A different jew
July 31 2004 - 5:41 p.m.

Today Chris revealed to me that I was not, in fact, his first choice for the role of A Nihilistic Christian in Even God Plays Dice. Rather, I was a last-minute substitution for a preferred player! The defining performance of my career, and I wasn't even the guy he wanted! I threw my Oscar at him.

More apartment hunting yielded more failures. And while I was out pounding the pavement, my apartment was being viewed by others. It made me feel really icky. I thought I would be okay with it... but when I came home I started counting my toys and action figures.

Some days, it's a struggle just to give up your seat on the subway to an elderly person.

Bob for Bond
July 31 2004 - 11:50 a.m.

I just had a thought: what if we let Bob Tuckus be the next James Bond? Keep the accent, change the skin colour? Is there anything wrong with that? I've been reviewing white brits in my mind since Wednesday, and can't really think of any I'd be particularly thrilled to see don the tux. But Bob Tuckus, that's where it's at, man. "The Operative" becomes "The Agent."

"Tuckus. Bob Tuckus."

Give it some thought.

Happy Birthday Harry!
July 31 2004 - 10:21 a.m.

Thanks for being born and saving us all from Lord Voldy-thingy.

This is for you. (And everyone else. And holy cow.)

I can imagine it better
July 30 2004 - 10:43 p.m.

Well, it's gotta be the first sign of the apocalypse; I ran out of comic books today. I had a few Free Comic Book Day issues left over and went to the Second Cup to read them; then I realized that they mostly suck, and I was left with nothing to do while sipping my rather poor coffee. It was debateably sad.

But on the whole, it was a good day. I'm in a very good place, subculture-wise; I had a look at the pages I wrote on Wednesday, and was relieved to find that they don't suck. I've got a few more things to do before The Tough Half, but I'm not apprehensive. I listened to the Desperado commentary to get juiced up about on-the-run filmmaking, and then I contemplated the perfection of this:

which was a gift from Courtney last year when the One Minute Film Festival got off the ground. The pic is from the set of Night of the Centipedes. And it's one of those things, like the big pink pig, that just pulls it all together for me.

As I told Mark tonight, this is no night to be home alone and single in the city of Toronto. Enjoy what you've got while you've got it...

Post op
July 30 2004 - 12:55 p.m.

Big Fuckin' Hellboy is going to be all right. I've just come out of surgery. I removed his original plastic spine and replaced it with a steel one; it's not a perfect fit, but he holds together well enough to allow him to stand up on my desk and look mean, which is really all he was ever called upon to do in the first place. Upon the conclusion of the procedure I actually slumped back in the chair, wiped the sweat from my brow, and said "He's Big Fuckin' Hellboy again. Everything's going to be all right."

Thanks to everyone who called the past hour to express their support for Big Fuckin' Hellboy. It's remarkable just how meaningful the big red guy has become to so many people. Gift donations of Hellboy DVDs will be gratefully appreciated.

The tallest and the smallest
July 30 2004 - 12:14 p.m.

Aw yeah. Chewbacca the Wookiee... talkin' to Yoda.

In a surprising turn of events, I just ripped Big Fuckin' Hellboy in half. I was adjusting his torso to make him stand up better, and he came apart, and not in a fixable way. His central axel actually tore in half. This is quite the conundrum.

And in other, non-halfa-Hellboy-related news, I WON THE LOTTERY!!! I WON THE FUCKING LOTTERY!!!! SO LONG, SUCKERS! ME AND MY TEN BUCKS WILL SEE YOU IN MEHICO!!!!

If I had known the back seat was on fire, why would I have gotten in the van?
July 30 2004 - 11:11 a.m.

"Oh yeah see the thing about that is... nya na na na na na na na na na na!"
        - Mark Hamill

I've got no freaking clue what to do with my time today. I know I have tasks that I need to perform, and they're in my day planner, but I feel like if I never open my day planner, those tasks don't actually exist. Is this what being stoned is like?

Things I oughta do today:

• Revise those pages I wrote on Wednesday
• Scour the Globe and Mail for apartments
• Clean the apartment, which currently smells like ass and looks like... um... [tries to think of appropriate corrolary to "ass"]... balls? hairy nipples? extruded labial lips?
• Finish building that thing that is currently in tiny pieces all over my kitchen table, but which I can't discuss until at least Sunday
• Watch one or the other of the movies I have borrowed from friends, as they are doubtlessly wondering when they shall get them back
• Go for a lengthy bike ride, improving both my physical fitness and mental clarity
• Work on a movie, write a script, read a book, for god's sake do something productive

But this all sounds so painfully dull, darling. Things I wanna do today:

• Watch "Ariel"
• Read Astonishing X-Men #3 another five times
• Lie around on the ground, pretending to be the cat
• Practice with the lightsabre
• Buy things I don't need, with money I don't have

I tell ya what is fun, though, is that I brought home a box of script drafts from the '90s, that was gathering dust at my parents' place. Among the ruins, both drafts of 3A6, the early workings of my mega fantasy trilogy, drafts of both A Pound of Flesh and Keramidas, and some early Bone Daddy futzin'. I might post some pages from those in the future, because it's damn funny to see that I couldn't write worth a damn back in the day, and that when comparing those materials to my current work, absolutely nothing has changed! Ah, character arcs.

Do you ever get the feeling, gentle reader, that this blog is nothing more than a rolling wheel of self-perpetuating procrastination made pixely?

Fine. I'm up. I'm going. Stop bothering me.

"Wheel never stops turnin', Badger." - Mal
"That only matters to the people on the rim." - Badger

Finest pipe-weed in the Southfarthing
July 29 2004 - 10:34 a.m.

