. This collector gentleman proves otherwise.

It doesn't look like all of those Mr. T's are making him happy, does it? You see, this is what comes of hoarding too much Mr. T for yourself. We must share Mr. T, for he belongs to all of us. That is the Tao of T. (Click to enlarge. On second thought, don't.)


















(Via No Cats on the Blog. Although I suspect, if you look hard enough, you'll probably find some cats somewhere on that blog.)

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Relative sizes of STAR TREK and STAR WARS ships

That chart showing the relative sizes of various sci-fi spaceships has been online for years. (Fair warning: if you've never seen it before, after you click on that link you will spend the next 20 minutes or so scrolling around in a geek trance, completely oblivious to your surroundings.) But while the images below depict similar information, they have a very different feel, with three dimensional views of the ships from the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises. Click the images to enlarge-ify.

It's interesting to see that a Next Generation-era Klingon Bird of Prey looks like it could probably take out an AT-AT with one shot, while the USS Defiant looks outmatched by the rebel ship from the opening scenes of the first Star Wars film.

The ships are unlabeled, but if you're hardcore geek you'll recognize most of them on sight. A few of them are just too small though, they're little gray dots. I'm not sure what the big doorknob-like ship is in the upper right of the top picture. I presume it's something from the Star Wars prequels; I've worked hard to repress most of my memories of those movies.










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JERICHO returns... again... in comics form!

I really liked Jericho, the surprisingly homey and heartwarming post-apocalyptic CBS series starring the perpetually fretful-looking Skeet Ulrich. (No wonder the poor guy always looks like he's waiting for the ax to fall, given how long his shows usually last.) While I wasn't crazy enough about Jericho to mail CBS packages of nuts as part of the fan campaign to get the show renewed for a second season, I was grateful when that seemingly quixotic campaign actually paid off and we got to return to the little town of Jericho for another handful of episodes.

Now the show is coming back yet again, this time in comic book form. Jericho: Season Three is just hitting stores now. In my experience TV shows adapted into ongoing comics are a hit-or-miss proposition, but this one does look promising, with some rather slick art and stories plotted by the show's original writing team. You can learn more at the comic's official site.

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A GRINDHOUSE Thanksgiving

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Eli Roth's faux slasher picture trailer from Grindhouse really captures the spirit of the season, doesn't it? (Note that it's not safe for work because of boobs and blood and stuff... But if your boss is making you work on Thanksgiving, maybe getting fired would not be such a bad thing.)




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MUSIC FROM SPACE: N.A.S.A. - SPACIOUS THOUGHTS

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

If you're anything like me, this video pretty much goes like this: "Huh. Cute cartoon, with some rapper dude nattering on about some damn thing. Yadda yadda, talky talky. Jesus, he's still going? Give it up already, pal. Oh... Tom Waits as a cartoon cloud of evil!"



And then it's pretty awesome, until the rapper guy butts in again.

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LOVELY BONES clip online


A new clip is online for The Lovely Bones, Peter Jackson's upcoming movie based on the Alice Sebold book.


The Lovely Bones Clip

Trailer Park | MySpace Video


This clip almost makes the film look like a teen romance, which is pretty misleading given what we know about the dark, supernatural nature of the story.

Jackson's had a peculiar career. He got his start with gross-out zombie comedies in his native New Zealand, then he totally changed course with Heavenly Creatures in 1994, a wrenching, visually stunning docudrama about two New Zealand schoolgirls whose obsessive, shared fantasy life led them to commit murder. It featured a breakout performance by a young Kate Winslet and turned Jackson into a star director in the art-house scene... And then he changed course yet again, with the Michael J. Fox supernatural comedy misfire, The Frighteners. I was a huge Creatures fan and I kept hoping that he'd take on another project that challenging. But after The Frighteners he went off to do the Rings pictures and King Kong, then he signed on to The Hobbit and it looked like that was it for him - he was just going to make big, noisy epics from there on out.

