Best scene in Rick and Morty so far

New X-Men Trailer is neato burrito

There is a high likelihood there are too many characters in this. I feel like someone is going to short-changed.

Did You Know Gaming covers Street Fighter

I found this interesting, especially the origins of the characters.

Jeremy Jahns reviews the new Metal Gear game.

Jeremy Jahns reviews the new Metal Gear game.

Damian Wayne coming back to the New 52?

Here's a link to the Bleeding Cool forum page.



Ever since Damian Wayne was killed in Batman, Incorporated, I have been wondering when they were going to bring him back. Hey, these are comic books.

I like Damian Wayne. He is a feisty, nasty version of Bruce-- and he's a lot of fun. How he will return, well, I am guessing a Lazarus Pit has Damian's name on it, or one of those armies of clones in Morrison's final issue on his run. At any rate, I wonder what will happen to Harper Rowe, or... Carrie Kelly? She sort of fell out of the New 52 universe didn't she?

Tom Hardy as Mad Max

A black and white pic of Hardy as Max. I am not sure how I feel about this. Mel Gibson IS Max to me, but I am interested in seeing where this goes.

New Godzilla poster for upcoming film!

I love the Japanese symbol under the name. Very Eastern feel about this-- I am in love.

Imax Poster of new Transformers

This looks positively Apocalyptic. I am 75% sure this movie is going to be awful, but you never know, I thought Transformers 3 was... not bad.

Total Recall -- Lost in the Haunted Dreamscape

1. Total Recall

"Total Recall", as directed by Paul Verhoeven, is pure sci-fi spectacle. Released in 1990, it stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as Douglas Quaid, a man disillusioned with his life-- his spouse and job bore him, and he keeps having dreams of a seductive woman on Mars. She is an albatross, a lost dream seeping into his daily reality, and somehow, she feels more than a figment of a fractured mind. She is out there. But the worst part of his nighttime experiences is this: he occasionally slips out into the Mars landscape, breathing in the toxic air. His eyes bulge red. His tongue slips out of his mouth like a slithering strawberry. And he dies in agony. That's the end of the story.


A truly disgusting image, ala Paul Verhoeven

Similar to "The Matix" in concept, Total Recall deals with reality-bending storytelling. It asks the perennial questions: Is what we experience with our senses real? Can it ever be proven to be real? And if it isn't real, would it matter anyway? Several great philosophers have dealt with this quandary, famously with Plato and his cave, Descartes and his 'think therefore I am', and Hume before Kant's a priori. Verhoeven confronts it through Philip K. Dick, attacking it laterally. In his film, a company, known as Rekall, implants memories into clients' brains. These are done willingly, a means to escape the drudgery of life without actually going anywhere physically. Rekall's newest 'vacation' is more than relaxation on a beach, it is being the hero, beating the bad guy, and saving the girl.

The doctor/salesmen gives Schwarzenegger's Quaid the pitch:

"Basic Mars package will run you 899 credits. Now, that's for two full weeks of memories, if you want a longer trip it will cost you a little bit more because it's a deeper implant. [...] When you go Recall, you get nothing but first class memories. Private cabin on the shuttle, deluxe suite at the Hilton, plus all the major sites, Mount Pyramid, grand canals, and of course, VenusVille. [...] As real as any memory in your head. [...] Your brain will not know the difference. And that's guaranteed or your money back."

After the procedure is done, the patient will mis-member a trip as a millionaire playboy, a sports hero, an industrial tycoon, a secret agent... "What is it that is exactly the same about every single vacation you have ever taken? [...] You. You're the same. No matter where you go, there you are, it's always the same old you. Let me suggest that you take a vacation from yourself. And I know it sounds wild. It's the latest thing in travel. We call it the ego trip." You want to escape yourself? Are you sick of standing on the side as the party rages? Of wondering why your life in meaningless? You can escape the facade of your character, just Rekall it.


Be the hero.

Post-Colonial theory hinges on the idea that by describing the Orient, the fantasy kingdom, the outer-space adventure, you are actually describing yourself more than a real location. These beautiful, horrific kingdoms of the dreamscape only exist in the interior world-- these modern gods, these Martian landscapes which Quaid finds himself in, these legions of Heaven and Hell-- they are results of a mind laid bare by the monotony of typical Western life. You are experiencing life through a window. You are bored. You need to escape. On Earth, you are constantly reminded you are unimportant, that your opinion doesn't matter, that you have to kowtow to other people's wishes-- Quaid's fantasies are deeply masculine ones. He finds himself in Joseph Campbell's mono-myth. He is the hero of this story. Rekall can fulfill a desire to be the main actor and win.

