Month: December 2008

Wednesday various

  • You know, it’s one thing to create an unnecessary and unanticipated sequel to a thirty-year-old movie that was deeply rooted in the computer technology of that time and hasn’t exactly aged well. It’s quite another to give it a title as terrible as TR2N.

  • “You don’t see that many novelizations of musicals.” Now we know why! [via]

  • A Twitter-based e-zine? It’s an interesting idea, if nothing else. Twitter’s 140-character limit doesn’t allow for much, if any story development, so it’s no surprise a lot of the stories so far have leaned closer to being jokes. Still, it’s a paying fiction market.

  • Speaking of paying fiction markets. And speaking of Twitter, I’m @unrealfred if you want to follow me. I make no guarantees I’ll follow you back — I suspect a small handful of my (very few) followers are spammers — but you never know.

  • Aw, this is just a shame: Peter Falk is suffering from Alzheimer’s.

That’s one way of putting it

Nathan Rabin on Superman IV:

The result suggests the Cliffs Notes’ version of a book that wasn’t worth reading in the first place.

He also writes:

Getting Reeve, Kidder, and Hackman to reprise their roles lends the film an air of authenticity but The Quest For Peace still feels like one of those creepy DirecTV commercials that drop clumsy commercial plugs into classic movies. It looks real but it still feels disturbingly ersatz.

I can remember seeing this in theaters. My ten-year-old self didn’t hate it, but probably should have. I’ve had no desire to ever re-visit it, whereas the suckiness of Superman III still has its limited charms.

Still, it wasn’t all bad. As Rabin points out, Reeve only agreed to participate if the studio also bankrolled his pet project, Street Smart, which is the film that introduced the public to Morgan Freeman — and for which Freeman earned his first Oscar nomination.

Tuesday various

  • I have mixed feelings about this new Farscape comic, but I will almost certainly pick up a copy when it comes out later in the month.
  • Bryan Fuller might save Heroes, but it comes at too high a cost. I’d rather have Pushing Daisies at its worst than Heroes at its best, any day of the week.
  • Did you know there was a color of the year? Apparently “no other color expresses hope and reassurance more than yellow.” I have to say, I’m not seeing it. [via]
  • Did you know you could be fired from the Salvation Army for marrying outside the organization? The charity’s official policy says:

    Originally Salvation Army officers (full-time ordained ministers) were required to marry other officers if they wished to remain in the ministry. But this is now changing, and it will be more possible in the future to find an officer who is married to a non-officer. However, Salvation Army officers still usually marry other officers by choice. This creates a special partnership in ministry, and in local centres in particular this joint ministry can make the work more effective.

    So maybe someone at the Oshkosh branch didn’t get the new memo?

  • “Archeologists in China are baffled after finding a tiny Swiss watch in a 400-year-old tomb” (link). This can mean only one thing: tiny time travelers!

Monday various

  • It occured me to yesterday, as I was musing on story ideas, that there’s something amiss with the “zombies” of movies like 28 Days Later and its sequel. This isn’t a problem that extends, necessarily, to the human flesh- or brain-eating variety you see it many other films, but it is something to look out for. In 28 Days Later, the monsters are not, strictly speaking, zombies at all, but humans infected with a rage virus. It provokes them into doing nothing but destroy and kill, lash out in rage beyond all reason. They’re a little like the Incredible Hulk with an insatiable blood-lust. And yet they never seem to lash out at each other. There’s no in-fighting; in fact, there’s often what looks like cooperative effort. Which doesn’t really make a lot of sense. The friend I discussed this with suggested that maybe the virus is intelligent enough to direct the host’s efforts, to focus its energies on spreading only to the non-infected. And that is a possible explanation. But when the uninfected become scarce, does the virus just switch off temporarily? Does it go dormant, with an accompanying calm?

    Obviously, some of this is for dramatic purposes — would it be at all scary to watch zombies fight amongst themselves? — and it probably requires another viewing of the films in question.

  • Whole Foods’ less than wholesome legal maneuverings has me feeling a little ambivalent about their Top Chef connection — although product placement has always been sort of ridiculous on that show. [via]

    I’m still enjoying Top Chef, by the way, although I think overall I enjoyed last season more. That’s partly because of the contestants, but also partly because of some of the weird challenges and kinks in the format they’ve introduced this time around. Two contestants sent home the first day? A Thanksgiving episode, when the show was filmed over the summer? Still, I find it hard not to get caught up in it week to week. I studiously avoid reality television, but this is the one exception.

  • Translations are interesting things. The German translation of Warren Ellis’ novel Crooked Little Vein, for instance, is apparently God Bless America. That’s a little weird, though apparently par for the course with German reprints, and it is a great cover. The Spanish version is Torturous Path — closer, but still a little off. I’m reminded of the joke that says the phrase “struck dumb,” when fed through a English-to-Russian translator and back, becomes “beaten senseless.”

    I wasn’t in love with the book, I must admit, when I read it a few months ago. It felt a little like Ellis warmed over at times. Already, vast swaths of the plot and characters are forgotten — poof! — from my brain.

  • So apparently, people lie about the books they’ve read to impress others:

    For all the talk of our superficial obsession with beauty, it looks like underneath it all we know that brains contribute to sex appeal too.

    This seems like old news to me — although outside of a classroom, I don’t think I’ve ever lied about reading something. (And even then, I never felt good about it.) I was reminded of this 2001 Slate article, discussing the classics that academics often skip:

    In his novel Changing Places, David Lodge describes a literary parlor game called “Humiliations” in which participants confess, one by one, titles of books they’ve never read. The genius of the game is that each player gains a point for each fellow player who’s read the book—in other words, the more accomplished the reader, the lower his or her score. Lodge’s winner is an American professor who, in a rousing display of one-downmanship, finally announces that he’s never read Hamlet.

    I’m mildly embarrassed by some of the books I haven’t read — I have read Hamlet — but I like to think I’m above lying about it, even to impress women.

  • James Frey, the discredited author of A Million Little Pieces — you remember? The man who betrayed Oprah’s trust — is writing a third book of the Bible. Oh yeah, this will end well.