Frankenstein Island and the Trailers of Hope

Without question, the worst movie I have ever seen -- the worst, I say -- is Frankenstein Island, which was released in 1981 but is so psychedelically awful that it comes across as if made in 1953…in Romania.  Here is a seven-minute highlights compilation that does a pretty good job of capturing the horror.

Generally speaking, I think one gets past the age where it seems worthwhile to marvel/laugh at terrible films, but Frankenstein Island is truly jaw-dropping.  Worse by far than Plan Nine from Outer Space, Frankenstein Island's every second of footage seems to contain some flagrant error of aesthetic judgment so astonishing as to make it barely believable that the whole thing's not a joke -- yet it's too humorless to be so easily explained.  Simply mind-boggling. 

By contrast, the more ambitious failures that were the Star Wars prequels have had the salutary side effect not merely of making me appreciate the 70s/80s ones more -- but even more so of making me appreciate Lucas's genuinely brainy and artful pre-Star Wars film THX 1138 more.  Take this ninety-second scene, for example.  I'd rather watch that a hundred times than see a Gungan ever again.

And here are trailers for films coming out in the next few months that inspire some hope: 

MAY: 

6th Thor

JUNE: 

3rd X-Men: First Class

17th Green Lantern

JULY (five geek films!): 

1st Transformers: Dark of the Moon

15th the final Harry Potter

20th Another Earth

22nd Captain America

29th Cowboys and Aliens

AUG: 

5th Rise of the Planet of the Apes (they only recently decided to add the official "Planet of the" phrase to the title, which I will take as a sign that they have concluded this thing has franchise potential -- looks cool to me, and it amuses me that the official movie site's URL is ApesWillRise.com).

This may be the nerdiest thought of my entire "Month of Heroes," but it's true nonetheless: They could in theory remake all five Planet of the Apes movies (this one being a remake of #4) and simply go 4, 5, 1, 2, 3 this time, since that would actually put them in chronological order (in terms of the point in Earth's history when they occur, aside from 3 looping back to the present).  That would be like performing a reverse-George-Lucas maneuver and rendering a series straightforwardly-chronological that used to involve some time-hopping prequel gymnastics (not that I really expect or want them to be so faithful).  

And on that bioengineered note, let's a do a "Month of Animals" for May.  But first: 

Five Concluding Notes for the "Month of Heroes"

The "Sci-Fironic" Mode

Finding the right balance between irony and seriousness in sci-fi and superhero movies has been a long, complex, dialectical process.  And at some point, I think film historians are going to look back at 90s-ish movies and realize that was a bizarre time of non-realistic, mannered films in general -- witness later Schwarzenegger efforts, 2000's Charlie's Angels, or the strange and more obscure action film The Big Hit -- though The Matrix helped convince everyone you could do serious-feeling fantasy stuff without apologies.  

In superhero movies, you could see things careening from the fairly realistic-feeling Superman: The Movie to Burton's kabuki-like Batman (which the recent Watchmen movie resembles more closely than the Nolan Batman movies do, really)…and years later the audience-pleasing -- but still ever so slightly awkward -- first Spider-Man movie…then the impressive but by some estimations over-serious X-Men 2 and then -- bingo! -- to the first Iron Man, which seemed to please everyone for the simple reason that it had jokes but not of the kind that undermine the reality and intensity of the story conventions or make the genre seem pointless (which I could have told them from the get-go).  

At last we had found our Irony Man, if you will.  I look forward to seeing what Joss Whedon does with the related Avengers movie in one year, script-wise more than fx-wise.

Audiences like comedy.  They do not like being told that the whole act of seeing the movie is a big, pointless joke on all of us.  It is amazing that Hollywood, which is hardly avant-garde, does not really understand this simple rule of realism.  George Lucas, for all the love and attention he lavishes on his universe, doesn't get it or else he would not do things like put a wacky Bob Costas-sounding sportscaster in a Star Wars movie, much as I hate to mention that shudder-inducing example. 

The past few years have seen a big increase in what we might call the "sci-fironic" mode in pop culture, too, with the hipsters adopting enough nerd tendencies to feel comfortable invoking robots and clones and the like for both comedic and cool purposes, without any longer feeling the need to explain.  X-Files probably helped pave the way, as did all the sci-fi-like jokes, often cropping up without any felt need for context, on The Simpsons (e.g., "I need tungsten to live!"). 