How old do you have to be to start smoking a pipe? Cuz I fully intend to start smoking a pipe. It's always been a "someday" thing, but sooner is definitely preferable to later. I'm not talking all the time here, I just mean on a fine summer night when visiting a lake, or maybe on an extremely cold winter night when locked away in my study reading a very old book. Would I own a smoking jacket for such a purpose? Perhaps.

I come by this honestly; both my grandfathers smoked pipes. I am concerned that you need to be a grandfather to do it, but there are photos of them smoking their pipes when they weren't much older than I am now. And let's face it: the smell of cigarette smoke is just about the most nauseating thing on earth, with cigar smoke being not far behind, but pipe smoke? That is sweet fucking ambrosia, my friends. Pipe smoke is where it's at.

Myrna and Shmyrna
July 29 2004 - 10:13 a.m.

All right, someone has got to drop-kick Team Midget into a gorge, a sump, or off of a damn airplane. Enough is enough already. I love how Phil Keoghan is visibly sick of having icky Myrna throw her arms around him at the end of each leg of the race. Down with Team Midget! The Brothers' rolling cry of "bitch!" last week is already pretty much my favourite Amazing Race clip, ever.

Do you ever have whole days where you just really miss Riker? This astonishingly detailed, 19-page interview oughta do it.

And finally, it's official: the deadline for submissions for the One Minute Film & Video Festival has been extended 30 days, to August 31. Now all procrastinators are utterly without excuse. Link to the web site goes here...

I can hear your face in my mind
July 29 2004 - 12:46 a.m.

As it turns out, there's absolutely nowhere to dance in the city of Toronto at 11:30 on a Wednesday. Well, nowhere good, anyway. But that's all right, cuz I'm a virtuous man.

I dropped off the grid for about seven hours today and all hell broke loose, or so I deduced when I finally checked my messages. The most extreme example was my parents leaving the country without notice for two weeks. Phones, man. Can't live with 'em, can't throw 'em in the damned lake.

And heeeeeeeeeeeeeeere's Batman! That's some mighty good Batman. I especially like the way you almost don't ever get to see Batman.

A place called home (The Process, pt. 5c)
July 28 2004 - 5:31 p.m.

It had been about an hour and twenty minutes of writing, at 4:00, when I knew I was actually going to do what I've been promising myself I'd do since last night, and make a run for the end of the third act. I'd started on page 78 and worked both backwards and forward, fixing little things, trying to find the story, find the path, and then there it was and I decided to go for it and get this draft done today, three days ahead of schedule, in spite of the massive, unrelenting procrastination and blockage that has gripped me for almost two full weeks. It was when I was cruising past page 90 a half an hour later that I knew that the script would exceed my intended 100 pages even by exactly four, and it was around 5:25 when I reached the bottom of the 104th page and wrote "the end."

Still lots to do. A couple of key points yet to add, and a whole bunch of "smoothing out" yet to be accomplished, but... yeah. Since I was fifteen years old (rebellious me), I have poured myself a dram of scotch to commemorate the conclusion of a feature screenplay draft, and I'm sippin' scotch right now.

Coffee, and iced tea, and whiskey (The Process, pt. 5b)
July 28 2004 - 4:02 p.m.

That's it, mark the time, we're going for it. It's him or me this time. No one gets out alive!

Quagmire (The Process, pt. 5a)
July 28 2004 - 2:50 p.m.

"A long kiss, leading elsewhere..."

Who writes something like that? No wonder I keep opening this file and staring at it for an hour before giving up. There is no human in creation with the ability to follow that fucking sentence. God-dammit.

Racing ahead of the rainstorm
July 28 2004 - 1:54 p.m.

I'm usually a step or two behind Whedon, but this week I'm apparently around five days ahead of him. Just last week I was contemplating the fact that when you ask someone what superpower they'd like to have, a great percentage will answer "flying." As would I. The problem with this is that flying, when not coupled with other superpowers, is not particularly superheroic. Without super strength or invinceability or some other form of superhumanness, you're basically just an early warning system. You show up at the scene of the crime before the cops... and then either a) fly off to get the cops or b) get shot.

And then, this notion proved to be the the lead-in for Astonishing X-Men #3, an issue so freakin' good I'll probably write to Marvel about it just to see my name in print. Yeah. I'm that guy.

I was talking to Chandra about this, and we got to talking about primary school events of various natures, and I recalled another great event in the history of flight: Balloon Day. Hands up if you had Balloon Day at your school. This was the thing where the kids would be sent out to get sponsors to buy helium-filled balloons, with the money going to the Inner City Angels (I wonder if they still exist? Does Toronto still have an Inner City?). Then you'd get all your balloons together on Balloon Day, and attach tags with your name and address on 'em. You'd go out to the school field... and let your balloons go. The notion was that if your balloon got somewhere really spectacular, like Buffalo, the person who found it would send the tag back to you with their address, and you'd have a story to tell about how your balloon went farther than any other balloon in the history of mankind. They always told us that one balloon got to, like, Hawaii or something, but that was probably propaganda created to make us sell more sponsorships.

Anyways, Balloon Day was probably my favourite regular school event. I'd always have a semi-respectable 8 or 10 balloons, but the real aces in the class (who were, without fail, usually the two prettiest girls, and the two most athletic boys) would have fifty or sixty of the fucking things, and would need entire entourages to help them carry them, lest they be swept away in the morning wind like Mary Poppins. And then there was that single crazy moment when the bell rang and two or three hundred balloons went skyward, all at once.

Some yonk figured out that we were killing every small animal in the GTA and beyond by doing this, and Balloon Day was kaput by the time I finished Grade 8. Thus were generations of children denied the simple pleasures of being, just once, formally permitted to do what all kids want to do with helium balloons anyway. It's moments like this that I really treasure growing up in environmentally-reckless times.

