Please Stop

Around 2000 I waited with baited breath for the release of Spider-Man. I drank in every publicity photo, video clip, and trailer. It had been since the Batfilms in the late 1980's and early 1990's since a quality superhero flick was released, and the fandom was in a tizzy.



within a decade Spidey had gone emo, and the rest of the comic to film players weren't faring a whole lot better. Fantastic Four was a fantastic bomb, Ang Lee's Hulk was as bloated as its title character, Ben Affleck Daredevil, Electra, Ghostrider, X3, Cat-Woman, and on and on. As years passed the quality and inventiveness of the genre died more. For me the soullessness genre reached its nadir with Zack Snyder's Watchmen. It was by far my favorite comic, and the way it eschewed the comic industry while being a part of it was genius. The movie though represented all that writer Allen Moore railed against in the creation of Watchmen. If written in the mid 2000's rather than the 1980's Ozymandias would've been hyping the movie with his Watchmen action figure line. It was sad.

This summer is lining up to be yet another uninspired, bland buffet of comic-rag crap. Set to come out are: Captain America (fuck yeah), Thor, Spider-Man (gone emo kid), and X-Men (also branching out in a decidedly emo direction). As a comic-con going geek I am in the target audience for these films, and I honestly say I've had enough.

I can only hope that projects like A&E's Walking Dead will raise the bar back to where it had been. Put the focus back on creativity and storytelling rather than the marketability of a character.

Build Ramps not Bombs

Waking up isn't always fun. Most mornings bring about a multitude pains: It's too early, where are my socks?, I should've drank less last night, maybe maybe staying up until 3am playing XBox wasn't the best idea. Regardless of how much the deck can sometimes seems stacked against, there has yet to be a morning that I woke up without hope. Without knowing if I'll be able to eat. Without knowing of whether I will make to bed time (regardless how late it is). Without any sense of future. Total chaos. Little in life is more tragic than a life that has just begun to already exist without hope.

Hearing about foreign lands, with their struggles so far removed, makes it easy to look at the problems holistically. People are killed. Lives are ruined. Women are raped. Suicide bombers explode. It all happens as a single set of data, and as a single problem- a message on the bottom scroll of Fox News. It isn't how things are. Society is an organized collection of individuals, and individuals really aren't that different form one another. Despite this, we've collectively done very little to address the struggles of these individuals, however, where there are individual problems there are individual solutions.

Terror Toons

Who hasn't had that horror movie 'kick?' It's that short period of time that, for whatever reason, the only movie genre that sounded intriguing was horror.

I love B-level horror (to an extent), but this one may have taken the cake as the most outrageous horror movie I've ever seen. It was a completely random pull from the video shelves about six years ago, but it will never be forgotten. Terror Toons was so awesome (define that however you'd like) it became legendary. Only in a movie like this could an actual porn star (Beverly Lynne) take the lead role. Well, actually, if you watch the trailer, it's not difficult to see that any acting experience (even if it's simply having sex in front of a camera) would have been sufficient for Terror Toons.