I, Swamp Thing (plus Superman vs. the U.S. and Iran)

I thought it odd that two years' worth of recent DC Comics climaxed (yesterday) with the return of the character Swamp Thing (as satirized in this cartoon noted by Jacob Levy).  Furthermore, I always thought Swamp Thing and Marvel's Man-Thing were a bit too similar (their births, unlike Obama's, remain mysterious -- yet they would make better presidents than Donald Trump, with Man-Thing likely a Republican, Swamp Thing obviously Green).  

But Michael Malice told me neither Swamp Thing nor Man-Thing was a rip-off of the other.  Rather, both were heavily influenced by the earlier character the Heap, who was also a man-shaped pile of villain-fighting vegetation.  

The weirdness doesn't end there: Malice told me this two weeks ago while were on a train bound for the HQ of the Foundation for Economic Education (a.k.a. FEE, which, alas, moves fully to Atlanta in a few months), and FEE may be best known for their periodical The Freeman, which had at one time been produced by the publisher Hillman…who also published, yes: the Heap! 

As meditation-practicing, pencil-contemplating FEE president Leonard Read knew so well, the universe is all connected -- from the most dastardly crimes to the rotting plants of the deepest swamplands.

As for Swamp Thing, his return to DC Comics proper means an end to his two-decade stint at DC's crime/occult/hipness imprint Vertigo (which has no connection to the Hitchcock movie, but I liked the picture above).  So, in a way, the publishing implications of this week's climax are more interesting than the fact that Swamp Thing is back to restore balance to nature and all that other elemental stuff he does.  

(And if he can't bring harmony to nature soon enough to stop the weather's attacks on the South, we're going to have to call in Thor -- but that's next week. )

P.S. In other news: Reid Mihalko tells me Superman renounced his U.S. citizenship in the comics.

Thunderbirds and Space: 1999

Gerry Anderson claims a CGI Thunderbirds series is imminent, which should be an improvement over the mid-90s attempt to repackage the original (awesome) 1960s sci-fi marionette series.  The 90s effort featured lame "hacker" kids as framing-device narrators -- and then the 2004 live-action film version, directed by (Star Trek's) Jonathan Frakes, was dubbed by Anderson himself "the biggest load of crap I have ever seen in my life."  

(I nonetheless saw the film in the theatre, with a small group that included a libertarian weighing about 400 pounds, who sadly later died of a stroke in his mid-forties.  He helped run Victor Niederhoffer's monthly Junto gatherings, at one of which I will speak on June 2.)

Needless to say, the influence of the (perfect) Thunderbirds "countdown" opening (note the flying guitar in this iteration) can still be felt in later, more modem and nuanced works such as the (Montreal-made) short "RoboJew vs. Giant Nazi Woman of the SS," a perfect follow-up to Passover.

••• 

All right, one more look at the funky opening of Anderson's other best-known series, Space: 1999.  

And I finally figured out which episode it was that I remembered mesmerizing me as a kid: "Dragon's Domain," in which the Lovecraftian tentacled beast seen in the clip linked here killed a spaceship crew, regurgitating their charred corpses from its glowing tunnel of a maw almost immediately each time it did so (that was alarming to a six-year-old, I must say), leaving one semi-hypnotized survivor (years before the Moon and the Alphans were blown out of orbit to begin their spacefaring journey), who now fears the creature is returning, even as flashbacks reveal no one believed him about the beast the first time around. 

Ron Paul, Michael “Max” Nofziger, Gnarr (not Gwarr), Bjork, and Grant Morrison

•My tweets from Ron Paul’s speech last night at rocking Webster Hall.  (He announces his exploratory committee today in Iowa instead.  Cold-blooded strategy thought: If he or Gary Johnson ends up dropping out and endorsing the other, could be big enough to reshape the primaries, I think.  And Johnson would be even better suited to bring the pot-lovers into the coalition than Paul is, reputation-wise.) 

•And there’s a (libertarian-friendly) “Right-Wing Tweet Up” tonight at O’Lunney’s (W. 50th just west of Broadway) at 7pm that I’ll attend.

•Here’s an Austin City Council candidate suggestion for libertarians.  Nice to see him appealing to the musician/artist community of which he’s a part, not so unlike...

•...the mayor of Reykjavik, Jon Gnarr, elected along with his fellow comedians and musicians (including a punk singing “Fuck the system”) after a joke campaign as members of the Best Party, which inadvertently tapped into a groundswell of financial-crisis-fueled resentment of the mainstream parties, as hilariously recounted in the documentary Gnarr, which I saw at a Tribeca Film Festival screening two days ago (with an economist pal who has at least visited Iceland). 