[aha. You thought it was another geeky posting, but it was actually a touching story from my childhood. suckahs!]

Good lord, can't we all just talk about our FEELINGS?!
July 28 2004 - 10:11 a.m.

So I was taken to task yesterday for geeking up the works here at Tederick.com. And it's true, it's been pretty much deep code only for the last five days, because of Comic Con. Allow me to degeekify:

Things I've been talking about, and what they mean

• "Comic Con:" The annual convention for comic book folk, which has expanded into a massive multi-event multi-day multi-franchise travelling road show for the entire fantasy universe, including films. San Diego based. Many revelations occur at Comic Con, regarding the future of the fantasy franchises. This year was the most fully-loaded slate yet.
  
  
• "Serenity:" This is the feature film version of Joss Whedon's doomed television series, Firefly. Two words: space cowboys. (Not to be confused with Space Cowboys, the Clint Eastwood movie, as Jeff did last night.) I am looking more forward to this than Revenge of the Sith. Own that in your mind for a minute.
  
  
• "Morena:" Morena Baccarin, actress playing Serenity's onboard legalized prostitute, Inara Sera. If God ever made man's dream into flesh, she is it.
  
  
• "Revenge of the Sith:" The last-ever Star Wars movie. Darth Vader is a "sith." He's gonna go hardcore on Obi-Wan's ass. It's a thing.
  
  
• "Star Wars DVDs:" They're releasing episodes 4 through 6 on DVD in September, except that they're fucking with the movies to an even greater extent than they did for the "special editions" in 1997, meaning that the true classics of cinema known as Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi have yet to be made available on legal DVD. Hence the piracy. You guys know how I feel about this, and why.
  
  
• "Sin City:" Robert Rodriguez's unprecedentedly faithful adaptation of Frank Miller's comic book series, about a nasty city and the nasty things that go on there. Potentially the coolest thing ever.
  
  
• "Batman Begins:" There's another Batman movie next summer. Hopefully it's better than Catwoman.

And that's it. I'm off the skag, Swanny, I'm done with that shite! The Sick Boy method. He's always been lacking in moral fibre. He knows a lot about Sean Connery... that's hardly a substitute. I'm not even going to talk about Brosnan.

Nights in white satin
July 28 2004 - 12:50 a.m.

So tonight, Lise, who is in all ways an irrefutable genius, threw a Freaks & Geeks prom to celebrate our viewing of the final episode. Being as that it was a F&G prom, it was a circa-1980 prom, so some costuming thought was required. I had about ten bucks to spend on the whole thing so I ended up in a kind of modified Miami Vice-ish look which is of course from later in the decade, but Tara, goddess of all things 1981, assured me that I looked sufficiently "New Wave" to pass. I have no idea what any of these things are, by the way, I was just doing what I could. The Darth Vader t-shirt was both an assertion of my inner geek, and yet another call-out to ROTS.

[Holy shit. The acronym for Revenge of the Sith spells "rots." That ain't gonna go well.]

I was also music guy for the night, so I stocked up my iPod with 5½ hours of tracks that had appeared on the show. It was good, because it massively broadened my exposure to bands like Styx, Journey, The Who, Supertramp, and Van Halen. I was veritably forced at gunpoint to conclude the evening with "Stairway to Heaven," and it was at that moment that the Freaks & Geeks prom became its most uncanny immitation of my previous two proms: a few couples slow-dancing, a bunch of nerdy guys watching from the sidelines, and one whacked out girl flower-childing by her self.

But as I noted on Friday, and shall reiterate now, boy howdy, there's nothing like a little ABBA or Jackson Five to get a bunch of folk onto a dancefloor. Myself included! What the hell is happening to me?!

Now, to bed, to deal with the sugar hangover. Tomorrow, the degeekifying of Tederick.com. I promise.

I think I'm going to Katmandu
July 27 2004 - 2:25 p.m.

Do you ever get the feeling that this whole King Kong thing is just a gigantic joke that Peter Jackson and his friends are playing on the entire Hollywood community? After which, they'll retreat to their Wellington fortress and cackle maniacally for years on end? God, I hope so.

I'm stuck in the mud in many aspects of my life right now. Script: stuck. Apartment hunt: stuck. My own apartment: muddy. One minute movie: mired. And for some reason, whole days seem to race past without my getting anything coherent done. It's a very strange time, given that a week ago, I was on top of the frickin' world. Frustration, I dub thee "now."

Thank god for disco.

My monkey eyes will see right through you
July 27 2004 - 9:34 a.m.

Get ready to feel reeeeeeeaaaaaally sick to your stomach...

• Here's a nice fat list of confirmed and rumoured changes to the Star Wars trilogy DVDs, including a few screen caps. If you scroll down below the initial report, you'll find:
  • Video of Hayden as a ghost at the end of ROTJ
  • Shots of the new Jabba from ANH
  • Audio of Temeura Morrison doing Boba Fett's voice
  • Most astonishingly of all, the Emperor scene from ESB, with new dialogue altering the nature of the conversation between Palpatine and Vader... apparently (as I've expected for quite some time), Anakin was less aware of his son's birth than we've thought

Arrrrrrh. Remember this old saw? Sign the damn petition!

If you need to cleanse your eardrums after listening to that audio, you can listen to William Shatner singing "Common People".

Ruttin' mudders
July 26 2004 - 8:47 p.m.

The complete audio of the Serenity presentation can be found here. It's a fairly indistinguishable most of the time, and it's a hell of a tease given that you can hear the trailer but not see the trailer. Hopefully that sucker will get posted one of these days.