So I was thrilled when the news hit that Jackson was adapting Alice Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones. The book is an intense, bittersweet story in which a murdered girl struggles to accept her own death and move on to whatever afterlife awaits her. This is exactly the sort of story I'd like to see Jackson take on, something more human-scale where his visual flights of fancy can really stand out.


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A blurry glimpse of the TRON sequel's Recognizers


Courtesy of Spike TV, we now have about five seconds of quick, heavily edited footage from the upcoming video game based on the Tron sequel.

To those of you who weren't Tron fanatics growing up, this will probably seem like a pretty sad thing to get excited about. But these five seconds give us a glimpse of what the redesigned Recognizers will look like! If you freeze the frame, you can see they look... Well, a lot like the Recognizers from the original film, but somewhat modernized and with different colors.


TRON Video Game to Premiere at Video Game Awards 2009

See? Recognizers! But kind of blue, and with rounded corners!

OK, so maybe this is a pretty sad thing to get all fluttery about.

(I wonder what Tron Guy has to say about this. Let's check out his LiveJournal, and see if he's posted anything lately...)


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King mulling SHINING sequel

When Stanley Kubrick adapted a novel into a film he rarely pleased the book's author. In the case of Stephen King’s The Shining, he didn't even try. Before he even started production on the film, Kubrick described the book as "hardly a serious literary work." Such nastiness certainly didn't endear him to King, who responded in kind after the film's release by calling it "a film by a man who thinks too much and feels too little."

Given all that, it's obviously a source of some annoyance to King that The Shining is generally considered the best adaptation of a King horror story by far. King has slagged the film at every opportunity, and back in 1997 he even wrote a Shining remake TV movie for ABC, removing all the stuff Kubrick put in and putting in all the stuff from the book that Kubrick cut. The result was a mess that just made Kubrick look like even better. King's version of the story was trashy and obvious, with shoddy characterization, hokey special effects and b-movie scares. (Stephen Webber gave good crazy as Jack Torrance, but the poor guy was stomping around the Overlook Hotel in Jack Nicholson's footsteps, and his performance inevitably suffered in comparison.)

So I must admit that hearing the news that King is now seriously considering writing a Shining sequel novel doesn't thrill me to the marrow. Apparently he's already got a title - Doctor Sleep - and he's mapped out the plot:

In King’s still tentative plan for the novel, Danny is now 40 years old and living in upstate New York, where he works as the equivalent of an orderly at a hospice for the terminally ill. Danny’s real job is to visit with patients who are just about to pass on to the other side, and to help them make that journey with the aid of his mysterious powers. Danny also has a sideline in betting on the horses, a trick he learned from his buddy Dick Hallorann.

King went on to say that he hasn't absolutely made up his mind to write the book, joking, "Maybe if I keep talking about it I won’t have to write it."

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The "archeo-art" of Jim Hornung

“In the beginning,” Douglas Adams once wrote, “the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and is widely regarded as a bad move.” Word.

The problem with intelligent design (well, one of the many problems) is that there’s nothing intelligent about the way this world is designed. Take the duck-billed platypus: It’s like God had a bunch of parts left over from other animals, and on some long, rainy night, he got bored and decided to just squish them all together and see what happened. So we end up with this wretched little beaver-lizard-duck thing secreting milk through its fur. The globe is overrun with silly, ugly, gross, stinky animals that really would not exist if somebody sensible were in charge. Who among us hasn’t taken a hard look at the whole of creation and thought, “Hell, I could do better than this crap?”

Well, Jim Hornung wasn’t content to just bitch about how messed-up nature is. He decided to do something about it, taking bits and pieces from existing animals and seeing if he could assemble them better than God did. His cabinet of curiosities includes the skeletons of “turkles” (flying turtles, and why not?), the quadruped “pelicat,” and other unearthly creatures. (Everything, alas, but the liger.)

