Yamato

I could have sworn that at some point on this crazy blog, I'd told the story of how Space Battleship Yamato, in its widely syndicated American version, Star Blazers, altered my view of serial drama and, as such, ruined my life forever.

You see, unlike American TV, and certainly unlike anything else that ran on weekday afternoons, you had to keep up with "Star Blazers". The story was linear. It started one day and advanced along until... it ended!

Of course there was a new story after that, and would later be another after that, as well. But those had to be watched in order too. This wasn't like Gilligan's Island, where some mad bit of convoluted logic made so they could never, ever get off the island forever.

I can't tell you whether "Star Blazers" influenced it, or if that was a realization I made beforehand, but the fact that I knew - I'm guessing after watching one or the other of the reunion movies - that the people behind the scenes were actually determined not to let them escape permanently, took all of the fun out of that show for me. I may be the odd duck there, though.

I have fond memories of trying to get home and keep up with the events, sometimes requiring help from friends to fill in needed blanks. Sometimes we'd speculate... and oddly, as I understand, sometimes our speculations may have come closer to the truth of what ran on the original series than what actually aired over here. Perhaps the inherent maturity and provocative nature of the stories naturally led us to think in those directions.

It took years for even the best of American television to attempt that kind of storytelling, and I often wished it would in the years to come.

And it should be noted that the only thing that stands out to me now as a flaw in something like The Rockford Files, which is basically flat-out brilliant from top-to-bottom, is the way it seems almost to avoid any potential continuity.

Eventually things such as Twin Peaks and VR.5 would attempt it until there premature demises, before the success of more continuity and storytelling serial shows would have big success on smaller channels such as HBO. Perhaps I wasn't the only one who had their expectations altered.

But it should come as no surprise that news such as Space Battleship Yamato goes live action! by Todd Brown make me about as excited as I can get about a movie at this advanced age, which thankfully is still quite a lot!

Hopefully this Space Battleship Yamato will run theatrically in the U.S., or at least at Fantastic Fest, where I could most likely find a way in.



Until then, it may be time for me to go ahead and track down the original Japanese cuts of the series. I watched the first series of "Star Blazers" a few years ago and found that it didn't live as well on my TV as it did in my memory. Many of the things I found frustrating, however, were alterations made for U.S. syndication.

I'll have to give it a try. I may never love it as much as I did as a kid, but it'd be nice to be in the same neighborhood.

The brightness of your future

In the last couple of weeks, both Kimberly Rae and I have been on the job hunt. She's managed to embarrass me with he amazing skills at getting a job within days of any attempt.

But then, while my ego is bruised by being the jackass who takes forever to find a job, hers is bruised by her mom who has the magic ability to make her feel bad about any job she gets, attempts to get or hopes to get. I half-joked that she'd come up with a way to make her feel bad if she became the president's official liaison to the city of Austin and made hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

(Ok, maybe a quarter-joked. Or even an eighth.)

It's an emotionally destructive habit, that offers no benefits at all. On the rare occasion it involves any positive suggestion involving what she should do, it's something like hairdresser, that seems a lateral move from the work she's been doing, as well as being something bizarrely, even insultingly, outside of her skills or interests.

Weirdly, I do think she means well by it. I somehow imagine her having no real conception of how counter-productive it is.

But I find myself wondering about this on a larger level about what Boomer parents expect of those of us of my generation and younger. I wondered some of this as recently as The suburbs.

The Boomers left scorched earth where once there was the possibility that one could get a job at a company, consider that a career, live, buy a house, raise and family and retire from it. There's good and bad that's come out of that, and I'm sure the generations to come will feel some real benefit from it.

But for those of us who aren't going to school to become lawyers or brokers, who don't have any interest in being dull suburbanites, what is there aside from a series of mediocre jobs that merely function as a means to keep a roof over our heads, food on our plates and the occasional night out.

Being a careerist sounds horrific to me. Having a house in a neighborhood that makes the right impression. Taking up a hobby like golf in order to socialize with the right people. It sounds like a world in which I have more money but less time and, in a practical sense, less freedom, and those are trade-offs I'm not interested in. They sound kinda... I dunno... gross. Does that mean I just never grew up? Maybe.