Kitty kitty cat bone
July 26 2004 - 4:42 p.m.

Well, I might be wrong, but I think this is the most fun I've had writing a review of anything, ever.

I got a Wookiee on my back
July 26 2004 - 10:26 a.m.

Well, I'm all Comic Conned out. The final bit of news is that those who got to borrow a copy of the Star Wars Trilogy DVD set discovered that all those changes you've heard about have indeed taken place, including (shudder) Hayden replacing Sebastian Shaw as Anakin at the end of Jedi. This is why, as I just remembered, it's time to run up the Jolly Roger.

Unrelatedly good news: Ren & Stimpy: Seasons 1 & 2 will street on shinydisk on October 12.

It was good to see The Bourne Supremacy do so phenomenally well over the weekend (and Catwoman so phenomenally badly). I like it when a good movie exceeds expectations at the box office. It revives my faith in humanity.

Take my love, take my land...
July 25 2004 - 9:56 p.m.

They're pouring in now, the boards are mostly inaccessible, but they're out there. Sign up to be a Browncoat if you haven't already, then check out the Serenity Board thread... here's a couple from Fireflyfans.net (1, 2)... I'm sure there are more but it's going to take days to sort through all this. Here's the best part:

That's right, I can colour-correct with the best of 'em! No words. Too happy. I love my captain.

What a weekend! What a time to be a geek!

Craft services
July 25 2004 - 9:21 p.m.

Mark the date, because as of today, Tederick.com has a complete Top Ten Films of 2004 list. Now, it's not a perfect list, it's not a great list, and god willing, at least five or six more movies will be decent enough this year to kick the bottom five or six films off the list and into the honourable mentions, but the point is that if I fell asleep tonight and woke up on New Year's Day, I would have a list for you. So there.

We're continuing to wait for word of the Serenity panel at Comic Con. Waiting, waiting, waiting... wondering... pronouncing "Morena" in our heads and growing logy with lust...

Apartment hunting continues to rankle. My place is being shown next weekend... might be time to crank up the Tederick.com webcam.

Pass the goddamn butter
July 25 2004 - 1:25 p.m.

Daniel set me an "obstruction" today on all my future film reviews, saying that I can no longer say that a film is ostensibly good in all regards but that it just didn't "get there for me." I think the best example of this remains my original Spider-Man review, but I can't recall having done it more recently... still, he's right, it's a good pattern to avoid. Thank goodness I'm not an actual film critic, and that it doesn't matter whether I can write or not. I was reading some of Ebert's reviews for the week, and say what you will about the guy, but that fella can actually write. He contrasts nicely against the bevvy of morons at the Globe and Mail, whose collective writing skill is so phenomenally poor, and constantly declining further, that every time I go into the paper to see what they're up to, the quality has noticeably dipped from the time before. I mean, these guys (and gals) just can't write. At least, however, Rick Groen's otherwise worthless review of Catwoman has the best title of any of the slag reviews of that flick: "Bad Kitty! Very Bad Kitty!"

And on, and on, and on
July 25 2004 - 9:50 a.m.

The Comic Con news never stops!

Here's a pair of character posters from Sin City, either of which would make a fine addition to my wall:

Here's Cillian Murphy as Dr. Crane in Batman Begins, notable only for the way the glasses subtly approximate the shape of Scarecrow's eyes. Nice.

And here's the 5-disk Return of the King DVD set. The extra disk, this time, will be a featurette on Howard Shore's work creating the LOTR symphony, and the includ-o-gadget will be a Minas Tirith-shaped jewellery box. (There's apparently a companion Minas Morgul box that you can get, too... the Two Towers, at last!)

The Serenity panel closes the event, in about eight hours. Still plenty of time for me to get on a plane...

THE TITLE I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR SINCE I WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD
July 24 2004 - 5:42 p.m.

Fuckin' A. I was so excited when this came up (in Starwars.com's tasty little "title reveal" video presentation) that I actually whooped. This is the real deal, man, this is what we've all been waiting for. This ties everything together: being a kid, waiting for the third movie to come out, hearing it was called Revenge of the Jedi... then the famous switchup, and twenty years of waiting to learn why, as Georgie boy explained it at the time, "Revenge is not a Jedi trait."

MWA HA HA HA HA HA.

Jason has already ordered t-shirts for us.

And once again, I leave the house for five fucking minutes and something huge drops in Star Wars land! Fuck!

In the additional-news department, Ewoks, Droids, Clone Wars, and the 2 Ewok movies are all on their way to DVD before the release of Episode III. I can no longer afford to be retired...!

Black could be anywhere
July 24 2004 - 10:45 a.m.

Just in from Comic Con, two of the bestest toy previews anywhere. On the left is the Unleashed IG-88 (!!), and on the right, the only figure left from my top ten most-wanted figures list, Celebration Amidala. I guess it's all downhill from here.

It's just a moment in time
July 24 2004 - 1:53 a.m.

Liz and Ron's wedding today was absolutely magnificent. Milena will tell you that I sobbed like a baby during the ceremony, which isn't even close to accurate, but there were tears. Liz looked beautiful. I could not have been happier than to share the day with Ev, and Jo, and Milena, and Mark, and the "new guy," because for whatever reason, no matter how frequently or infrequently we see each other, this group somehow remains indestructible, and when we get together, we're all kids again. So much so that when "Take a Chance on Me" came on, we all flooded onto the dancefloor and picked up doing our cheesy old disco routine as though not a moment had passed since the last time we'd done it, nine whole damn years ago. And then we just kept dancing, like it was just another semi-formal. Mark and Milena did their Michael Jackson moves as though they'd been practicing for weeks, and brought the house down. And somehow, yoga has opened up my body and made it possible for me to keep a rhythm. For about twenty minutes tonight, I was sixteen years old again.

