Class of 2014

Every year, Beloit College releases the "Mindset List," supposedly capturing the mindset of new college students. It's a very strange, rather masochistic annual tradition, where people all over America read these lists specifically so they can feel old and irrelevant.

The lists have never been a very accurate barometer of what kids know and don't know. (When I was a kid the lists kept saying I'd never heard of stuff like Watergate and Laugh In, like I'd grown up in a locked basement without a TV or something.) But this year's list seems particularly odd and out-of-touch. Check out number six:

6. Buffy has always been meeting her obligations to hunt down Lothos and the other blood-suckers at Hemery High.

Okay, first: Buffy? That seems like kind of a dated reference. Aren't today's kids a lot more into Twilight and crap like that? Second, does whoever wrote this list realize that Buffy's story continued beyond the 1992 movie? In the movie she fought Lothos at Hemery High, but in the later, much more popular TV series, she attended Sunnydale High and Lothos played no part.

And then we get to this baffler at number nine:

9. Had it remained operational, the villainous computer HAL could be their college classmate this fall, but they have a better chance of running into Miley Cyrus’s folks on Parents’ Weekend.

Hal 9000? From 2001: A Space Odyssey? According to 2010: The Year We Make Contact, in 2010 Hal is re-activated after murdering the Discovery crew in 2001, briefly assists the scientists aboard the Leonov and then sacrifices himself as part of all that weird "All these worlds are yours except Europa" stuff. So, where does Hal find time in all that to go to college? That's at least as baffling as anything Dave Bowman experienced before the aliens turned him into the floating star baby.

And then there's #53:

53. J.R. Ewing has always been dead and gone. Hasn’t he? 

Well, according to Wikipedia, J.R.'s not dead. He was last seen in some 1998 TV movie, alive and well and getting up to his usual mischief. If any of today's kids have even heard of J.R. Ewing, why would they assume he was dead?

Frankly this seems less like a list of stuff that today's kids think, and more like your grandpa's list of stuff that he thinks today's kids think.

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More movie marquee mashups!

Today I saw a couple of new movie marquee mashups that I wanted to share:

THE LOSERS BACK UP PLAN

KICK ASS DEATH AT A FUNERAL

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Farewell to the Billy Shire

I am saddened to report that Billy Shire Fine Arts, perhaps the finest art gallery in all of Los Angeles, has closed its doors. I'll treasure my memories of discovering Elizabeth McGrath, Chris Mars, Dave Cooper and many of my other favorite contemporary artists at Billy Shire. I'm really going to miss that place.

I'm not privy to any inside info, but I get the impression this closing was rather abrupt. A lot of art galleries are really suffering in this brutal economy, so if you have a favorite local gallery, visit them this afternoon and enjoy them while you can. (And if you happen to see some artwork you really like and you can afford it, go ahead and buy it. That's how these places stay in business, after all.)

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SON OF MOVIE MARQUEE MASHUPS!

Some months back I did a post about movie marquee mashups, where the titles on a movie marquee seem to combine to tell a little story. Well, I saw a beauty yesterday:

Valentine's Day
From Paris with Love
Precious
Dear John
It's Complicated
Edge of Darkness
Crazy Heart

So, it's Valentine's Day, and some guy receives a letter from his sweet precious in Paris. But it turns out to be a Dear John letter - "It's complicated," she writes - and soon he has gone over the edge of darkness and he's suffering from a crazy heart! (Actually, the last movie on the bill was The Wolfman, which doesn't really fit... Unless maybe the guy who got the dear John letter was so upset that he turned into a werewolf.)

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That MARMADUKE movie

USA Today has now graced us with the first picture from the upcoming movie based on Brad Anderson's inexplicably long-running comic strip, Marmaduke.

"We've approached the movie like a John Hughes movie with dogs," director Tom Dey says. "The dog park is like high school for dogs. To make this kind of movie, you really have to understand that it is the dog's world and we just live in it."

That's right. Marmaduke = Ferris. That's an angle that never would've occurred to me. But then, that's why guys like Dey are making that fat Hollywood money. They lack that little glimmer of common sense and decency that prevents you or I from conceiving of such horrors as these.