One touching thing the director said during Q&A after the film is that even though the Best Party members all started this as a joke – and all of them now say this is the hardest, least fun, most grueling and thankless thing they’ve ever done – none of them has resigned from office despite having entertainment careers they could go back to, and they are trying to muddle through at a time when virtually all of Reykjavik is bankrupt and angry.

The documentary was described thusly in a promo:

Following his country's economic meltdown, in 2009 acerbic Icelandic comedian Jon Gnarr launches his own political party, the Best Party.  His platform?  Build a Disneyland, put more polar bears in the zoo, economize by hiring only one Santa during the holidays, and oust from the government anyone who hasn’t seen The Wire.  It starts out as a joke, but when support for Gnarr’s wacky mayoral bid surprisingly snowballs, a group of rebels and punk rockers quickly captures the imagination of a nation desperate for a release from the corruption that nearly brought on its collapse.

Some of my favorite items from his list of political promises: a drug-free Parliament by 2020, “all kinds of things for weaklings,” and “sustainable transparency.”

Gnarr said in an interview that he’d started out socialist but had been nudged toward individualism by punk.  And that is how we will win. 

•There was only one brief glimpse of Bjork in the documentary, so here’s the whole video in question, “Motorcrash,” from back when she was in her early twenties and more punk, and I was in my late teens and, well, just more nerdy, let’s be honest.

A friend of mine once said Bjork’s co-vocalist from Sugarcubes sang like he was “falling off a mountain,” and he doesn’t seem to have done too much since, so it may have been an apt metaphor.  His sad Wikipedia entry about having had some bartending gigs, etc., sounds self-written.  Bjork by contrast is now de facto prime minister and queen of the faerie in Iceland, just as the bald guy from Midnight Oil, who is fourteen feet tall and has twenty-seven children, is now the king of Australia, I think.

NOTE: Bjork has a twenty-four year-old rock writer/bass player daughter whose reviews contain sentences like:

Caterpillarmen make music I despise.  I’ll make no secret of that fact.  I hate progressive rock with a passion, and would rather die than be caught listening to it.  That said, Caterpillarmen are very good at making this music I so despise, and in fact, my visceral loathing of their music is proof of how good they are at making shit.

Here is a less positive element of Bjork’s life, per Wikipedia:

On 12 September 1996, obsessed fan Ricardo López mailed an acid-spraying letter bomb to Björk’s London home and then killed himself, but the package was intercepted by the Metropolitan Police Service.  López filmed himself in the process of making the acid bomb which was intended to kill her.  The nearly eighteen hours of videotape described López’s obsession with Björk, the construction of the device, his thoughts on love and other subjects, including racial remarks against Björk's then-boyfriend Goldie.  The video footage continues after his mailing the bomb to Björk's London home and ends dramatically as López shaves his head, applies face paint and commits suicide by shooting himself on camera.

And you thought her husband Matthew Barney’s video of the two of them carving up each other’s flesh like whale meat was disturbing.  Actually, it was, but then, I find even the giant teddy bear from the “Human Behavior” video sort of disturbing. 

•Also musically and (left-)anarchically inclined is comics writer Grant Morrison (his Sugarcubes-era song “Tortured Soul” with his band the Fauves –not to be confused with the other band by that name – is Violent Femmes-worthy and is here accompanied by a Fleischer Superman cartoon of much older vintage).  As a man from Scotland, he might appreciate the tragedy of the recent Boston-area man killed while burning leaves in a kilt (pointed out to me by Jake Harrison). 

A friend of mine has joked about what it would be like if the shrinking number of comic book readers ever got so small that the creators could just pass original art around the room, without going to all the trouble of publishing things.  And it occurs to me that another disturbing tipping point would be if the fans of any given comic come to be outnumbered by the (named, individual) characters in the fictional universe in which that comic takes place.  (Marvel, for instance, has something like 5,000 characters, and a top comic only sells around 100,000 copies these days.) 

I could probably convince mystically-inclined Morrison that some sort of sentience-awakening event occurs that makes the comic book come to life at that point. 

AND THE SECOND HALF OF THIS 2,000-WORD ENTRY is entirely about Grant Morrison, I should warn you (anyone who actually reads the whole thing should let me know):

Wolverine, Popeye, and Death

•It’s ironic that radiation in Japan has made it less likely that we’ll see a movie about mutants, but since Darren Aronofsky decided not to spend a year there filming The Wolverine, I’m not confident that film’s going to happen on schedule (it was supposed to be out next year). 