It’s all presented with a perfectly straight face and loving craftsmanship, featuring museum-grade displays and animals sporting sparkling, golden bones just because it looks cool. (Did God think to give his animals bones made of gold? No, he did not.) Actual dead things went into the creation of these beasts... But seriously, now—if you were a turtle, would you rather end up in somebody’s soup, or be transformed into the legendary turkle, a fierce creature of the air?

Hornung also offers up a few fertility objects - cute, metallic lumps extending hopeful feelers in all directions. They have a vibe that’s at once retro-futuristic and sleazy, sort of like sex toys from Emperor Ming’s palace on planet Mongo. They’re wholly inexplicable little things, but just to be safe, you should probably refrain from sex for a few weeks after you see this show. (After all, what if these freaky dealies actually work, and this show somehow gets you knocked-up? You don’t want to end up giving birth to a litter of pelicats, believe me.)

Hornung’s work makes me think of jackalopes, those truck-stop horrors made from unfortunate, taxidermied bunnies with little antlers glued to their skulls. But it also calls to mind much finer things, such as Culver City’s Museum of Jurassic Technology, a wondrous place where you can never be quite sure where hard science leaves off and the prankish, artsy bullshittery begins. The Jurassic proves that if you give any crazy thing enough of the trappings of a real museum, that crazy thing can be made to seem totally legit. Hornung is like a one-man Jurassic.

Douglas Adams is gone, so it’s too late to ask him if he’d find Hornung’s strange universe any sort of improvement on the one we’re all stuck with. I’ll admit that Hornung’s animals don’t really stand up to serious comparison with some of the magnificent animals we’ve already got wandering the globe—animals like the elephant. Or the lion. Or the Angelina Jolie. But it’s not really a fair match-up. Besides, God had omniscience on his side, and all Hornung had was a pile of bones, some Super Glue, a peculiar imagination and a lack of squeamishness.

But compared to that goddamn platypus, Hornung’s beasties win in a walk.

(This post originally appeared, in an altered form, as an article in OC Weekly.)

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Today's depressing YELLOW SUBMARINE remake news

Tuesday, November 24, 2009


No matter how hard I wish for Robert Zemeckis' planned Yellow Submarine motion-capture remake to just go away, news about the project just keeps trickling out (like the bitter tears from my eyes).

I think that pretty much everybody in the world who isn't actually Robert Zemeckis himself agrees that a motion-capture remake of Yellow Submarine is a freaking terrible idea. I mean, we are all in agreement on this, right? (Can I get a show of hands?) Right. So, why are we indulging him in this foolishness? I loved Back to the Future as much as anybody, but it's time to admit to ourselves that Zemeckis has somehow taken leave of his senses and can't be trusted with the keys to the DeLorean anymore.

Next weekend there's going to be a Beatles convention in Stamford, Connecticut, and according to Slashfilm Zemeckis' people will be holding auditions there for actors to play the Fab Four. This is being widely dismissed as a PR stunt, as Zemeckis has already talked about McCartney and Starr possibly playing themselves. But from the audition info that's gone out, we can gather that the remake will feature a host of new locations (including a bar, a press conference and Buckingham Palace) and at least one song (Help) that wasn't in the original.

Maybe this will surprise you, but I'm all for adding new stuff to this remake. Replace the old songs! Replace the old locations! Heck, replace the Yellow Submarine itself and replace the Beatles, make this into a movie about the freaking Bee Gees riding around in a blue balloon or something! Just keep on replacing stuff, Bob, until there's nothing left of the classic original and you're making some whole new thing that can suck without tainting my memories of one of my all-time favorite films.

Ugh. I need something sweet and wonderful to wipe the image of mo-cap mop-tops from my mind! Lego Yellow Submarine fan film, take me away!



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Straczynski talks FORBIDDEN PLANET remake... And sequel?!

In an interview with SCI FI Wire, Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski discussed the Forbidden Planet remake he is currently writing.