Because of these reasons, because he is bored with his wife, his job, his childless experience as the world falls apart around him, Quaid chooses a secret agent as his dream persona. Something goes dramatically wrong with the process though. He stands and throws the doctors aside, escaping through the front doors, pursuers on his trail. Arnold has awakened. He has become a Buddha.

Layers keep falling away, revealing new aspects to the complex question of "who am I if I am not me?". We are introduced to a Mars colony, the woman in Quaid's dreams, and we discover that Quaid's previous persona may have been complicit all along.


You are your own enemy.

Arnold's character finds out that he was once Hauser, part of a conspiracy to find the terrorist, Kuato. He was the villain before he was the hero. In other words, his past comes back to haunt him. Hauser is Phaedrus-- the evil wolf, Saturn, who slices and dices the universe. And that means Kuato is the wise teacher come to help Osiris beat Set. On Mars, Kuato is an illusive man who the capitalists are desperate to find and kill. Quaid does find Kuato's hiding place, but he turns out not to be the ordinary person we expect. He is, in fact, an infant tumor growing on the chest of another man.


Kuato is the true Messiah. What does that mean to you?

He tells Quaid, "you are what you do. A man is defined by his actions not his memories." He grabs Arnold's hands. "Now open your mind to me, please. Open your mind. Open your mind. Open your mind. Open your mind. Open your mind." He repeats it to really get his point there, see? We are taken down a hallway to underneath the mysterious Marshian pyramid, down more passages, and discover the ancient alien technology which will release oxygen into the atmosphere of Mars, ruining the villain's monopoly on the planet's gas.

Besides being a rip-roaring male fantasy with intrigue, back-stabbings, romance, and three-breasted whores, Total Recall is a surprisingly deep meditation on modern-day life. Because Quaid is a white man, we experience his perfect dream-- and it is a dream full of heroism, of killing, of sex. He kills his wife. He gets to be with the hot, exotic Marshian. He gets to be the cunning, heroic, strong leader of a clan of mutants. There are midgets. There are whores. There are gunfights. There are twists and turns, but Quaid is always the one who will win in the end. This is his fantasy. This is his Orient of the mind.


The Winner

But then it all comes crashing down. As Quaid sits in his fancy suite, he hears a knock on a door...

In walks Dr. Edgemar.


Ye tempter.

We assume that he is working for the film's villain, Cohaagen, because the audience has also been swept up in the Quaid's adventure. But almost surprisingly the doctor suggests none of this real afterall, that the adventure we have all been living through Quaid is a dream within a dream within a dream. He tells our hero that he has "suffered a schizoid embolism" and that he has experienced a "delusion". When Quaid tries to justify it, especially of the woman he had visions of before the memory implants, Edgemar answers back, "Oh Mr. Quaid, she's real because you dreamed her." Quaid raises a gun the doctor's head and threatens to kill him:

"It won't make the slightest difference to me Doug, but the consequences to you will be devastating. In your mind, I'll be dead, and with no one to guide you out, you'll be stuck here in permanent psychosis. The walls of reality will come crashing down around you. One minute, you're the savior of the rebel cause; next thing you know, you'll be Cohaagen's bosom buddy. You'll even have fantasies about alien civilizations as you requested; but in the end, back on Earth, you'll be lobotomized! So get a grip on yourself, Doug, and put down that gun!"

Quaid fires it. He refuses to give into the Doctor's suggestions. The basis of growth is 'letting go' say the mythologies of the East. We have to release the ego's need to cling to things to be at peace. 'Bhudda' literally means one who has awakened.





2. Intense Level of Play

Hinduism's Shiva has ten arms. He moves them independently but also without thought, as if they were a machine working in tandem. "[The Hindus'] image of the divine is of a sort of centipede. A centipede can move a hundred legs without having to think about it, and Shiva can move ten arms very dexterously without having to think about them" (Watts 79, Myth and Religion). Kurt Vonnegut, perhaps unsurprisingly, delivers a similar image in Slaughterhouse-Five, one of a man's life in the form of a millipede, crawling from baby to death, forever alive in still images in the fourth demension.


Featured in film, Samsara.

The multi-armed god is a representation of every person whom has ever lived. We are his arms, we are all Shiva and just don't know it, pretending to be someone we are not. The word person having the same origin as 'persona' or mask. We wear 'personalities' like a mask, and the more lost you are the more you have forgotten the fact that you are THE godhead, the universe, the divine. Watts continues, comparing theater to the Hindu god. He says:

There are actors coming on the stage, but they are real people like you. In order for you not to see them in that way, they are going to put on their costumes and makeup, and then they are going to come out in front here and pretend to various roles. And you know you want to be half convinced that what they are doing on the stage is real.