•If fear of radioactive residue on leafy plants such as spinach becomes a sufficiently popular topic in the wake of the Japan disasters, though, maybe they could retool the Wolverine film as a Popeye origin story.  No reason Popeye can’t fight ninjas: “Oh, shuriken, you say? Well, I’m sure I can,” (biff, bop, etc.). 

NOTE: If you join me at tonight’s Ron Paul event at Webster Hall or tomorrow’s right-wing Tweet Up at O’Lunney’s on W. 50th, I think it’s safe to say I could be talked into doing an audio version of the preceding Popeye impression. 

•Coincidentally(??), right around the time of the tsunami, Marvel Comics finished a miniseries written by Fred van Lente and Greg Pak in which a Shinto deathgod temporarily destroyed the Marvel multiverse.  I suppose it would have been tasteless to tack on an ending in which, as he’s defeated, he vengefully summons this year’s tsunami, but it would surely have been at least a bit aesthetically tempting to tie it in (though the writing was presumably complete months earlier).

•With or without Wolverine, though, we’ve got X-Men: First Class in theatres in two months, and I am going on record predicting it will be the best geek film of 2011.  

Resurrecting Dwayne McDuffie

Hazel Dickens, the old-timey bluegrass singer seen in the union-ophilic film Matewan among other places, passed away on Friday, having lived just long enough to see the beginning of the end for unions in Wisconsin.  Just as we can respect the Clash without sharing their socialist sentiments, we can admire the folk and bluegrass traditions without being foolish enough to let aesthetics determine our moral or political judgments.  

But the passing of a far nerdier pop culture figure, with a better understanding of heroism, is on my mind (and I do not refer to a member of the Pipettes or the Raveonettes, though I saw performances by both last week and there were nerds present, as well as Danes and possibly some nerds who were also Danes). 

A popular writer from the Justice League and Justice League Unlimited animated series -- and historic creator of the more-ethnically-diverse Milestone  Comics -- Dwayne McDuffie, died of surgery complications in February, ironically just a couple years after introducing the idea that each elemental in the DC Universe, such as the character Firestorm, contains a portion of the "Life Equation" (which can fend off darkness and evil such as that of the old villain Darkseid, who figures into the final episodes of Smallville next month).

•••

But I think anyone in this modern-media era who has ever worried that blogging might get them in trouble with the boss has reason to sympathize with McDuffie, who was removed from writing the Justice League comic book because he publicly blogged about how annoying it was to have to write the series with higher-ups continually telling him to add or remove characters from the team roster, altering his intended plotlines.  

DC saw it as disloyal grousing, but I think he saw it as just a writer talking about the challenges of his creative process and circumstances.  (If Frank Oz blogged that he only got to speak for a few minutes in a new Star Wars movie, I don't think it would necessarily mean he was staunchly anti-Lucas.)

It all went down right around the time DC (presumably executive editor Dan Didio, who I also mentioned in yesterday's entry) couldn't decide whether to kill Justice League members Hawkman and Hawkgirl, assume they were already dead, have them get reincarnated, or show them as merely injured but getting better.  After finally deciding that they were fine, they were then (temporarily) killed by zombies (and later temporarily killed by an anti-zombie entity).  They remain confusing, in any case.  That ain't gonna change.  

In fact, I'll bet I'm not the only person who sees pictures of Hawkman looking fierce and warrior-like and feels sorry for him, as though he's angry at how messed up his fictional continuity is.  All his rage will seem shallow and impotent to me until the unlikely day when all that gets cleaned up.  Without more writers like McDuffie who enjoy clarifying, simplifying, and systematizing things, that day remains as distant as the Resurrection.

Flaming Purple Gorillas (and Newsarama on DC's Woes)

(On Facebook yesterday, when not joking about an unhappy young Ivy League woman, I continued my somewhat-related Narnia comments begun in yesterday's blog entry -- causing someone to point out, rightly, that the Narnia movies aren't very good.  I know, but I just want to see the evil ape in the final story.  He's a false prophet -- and he's an ape!  What a cool character.)

Well, marketing analysts at DC Comics in mid-century noted fans' love of apes, fire, and the color purple, notoriously resulting in a brief period when DC would come up with almost any excuse to put flaming purple gorillas (and the like) on its covers.  Here's one particularly bizarre example.  