I don't care, though.

I know that the possibility that I'll become successful as a writer (or whatever) becomes more remote as time goes on, although that's not intended as a statement of defeat. But it does leave the open question of what else I might do with myself with whatever years I have left.

I don't necessarily have a useful answer.

I suspect it'll include some continuing number of jobs that don't sound very exciting on the surface, though, and that's a choice I'm frankly happy with.

Planet

I didn't read the Planet Hulk run of comics before seeing the new animated movie Planet Hulk, and I can't say the movie itself is drawing me to change that.

That's odd, however, as I actually enjoyed it in a kind of Warworld way. Enjoyed it quite a bit, in fact.

I'm not sure I should have and I'm even less sure it's successful at being "good" in any generic sense.

I watched with Kimberly Rae paying sporadic attention in the room. She didn't understand why he never reverted to Bruce Banner, and I didn't have anything I could answer aside from my own geeky familiarity with reading any number of Hulk storylines where he simply goes on in Hulk form for long periods. I suspect most people without that familiarity will find themselves asking that question without an answer to be found.

Within this 80 minute run time at least, the villainous Red King failed to prove himself as compelling as Mongul. Perhaps in a longer story, such as the comic book run, that's an opportunity for subtlety, but here it may just be awkward.

That kind of leaves a big hole in why I liked it so damn much, I know.

I think the idea of putting Hulk on a substitute Warworld as an interplanetary Spartacus is in itself a fantastic idea, and once gets past what it could have been, is a lot of fun. I think this is one of the few places where this kind of old fashion pulp style Space Opera can be done, and I'm a sucker for that stuff.

On a more critically sound level, there was also an interesting and amusing group of supporting characters and an actual character arc for Hulk, which is something you certainly don't see every day.

But I'm still chewing on whether I think the good elements are enough to call it good or if they're just good enough to allow me to roll with the things I'm already a sucker for. I am certain that most people who are equally suckers for this stuff will at least have a good time.

Zombieland

When I was growing up, Zombieland, if such a thing could have existed, would have been about Woody Harrelson's Tallahassee character, it would have had plenty of zombie killing action, and it would have been good.

Today, the movie is about one more generic "indie movie" whining douche bag, has three zombie fighting scenes and doesn't even attempt to build suspense or excitement in those. It's like a guest that comes to your house, insults your food and then shits on your carpet.

I just don't have much good to say about it, except that I did like Woody Harrelson and his character, and really wished they'd been given an ass kicking zombie movie to walk around in. That other movie might have been slightly more "formula", but at least it would have been sticking to a good formula.

Zombieland is slavishly within the familiar, mind you. The staples of the "quirky indie movie", even more familiar from the big studio rehash of the "quirky indie movie" formula, featuring many characters we have all come to accept as "quirky" and "wacky" in that friendly "real world" way. It's all become like Northern Exposure by the writers of Home Improvement, and now we're giving it a supposed shot in the arm by setting in "zombieland", a world after a zombie apocalypse. Sadly, the effect is not to freshen up the now dull "quirky indie movie" formula, but rather to ensure that the zombie apocalypse is writ dull and witless.

Too bad. The old formula would have been a fun night of movie watching.

O, the horror!

I think Capsule Reviews - January Doldrums Edition by Bill Ryan captures a number of things that are important to me, whether he exactly intended it or not.

There are two things... two of the things I've traditionally enjoyed more than anything else... that I can't get interested in at all of late. Horror and movie writing.

In the post linked, Bill writes, "I'm becoming more and more convinced that if horror fans fear anything, it's change."

It's true.

Horror fandom is a dull, humorless lot, that practically defines itself by its disdain for imagination.

Presumably most horror fans were originally drawn to the medium by early experiences that startled and frightened us with unexpected shocks and creative turns that fired our imaginations and fueled our nightmares.

Somehow after becoming a fan, one starts to codify the things they like. How much of the horrors should be explained, whether the horrors could exist in our world, how much humor should be included, etc.