The work of a great actor is to get you sitting on the edge of your chair, anxious, or weeping, or roaring with laughter, because he has almost persuaded you that what is on the stage is really happening. That is the greatness of his art, to take the audience in. In the same way, the Hindu feels that the Godhead acts his part so well that he takes himself in completely. And each of you is the godhead, wonderfully fooled by your own act. And although you won't admit it to yourself, you are enjoying it like anything. (Watts 82)

Story and myth are the closest we get to truth. They represent the plays which have been occurring since the big bang exploded and light and matter ballooned across the nothingness and until the end of everything.


The knight saving the princess from whatever.

We are capable of playing every role there is. We identify with the hero's quest to take down the villain, we gasp when it looks like he is about to be killed, and applaud when he wins out; but at the same time there is delight with the villain's shenanigans. In theater, we realize the importance of the bad guy when he receives applause from the audience at the end of play. This, of course, is less explicit in modern entertainment. There is no dramatic bowing of the mobster with gales of approval at the end of the movie.

As kids, we engage in this intense "level of play", which the ancient hunter-gatherers in the Paleolithic era extended to all of life. Joseph Cambpell writes in Primitive Mythologies: The Masks of God that a "certain level of 'make-believe' is operative in all primitive religious. 'The savage' wrote Marett, 'is a good actor who can be quite absorbed in his role, like a child at play; and also, like a child, a good spectator who can be frightened to death by the roaring of something he knows perfectly well to be no 'real' lion'" (Campbell 23). By acknowledging that the villain is being acted by someone who is not evil, we are beginning to acknowledge that it is all an act. That we are all being tricked into believing that we are who we are, that we are the hero, and that we should cling to material things. And that we have been tricked by ourselves.

Like Dr. Edgemar says, it is a delusion. What Quaid's character in Total Recall doesn't realize is that he is performing the hero's role in this dream. In the next, he might be the evil industrialist, the perky lover, the little mutant child with the freaky eye. That is what reincarnation truly is, a morphing of the eternal consciousness into every role.


MUUUUTANTS!

The Indians have the mythic image of the Net of Indra. It "is a net of gems, where at every crossing of one thread over another there is a gem reflecting all the other reflective gems. Everything arises in mutual relation to everything else, so you can't blame anybody for anything. It is even as though there were a single intention behind it all, which always makes some kind of sense, though none of us knows what the sense might be, or has lived the life that he quite intended" (Campbell 284, The Power of Myth).

This is not to say we shouldn't be involved; however, it does seem to be the case that the worst atrocities against our fellow men occur when we become too involved in rationality, in complexity of 'I'-ness, in the material world. Stories show us that we are communicating with archetypes. When we get into a really good book, our minds start communicating with this unconscious realm. It gives the chaotic voices of the right brain shape and coherence, linking both hemispheres together in a song or dance and harmonizing the brain like a lyre.


A liar... I mean a lyre.

Old archetypes from ages past haunt us again. There is no one there to tell us that this isn't real, or that this can't happen. It is complete experience. We get caught up with the characters, with the monsters which the ego usually denies us with its rational knowledge. Trolls, ogres, demons gods are there in their archetypal splendor, daring us to be terrified by their grotesque visages, or the specters within ourselves.

Erik Davis in his book TechGnosis claims that the "pagan and the paranormal have colonized our pop media" and that the "West's mystical heritage of occult dreamings, spiritual transformations, and apocalyptic visions crashed on the scientific shores of the modern age" (4-5). It is the same with video games, with their fascination with alien and fantastical monsters, the same with Total Recall with its mutants and godlike aliens-- creatures that were at first thrust into the spiritual dimensions, then to the farthest reaches of the Earth, and now alive in science fiction and fantasy... these nightmares will never go away...

As we progress further into the 21st century, there is going to be more bending of identity to the whims of computer interface. Information technology has already begun to shape our personalities in profound ways. With the ascension of social media, users are picturing themselves not as a person but an online image.




Go through your friends' photo albums, wall posts, and favorites list-- these are online identities which can be very separate from the person they present in public.

Erik Davis says that of all the technologies, "it is the technologies of information and communication that most mold and shape the source of all mystical glimmerings: the human self." It "tweaks our perceptions, communicates our picture of the world to one another, and constructs remarkable and sometimes insidious forms of control over the cultural stories that shape our sense of the world" (Davis 6).

Like all tools, these technologies become extensions of the person wielding them. However, beyond even that, they allow us to interface with each other in methods which weren't available to us before. In the online sphere we can hide behind masks. No one knows our "true" personalities, only a silly username. This allows great freedom of identity in the cyber-world and is an interesting case-study on the nature of reality-- of images and illusion.

Davis writes of the growing number of new technologies. Each time a new one became available, people would see it as mystical. People believed that electricity was the spiritual force which God used to create life. In it, they found new mythic experiences. When we don't understand something, we usually choose to see it as magical, fill in the space with 'lacuna'. Magnets were also used for therapy by icons like Franz Anton Mesmer who came up with 'animal magnetism', which eventually led to the concept of hypnotism.