But I'm not, and we're not, and one of us has actually gone the whole hog and gotten married and found herself the perfect life. It couldn't be a more life-affirming event to witness.

And Mark got into York. He's going back to school for the next three years in music and concurrent ed. Someone's going to have to break it to him gently about giving up the burlesque...

To Liz and Ron, all the happiness in the world, and my deepest thanks for letting me be a part of your big day.

The fever broke
July 23 2004 - 9:03 a.m.

Happy birthday to Daniel Radcliffe, who's 15 today and is therefore... gasp...!! ... one year older than Harry Potter in Goblet of Fire! Oh, no! Recast! Recast!

People are such wankers.

There's also a horrible rumour floating around that due to other commitments, John Williams won't be available to score Goblet. I think this could well be bulljive, as to my knowledge, his only contracts for '05 are Memoirs of a Geisha and Episode III, and that oughta leave plenty of time for Harry, provided a semi-final cut gets done by next summer.

In the big comic news of the hour (with Comic Con going on, this kind of thing changes rapidly), Darren Aronofsky has inked a deal to do Watchmen on the big screen. Which means nothing to me, having not yet read the comics, nor seen any of his movies. But hey, it's bound to interest somebody!

And then there's Death: The High Cost of Living, which is looking increasingly firm with a Gaiman script based on his own work, and even the possibility that the man himself will direct. How this is going to work is beyond me, but I'm feeling optimistic today, so I'll leave it at that.

I have to admit, Catwoman is the must-see movie this weekend for me. Even though I know it's going to be absolutely excruciating, I just can't contain my vindictive, gleeful gleefullity. Bourne Supremacy's a better bet, but both will have to wait...

Wow Chris, that's a hell of a John Thomas
July 22 2004 - 11:43 p.m.

So I don't know what happened today, but everybody decided to call me. I got like 35 phone calls today. I would come back to my phone after an absence and find half a dozen messages waiting, and would receive two more calls while trying to check the aforementioned messages. Are you seeing the problem here? I FUCKING HATE PHONES!!! Argh. Supremely frustrating little blighters, aren't they?

[This is by no means a condemnation of any of the people who called me today, as they could not have possibly known that I was being swarmed with calls for no particularly good reason. It was just one of those rare convergences. and I do hate phones generally.]

I'm in the midst of a fine Quantum Leap craving; I didn't buy Season One when it came out on DVD in June and now I think that was an error. I chanced upon a bit of the score from "Lee Harvey Oswald," and it really took me back. There was a time when that show was my favourite thing on earth. I know it's silly and cheesy now, but hey, so's Wonder Woman. If I get through this month on budget - which right now is looking risky, but possible - I'm buyin' the mo-fo on August 1.

Or maybe I'll buy this. I've always wanted a naked Rolf, and it would be a good place to put my Fozzy and Kermit, and then consider my short delve into the Muppet line gloriously finished.

And I went to see a flick today called Control Room; there's just no way around the towering Jesus-based rage I am developing towards the Bush administration. Except that it's not even slightly Jesus-based. Otherwise, it's unstoppable. It made me want to take Amelia up on her offer to go over to the Middle East and make a documentary and get shot at, just for the sake of not living on this side of the equation any more.

Gorram!
July 22 2004 - 5:12 p.m.

Official teaser poster for Serenity:

And in case it wasn't before (and it really was), Comic Con is the place to be this weekend. Not only will Joss be there... but Nathan, Gina, Adam, Summer, Jewel, Ron, Alan, Sean, and Morena will all there...!!! and they'll be showing the first footage from the flick. Fuck me I wish I were in San Diego.

(See how the Star Wars / Serenity Tederick.com ping-pong game got refined to a 42-minute volley return today? That's a whole thing, that.)

Pray for us sinners now and in the hour of our death
July 22 2004 - 4:30 p.m.

It's too fucking hot. It's too hot to do anything. It's too hot to blog, journalize, write, watch tv, or do anything other than lie naked in the stream of a very large and powerful desk fan. I remain resolute in my refusal to install my air conditioner before I move out, and with the fever theoretically breaking tomorrow, I think I can last... but holy doodle, it's hot.

This is pretty much illegal for me to post, but I'm doing it anyway cuz it got me so excited I actually dreamed about it. I'll just put a little bit:

Yeah. Fuckin' Master Yoda. Yeah. That would be the "Anakin's gone evil what the FUCK do we do now?" scene, if I'm not mistaken.

Saw Amanda today for lunch for the first time in quite a while; she now works in that crazy box hovering over McCaul. I look forward to one day doing a disaster movie based in Toronto, and knocking that public menace off its struts.

"Crowning Cockburn?!" Stop being famous, you crazy video artist you!

GOLDSMITH: 1929-2004
July 22 2004 - 10:28 a.m.

This is just freaking bizarre: I was listening to some of the Supergirl score last night and thinking to myself that Jerry Goldsmith probably wouldn't be alive for much longer... and I woke up this morning and got the news that he'd died. I may have killed him with my brain.

Shit, where to start? My relationship with Goldsmith is a long and troubled one. When I don't like a Goldsmith score, I really don't like it. I get mad at the movie because of it. Growing up, I always viewed him as the anti-Williams, and I guess that's how many people think of him, the other half of the dividing line of that generation of big, brassy orchestrators.

But there's no denying that the man has written some of the greatest film scores of all time. Personal faves, no particular order:

• Supergirl
• Alien, for fuck's sakes!
• Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The scores for 5, 8, 9, and 10 are all his, as well, but are largely derivative of the original work. I really like the opening cue for Insurrection, though. And, of course, his TMP theme was adapted into the weekly theme for Star Trek: The Next Generation, and he wrote the theme for Voyager, which could very well be the best thing about the whole damn series.
• Planet of the Apes
• Total Recall
• Chinatown!