Most horror fans - myself included, I know - not only have some mental Mad Monster Party hodge-podge living in their brain, cobbled together from "rules" they've created from the things that happened to scare them as a child and notions they've built up from overthinking everything about the genre. Any attempt to piece together any of even the most well-considered and intelligent of these - so my own certainly not included - would stumble pathetically on a lack of room for imagination as well as internal contradiction.

Horror needs room to move around and breath. It needs to stumble clumsily about.

House of 1000 Corpses and House of the Devil seem to me to be the House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula, which is to say nothing about the value of any of these as entertainment, but simply that all four are reflexive and concious of what the audience wants or what the moviemakers believe the audience wants.

In the age of the Internet, fan "rules" have been codified, people believe they're not idiotic (by definition), that they make sense and even that they're right.

Look, I'm sitting here having read Bill's post that I linked and his earlier review of Halloween II, in which he writes, "Explanations are for simpletons, and it's frankly beyond me why Zombie is convinced the opposite is true."

And I agree with every fabric of my being.

I picture everyone who ever explained to me that some horror movie was scary because "it could really happen" and I want to scream and force them to watch a Lucio Fulci or J-Horror marathon.

And I think I remain right. Whereas I believe horror needs some connection to what we can imagine as immediate, our primitive animal fears, I think understanding is the opposite of fear, too. Ask Joseph Goebbels, or any other politician who has led a campaign of war against another country, for that matter. It's easy to get people to fear (and, as such, hate) something or someone they don't understand and nearly impossible to do the same with something or someone they do understand.

I type, wanting to write more on this, to further codify my beliefs on this, but all the while seeing that I am part of the problem.

You see, I'm sure Bill's thoughts are on the money as to why he felt like he did about Halloween II, and may very well apply to how I will feel or a majority of viewers felt to that specific movie.

Yet I'm even surer that the most important thing a horror movie (or story) needs is the ability to do what I'm not expecting. And codifying a bunch of rules of what is or isn't "good" horror or, even worse, what is or isn't "scary" puts a box around what a movie should or shouldn't do and makes it easy for me, as an experienced horror fan, to expect everything that might reasonably be done inside that box.

Someone could probably study on the psychology of horror's biggest advocates stripping away it's most important tool. That shall not be me, though.

I'm just a guy who is sitting and feeling perplexed.

Lakeside and such

Lakeside was supposed to be a beginning, but looking back it feels like an ending.

I think a lot of amazing work was done on it. The material all looks beautiful. Everyone involved did an amazing job, perhaps even me in places. And for a time the momentum of it was so invigorating it was like a drug. I imagined the creative partnerships forged in it continuing for a long time and in a variety of ways.

And for some, as I understand, it has.

As the momentum fell apart, through a variety of personal and professional issues, it had to be forcibly dragged to the last day of principal photography. By then it felt like doing so was nearly against the will or interest of everyone involved. The planning for that day felt more like an obligation.

Yet the success of the day, in many ways it was the most successful shooting day of the whole shoot, could have reinvigorated it.

But by then it didn't.

I guess trying to explain how that momentum died would require telling tales on other people that aren't all mine to tell, but that's certainly not to keep the responsibility from myself. In fact, most of the time, I'm satisfied to keep the failure on my shoulders along with all of the other things in my life that slowly fell apart in the time since then.

Now I go about trying to rebuild my life from then, having been kicked around pretty well and good by life, as well as by "Lakeside", in many ways.

I see that I've not done any significant creative work since then, and perhaps I don't believe I will in the same sense I did before of during the production of "Lakeside".

I feel a continuing nagging guilt that I haven't been able to provide the results to the other participants. It seems like every time I get into a position where I'll be able to get things moving toward the finish, some new obstacle sends my life tumbling about.

I have to admit that as time goes on, finishing it sounds less like a relief and more of an ending. The ending to my attempt to live out my dream of making movies.

Perhaps I exaggerate. I hope so on better days.

But then I look at the calendar and see my fortieth birthday approaching...

I suspect that's one dream that needs to be left behind for smaller options.

I promise I'll get that door closed as soon as I can, though. I know I'm the only one for whom this feels like the end of a dream rather than a signpost or small piece of one, and I know I owe all of those others their piece.