Picture by Christopher Burdett... I thought the eye was a nose.

Phone calls and radio waves were seen as spiritual-- voices from people that were them and not them at the same time. Old animist spirits were evoked in us. Their desire was to be free, roam the collective imagination once again. As the world became increasingly demystified, the magic was drained from peoples' everyday lives. This was translated into 'real-life' adventures of explorers discovering new civilizations underground and ancient islands populated with strange locals in books like The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Erewhon by Samuel Butler, or reemerged in spiritual contact through electricity and radio waves.

Whereas older technologies were extensions of a limb, McLuhan opines that modern ones were more like the expansion of the nervous system. "As new technologies begin to remold [...] boundaries, the shadows, doubles, and dark reflections that haunt human identity begin to leak outside the self as well, many of them taking up residence in the virtual spaces opened up by the new technologies" (73). Magic of ages past has dissolved into the pseudo-underworld, and it is now the magic of the internet which possesses the mind of man, only one part of the GRIN (genetics, robotics, information tech, and nano-tech).

Now that we are nearing the technology that Total Recall experimented with, what does this mean for us? Will it be the continued break down of identity into something new, into something terrifying? Other science fiction has also shown similar dystopic hells where the only outlet is fantasy, so much so that it becomes the only reality for most people. The power of story, of myth, is endless. Governments and corporations can use it to manipulate us, to control, and especially to distract us, but we can also use it destroy ourselves. Most of us see our lives as being on a course with a destination in mind. Taoism, Zen Buddhism would remind us that that's not what life is really about-- it's about letting go, experiencing the moments, the joys of the uncarved block. It is folly to believe that life can be controlled at all, at least in the long run-- are we moving to a world where technology destroys the self? And is that a bad thing? Verhoeven seems to believe that this desire is a symptom of something greater: the desire to be free of the demystification of the universe, of the collective boredom, the dazed eyes of contemporary life. What do you think?

There is also one more important piece to Total Recall's story: you, the viewer. We watch a man live out his fantasy, but are we not living out our fantasies through him. Like the play at the end of A Midsummer's Night Dream, are we not forced to view ourselves as potential actors in a play we did not realize we were in?

What Comics Mean to Me, Part 1

About two years ago I went through a bad break-up. I mean it was really bad. I felt like a little kid lost in the mall looking for his parents, every face scary or strange... there was a big hole and I wanted to fill it so badly with something, anything, to distract me from the one thing I couldn't accept: she was gone. Looking back now, I realize I was being childish, selfish, generally awful-- and one of the only things that got me through that time was comics.


[Getty Images from The Guardian]

I needed an outlet, something to entertain my mind. Since then I have latched on to other passions: magic the gathering, writing, mythology, and generally anything that has to with magick. But I speak about this now to give you a context for my passion for comics. I didn't necessarily grow up with them like a lot of others did. I didn't spend my allowance on them, I didn't get caught up in the '90s craze. I was a kid then, but I still remember loving the X-Men on Fox Kids, playing the N64 Activision Spiderman game, occasionally seeing Bruce Timm's Batman series... no one ever told me to love comics, to follow the various teams, I just did, but none of that really mattered until two years ago when I finally started reading them for myself-- and I know people will hate me for saying this, but my gateway was the New 52.

A lot of people hate DC's relaunch, but I can only say I love it. I picked up several series randomly I guess. I don't remember why I chose them in particular. It could have been the art, stuff I read on the internet, like I said, I don't recall, but I got Snyder's Batman and his Swamp Thing, Azzarello's Wonder Woman, Lemire's Animal Man, John's Justice League and Aquaman, and a Superman comic. In the end, I think I chose right. I ended up dropping John's output and Superman, and stuck with Batman, Wonder Woman, Swamp Thing, and Animal Man. These were my favorites, and I have enjoyed them throughout their run.

Comics are gratifying-- they are a more pure form of art than most give them credit, perhaps in a way a lot of literature lovers will never understand. It isn't only the writer, but the artist, the inker, all these talents coming together to produce a moving image in your head. They can be more cinematic than books, something I struggle with in my writing because I think in images and feelings. They are perhaps more ancient, more inviolate. They are a spirit which grabs you, pulling you into its world... Grant Morrison's book, Supergods, mentions that the different artists interpretations of the character give a tapestry, a history, slaving over the spirit of Batman, Iron Man, or Spiderman, they hand over their soul to a budding image from the collective unconscious, giving it meaning, life, power, something which harkens back to oral tradition, where each storyteller gave his interpretation of a tale each time it was retold. Perhaps, these characters are pure enough, have affected enough lives that they are more real than any one person could ever be. We are birthing universes.