"We've actually decided to show more of the first ship when it first arrived 20 years earlier to sort of counterpoint what's happening in the present story," Straczynski said. "If you're a fan of the original, as I am, and have always been, I think it's very faithful to that."

While Straczynski said that the remake will still be a character piece, he said it will also include more action and Warner Brothers is actually hoping for a sequel.

"Warners is very excited about it, thinks it's a big franchise for them and a huge budget, so they're very much oriented toward getting it done."

Here's the trailer for the fantastic 1956 original. While Straczynski's hardly your typical Hollywood hack, the prospect of a Forbidden Planet remake is already alarming enough without trying to set it up as a franchise deal.



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BADLANDS

The girls, they do love a good-looking bad boy who plays by his own rules, and Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) is certainly that. With his sideburns, pompadour and broodingly intense manner, Kit has the James Dean thing going on big time, and his pet teenybopper, Holly (Sissy Spacek) is just wild about him.

But while Kit may look like he just stepped off the set of Rebel Without a Cause, unfortunately this rebel does have a cause; he’s a serial killer, cruising through the Midwest, leaving a path of corpses in his wake and taking Holly along for a wild ride.



Hopefully this all doesn’t make Terence Malick's 1973 film Badlands sound more romantic than it is, for while there is a certain awful, Bonnie and Clyde glamor of these two, what we mostly feel for them is pity tinged with revulsion.

Kit has the swagger and the cool of a teen juvie, but he’s actually a garbage man who is ten years older than his jailbait girlfriend. Holly, for her part, is a “good girl” from a “good home” who is happy to tag along on Kit’s murder spree if it means she can escape her suffocating suburban existence. Kit’s a dumb psycho who kills pretty much anybody who crosses him (including, early on, Holly’s dad) but he also seems to think that murder makes him a non-conformist, a bigger man than the loser who used to lug sacks of people’s trash around. Holly has spent too long lost in her world of pulp fiction and movie magazines, and when Kit comes along she’s so desperate for a real, live romantic hero that she’ll follow him straight to hell without a look back.

Martin Sheen has now been a puffy, avuncular, respected character actor for so long that it’s a shock to look back and see what an intense, wiry little rooster he was when he started out. Looking quite a bit like one of his own sons (well, his sons back before they themselves started looking puffy and avuncular), Sheen plays Kit with such conviction that the role could have easily typecast him if anybody but the critics had seen the film when it came out. Spacek was well into her twenties when she played the 15-year-old Holly, but her tight little face and spooky innocence were extremely successful in putting across this raw, dangerously malleable girl.

Some critics have seen the film as a scathing indictment of the American media and the way it makes heroes out of bloody zeroes like these. Others have seen it as a critique of the nation’s shallow values, at a culture that pumps dumb kids full of big dreams and no way to realize them. Kit and Holly have been held up as counter cultural heroes (this was 1973, remember) nearly as often as they’ve been cited as the poster children for the banality of evil.

Tak Fujimoto's cinematography sometimes lifts us right out of the action; suddenly we see these characters lost amid the awesome beauty of the Montana plains, and they, their crimes and their victims hardly seem to matter any more; they fade to insignificance, upstaged by the unchanging, uncaring natural world. The film simply presents this ghastly couple, records their ghastly doings, and leaves it to us to draw our own conclusions.

(This post originally appeared, in an altered form, as an article for OC Weekly.)

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YOU NAZTY SPY: The Three Stooges vs. the Third Reich

The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin's 1939 satire of the Third Reich, is rightly regarded as a classic today. But it wasn't the first Hollywood comedy to mock the Nazis. Nine months earlier, the Three Stooges starred in You Nazty Spy. While not as brilliant as Chaplin's film (this is the Three Stooges, after all), You Nazty Spy is a commendably brave comedy, openly satirizing the Nazis at a time when this was still controversial.