Kitty

Cary Grant

Roger Ebert tweeted a link to In Memory: Cary Grant 1904-1986, in honor of today, which would have been Cary Grant's 106th birthday. It's a great obituary and I'll certainly not try to expand upon it.

But it reminded me that two of the saddest quotes I know are both by Cary Grant.

The first is the story of him being told how much the other person wished to be Cary Grant and he replied, "So would I."

Now, I'm sure that was said in a perfectly charming way, with a Cary Grant smile and wink, but it's impossible for me not to hear a sadness underneath that's somehow almost heartbreaking for me.

The other is recounted by Ebert, "His parents were unhappily married, and the key psychological event in his life occurred when he was 9, and came home from school one day to find that his mother was no longer there. At first he was told she had gone on holiday, and then that she had gone somewhere on a long visit.

"Only 20 years later did he learn that she had been committed to a mental institution, 'by which time,' he once said, 'my name was changed and I was a full-grown man living in America, known to most people of the world by sight and by name, yet not to my mother.'"

But I didn't jump in here to make everyone weep. I just read that and thought that Cary Grant is one of those talents whose importance and charm are so evident to any movie lover that sometimes we forget to stop and celebrate them.

Late night chaos: epilogue

Chris Mason brought up an interesting point in response to my Tonight Show obituary, one that I think also illuminates some of the pure emotion that gets brought out during these Late Night Wars. We call these guys by their first names.

We think of them as their first names.

They are like quasi-friends. They are always there. Sometimes we pay close attention to them and get excited over them. Sometimes we ignore them a little.

In the case of Late Night Hosts, they often play in the background during our most intimate times.

Not just sexually intimate, but as we lay down before we sleep, cuddled up with a partner or even by ourselves, it's a quiet personal time.

I'm not sure it's a healthy psychological position for us, as viewers of corporate owned media, to take, but I think NBC has been foolish throughout this to forget this.

For those of you interested in this subject, I can't recommend these two articles enough: The Late Night Distemper of Our Times by Kliph Nesteroff on the deep history of the Late Night Wars and What Went Wrong by Mark Evanier about the more recent history. Both are entertaining reads and help put a lot of perspective on the issues at hand.

Tonight (1954-2010)

Yes, I'm calling it.

I suspect NBC knows it.

And I predict history will record it.

This is the death of The Tonight Show.

Oh, sure, something will hang on with the name and some people will watch it, but it will just be stumbling along. Whatever was left of the institution is gone.

You see, five years ago NBC made a decision to dump Leno from "Tonight" and replace him with popular Late Night host Conan O'Brien.

People now are trying to go back and suggest that the decision itself was wrong, but will be making a mistake.

What they did was right. It was the when that they got wrong.

You see, I'm sure NBC's research tells them what anyone my age or younger could tell them anecdotally. Baby Boomers, or "The Worst Generation", may put up with that Leno guy's shenanigans but younger viewers don't just not care for him, we fucking hate him like poison.



And the generation coming of age now doesn't even have a way to remember, as Why Some Comics Aren’t Laughing at Jay Leno by Nathan Rabin makes note of, when Leno used to be funny.

Somehow, internally, this is more than a preference thing. You say you like Ray Romano or even Larry the Cable Guy and I'll roll my eyes and remember not to take comedy advice from you. Even before this, saying you like Leno upsets me viscerally. It kind of make me want to kick your ass. It makes you the other.

My enemy.

It's not an accident that the I'm with Coco campaign pictures and rhetoric look political. There is a feeling of us vs. them.

Frankly, if Leno is going to hell for nothing else, though, it's for making me write the following words: Jimmy Kimmel, you sir, totally rock!



But you want to know what really upsets me in all of this? The fact that I don't really care.

Since Johnny Carson retired, I don't care for that 11:35/10:35pm slot. I loved David Letterman on "Late Night", but I have to admit, as much as I wanted to latch onto Late Show and have tried to, and may have occasionally pretended to, I just can't seem to. I enjoy it occasionally when I've bothered to watch. And frankly I feel the same about Conan's version of "The Tonight Show".

I think Conan's awesome. I think "The Tonight Show" time, place, etc. is meaningless.