"Marmaduke is a teenager, and he's trying to find his way in the world," Dey says. "It's a boy-meets-girl story, a coming-of-age and cautionary tale. My job as director is to try to place the audience inside this world."

I don't want to be placed inside that world, Mr. Dey. That world sounds like some sort of freakish hellscape to me, a plane of eternal torment populated by CGI great danes winking at CGI poodles while Yello's Oh Yeah plays on the soundtrack.

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THE 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN WHO KNOCKED UP SARAH MARSHALL, ETC.

The 40 Year Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It is an actual movie, sweet lord help us all. I thought those Meet the Spartans Epic Disaster Date Movie things were scraping the bottom of the comedy barrel... But the following clip breaks right through the bottom of that barrel and keeps on digging until it hits a sewer pipe.

This perfectly wretched-looking Judd Apatow parody isn't even made by the Meet the Spartans guys, it's made by aspiring Meet the Spartans guys. I warn you now that the clip below will make your soul ache. It will make your eyes burn, and it will make your skin blister and crack. It will make your teeth fall out, and your gums will turn to glue. It also features lots of swears and gross stuff and a flash of girl-butt, so it's definitely not safe for work.




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BLACK HOLE remake coming

While it's generally dismissed as an expensive dud, The Black Hole is a movie I have enormous affection and respect for. They set out to make a story about a mad Captain Nemo in space, and they went all out. Chatty floating robots with googly eyes aside, it's an incredibly dark movie, with a sinister, cathedral-like starship, an army of killer androids headed up by the flying red terror known as Maximilian, a lobotomized zombie-cyborg crew who have just enough humanity left to still hold funerals for their fallen comrades, and Maximilian Schell as the crazed scientist behind it all. Some of the dialogue clunks and the science gets quite dodgy at times, but this is a beautifully made movie, with great art direction, thrilling action sequences and a startling and disturbing ending that takes us through hell itself and then drops out on the other side, wherever the heck that might be.

I greet the news of the upcoming remake with dread, tinged with the inevitable fanboy eagerness to see all of the "re-imagined" characters and gizmos. But harken ye unto my words, Hollywood: screw this one up, and don't be surprised if, when you expire decades hence, you find yourselves encased in a red android shell, perched on a high rocky outcrop looking down on a Stygian scene right out of Dante's Inferno. This could be your future, boys:



(Actually, it is my sincere hope that when the execs who greenlight crappy and insulting movie remakes finally die, they all go to special hells themed after the properties they desecrated in life. So, the guy who signed off on the Mike Myers Cat in the Hat spends eternity being flayed by Thing One and Thing Two, while the cokehead who approved the Land of the Lost movie spends a few millennia getting chased through twisty underground caverns by randy Sleestaks.)

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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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Today's depressing YELLOW SUBMARINE remake news

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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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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Ohio's Berea High is schooling tomorrow's Frankensteins

For far too many of us, high school was a purgatory of constant dodgeball games that left us with deep scars both metal and physical, and math classes that felt like they would never, ever end. (Mr. Carter, you told us that when we grew up, we would be glad we took algebra and we would use it all the time... But you lied! Why did you lie to us?! Why?!)

So I'm sure I'm not the only one who seethes with envy when they read about the Visual Effects and Design class that Jim Bycznski teaches at Berea High School in Ohio. (The class' official website, bhsfx.com, seems to have been hijacked by a Japanese site at present.) For several hours each day, the kids collaborate on various sculptures, props, masks, and goodness knows what else. And their work has real world applications, being put to use by indie filmmakers, local businesses, trade shows and more.

Let that sink in. These kids go to school every day, and make monsters. Vampires! Zombies! Other wonderfully gross and horrible things! And all the while, Bycznski is teaching them the kind of team-building skills and creative problem solving that they really will use all their lives. I wasted my youth trying to understand what the heck an integer was, while these little creeps get to make grotesque rubber boogiemen like Mr. Horribulus de Fangface over there!

And just to pour sulphuric acid in the wound, a lot of their work looks really good, too. Just look at this short film where a teenage mad scientist goes nuts in his laboratory. Those effects are lot better than anything you'll see in a SyFy original movie.