If consumers demand apes, the market will supply them.  We must not be silent, with our voices or our dollars.  Indeed, I will conclude the "Month of Heroes" with an important ape-related link one week from today. 

•••

In the meantime: the site Newsrama asks why only DC Comics' top-tier books (mainly Batman and Green Lantern nowadays) sell well whereas Marvel has a fair number of "mid-list" titles instead of just a few heavy-hitters and numerous low-sellers.  (DC makes up about 31% of the comics market and Marvel about 45%, and things have been more or less that way for a long time.)  The writer of the piece says it doesn't seem to be quality -- though I'd note that Marvel does seem to use far more realistic, polished art than DC (Dan Didio's fault, perhaps?), making even the blandly-written Marvel tales look almost Alex Ross-worthy in recent years. 

But I think the real explanation is a deeper, more intrinsic one that's been true for a half-century now: With DC, you basically know which characters really matter -- which ones are the aristocracy of the superhero world, as it were -- and you know you can safely ignore the rest because they're rarely the ones who change the world.  

You know the Justice League is the center of the DC Universe; its most familiar characters are the superstars likely to get their own movies; most other teams in that universe are so highly analogous to the JLA that it almost seems redundant to read about them (the Teen Titans, the Justice Society, etc.); and though DC might "invest in" the lesser characters in a business sense, it's not really going to invest in them in the way that makes nerds care: letting the "little characters" do things that have ripple effects across that fictional cosmos that permanently change the lives of even the bigwigs like Superman and Batman. 

•••

By contrast, it's genuinely hard to say what the "center" of the diverse Marvel Universe is, and each candidate character-set can in theory have a very different type of fan: Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the cosmic/space characters such as Warlock, lately the Hulk…  Marvel reaps the benefits of seeming convincingly polycentric (to put it in international relations terms).  And yet most of the characters live in New York

Narnia Is Doomed, One Way or Another

Just in time for Good Friday -- and the doomed-animals narratives of Earth Day -- it's: my thoughts about the future of the Narnia movies:

All I want out of the mediocre Narnia films (three down so far, out of seven) is to see the apocalyptic and ape-oriented Last Battle get produced.  Though it was written seventh, the logical thing to do, plainly, would have been to release the film version of it fifth -- enabling them to complete the main arc of the series without interruption (the already-released Wardrobe, Caspian, and Treader, followed by Silver Chair and Last Battle).  Then, if the franchise still has any gas left after that, you go on to do the rather expendable prequel The Magician's Nephew and the tangential tale The Horse and His Boy.  Don't risk having the series end before, well, the end.  

Instead, they're reportedly doing Nephew next, if anything (maybe because it's cheaper).  Any way you slice it, aesthetically or logically or novel-publishing-wise, Silver Chair should be next, i.e., fourth (and surely they should ask Silverchair to do an end credits song), not Nephew.  

But as long as we get to the apocalypse eventually, I'll be happy.  And with the current plan, we do get to see Tilda Swinton's character one more time much sooner (quite prominently in Nephew, actually).

GOP 2012 Presidential Field: The View from John Jay Park

During this blog’s “Month of Heroes,” remember that it is wisest not to have any political heroes.  We fight for the day when there will be no electoral politics. 

But in the meantime, it’s good to see former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson announce his run for president in New Hampshire this morning.  He’s a libertarian Republican but perhaps best known nationally for his opposition the drug war.  You have to wonder if he considered announcing one day earlier, on “4/20.” 

(I heard a rumor that the Ron Paul event taking place in New York City on Monday the 25th might feature some sort of announcement as well.  I hope to be there – and at the May 2 debate at NYU at which Objectivist John Allison shall surely crush Constitution-dismissing young pundit Ezra Klein.  NYU also sees an Intelligence Squared U.S. debate on immigration the next day, May 3.)

I am not worried, at this early stage, about the libertarianish candidates drawing votes from each other in the GOP primaries, so long as we all agree to stick to whichever one survives the winnowing.  My real fear is that we are already seeing the GOP field divide into two tiers, with roughly five candidates polling in the double digits who are mostly statists – and roughly six candidates polling only in single digits who are mostly libertarian-leaning ones I might actually endorse. 

We’re a year and a half away from the election, but last time I checked RealClearPolitics’ aggregated polls, the field looked sort of like this:

•Huckabee, Romney, Trump, Palin, Gingrich (all double digits, ranging from about 20% down to 10, respectively)

•Paul, Bachmann, Pawlenty, Daniels, Santorum (all single digits, with Johnson and Cain not yet tracked by them)

The top tier at this point is mostly the ones who, at least in the past few years, seem more focused on celebrity than on policy-making.  Most of them may melt away once debates begin. 

