Who is going to read this? No one I imagine. However, I enjoy my own opinion, so let's talk about comics, movies, music and whatever else strikes our fancy!
Monday, September 24, 2007
Some Things I Wish I Never Said
"This is easily the best one since the first movie!" - I said this on opening day of "Batman and Robin", one of the greatest crimes ever committed to filmstock. I have no excuse for it.
"There is no way they are going to be just a one-hit wonder!" - I said this in response to my friend Beil when he dared to impugn the good name of 80s band Boys Don't Cry. I was quite taken with their one and only hit "I Wanna Be A Cowboy."
"It seems like it might be a good story." - My reaction to a mid-1990's Superman story story where they split the Man of Steel into two different people with all new powers and costumes. He was now electricity based and the comic was nigh-unreadable.
"They are the new Beatles!" - I mentioned this to my dad at the height of Culture Club's popularity and he has never let me live it down. Having said that, I still enjoy all of Boy George's music - even to this day. His "Cheapness and Beauty" album was criminally overlooked.
Many, many years ago, when I was still in college, I was introduced to the movie "Highlander." I look back on the film fondly for many reasons - some great visual work from director Russell Mulcahy, the presence of actress Beatie Edney (who I have never seen anywhere other than in her two Highlander appearances, but I would like to!), Sean Connery (a man who raises any movie's rating by a couple stars just by showing up for work), and of course because of the wonderful soundtrack by my boys, Queen!
I enjoyed "Highlander" more so than most Americans - the film pretty much was DOA when it opened here in the states in 1986. In other parts of the world though, it was quite popular, popular enough to warrant a string of sequels and a TV series. As a result, the world has been made to suffer the existence of such mind-numbing silliness as "Highlander 2", "Highlander 3: the Final Dimension" and now the worst of all Highlander product, "Highlander: The Source."
"Highlander: The Source" was to be a wonderful first installment of a new trilogy of films intended to set the world on fire. At one point, the production company actually claimed that New Line Films was looking to distribute the films and hoped that they would fill the void left by the completion of Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" series.Unfortunately, by the time it was finished, "The Source" was so bad that no company wanted to release it to theatres in the US, so it premiered as a SCI-FI channel "original" film.
Dear God this thing was terrible! It takes place in the near future where society has turned quite horrible. Cities are urban zoos where criminals run rampant and stuff is on fire for no real reason, islands are populated by cannibalistic motorcycle gangs, and of course, all the planets in the solar system are, for some strange reason, moving out of orbit in order to line up in a straight line out from the sun. Only one scientist seems to be concerned (or even notice this) and as luck would have it, he is an Immortal. He contacts the leader of the Immortals, Methos, to let him know about the planets and Methos, in his infinite wisdom, decides the best course of action is to let depressed swordsman Duncan McLeod know about this.
If you don't know who the Immortals are in "Highlander", here's a brief rundown. The Immortals fight each other for the right to claim "the Prize". They are Immortal until they are killed (yes, you read that right. Don't complain to me - I didn't make it up.) In the first movie, Connor McLeod became the last living Immortal and claimed the Prize. After that there were four more movies where other Immortals happened to show up and it turned out that Connor didn't really ever win the Prize. I think maybe one of the characters even says "You thought you won the Prize, but you didn't!" Then in the fourth movie, Connor is killed before the end of the very contest he won in the first movie. Now he will never get to win the Prize even though he had won it or at least deluded himself into thinking that he had. Oh, at the end of the first movie, he hooked up with the lovely police scientist Brenda, but then in the second movie we learned that she died due to radiation poisoning when Earth's ozone was destroyed. And then in the third movie we learned that she died in a car accident.
I'm being serious.
Anyway, this is making me angry so I'm going to stop. I was going to go on to explain what was so terrible about "Highlander: the Source" and why I was so disappointed by it, but I was stupid to ever assume that it was going to be good! I should have learned from the past. Me taking the time to make fun of it is like mental masturbation - it's boring and serves no real purpose. I'm embarrassing myself by acting surprised that it sucked.
Highlander has given us one truly fantastic thing though, and here it is. One of the greatest songs ever written. I've heard it 1,000 times and it can still occasionally give me chills. Enjoy!
Here are some things of note that I found on my PC as I sat here listening to The Mission UK while drinking cider and exploring the dark corners of my hard drive:
Lucas Drampt
Here is a drawing I did in MS-Paint of Lucas Drampt many years ago. Who is Lucas Drampt you ask? He is a diabolical businessman who would pester the superheroes in the homemade comic books I made years ago. He was the leader of S.K.U.L.L Labs. I'm sure that "S.K.U.L.L." stood for something incredibly evil since it has all those periods in it, but I was always too lazy to ever come up with anything. The possibilities are endless though.
Heavy Metal Killer at Hershey Park
Yup, it's a drawing I did of some sort of murderous death metal fan. You can tell he is evil because not only does he have a "666" tattoo and blood red eyes, he also listens to death metal. You might also notice that he is carrying a severed head with him as he makes his way either to or from Hershey Park. He is probably not coming FROM Hershey Park as it IS the "friendliest place on Earth" and getting decapitated by a death rocker as you wait in a two-hour line for The Great Bear doesn't really seem all that friendly.
I went to this website called GameDaily BIZ and I learned that Hollywood is preparing to make a movie based on Joust. JOUST!!
If you aren't old like me, you may not realize how stupid that is. Joust is a video game that we used to like back in the 1980s. It came along after Pac-Man but before Double Dragon II. Let me show you what Joust looked like:
That's all there is to it. How do you make a movie out of that??
On another site, Newsarama, I learned that in order to "launch the new Joust franchise" even before the movie's release, they are making a Joust comic book.
Has the world gone mad??
In Joust, you are a warrior who ...well...JOUSTS...on the back of some sort of oversized winged bird against other warriors who are also riding oversized winged birds. When you defeat an opponent in combat, their bird lays an egg and flies away. You have to fly over that egg then to crush it before it hatches into another oversized bird that will try to fight you. Meanwhile, you have to watch out for the fiery hand that reachs up out of the lava at the bottom of the screen because if it catches you, it pulls you into a horrible death in the molten rock.
Oh, and every now and again a pterodactyl flies across the screen and you just have to avoid him because there is no way to kill him.
What a movie that all is going to make!!!
I'm going to go drink a bit. Maybe I'll post something later when I'm too tipsy to remember how much hollywood sucks!