Fortunately, this is apparently the only such class in the nation. Let's just hope it stays that way. Your teen years are when you're supposed to be ditching class, smoking clove cigarettes out behind the dumpster and forging the bitter regrets that will follow you to your grave. Teenagers should not be having this much fun. We were taught that our monsters needed to be turned inward, so they could gnaw away at our very souls. If today's youth were to have a creative outlet for their angst and aggression, they might just grow up to be happy and well-adjusted adults!

Now, there's a prospect to really chill the blood.

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Don't forget the Geocities... This was supposed to be the new world

An era ends on October 26th, 2009 (that would presumably be tonight at midnight) when Geocities officially shuts down for good.

Back in the late 90s and the early whatever-we're-calling-this-decade*, Geocities was the place where a lot of us first got to know the internet. Ranting manifestos, pages listing every item in some shut-in's collection of He-Man action figures, obsessive fan sites dedicated to some band that broke up in 1980 without ever getting within shouting distance of the top 40, galleries of furry giantess jpegs... Geocities offered all of that, and oh, so much more. All of a sudden, being a misfit became a lot less lonely. No matter what wacky crap you were into, all you had to do was click around on Geocities for a while, and eventually you would find people who shared your obsessions.

If you're enough of a geek to be reading this and you're over the age of 25 or so, I'm willing to bet that Geocities has touched your life. Before Geocities, America's misfits had pen pals and they published 'zines (and raged against machines), and that was all very well... But it just wasn't enough. The internet changed everything, in ways tiny and beyond measuring, for good and ill. And for a lot of us, the internet began with a visit to those dorky little virtual "neighborhoods": Area51, TimeSquare, SiliconValley, SoHo...

You might think it's silly to get nostalgic about virtual places you haven't visited since 2001 or so. Or you might feel like they're bulldozing the streets where you grew up.


*Isn't it ridiculous that we still haven't figured out what to call the years 2000-2009, even now that they're almost over?

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WONDERLANDS: ALICE AT THE PALACE, 1982

In 1982, NBC broadcast Alice at the Palace, a stage musical rather loosely adapted from Alice in Wonderland. Meryl Streep starred, and in this clip you can see Meryl and her fellow thespians Broadway-ing the snot out of Lewis Carroll, with very showy showtunes and performances pitched not just at the cheap seats, but at anybody who is still in line at the concession stand.

Your opinion of this clip will probably have a lot to do with whether you grew up around theater kids. I went to the LA County High School for the Arts, and I was surrounded by aspiring actors, singers and dancers who were always just a bit too eager to share their talents with the world. It was sort of like being trapped in an episode of Fame that lasted for years. Sometimes the students really did break out in production numbers in the halls. You'd be coming out of history class and there would three girls in leotards outside doing I Hope I Get It and you'd have to try to get past them without getting kicked in the shins. The theater kids were loud and annoying in a very sweet and endearing way. Their relentless pep and desperate need for attention often made them simply exhausting to be around, especially at 9 in the damn morning, but they were never dull. Being dull would have been death to them.

So watching Streep and company bounce around and holler out these songs, I'm impressed by all that outsize talent on display... But I also feel a nasty old shin injury acting up and I feel the strong urge to hurry in the other direction.





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DORIAN GRAY, and what's wrong with Hollywood today

The upcoming remake of The Picture of Dorian Gray is still a ways off, but the studio has already released a clip showing how the did a lot of the special effects. While it's interesting to watch, it also showcases a couple of the big problems I have with modern Hollywood. Allow me to put on my old man hat and expound upon What's Wrong with Hollywood Today.

First, they show you too much in advance. Between all the online clips and trailers, by the time a movie comes out you're already kind of sick of it. Watch this clip, and you'll have seen most of Dorian Gray's big moments. Seriously, if you're at all interested in seeing this movie in theaters, you don't wanna watch this clip because it will spoil damn near everything.

Second, you can see just how crazy they got with the CGI here, and how much more fake everything looks after they pixel it all up. In the first part of the clip, you watch as they superimpose a hooded figure and a trunk near a dock, then they tweak the shading on the figure and tweak the dock so some of its posts are taller and the end of the dock is darker and they tweak and tweak until everything looks... tweaked. This fakey-ass shot probably cost a couple of million bucks, and it would've looked a heck of a lot better if they'd just changed the lighting on the actual set.