Recently, the PBS Idea Channel had a video on the same topic:



In fact, the author himself may be communicating with a higher authority if he writes from a subconscious state. If his words are clairvoyant enough, the spirit may go on to infect the masses around its original creator. Cultural figures like Superman or Batman have gone through many deviations over the years, and the same holds true for Harry Potter, who was originally created by just one author, but after his ascension in pop culture, thousands, if not millions, have used their own voice to portray him, especially across different medium. Is it possible that man did not create these cultural icons? What if, instead, they were particular powerful gods who wanted to be known in the lower spheres?

In The Secret History of the World, Mark Booth quotes Bob Dylan as saying that to change the age “‘you have to have power and dominion over the spirits. I had it once ... ‘ [Dylan] writes that such individuals are able to ‘... see into the heart of things, the truth of things—not metaphorically either—but really see, like seeing into metal and making it melt, see it for what it is with hard words and vicious insight’” (Booth 36). Booth says of this:

Note that he [Bob Dylan] emphasizes he is not talking metaphorically. He is talking directly and quite literally about a powerful, ancient wisdom, preserved in the secret societies, a wisdom in which the great artists, writers and thinkers who have forged our culture are steeped. At the heart of this wisdom is the belief that the deepest springs of our mental life are also the deepest springs of the physical world, because in the universe of the secret societies all chemistry is psycho-chemistry, and the ways in which the physical content of the universe responds to the human psyche are described by deeper and more powerful laws than the laws of material science (Booth 36)

There have been eight films produced from J.K. Rowling’s books, artwork by thousands of artists, and maybe most importantly, the fan fiction littered across the web. Sites like fanfiction.net and MuggleNet allow users to log on and create their own stories with their favorite pop culture properties. There is a wide range of romances (be they between Hermione and Harry, or Harry and Hagrid), rewritings of established books, and further sequels. Harry is not the singular point of one woman’s imagination anymore. He is a lightning rod of our collective dreams and fears. He can be anything to anyone, and his books are not “delimited by the individual who writes alone and silently” (Wisdom of the Mythtellers, 188).

Walter Ong’s ‘secondary orality’ lets the online community continue Harry’s adventures, though they may be apocryphal. We can compare this to the authoritative canon of the Bible, which was used to try and squash the writings of the Gnostics and other sects at the first Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. The internet, in its own perverse way, is the voice of humanity—it is so alien, so intangible and logical, but it is also more human than any one person could be. It is our collective emotions, prejudices, logos, and mythos; it is everything great about us, but also everything wrong with us.

Grant Morrison, in his book about super heroes, Super Gods, says characters like Superman and Batman did not exist in a:

Close continua with beginnings, middles, and ends; the fictional ‘universe’ [of DC and Marvel] ran on certain repeating rules but could essentially change and develop beyond the intention of its creators. It was an evolving, learning, cybernetic system that could reproduce itself into the future using new generations of creators who would be attracted like worker bees to serve and renew the universe (Morrison 117)

(His emphasis, not mine.) He goes onto to compare the characters to something like twelve-bar blues or a chord progression. Different writers could “play very different music. This meant interesting work could be done by writers and artists who knew what they were getting into and were happy to add their own little square to a vast patchwork quilt of stories that would outlast their lives” (Morrison 118).

Myths, memes, and serials are similar to the concept of ‘tulpas’ created by Tibetan masters (‘thought-beings’). They can possess an age, live past their creators, and become something bigger than any one man or woman. The characters we create and adore are like the gods of old. They descend from the astral spheres and inhabit a person, speak through them, become them. The voices inside their head are not their own, but the gods’ divine thoughts. Sean Kane relates that myth-telling, like all communication, is a performance. We dance with each other without realizing it. In this way, we are God pretending to be human, a rabbit, or a bush because in the end, it is all an act.



Myth is everywhere. It is in the trees. In the rocks. In the rivers. In the sky, and especially in the comic book shop. It is alive, almost as if the polyphonic voices of nature (the spirits) were coming together to craft a story. Myth is not static. It changes every time someone retells it. This is similar to how memory works, in that each time a person relives a memory, they mismember it subtly. It morphs to fit the arch they believe themselves to be on and because of this, a myth will die away if it is no longer relevant to the group of people which it is associated, just like we bury a memory which no longer fits in with our story.

In contrast to characters being accepted as gods, Alison Lurie, in her article “Who is Peter Pan?” opines that instead of their works, writers are often compared to the higher authorities:

They create men and women and children who seem to us to be real. But unlike gods, these writers do not control the lives of their most famous creations. As time passes, their tales are told and retold. Writers and dramatists and film-makers kidnap famous characters like Romeo and Juliet, Sherlocke Holmes, and Superman; they change the characters’ ages and appearance, the progress and endings of their stories, and even their meanings (Lurie).