In electoral politics, people routinely discourage stating the truth – such as “We might lose” – but I prefer to prepare for the worst and then contemplate the somewhat-acceptable moderately-plausible.  If current trends hold (and of course they never do), then, I must confess that Newt, for all his flaws, might be the best of the top tier folk so far – if we had to choose from that tier, I mean, much as I’d be thrilled by Paul or Johnson winning, not to mention Daniels or Pawlenty.

Newt, if it comes to that, at least understands federalism and decentralization –pushing both after the 1994 GOP takeover of Congress, even if not consistently.   He has brains and the ability to appeal to the religious (though Giuliani showed how unforgiving they can be of divorcees, so he might not have that flank as well-covered as we might think).

If I had to bet on the outcome at this point, though, I would predict it’s going to be a Mormon vs. a black man in the 2012 general election (so reporters can start preparing fluffy pieces on that theme instead of talking about spending cuts and deregulation).  Technically, I voted for Romney in 2008, as the handiest anti-McCain protest vote available to me by the time the New York primary rolled around.  All so meaningless now – yet, disturbingly, perhaps also a sign of things to come. 

And speaking of ominous prophecies, tomorrow’s topic: Narnia and the Apocalypse!

Lady Gaga Has No Clothes (and a Dozen More Items on Ladies)

I just wrote a letter of recommendation for a woman interested in both economics and science, the sort of woman we need more of.  Or at least I do, especially if she doesn’t want children (perhaps they will flock to tonight’s Story Collider, which I plan to attend).  About half of this entry, though, will be about fictional women (some would argue this paragraph was as well) – science-fictional women, that is (and tonight’s theme at Story Collider is sci-fi, too – be there, 8pm, at the bar Pacific Standard in Brooklyn). 

But first a note on a woman who merely dabbles in sci-fi-like imagery once in a while:

1. I don’t want to be the lone Lady Gaga-hater, but (A) she’s obviously terrible, (B) her oddly-numerous supporters should now be at least slightly troubled by the creeping realization that her single “Born This Way” is just a lawsuit-worthy mash-up of Madonna’s “Express Yourself” and “Vogue” (covers of Rebecca Black while wearing a Darth Vader mask next, perhaps?), and (C) now she’s even stealing Madonna's Catholic-tweaking shtick with the song “Judas.”  Maybe for an encore, she can invent sadomasochism or bisexuality. 

I don't much care for Gaga or Catholicism, obviously, but if there's someone out there stupid enough to like both, I hope that person feels horribly conflicted right now.  (If I believed there were a God, by the way, I'd have to suspect he has something against North Carolina after the storms of the past few days.  I hope my friends in that state are well.)

2. It was fun to see a site about comics lambast the New York Times for doing such shallow reporting on the question of whether women like sci-fi.  You see how arrogant the Times seems when training its ignorant sights on your subculture, nerds?  Now imagine being a conservative. 

3. Too, let’s take a moment to remember how awful the arrogant, smirking, relentlessly oversimplifying Rachel Maddow is as well – by reading this response, brought to my attention by Bretigne Shaffer, to Maddow’s attack on federalism.  I don’t think there’s much hope of teaching most people economics, so I’m really banking on Americans warming to the idea of just shrinking DC’s role and letting the states go their own ways, which would at least allow some diversity and experiment. 

4. Speaking of central authorities, happy eighty-fifth birthday (tomorrow) to QE2 (the Queen of England).  By my pro-market, pro-technology standards, she’s nowhere near as cool as the QE2 (the boat) but is cooler than QE2 (a second round of Quantitative Easing by the Fed).

5. On a sadder British note, R.I.P. actress Elisabeth Sladen, lost too soon at sixty-three to cancer while still playing the role of Sarah Jane from Doctor Who, as she had been for forty years, still looking pretty damn cute and acting much more convincingly than a lot of the monsters and aliens surrounding her.  Somewhere, her robot dog K9 howls mournfully.  And listening to this dirge-like song for forty seconds might be appropriate.

6. Sarah Jane was many fans’ favorite Doctor sidekick, but the fourth Doctor, Tom Baker, clearly liked Romana (or rather, actress Lalla Ward) best, since he married her, and although their Timelord characters were never lovers on the show, if you ever wanted to know what it would have been like if they had been (you sick freak), look no farther than these TV commercials featuring the two of them – in character yet being openly flirty in a very fun and obviously sincere way – advertising a 1980s computer. 