There are a few shots here where you can see how much CGI work they did on a building that I presume is Gray's home. We see them adding lots of soot to the building's exterior and giving the top story and roof a redesign. But again, it probably would have been a lot simpler and cheaper, and would have looked a lot better, if they had just found a real building with a top story they liked better, and sprayed the outside with a little faux soot. As it is, the building (and the London around it) is so tweaked-out, with every little detail made just as crisp as can be, that it looks nothing like the real world. A lot of modern filmmakers don't just gild the lily... They gild the whole darn garden!







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The happy misers

Walmart is the conservative mindset run amok, it's like it's run by Ebenezer Scrooge on a 1980s coke binge. They make no secret of the fact that they want to destroy the competition. They don't just want to win. They don't just want to beat other companies by a wide margin. They want other businesses to die, they literally want to be the only store left in town. They want Target to go away and Borders to go away, they want Michael's to go away and CVS to go away. They want everybody else to go away. There shall be only Walmart! Forevermore!

I wonder if they've given any thought to what happens after all of the other stores go away, when everybody who used to work for all of those companies is out of a job, when getting a crappy greeter job at Walmart for slave wages is the best anybody can hope for. If they totally crush the competition, where do they think people are going to earn their money to shop at Walmart?

It boggles my mind that as this recession deepens, Walmart is still trying to slit the throats of any other company that could possibly compete for profits ever. It's absolutely childish. No... That's an insult to children. It's insane.

I'm getting a flashback of Ali Baba Bunny, that old Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck cartoon with the genie. You know, the one that ends with a miniaturized Daffy Duck inside of a clam shell, pathetically grasping onto a pearl as he mutters to himself in a little Gollum voice. "I'm rich! I'm rich! I'm a happy miser!"

The people who run Walmart are happy misers.



(Yes, I know this is straying quite a bit from our usual fare, here. But I read an article like that news story I linked to above, and the America of 2009 sure feels like sci-fi to me.)

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Robert Rodriguez on productivity

I wouldn't exactly call myself a fan of Robert Rodriguez. He's really good about half the time, and he doesn't interest me at all the rest of the time. But in a short interview with SCI FI Wire where he was offering updates on the seemingly dozens of movies he has in development, he dropped a line that actually struck me as rather profound. He said that being so busy is, paradoxically, the thing that allows him to do so much without being over-stressed.

"It's actually a strange thing," he said. "The more you do, the easier it is. My mom used to say, 'If you want something done, give it to a busy man.' Because there's an efficiency to it. So I think if I just did one job, I think I would be more tired, and the decisions wouldn't be right, because you have too much to think about. You can go more based on instinct, which is always smarter than your conscious self, and you just have to make all of the decisions, so it just moves so much faster."

In my own life, there are certainly times when I take on too much and just can't get it all done. But I do understand what he's saying. The times when I don't have as much going on, it can be very hard to get anything done. Think about going back to school after summer vacation when you were a kid, and how completely stupid and unmotivated you felt trying to do your homework after months of not challenging your brain. Then compare that to times in your life when you had a lot of deadlines and personal responsibilities and your brain never got a chance to rest.

Too much stress is terrible for you, but maybe the ideal is to have just the right amount of the right kind of stress.

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Tim Burton doesn't understand ALICE

Speaking with Jim Hill Media, Tim Burton spoke in a little more detail about his plans to remake Alice in Wonderland with Alice as a warrior in armor going up against the dreaded Jabberwock with the Mad Hatter at her side.

“In all of the other versions of Alice in Wonderland that I’ve ever seen, I’ve never felt an emotional connection to the material,” Burton explained. “Alice was always this passive little girl who wandered from place to place, meeting one crazy character after another. What Linda and I have tried to do is give this story some sort of emotional grounding.”

And with that, I have officially lost hope for Burton's Alice. Sure, it will look great. But it's clear that Burton just doesn't understand how the original Alice works, and why it's been popular for so long. Alice is a surreal masterpiece in which Alice finds herself in a confusing, nonsensical world and struggles to find her way through it. Alice isn't passive. She spends Alice in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass exploring her surroundings, asking questions and getting into arguments with mad people.