Like I discussed above, characters used in perpetuity by a host of different media and interpreters develop a life of their own. Did Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster foresee a modern Superman fighting Supergirl and the villains of Wildstorm inside the pages of the New 52? No, it would not only be improbable but impossible. Lurie brings up a good point—often when we perceive the author, we think of him or her as a god, but the the real question may be who is controlling who? Many authors will tell you there comes a point when their characters start to possess them. They cease to be writing about them. Their creations are now writing through them. Grant Morrison wonders in his aforementioned book “if ficto-scientists of the future might finally locate this theological point where a story becomes sufficiently complex to begin its own form of calculation, and even to become in some way self-aware. Perhaps that had already happened” (Morrison 119).



It was Bob Dylan who talked of the spirits’ (stories, images, and characters) ability to mesmerize an age and the artist himself. It is almost as if the great gods are worming their way into the lower celestial spheres by using clumsy talismans. Booth writes of the gods, “If you believe that ideas are more real than objects, as the ancients did, collective hallucinations are, of course, much easier to accept than if you believe in a matter-before-mind universe—in which case they are almost impossible to explain. In this history gods and spirits control the material world and exercise power over it” (Booth 59). Where before humanity was in direct communication with the gods, now they are distant, and the only way they can be contacted is through perverse means, and reading and writing are just a few of the ways.

Inside a book or comic, a person is free to commune with aspects of themselves that are hidden away or buried. Books, like any good talisman, have been burned for being evil. They can inspire great evil or great kindness. Literate society has not killed humanity’s great mythos, it has only changed or transformed it. It has moved toward the Occult, to the Orient, to serials and cultural icons, and finally to fantasy and outerspace. Myth and story, once recognized as a great societal linker, bringing together the young and the old and instructing on the proper ways of life, has died. It has moved into the hands of the few. Capitalism has led to the commoditization of our cultural icons, and it has done this without the masses realizing what they have lost.

These days, I continue to pick up Batman (along with Batman and ...), Soule's Swamp Thing (even better than Snyder's), Animal Man (though this month is its last issue), Wonder Woman, Superman and Wonder Woman (I love Charles Soule!), and some of the Forever Evil tie-ins. Books I have heard that are worth reading from DC include Lemire's Green Arrow, Soule's Red Lanterns, and Snyder's Superman Unchained-- and these three tend to be my favorite authors from DC. I have yet to delve into Marvel because as my uncle put it, you know what you are buying when you pick up a DC book, but apparently Bendis' X-Men series are pretty awesome, as well as Hawkeye, and a few others I read about on CBR and Bleeding Cool. These books don't even take into the account the great stuff going on in Vertigo, Image, Dark Horse, and a menagerie of other outlets-- it is a great time to be a comic book fan, especially with Vaughan's Saga.

Like I said at the beginning, comics mean a lot to me. They were another world I could hide away in during a dark time. I felt like I had nobody, like I could talk to nobody about the problems I had, the things I felt. But Batman was always there, in all his righteous rage and his tenaciousness. Swamp Thing and Animal were fighting against the rot. Wonder Woman was meeting her family for the first time. There is that feeling when I was leaving my home to grab a few books or novels from the local Hastings or Barnes and Noble-- it felt like everything was going to be okay for awhile, like I could manage the next few hours. I know things will not always go swimmingly, and bad things will always happen, but I know my friends will always be there, and I count these heroes as friends.

Daylight Savings Pain

Why do we still perform this old and terrible tradition? Fall back, Spring ahead!  And here I am just wanting to sleep another hour.  Why do we follow something which was only meant to be a joke in the first place?

Maybe it saved a little on coal during the first World War, but come on.  That ended in 1918.  Most recent studies show we actually use more energy during the months of DST.  That sucks.  In fact, it sucks even more than you or I think.  During the final month of DST, consumers spend an extra amount on car fuel, with most buyers getting their fuel at convenience stores, producing and extra $1 billion for oil industries.  This means it will probably never change!

This, despite the fact that traffic accidents tend to surge the Monday immediately following the DST changeover.  We live in a sad world, folks.  One in which monetary profits far outweigh the cost of human lives and safety.  Hell, Daylight Savings Time is simply bad for your health.  And the Fast Food industry likes it that way.

I could come up with a million reasons why I think this evil tradition should be straight up abolished.  But really, the only one that matters is I want my damn sleep.

Spider-Cents And PG-13 Pains

I was watching the new Spider-Man incarnation, The Amazing Spider-Man, the other day and I realized I have a difficult time getting into contemporary American cinema.  Maybe I’m getting old, but I can’t relate to the characters (who are, admittedly, younger than myself a lot of the time) or get into the drama of these stories.  I think it might be because the stories and characters take turns because they are expected, rather than earned.