So, raise a glass for the old guy. He'll be missed.

Batterdammerung
July 22 2004 - 12:35 a.m.

Holy Sutton Hoo, it's thick as pea soup out there. I'm not talking about fog; I mean humidity. I might as well be talking about fog. It's that thick. Today was also a smog day in T.O., and I foolishly went downtown at around midday to try to find a few things (and, even more foolishly, left my fucking wallet at home), and by the time I was slogging back up University, I felt like I had a heavyset feline sitting on my chest. It was icky and gross. It still is. I haven't felt like this since I was 8,000 feet over Palm Springs. Smog doesn't usually bother me... but I guess I'm gettin' old or something, cuz it's hitting me hard today.

Milena, on the other hand, hasn't aged a day. She's in town for Liz's wedding on Friday, and having not seen her in at least 6 years or so, I can firmly say that she looks exactly, precisely like I remember her... i.e., like a million damn dollars. Spooky! May we all be so lucky.

All things being equal, today was definitely a day to be wearing a Superman t-shirt, so I did. It gave a good beat to my stride. People are always calling out to me when I wear the shirt, "hey Superman!", "look, it's Superman!" or just plain "SUPERMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!", but Adam got me a deck of Supergirl trading cards last week, so I've stuck one in my wallet where my ID should be and now when someone yells out to me, I correct them. "No no no. Supergirl."

Flyswatter
July 21 2004 - 11:12 a.m.

Jason has returned from his self-imposed blogging absentia. Why? Liquid donuts.

We didn't get that house we applied for on Sunday. This sucks, cuz I've spent the last two days telling people about it, and working myself into a right frenzy of excitement over the whole deal. Now I am dismayed.

And I'm killing flies right and left - some kind of evil space spore must have exploded in my kitchen, because all of a sudden there's three dozen flies living in my kitchen window. I kill them, they die, it's a whole life-or-death struggle miniaturized to Lego proportions. But I grow weary of slaughter...

So twisted up that I'm ready to declare an X-men emergency, I depart for warmer climes and different temptations.

CRUSH KILL DESTROY
July 21 2004 - 12:52 a.m.

So it seems that for the third time in my life, I'm going to have to worry about finding a tux, renting a limo, getting a corsage, and asking that really cute girl to be my date. Yup, I'm going to the damned prom. Again.

It's a Freaks & Geeks prom, of course, to celebrate the last episode, and it comes jam-packed with a 1980s theme and all kinds of enforced nerdiness, which oughta suit me just fine. I think it's the best idea in the whole history of the world. I attribute it to Lise. Lise should never leave the city. We need her around. The fun stuff is always her idea.

Seeing as how my first two proms were floor-to-ceiling evil from start to finish, it oughta be interesting to see how this one shakes down. I haven't decided if I'm going "freak" or if I'm going "geek" yet. I guess Value Village will determine that.

To demonstrate my geekworthiness, here's a shot from the set of Episode III that put me over the moon:

And, from 1977...

Mama, I'm home.

They say follow your heart; follow it through. But how can you, when it's split in two?
July 20 2004 - 2:20 p.m.

This has taken a hell of a long time, but it's finally done; I've reviewed the four Batman films, in anticipation of both Batman Begins next year, and stupid nasty Catwoman this week. It was surprisingly hard work; I've been slamming away at it for about six weeks, but I'm reasonably happy with 'em now. You can get started with the 1989 flick right here, or shortcut to the sequels - Returns, Forever, and everybody's very favourite, good old & Robin.

Logan's Run
July 20 2004 - 10:37 a.m.

Good comedy piece on E!Online about Singer's departure from the X-franchise, written as a letter from Wolverine to Superman. I'm still really upset about this... it's like finding out that Lucas has left Star Wars. Wait... forget I said that.

Here's a bit of history that Jason dug up out of the archives: the receipt from my very first day of DVD purchasing.

On that day, I bought my first 6 DVDs; two of them (The Dark Crystal and Pee Wee's Big Adventure) were purchased elsewhere, and four were purchased at Laserland for absolutely ridiculous prices - $45 for Prince of Egypt, $37 for The Abyss, $35 for Return to Oz, $30 for Romancing the Stone. My bad luck for getting into the market a year before it went mainstream.

And yeah, this kinda needs to be seen to be believed...

Pat Roach
July 20 2004 - 9:44 a.m.

Very sad to hear that Pat Roach died over the weekend, at the age of 61, after a long fight with cancer. Besides being "that guy" in the Indiana Jones movies - anytime some big dude shows up to beat Indy into a moist pulp, it tends to be Pat Roach - he also played one of my favourite fantasy baddies of all time, General Kael in Willow. And as the last surviving human Willow fan, I thought I oughta give a shout out to the big guy. He'll be missed!

Holy Shit
July 19 2004 - 9:17 p.m.

Yeah. Clearly:

For my birthday. Shit, and I wanted DVDs...

You know it looks so good tonight
July 19 2004 - 2:44 p.m.

Do you ever have one of those days where you explode out of the gates doing work, and you're doing really good work, and the work is going really well, and yet at some point during the day, you slow-fade from doing work to just downloading massive quantities of music, and then you realize you can't remember when you started downloading music, or when you stopped doing work, but you've toasted half of your day already and everything's all fucked up? Do you ever have one of those days?

It's almost a nuance
July 19 2004 - 1:13 p.m.

One thing I can apparently no longer do at all, is properly date and time these entries. What the fuck.