Nothing against the recent Doctors, but these three minutes of TV ads are more entertaining than whole seasons of other people playing the Doctor.  Tom Baker is just that good – and was frankly sort of my childhood role model for  “whimsy” (and was a former Catholic monk who lost his faith, incidentally).

Lalla Ward, as I’ve noted before, has had one of the most delightfully nerdy lovelives in all of history, and after divorcing Tom Baker, she met her next husband

Marvel Movie Team-Ups: Intellectual Property Factions

One of the most exciting developments of the past several years – for nerds – has been watching Marvel link their superhero movies into a single fictional universe.  But not just any character can meet just any other character – because of which characters are contracted to which film companies. 

You’re likely to see only intra-film-company rather than inter-film-company assemblages and confrontations, which last I knew meant something like so (and I’m totally glossing over distinctions between production rights, distribution rights, and six million other nuances, just keep tracking of what I think are the creative “bailiwicks,” to put it in terms about as technical as befits my level of legal expertise – don’t plan your investment portfolio around this or sue me if someone in an alley tries to sell you Doctor Octopus):

X-Men + Fantastic Four + Daredevil: Fox

Spider-Man: Sony (later Columbia)

Avengers + (now in development) Inhumans: Disney

(Punisher, for what it's worth: Lions Gate/Columbia)

Disney now owns Marvel, so most future characters will likely emerge there, I’d imagine, and potentially be Avengers-tied if tied to anything.  

I notice it would be especially tricky to do a film adaptation of the mid-00s series New Avengers comic book, which featured a team composed (at one point) of Wolverine, Spider-Man, and a few old-school Avengers.  That will disappoint the youngest fans.  And it means you shouldn’t expect to see post-credits sequences on next year’s scheduled Spider-Man and Wolverine movies in which Luke Cage recruits them to join a team that will be a more “street” version of Nick Fury’s Avengers, much as I would enjoy that.

One thing that could legally happen that I wouldn’t mind seeing, though, is the X-Men’s Prof. X bumping into the Fantastic Four’s Reed Richards one day.  They both have mutant children to exchange advice about.  And Daredevil chatting with the FF’s Ben Grimm would go a long way toward capturing the feel in the comics that all these characters are neighbors in New York City (always appealing to me as a kid – could that have subconsciously influenced my eventual choice of habitat?).

To me, from a purely legal/strategic point of view, the most interesting question, though, is whether we’ll ever see Magneto’s children, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, who were members of the Avengers.  I haven’t checked, but I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that they were listed in the briefly-glimpsed files about mutants stolen by Mystique in X-Men 2, thus placing them in the Fox bailiwick – but Quicksilver is both an Avenger and the husband of an Inhuman, so the creative potential if he were kept at Disney is significant.

(Oddly enough, I think the studio that made the Marvel superhero movie Blade is now part of Warner Bros., which, as parent to DC Comics, might be disinclined ever to do another movie with Marvel characters.  DC films are all Warner, of course: Batman, Superman, soon Green Lantern, etc.  Much easier to do DC Universe references on Smallville.)

Beyond the legal concerns, next year may be a pivotal one for determining

Ten Brief Semi-Literate Notes

(1) Tonight (7pm-on) at Langan’s bar (47th just east of 7th) is the monthly social gathering called the Manhattans Project, where I imagine some of us will be chatting about the somewhat dopey topic of the Atlas Shrugged movie, but it’s not so far from the Algonquin Hotel, if that makes you feel more sophisticated.

(2) We won’t be hearing from planned guest of honor Bryan Harris about why college is a waste of time, since he had to go to Turkey on business.

(3) But hey, talking about Atlas is sort of a reminder that real education occurs outside of college anyway. 

(4) If that leaves you feeling the need to do something more nuanced and artsy-literary, though, you could wish libertarian-friendly novelist Katherine Taylor a happy birthday today.  You could send her money to buy a puppy, even.

(5) And here in NYC, I believe writer Alyssa Pelish moves back today [CORRECTION: Oops -- not quite yet].

(6) She wrote a piece about being a teacher of a class on comics and says some of the nerdy kids therein reminded her of me. 

(7) I am reminded of my friend Holly Caldwell’s reaction in college upon reading a page from an issue of Flaming Carrot Comics I had, full of phrases such as “a dreadnought of chicanery,” which was to say: “Now I understand why you talk like that.”