In the troubled nation of Moronica, a trio of sinister munitions manufacturers decides that a nice war will turn the economy around. They overthrow the king and install three idiot wallpaper hangers - Moe, Larry and Curly - as the figureheads for a cruel dictatorship. Moe, naturally, takes on the Hitler role, complete with a wallpaper scrap mustache. Curly becomes the Mussolini, but of course, while Larry is the Goebbels.

We're used to seeing the Stooges as absolute goofballs, and seeing them take on a deathly serious subject like the Nazis is bizarre. The satire is not subtle, featuring book burnings and "concentrated camps", and there is a lot of righteous anger just beneath the usual Stooge puns and nyuks-nyuks. (And yes, X-Files fans, you did indeed glimpse the very familiar name Clyde Bruckman in the short's opening titles.)



Although the short ends in a way that makes a sequel seem unlikely, in 1941 the Stooges returned to Moronica in the short I'll Never Heil Again. By then, there was no controversy about an anti-Nazi comedy, everybody knew that Hitler was a stinker. If only America had listened to the Three Stooges before it was too late...


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Tim Burton MOMA photos online

MTV's site has posted a gallery of photos from the Tim Burton retrospective show at New York's Museum of Modern Art. The exhibit looks great, featuring a lot of interesting rarities. Burton's own promo for the MOMA show is below. (Try saying that three times fast.)





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Happy birthday, DOCTOR WHO

Monday, November 23, 2009

Doctor Who was originally scheduled to premiere November 22nd, 1963, but was postponed a day because of the Kennedy assassination. (A historical footnote that really puts this show's longevity into perspective.) What better way to celebrate the longest running sci-fi show in TV history than taking another look at the evolution of the show's opening titles over the decades?

This video features the opening titles for all ten incarnations of the Doctor. There are times when it gets so pixelated that it's kind of hard to make out, but it gives you a pretty good idea of what the titles were like (and this is the clearest version I could find on Youtube).



The credits from the '60s and '70s actually hold up pretty well. That music must have been freaky as heck in 1963, and the graphics were simple but effectively creepy. Then things start to go totally berserk towards the end of the Tom Baker era, culminating in the sparkly Commodore 64 acid trip that was the Colin Baker-era titles. The titles were at their most strenuously "modern" in the '80s, and as a result they have dated pretty badly.

I wonder how the show's current titles will look to audiences four decades from now? (And will Doctor Who still be in production in some form, even then? It seems a bit unlikely... But then again, this is a guy who has been saving the universe since before the Beatles were on The Ed Sullivan Show.)

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The Anne Rice Jesus biopic that almost was

I gave up on Anne Rice when I was maybe 15, probably about halfway through Queen of the Damned. I liked Interview with the Vampire well enough and the rock star stuff kept me going through The Vampire Lestat, but at some point in Queen of the Damned I kind of burned out on dead dudes in fancy shirts telling stories about how they met other dead dudes in fancy shirts and then they spent the next 112 years angsting at each other.

I retained a certain fondness for Rice, and I knew she kept churning out vampire books long after I lost interest. But I hadn't known until fairly recently that at some point she found God, dropped Lestat and company and started writing religious books. Her book Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt followed Christ as a little boy, and apparently it was on its way to becoming a big, epic movie before things went awry.

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STRANGE TOONS: NOAH'S ARK

Here's an odd little charmer from the Disney vaults. In 1959, the studio experimented with stop-motion animation for this unconventional, jazzy take on the Noah's Ark story. The characters and props are made from everyday objects, with no attempt made to disguise them as anything else. (The moose antlers, for instance, are clearly sporks!)

I think it runs a bit long, frankly, but it's a fascinating piece of obscure Disney history and it's so weird I had to share it. The first part of the clip is below, and the next part pops up as a clickable option when this part's done.




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UFO remake to star FRINGE's Joshua Jackson


Variety is reporting that Fringe's Joshua Jackson will star in the upcoming big screen version of UFO.