New iPods! Well within the price range of certain iPod-not-having people! The downside, as Matty Price pointed out, is the lack of case or remote in the new package. Which is probably why the price is down. Expect a 60-gigger at the high price point, sometime in the near future.

Matthew recently took me to task, by the way, on the Tederick.com spelling of "Matty." He said that it's properly spelled with an "i" instead of the "y." I said, "I don't know how you spell your name, but I can assure you that the character on Tederick.com named Matty Price damn well spells his name with a Y."

For the sake of momentum
July 19 2004 - 9:28 a.m.

In the worst news ever announced by anyone ever about anything anywhere, Bryan Singer has signed on to direct Superman, at the likely expense of leaving X-Men 3 behind. This is just a heartbreaker. X3 was the comic book project I was most looking forward to for the next several years, and while I'm far more interested in seeing a Singer Superman than a McG Superman, it's absolutely criminal that things had to shake down this way. God help us when they sick a Schumacher equivalent on the X franchise. Wait, I've got an idea... let me do it! I promise to be nice and include many pretty shots of Wolverine glowering.

Meanwhile, be somewhat calmed by the fact that with Warner's purchase of MGM imminent, the legal woes that have grounded The Hobbit will be shortly made to disappear. If everything goes as planned, PJ could probably start tackling the project as soon as the end of next year, although I'm unsure if he still intends to take a swing at Lovely Bones after King Kong.

Let's have a Peter Jackson love-in appreciation moment, people. Right now, at your desks, picture endless fuzziness and muscular Kiwi legs, and smile.

This thing (on the right) has been kicking my ass; it's the Palisades Alien "special edition" mini-bust, and I think it's the best rendering of the Giger alien I've ever seen. I should have bought it when I saw it at the Snail two months ago for $60; now it's sold out there, sold out online, and the resale prices are into the hundreds. Don't procrastinate, kids, it will deny you perfect Swiss surrealism to put alongside your kick-ass green clonetrooper bust. (Poor Obi-Wan, he's hidden behind the lightsabre now because he just ain't cool enough.)

Weekend was a tough one; I was completely exhausted for pretty much all of it. I'm not sure why. I'm doing better now, though, and hope to tackle the first half of the second act of subculture this afternoon, and hopefully finish the entirety of the second act by midweek. That would be sweet. Meanwhile, apartment hunting continues apace... we looked at 3 places last night. One was filthy mcnasty, one was out of (my) price range (and had a sauna!), and the last was pretty much just right, so we applied. We'll find out on Wednesday. This house has the best quantity of basement space I've ever freakin' seen. It's a Star Wars exhibit waiting to happen.

Noticeably thin
July 18 2004 - 10:22 a.m.

Here's the guy who's playing Cedric Diggory in Goblet:

Ooooh, I hate him already. Good casting choice.

Meanwhile, Mark Burnett is saying that Survivor 11 could very well be shot here in Canada... but Canadians are still out of the running for playing the game. He just knows we'd be too good at it. BURNETT!!!

Namaste
July 17 2004 - 5:43 p.m.

My friend Andria had a reception today to open the showing of some of her sculptures at the Lonsdale Gallery. Very cool. It's great to see anyone get so far with something they're passionate about - this was the equivalent, for her, of one of us yonks opening a film. The pieces are inspired by yoga, which made going there after my session this morning fairly "and... scene!" circular. And the sculptures are wicked! In several of the pieces she really captured the sense of the process, the connection between the body and the spirit that we're all juiced up about. It was a real treat to see.

If you're in T-dot, you can see for yourself at the Lonsdale Gallery in Forest Hill. The exhibition lasts through the end of the month. Go! See! Buy stuff and make my friend rich!

UPDATE: Andria's official web site is live at www.andriakeen.com. Check it out for more pics of her stuff.

A tall tale involving fascism and a brown bear
July 17 2004 - 2:14 p.m.

Masahiro Hirakubo has the best Japanese name ever. It's even better than Masaharu Morimoto, which was already in itself perfect, and a damn sight better than Noriyuki "Pat" Morita.

Today I went to yoga for the first time in 48 years; it was surprisingly good. The first time back after a long period of awayness, somehow, tends to finds me more flexible than usual. Plus, there were newbies, and I always show off in front of the newbies. It is petty and small, and that is okay with me.

So, as it turns out, the whole thing about the unauthorized M. Night Shyamalan documentary on the Sci Fi channel was just bulljive. Or so they say. Now Sci Fi is claiming that the whole thing was just a hoax and that they've always had Shyamalan's participation. Which probably just means that Night got to them.

I don't know where I am on that guy. I think Unbreakable is one of the most perfect movies ever made and I certainly find The Sixth Sense entertaining, but Signs was irritatingly suckworthy and I am getting so sick of all the ego bullshit, like the trailers for The Village advertising it exclusively as M. Night Shyamalan's The Village as though he's William Shakespeare or Bram Stoker. Settle down and make the movies, mate; let us decide if you're any good.

Seats of Power
July 16 2004 - 8:03 p.m.

I, Robot review is up. I guess my day ended up kinda being "off," which turns tonight into a kind of work night. Which is a horrible way to spend a Friday night, but whaddayagonnado. Time is so fluid these days I rarely even know what day of the week it is any more.

By the way, you can thank/blame Mer and Amy for the blogponderance this week; they tasked me to write more last Friday, and so I have. And now my fingers are bleeding...!

I once saw a guy on Oprah who wrote in his journal every five minutes for fifty years. Whole rooms of his house were filled with journals, stacked floor-to-ceiling, dozens deep. Each entry was a single notation, such as:

11:05 - Ate can of creamed corn.
11:10 - Threw empty can of creamed corn away.
11:15 - Sat in chair. Read newspaper.
11:20 - Shagged wife.
11:25 - Sat in chair. Read newspaper.
Etc., etc., etc.