I'm similarly discouraged by Burton's comments about Johnny Depp's performance as the Mad Hatter.

“(The Mad Hatter has) been portrayed in animation and in live action before. But in most of those versions, the Hatter is just this one note character,” Burton continued. “And Johnny – just as he always does – dug deeper. He tried to find a grounding for this character, something that you feel, as opposed to just having the Hatter be mad. (Johnny’s) goal was to try and bring out a human side to the strangeness of this character.”

The reason people have always been fascinated by the Mad Hatter is that he's so hard to figure out. He speaks in riddles without answers. Burton's version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory tried to spell out all of Wonka's psychological issues, and as a result Depp's character, while strange in an interesting way, had nothing like the power of Gene Wilder's performance in the original film. Wilder's Wonka was a mysterious and dangerously moody trickster, playful one moment and inexplicably malevolent the next. We didn't need to know about his daddy the evil dentist, and we don't need to know about whatever tragic happenings made the Mad Hatter such a wacky guy.

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The many Molly Ringwalds of John Hughes' Shermer, Illinois

"When I first started making movies," John Hughes once told Premiere Magazine, "I thought I would just invent a town where everything happened. Everybody, in all my movies, is from Shermer, Illinois. Del Griffith from Planes, Trains & Automobiles lives two doors down from Samantha Baker. Ferris Bueller knew Samantha Baker from Sixteen Candles. For 15 years I've written my Shermer stories in prose, collecting its history."

Hughes' Shermer is a Chicago suburb with a very strange history indeed. Circa 1985, Sixteen Candles' Sam Baker, The Breakfast Club's Claire Standish and Pretty in Pink's Andie Walsh were all students at Shermer High School. In other words, three Molly Ringwalds were attending the school at the same time. It would seem like three unrelated but identical pouty redheads would attract a lot of attention... But perhaps the students and faculty were distracted by all of the Anthony Michael Halls running around. There was Sixteen Candles' King of the Geeks, The Breakfast Club's Brian Johnson, Rusty Griswold from National Lampoon's Vacation and Gary Wallace from Weird Science.

Actually, so much weird stuff happened at Shermer High School that it's possible nobody ever even noticed all of the Molly and Anthony Michael clones. After all, at the end of Weird Science Gary and Wyatt's magical cyber-girlfriend Lisa gets a job at the school as the new gym teacher. Given Lisa's mischievous nature and god-like powers, it seems inevitable that eventually she'd have a run-in with Mr. Vernon - the sneery teacher from The Breakfast Club - and she'd turn him into a big, gross toad monster. One shudders to imagine how she would discipline Emilio Estevez for taping that one kid's buns together.

If all of Hughes' movies took place in the same town, that raises many troubling questions. If John Candy's Del Griffith really lived two doors down from Sam Baker, did he ever encounter Uncle Buck? Or that other John Candy who managed the neighborhood Target store in Career Opportunities? Did Buck's nephew Miles (Macaulay Culkin) attend elementary school with Kevin, the Macaulay Culkin who was always getting left Home Alone? Did the John Kapelos who was the janitor in The Breakfast Club ever cross paths with the Kapelos who was marrying Sam's sister in Sixteen Candles, or the Kapelos who owned a blues bar in Weird Science? Why were the citizens of Shermer blessed with but one John Cusack, one Annie Potts, one Kelly LeBrock... But cursed with two Jim Belushis?

As the '90s wore on, Hughes gradually became less productive and more reclusive. The last time Shermer was seen onscreen was in Reach the Rock, a little-seen 1998 indie picture that Hughes wrote but did not direct. Hughes originally began the script as a sort of sequel to The Breakfast Club, imagining what would have happened to Bender if he'd stayed in Shermer with Claire and grown into a frustrated, aimless adult. While none of Hughes' old characters or actors appear in the final film, we do get a glimpse of Shermer a decade on from its glory days, and it's become a sad, run-down place. Ferris sure isn't leading any parades through this town.