If you've never heard of the '70s British series UFO, you've been missing out. Set in the distant future world of 1980, the show followed SHADO, a covert agency that tried to defend the Earth from sinister aliens who came from their dying home world to harvest human organs. It was Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's first live-action sci-fi series, after a few series featuring disturbing little puppet people (Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, etc.) It was slightly less odd than the puppet shows, but only slightly, with storylines that were often quite dark and adult for the TV sci-fi of the era.

UFO (or "Yu-fo," as the show rather insistently pronounced it) is being adapted into a movie by first-time director Matthew Gratzner, who previously handled the effects for such films as The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Hancock and Iron Man. There's no telling yet how faithful Gratnzer will be to the original series... But sadly I suspect he'll probably cut the sparkly silver catsuits and crazy purple wigs that were standard issue for female Shado agents in the Anderson's 1980.



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STAR WARS UNCUT trailer

Star Wars Uncut is a new project where Star Wars: A New Hope is divided into 472 15-second clips, each segment is re-created by fans, and then the final result is stitched together into one big, hilarious mess. The first trailer is below.


Star Wars: Uncut Trailer from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.




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WONDERLANDS: ALICE IN WONDERLAND, 1983

When we think of Alice in Wonderland, we tend to think of Sir John Tenniel's illustrations as much as Lewis Carroll's words. Tenniel's expert crosshatching gave life to bizarre characters like the Mad Hatter, the Mock Turtle and Humpty Dumpty. This 1983 theatrical production of Alice tries to capture the look of Tenniel's art by making everything black and white, with fussy little pen marks everywhere. The result is certainly interesting to look at, if a bit busy and kind of ugly. The characters sometimes look a bit like zombies who have been spattered with black ink.

But while the production is very faithful to certain aspects of the story, it gets pretty wacky in other ways - the Cheshire Cat, for instance, is portrayed by former 7 Up pitchman Geoffrey Holder as a big, bald black guy with a kind of creepy, Caribbean Morpheus vibe.

If the Mad Hatter in the clip below seems familiar to you fans of early '80s arthouse cinema, that's because he's Andre Gregory, the "Andre" from My Dinner with Andre. In that film he proved to be a much more agreeable mealtime companion to Wallace Shawn. He's positively bitchy to poor Alice, here.



Alice is portrayed by Kate Burton, Richard Burton's daughter. Richard Burton has a brief but memorable role later on as the kindly and addled White Knight from Through the Looking Glass. (This adaptation, like many others, mashes together Wonderland and Looking Glass as if they were all one story.)

If I seem a little non-committal about this Alice, it's because even now, going on three decades later, I'm still not sure what I think of it. You know that weird, unsettled feeling you got watching that clip? That's pretty much how you'll feel the whole way through.

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SHATNER SUNDAY: Shatner/Beatles LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS mashup

Sunday, November 22, 2009

It's only been a couple of weekends since we enjoyed a music video for William Shatner's epic 1968 version of the Beatles' Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. But after you see this one, I think you'll agree that it deserves to be shared. It mashes up two of my favorite things - Star Trek and The Yellow Submarine - and does a surprisingly good job of it, making it seem almost natural for Captain Kirk to be beaming in and out of Pepperland. (It probably helps that the 1970s Star Trek cartoon was so trippy to start with.)




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More WATCHMEN burlesque

I keep finding more "sexy" Watchmen stuff online, and it keeps creeping me out. Honestly, I don't understand why or how people are getting hot and bothered about anything do with Alan Moore and David Gibbon's 1986 book about middle-aged superheroes in an alternate universe America on the brink of apocalypse. Sure, Watchmen is brilliant, but it's just about the least sexy graphic novel of all time. (Maus is less sexy, but just barely.)