(8) But Alyssa is not here just for the sake of art: She’s taking the editor job at ACSH that I left almost exactly one year ago (there were a couple interim occupants since then), so she’s also serving science.  (I was at Fox most of the time since then but am now working on a couple ghostwriting projects – I can say no more.)

(9) Another cool science/writing combo is the series in Brooklyn called Story Collider, which gathers again in two days, featuring my friend Michele Carlo this time, among other monologuists talking about how science has affected their lives, a noble topic (I’ll be in the audience). 

(10) And speaking of literature, here’s a very funny lesson in how not to respond if you are a writer and receive public criticism (I should really send a gift to the highly literate person who pointed out this link to me).

Atlas Shrugged vs. Smallville

Most of my last eighteen tweets were about the Atlas Shrugged movie and Randian supermen, and when I was lamenting in the penultimate one that the movie might have been more fun if some dope like Zack Snyder did it, it didn’t even cross my mind that we will get to see Snyder depict supermen of a different sort next year, in the movie Superman: The Man of Steel. 

Isn’t it an amazing and historic triumph of bourgeois American pop culture that the superman who matters the most, to the most people, nowadays is Clark Kent rather than the original amoral Nietzschean superman, George Bernard Shaw’s left-eugenicist superman, the Nazi fascist-eugenicist supermen, or the anti-altruistic Randian supermen (much as I admire the last kind’s regard for property rights – but then, altruistic Clark Kent spends a lot of time stopping theft and assault, too, when not taking orders from FDR). 

Despite the occasional pacifist ignoramus thinking that the ethos of Clark Kent is “might makes right” (what a truly grotesque misinterpretation of his profound decency – and usually from people who think they’re too sophisticated to read comics), I will feel morally sound next month taking more joy (most likely) in watching the two-hour finale (May 13 at 8pm) of Smallville’s ten-season run than I did in the Atlas movie yesterday, or for that matter the play Man and Superman.  (Nietzsche, of course, remains an important guilty pleasure.)

P.S. Darkseid and the Anti-Matter Universe’s Lionel Luthor appear to be planning to resurrect Lex Luthor.  In any case, the finale will likely be more tension-filled than this CollegeHumor short from a couple years back about why Batman would seem lame if he really co-existed with Superman.

Fans Worry About the Film Version...of Green Lantern

That’s right.  In much the same way we libertarians have been worrying about whether the Atlas Shrugged movie(s?) is (will be?) any good, we comics/sci-fi nerds have been worrying about June’s Green Lantern movie. 

The comic is about an impressive intergalactic police force from thousands of planets that keeps the peace throughout space and has existed for billions of years.  Yet the early trailers made Earth’s Green Lantern, Hal Jordan (played by Ryan Reynolds), look a bit goofy, and the special effects were a bit cheesy, and only this very month did they get around to casting Geoffrey Rush and that gigantic guy from Green Mile, Michael Clarke Duncan, as the voice actors for a couple of the computer-animated Green Lantern Corps members.

That may not be unusual but is still a little worrying given that the film is out in two months.  (Of course, by living in fear of how the film will turn out, we risk empowering the fear-demon Parallax, so best not to think about it.)  Perhaps I’ll audition for a role in a few weeks, if they’re still putting the finishing touches on it.  (I would enjoy playing Krona, the villain around whom I built one of the stories I wrote for DC Comics – in JLA Showcase #1, for real.) 

Michael Clarke Duncan is voicing a big bruiser of an alien named Kilowog, which unfortunately sounds as if it means “possessing the power of a thousand swarthy people” but does not.  Kilowog has the strange honor of being voiced by two interesting actors this summer, the other being punk rocker and comics fan Henry Rollins, who is also large (in the DVD cartoon Green Lantern: Emerald Knights, out ten days before the live-action film).  George Tabb, a punk rocker in his own right (with the band Furious George) and a NYPress columnist back in the day, once likened a snapping turtle’s neck to that of Rollins in order to explain how impressive the snapping turtle was. 

Well, the Corps has 3,600 (or more recently 7,200) members, so at least some of them are bound to be cool, right?  And with that many power rings floating around the universe, there’s a decent chance that the next Green Lantern...will be you.

(In the meantime, remember: from about 6:20pm to 7:06pm, catch my post-Atlas tweets direct from Metro North – bound from Midtown Manhattan to the Foundation for Economic Education – reacting to Atlas Shrugged, if all goes as planned.)