The only thing I like is the part where Leno is publicly humiliated a little, but he's obviously "won".

And clearly that's literally the only thing that smug, smarmy little car salesman bastard cares about. 17 years as regular host on "The Tonight Show" have demonstrated that gaining respect isn't something he cares about. His is an insular perspective, uninterested in the world around him except in how it benefits him or can be used in a way to better show him off to the world.

Perhaps in that way is how Leno best represents his generation, and how the world will deserve him until the Baby Boomers die off and fall to senility in greater numbers.

Ruining Conan

I caught up with the amusing The DeCampista Awards posted by Al Harron from a proposal by Mark Singleton, which takes up the very worthwhile pursuit of calling people to task for spreading lazy and inaccurate notions about Robert E. Howard and his work. For those unfamiliar with the crux of this issue, I highly recommend "The De Camp Controversy" by Morgan Holmes, which I previously linked in my post Thongor.

Then I found Harron's Conan the Rehash.

Are you kidding me?

Sadly, I know he's not.

Now, I'm generally a Howard purist, although not too much love Conan the Barbarian by John Milius or enjoy many of the Marvel Conan comics by Roy Thomas et al, so I'm willing to meet a creative person halfway, if they show some effort.

The "big" issues brought up in this article, such as it being more racially insensitive than the original works, which were written by a man who grew up in small towns in West Texas during the early years of the twentieth century, are all things that could be fixed by a single rewrite by a moderately talented writer.

But frankly, it's not only the purist in me that wonders why everyone feels the need to walk away from Howard's stories when trying to bring the Conan character to the big screen.

Seriously, if there was ever a writer whose prose stories were custom made for movie adaptation, it's Howard. They have nice three-act structures, plenty of action and spectacle, glorious imagery and compelling characters.

The criticisms of his work generally center around his skill as a writer in a literary sense, and are sadly still too often built on an understanding of his writing based on re-edited versions, posthumous "collaborations", pastiches and adaptations, all of which were done long after his death.

Even so, all of the things for which he receives the most praise are exactly what's required of a kickass adventure movie and all of the supposed vices he's accused of are irrelevant to them. There's no call in this to reinvent the wheel.

Supposedly this animated Red Nails will come out eventually. Won't it? The most recent news on their web site is over 2 years old. That would be the first direct adaptation of a Howard Conan story to be filmed and the best idea anyone's had in terms of making a Conan movie.

As Howard biographer Mark Finn writes in An Appeal To Paradox, "Look at Casino Royale. Batman Begins. Pirates of the Carribean. All of these films took dead characters, dead franchises, and dead genres and reinvigorated them by not playing it safe. Even fans of Conan the Barbarian don't want a rehash of that. We are twenty years older now, and we need something more sophisticated. Bryan Singer learned that the hard way with Superman Returns. This can NOT be a nostalgia project."

A good Conan movie could make everyone happy. It could be, like the projects mentioned above, and I'd add Iron Man, a major commercial, critical and popular success.

The movie described in "Conan the Rehash" could be marketed to make a lot of money and get some half-ass "popcorn movie" praise, but it couldn't be those other things nor would it be a tent pole on which one could build a lasting and profitable series upon.

Frankly, though, if the IMDb is correct and Marcus Nispel is attached, then the script, even a terrible, trite and even racist script, is the least of its problems. On the other hand, if the casual reference I heard to Neil Marshall being attached instead is right, then maybe, just maybe, there is some hope...


BONUS: Here's Revenge of the Barbarian adapted from Howard's Black Vulmea's Vengeance by Thomas, John Buscema, Alfredo Alcada and Marie Serverin and hosted by Diversions of the Groovy Kind (which also hosts a number of the better Howard comic adaptations). I wouldn't argue it's the best comic adaptation of the Howard stories, but it gives a hint at what a really kick ass Conan movie could be like.

(And, yes, I recognize the hypocrisy of using a pastiche adapting a non-Conan story into a Conan story as my example.)

Persona

Some days I wish I'd created a pseudonym or personality to blog under like Arbogast or The Groovy Agent.

But then there are undoubtedly plenty of more interesting reasons their blogs are better than mine, and I'm not sure I have the patience for that.