I’ve come to notice a particular trend towards zero consequence in modern movies, and perhaps even more frequently in a lot of these Super Hero films.  Characters behave without recourse, and it ends up making these adventures ring false, and the deeds hollow.

The Peter Parker of The Amazing Spider-Man (not to be confused with the Peter Parker of the comic books of the same name) is the latest descendant of the Harry Potter-type. A your-parents-were-awesome-so-you-were-born-to-be-special wish fulfillment disguised as a character.  If it sounds like I don’t care for this modern iteration of a “hero”, it’s because I don’t.  He’s a whiny, needy, nothing and everything who is continually rewarded for his idiotic decisions and non-decisions alike.

Just your average (super good-looking, muscular, athletic, skateboarding, popular) nerd

He attacks police officers, afflicted scientists, and gets people he knows hurt and killed with such stunning frequency, you think he’d start to notice and straighten up.  But is he blamed or punished for this?  Not really.  The sole person who considers this emotionally unbalanced teen masquerading as a hero a true menace is treated as a villain.  No wonder kids want to be super heroes.

Notions of choice and accountability are rare in American cinema today.  I mean, the Ridley Scott-directed The Counselor was heavily about consequence, but it was also a convoluted mess almost no one saw.  Are audiences so desperate for escapism they’ll only watch movies with miniature drama, whose heroes all seem to represent the fulfillment of vague “chosen one” prophecies or children of greatness who can do no wrong?

Films seem to have long-since dropped the “will-they-or-won’t-they-survive” sort of drama, especially in today’s franchise-building efforts.  Was there anyone seriously concerned they would kill off Iron Man at the end of The Avengers?  No.  They had to invent an entirely original character, because they won’t even allow the movie’s antagonist a just demise.

"We'll let you go if you promise not to do it again."

I’ll give The Avengers credit in that you actually see people on the streets reacting to the carnage occurring around them.  Sure, it’s basically just a couple dozen or so people, but at least it doesn’t give the impression this is some vacated cityscape as in Man Of Steel.

Why are these movies so afraid of collateral damage?  It’s of thematic importance our heroes have something to fight for, and yet we rarely see it.  Without showing us the danger these scenarios ring completely hollow.  Do studios think we’re too squeamish to imagine our heroes might fail and our world will be dominated by these aliens?  Or do they think such thinking will eliminate the “fun factor” if we know innocent civilians are out amongst the chaos?

I once watched a film where a demigod opened up an interdimensional portal over New York, let loose a colossal monster which then began stomping cars and crushing buildings, and only a small mismatched band of heroes could hope to save everyone. 

It also had a decent run time

It was called Ghostbusters, and I would argue not too many people  would accuse it of being a dour or unfun movie.  In fact, not only is Ghostbusters widely considered  a classic genre film, it does so entirely without avoiding the subjects of consequence and collateral damage.  One could even say some of the movie’s best bits are derived  from these very themes.

I’ve noticed modern films have a surprising lack of violence, or rather, the lack of consequence to the violence.  When I was a child, we had G.I. Joe and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  These shows, respectively, were about a paramilitary force loaded to the teeth with the most advanced weaponry, and set of bipedal reptiles trained in the ancient and deadly art of ninjistu, the martial art of ninja assassins.

These are shows whose very concepts are unavoidably linked to violence.  But each one found a way around using what, in most circumstances, would be lethal force to defeat their adversaries (always bent on world domination).  The favorite fix-it for these shows was the change from weapons utilizing bullets to those of lasers.

 To be fair, the whole show is incredibly weird

The change in weaponry has a dual effect: firstly in that the weapon can pretty much magically change its use and level of damage and effect; and secondly that impressionable children may feel less apt to dig out their father’s laser gun and unwittingly zap someone to death.  Mostly, it’s for the latter.  In accordance with our culture’s strange rules, violence must be, in all its forms, shielded from the eyes of the youth.  This is why these television shows, and the many that preceded them and those that followed, used the same device to bring violent concepts safely into the hearts and minds of the youth.

Yeah, this is real

And how a comic book about lethal mutant ninja monsters who kill people

became a kid’s t-shirt and a catchphrase.

How does this relate to consequence?  I’m getting there.  See, the other thing shows about violent confrontation need is some level of of consequence.  Having heroes who can perform all manner of martial art gymnastics is good and well, but they’ll probably need to hit something if you want to keep kids watching.  But if our heroes are beating people mercilessly, won’t that encourage violent behavior in children? Enter the robots.

A robot feels nothing.  You can chop it apart, beat it, shoot it (with lasers), blow it up, mangle its innards, and it can still be shown on Saturday morning television to kids of all ages.  Loop hole granted.