Don't get me wrong, the dancer in this video - Ms. Lily Stitches - is lovely to look at, and she's done a fine job of recreating Sally Jupiter's Silk Spectre costume. And Unforgettable is a spot-on musical choice, I'll give her that. But I look at the 1940s Silk Spectre, and I think of bitterness and regret. I think of that horrific scene where the comedian sexually assaults her; I think of her years later as a retired broad, venomously arguing with her daughter. I think of her lipstick print on Edward Blake's face in that old group photo of the Minutemen. I absolutely do not think of sexy good times!

Note that this clip ends with a bit of semi-nudity - involving the inappropriate use of happy face buttons - that's probably not safe for work.



Even the fact that Rubies is selling that Sexy Silk Sceptor (sic) costume kind of freaks me out. Are sexy Maus costumes next?


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TERMINUS

Terminus is a marvelously creepy short film from 2007 in which a meek businessman finds himself being pursued and bullied by a walking piece of mall decor. The film expertly recreates that creepy vibe unique to '70s horror, and the special effects are stunning.



I gather that the film is set in a very recognizable section of Montreal, and a lot of these sinister objects are real things that can be seen around there. I hope the big stone man isn't among them, because after seeing this film I wouldn't want to get within ten miles of that thing.

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THE MACHINE

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Speaking of infernal devices, here's The Machine, Rob Shaw's grim but amazing stop-motion/cut-out paper short film about a very ambitious android.

the Machine from Rob Shaw on Vimeo.



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Creaturefy!

Here's a neat little gizmo from the Animal Planet site. You can upload pictures of people, and with just a few clicks of your mouse you can turn them into horrible monsters. They got vampires, they got werewolves, they got bigfoots (Bigfeet?)... They got all kinds of fine fiends for you to play with.




For instance, here is a famous person.


And here she is with her human disguise stripped away, revealed in her true form as a sewer-dwelling lizard mutant.

(A commenter the other day took me to task for getting too political on this blog. This post is my response. You see, it's not a matter of liberal or conservative... It's a matter of exposing the truth about the mutant lizard people, before it's too late.)

If you'd like to Creaturefy your friends, family or famous people who annoy you, you'd better use this gizmo quick. I gather it was a promo feature for a show that aired around Halloween, and in my experience such things don't usually stay online forever.

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THQ TRENCH RUN game for the iPhone

My girlfriend is one of those iPhone zombies. She's constantly fiddling with that infernal device and prattling on about all the wondrous things it can do. In my experience, the iPhone basically does three things:

1) It takes ten minutes to load up a website unless you are sitting directly on top of a wifi hotspot. Like, you have one under your chair.

2) It has a crappy onscreen keyboard that you can't use unless you have tiny fingers like a raccoon. Believe me, you don't know what frustration is until you've accidentally hit the same three freaking keys together, for like the fifth time in a row. (That's right, short people, laugh at the big fellow as he struggles with your tiny plastic toy phone. But never forget that you only continue to live at the whim of the tall folk. Anger us sufficiently, and we will eat you.)

3) It smudges if you so much as look at it across a crowded room.

At least, in the iPhone's defense, it really excels at being slow, too small and smudgy.

So, I'm no iFan, but even I might be persuaded to play with one if was loaded up with this thing. It's the Death Star trench. As a portable game!



Good lord, if a portable Death Star trench game had been around when I was a kid, I don't think I ever would've gone to school again. I would've just wandered around town all day, playing with this thing and taking naps in doorways as needed.


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About This Blog

"Science fiction plucks from within us our deepest fears and hopes, then shows them to us in rough disguise: the monster and the rocket." - W.H. Auden

Who is he, this one who is called "Greg Stacy"?

Greg Stacy began the MONSTERS AND ROCKETS blog in April of 2009. Prior to that, he was editor of the popular sci-fi/horror news website DARKWOLDS.COM. He has also written for LA WEEKLY, OC WEEKLY, UTNE READER and LOS ANGELES CITYBEAT. He always feels weird writing about himself in the third person.

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