Hughes is now gone, and we'll probably never get the chance to visit Shermer again. But strangely enough, Hughes' son James Hughes has made some efforts to establish his own fictional Chicago suburb. He wrote the script for the 2001 film New Port South, following a group of rebellious students at New Port South High School in the town of New Port. That's his only credit on the IMDB so far, but give him time. Perhaps one day New Port will be a thriving city, with stories interacting in unlikely ways and the same faces showing up over and over again. If John Bender can go to the same high school as Ferris Beuller, anything is possible.



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NAOMI WILDMAN GONE WILD!

My fellow fans of Star Trek: Voyager, we have endured a lot of suffering.

We have seen our beloved show unfairly vilified and spat upon by the press, other Trekkies, and even members of the show's cast. People said that Seven of Nine was just a bimbo added to the show for ratings, but we knew she was really a complex and compelling character (who just happened to look spectacular in a silver catsuit.) Everybody was always hating on Neelix, but we adored the cheery alien warthog with a tragic past. That episode where Tom Paris' tongue fell out and he evolved into an evil salamander monster rocked, no matter what the haters said!

Everybody in the world said we were stupid for liking Voyager, but that just made our fandom stronger. We would never give up our love for Voyager... Just like Janeway and her crew fought overwhelming odd and never gave up trying to find Earth.

Well, Voyager fans, I'm afraid I've got some more bad news for you, a development so upsetting that it could cause a level-1 breach in your warp core.

I'm sure by now you've noticed the crazy-hot goth model in the picture there, doing her Lizzie Borden thing. You're probably wondering what she's doing there, in the middle of all this stuff about Voyager.

That is Naomi Wildman. Yes, it's true. The sweet little girl with the spines on her head, the one that Neelix would tuck into bed at night with tales of Treevis and Flotter... She's all grow'ed up, and she's become a Suicide Girl.

After Voyager ended, Scarlett Pomers went on to enjoy a successful acting career, including a co-starring role on the sitcom Reba. She's also done cartoon voice-overs and apparently she has her own rock band. In addition to these pursuits, she's also now doing some rather exotic modeling.

Here's what she has to say on her Model Mayhem page:

I prefer edgy, ethereal, dark, fantasy, creepy, fetish, pinup, fashion and frightening/bizarre shoots. However, I am very versatile and am always open to glamour, beauty, and more mainstream looks. I do NOT do nudes.

All of which would be perfectly fine - kind of fantastic, even - if I could just stop picturing her as an innocent 9-year-old with poky rubber things on her forehead. This is like seeing your niece in lingerie or something. And... Oh God, is that a Klingon knife she's using in that picture? I think it is. No! Not right! Very not right!

Sigh... Go ahead, Naomi, twist your Klingon blade in my heart. Today is a good day to die.


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Steampunk Disneyland: the Tragic Kingdom

I like a lot of steampunk stuff. I mean, I could happily live inside of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. (Sure, I'd have to put up with an authoritarian state and constant terrorist attacks... But on the other hand, there would be all those cool gizmos!) And I love a lot of the old Disney stuff. I'm cool with almost everything the studio did, pre-Walt's death.

Yet somehow, the prospect of a grim, steampunk take on Disneyland fills me with an overpowering boredom tinged with distaste.

Don't get me wrong, the leaked concept art for the video game with the working title of Epic Mickey is very well-designed, imaginative stuff. But seeing Disneyland and characters like Mickey Mouse and Goofy "re-imagined" as "dark" and "edgy" just feels wrong. Wrong like seeing your favorite teacher from elementary school turning tricks down by the docks. Wrong like watching toddlers get drunk. Wrong like that Loonatics mess. Wrong.

The game's plot apparently involves a bunch of old Disney characters (Oswald the Lucky Rabbit among them) trying to get revenge on Mickey because he let them fall into obscurity, or some painfully post-modern crap like that. It's kind of hard to believe Disney would sign off on this thing, given how fussy they are about keeping their characters so sparkingly wholesome. But maybe the Mickey merchandise wasn't selling so good with the under-25s, and it was decided that desperate measures were called for to re-brand Mickey for a new generation.

I've grown used to Disney's greed and cynicism, and their willingness to sell out their old characters - this, after all, is the company that brought us quickie, direct-to-DVD sequels to Bambi and Cinderella. I thought nothing they could do would shock me anymore. But I had not reckoned on steampunk Goofy.



Gawrsh.

So, is this the moment that steampunk officially died?


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