When we’re talking about live-action films, we’re in the same boat.  But here, we’re also talking about a lot more money at stake.  Films are more commerce than art anymore, and anyone who disagrees can look at the sudden prevalence of PG-13 action films for proof.

Movies rarely receive the PG-13 rating by chance.  Much planning, editing, and giving up of artistic ground takes place before finally being granted this rating instead of a dreaded R rating.  Film studios recognize that kids under 17 will be turned away from R-rated films, and thus pressure filmmakers into making PG-13 movies and even frequently take finished films away from said filmmakers and edit them down.

Take the new RoboCop, a remake of one of the most famously violent movies ever made.  Iconic sequences from the original mostly involve vast amounts of blood and gore as the titled protagonist blasts round after round into corporate and streets scum, shredding their flesh apart in an amazing and also disgusting display of red violence.  

Probably not lasers doing that

In one particular sequence, a corporate upstart is horrifically killed when a test of one of the corporation’s new products goes wrong.  The big machine pumps hundreds of rounds into the poor man’s already dead and mutilated body, implicating not only the companies shocked executives as spectators, but also us, the audience at home.  We’re meant to be completely taken aback by what we’ve witnessed, similar to the titular character’s human demise early in the film.  

Not quite the same, ahem, impact

The remake completely sanitizes these moments by removing the gore, changing RoboCop’s “death” to a blocked out but colorful CGI explosion, and removing the violence of the original film’s lethal bullets by giving our hero a taser gun and making his enemies robots instead of humans.  Seeing a human body torn to shreds by an array of bullets is affecting.  Seeing non-blinking cyborgs with sparks bouncing off of them is quite a bit less so.  It may open the movie up to a broader audience, but it’s also a loss for the film’s integrity.  But worse, while we might suddenly be treated to a litany of ways to dispatch robots, and thus technically more violence, we are not shown or feeling the consequences of such violence.  We, the audience, are not asked to think about these acts, which may have a far more damnable effect.

If there is no consequence to violence, than what’s to stop an impressionable mind from committing it on another?  If all of the adversaries of one’s heroes are unfeeling combatants, why not begin assuming everyone who stands against you is equally unfeeling and undeserving of remorse?

Continuing on, the lack of consequence in choice in these more modern films may also have a damning effect in itself.  I return to the character of Peter Parker.  He causes his uncle to die.  He reveals his secret identity to his love interest. He reveals his secret identity to his love interest’s father.  He basically gets that guy killed.  What recourse does he suffer for these acts? Nothing.  He ends the film on good terms with his love interest, who’s father he had promised he’d leave her alone in a last dying wish scenario.  His bad behavior is rewarded throughout the entire film, while his primary antagonist, Dr. Connors (Lizard) is a man trying desperately to save lives and his own career but is treated as a vile enemy.  Something is off here.

 Yet he still gets the girl

I feel like I’m not being particularly constructive here.  I really could go on and on about other movies which deal with choice, consequence, and violence incredibly well.  But let me try and end this on a more conciliatory note.  I believe this new iteration can be turned around.  They can make it all built toward something so character-shaping and interesting it would make for a very good turnaround.  Something even Sam Raimi’s much better Spider-Man movies messed up.

Fans of the comics know exactly what I’m talking about.

New Transformers Age of Extinction trailer

Pretty sure this is going to be a load of crap, but hey, my love of Beast Wars still carries through. Hope this is awesome.

Aaron Paul in talks to reprise Jesse Pinkman

So reports Rolling Stone here. I am worried this thing is going to fall flat on its face. I love Breaking Bad. I want Breaking Bad to go down as one of the greatest TV shows ever, but I don't want it to be tainted by spin-off that's not as good. That would depress me, and part of me knows that is exactly what this will be. BB had a purpose, a vision, an idea that was at its center. As far as I can tell this does not.

New Matrix Prequel trilogy on the way?

According to Ain't It Cool News, it's a real possibility. Personally, I am okay with this, but I see franchises as a living canvas new creators can leave their mark on. Some kid out there grew up with the Matrix films. They influenced his tastes, sensibilities, changing his life in ways only he can see. I want this kid, now grown up, to have a go at a Matrix film. What did they mean to him and can he translate it to a new audience, maybe influencing a new child?

It's part of what makes Doctor Who so special. It's organic. It changes with the generations. It's like the oral tradition, changing with each storyteller, and it will only continue to grow, to shift, to transform.

I think, in the end, my favorite part of the Matrix franchise was the Animatrix shorts, specifically the ones dealing with the rise of the machines. They were philosophical and interesting, harking back to the greatness of the first in the series. Apparently the new films would have nothing to do with these, which is okay.