And that's gonna be me someday.

Sometimes I picture all your fingers; sometimes they're crawling down my spine
July 16 2004 - 5:02 p.m.

Okay, so that happened. I figured it was a prime opportunity to smoke the last Cuban cigar my mom brought back from her trip in February, so I sat on the porch and chomped on the stogie while sipping scotch and listening to Trespassers William on my iPod. It all seemed terribly civilized. Then I slept and dreamed of great rising waters and the inability to keep a powerboat properly anchored under such circumstances, and woke with a kind of bad acetone hangover from the entire previous day's outburst. Stripped, raw, butter, too much bread. Whatever the great flood was, it's over now. It was too much. Now I can barely type.

And kids, don't be smokin' them cigars. For the half hour or so when you're actually doing it, which is like a kind of heaven, there's a good 48 hours of misery and despair that must follow. I mean, three meals and four toothbrushings later, I can still taste the fucking thing. My hand still reeks of it. My eyes are still pale and wretched. Harsh Cuban mistress, your seductive embrace ain't worth it... but I suspect the next glimpse of your chocolate skin will win me over yet again.

Sunshine was a good cure; lots of time out in the city today with Matty Price, who at the end of it all dropped me off at Yonge and Queens Quay, which turned out to be just the thing. It was a gorgeous afternoon to be in the downtown core on foot. I bought my first Star Wars figure in six weeks, and it's looking like a scarce time for my hobbies; my toy and DVD budgets are slashed to the bone. This shiny little Spirit Obi-Wan is probably the last of his kind for a while. For some reason, Hasbro's taken to giving the ghost/holographic figures lightsabres these days; it seems odd, but I guess an armed ghost puts the "action" back in action figure. Which is a course we all should follow.

And now it's hot and I'm tired and I'm going to gnap and think about cool breezes and other sources of fresh air.

Iman and I shared many a cheroot
July 16 2004 - 9:38 a.m.

Happy Pirates of the Caribbean Day! I saw Pirates one year ago today. Of course, I was later than most people so your POTC day might have been yesterday, or the day before that, etc. You will have to find the peace of this in your own mind.

Worth noting:

• Beowulf: the Movie is moving ahead, because Hollywood simply cannot quench its post-LOTR desperation.
• Avi Arad says Fantastic Four will be "comedic."
• There's gonna be a Magnum P.I. movie but they're not letting Tom Selleck be in it. Which sucks. He's the male Lynda Carter.
• Disney is releasing Narnia, and they're already promising a cross-promotional marketing campaign that will make the LOTR campaign look staid and restrained. God fucking help us.

And my ride's here so the rest will have to wait. Never stay up late watching Letterman and eating twelve-grain bread when you're going equipment rentin' in the morning.

About 60% a labyrinth
July 15 2004 - 7:25 p.m.

Oh, the writer's life for me. Today was awesome. I didn't plan it, I didn't mean for it to happen, but somehow today I:

• wrote the short story, The Exorbitant Leer of Shirley M. Stalker;
• wrote a new 10-page short film, Cold;
• wrote a review for Before Sunset;
• rough-cut Leap to 1:29 (not bad for a 1-minute film);
• revised a short story, The Ghost Story, which will serve as the basis for another short film;
• wrote the first draft of Dave and I's collaborative "firsts" movie, The Second Cup;
• and drafted eight more pages of subculture to boot.

I am on some kind of fire.

Clearly, I'm fighting inertia here. Everything I've ever been told just might turn out to have been write all along.

When I was working at BCE Place I met a woman named Natalie. She was pale and frail and not exactly pretty, but there was something beautiful about the way she arranged her smock so that the burn scars on her left arm and travelling all the way up to her chin were almost unnoticeable at first, second, and third glance. Her husband didn't know how lucky he was to have found her, but he would soon find out.

These I met today:

Shelley is thin, with dirty blonde hair and a cold vacancy that inspires the best psychoanalysis and the worst pop songs. She's buried in a white terrycloth bathrobe and it's almost enough to conceal her hand, which is wrapped in a dirty bandage still stained brown with dried blood. She'll learn, but it'll take a while.

Deb is large, womanly, mothering, and carries a whip in one hand and a clipboard in the other. She plays chess and rolls tape, would make an excellent Survivor player, and hides the fact that she's so good at her job because beyond the four walls, she's just the same as her clients, a malady she'll never cure.

Erin is short, brunette, wears bright blue in the daytime and looks mousy with her glasses, but at night her shirt is made of diamonds and her cell phone clips into the front of her pants, enough to pull them out "just so." Two or three things I know about her are: she usually works until 4, likes it when her job is made simple, and somewhere behind her eyes she could be the most perfect thing ever. She has yet to be featured in any story.

"Quien es esa nina..."

The Exorbitant Leer of Shirley M. Stalker
July 15 2004 - 11:21 a.m.

She couldn't find the door so she went in through the window; as her fingers grappled with broadloom and she turned herself about she wondered how it could be that any house in modern civilization could be without a door, and what that could mean.

In. Out. The air was fussy, not inclined to wholesomeness or rejuvenation, and already she felt lightheaded and sick to her stomach and saw dark clouds circling only for her. As she stood up she gripped the end-table to keep from falling; it was fully ten more minutes before she could take a tentative step across that all-too-white carpet.

The ceiling was uncomfortably close. Pot lights making insect whines. The noises of outside frozen in amber at the open window; avoidable if necessary; too easily packaged and put away.

She looked back behind her and saw rough cylinders of caked earth following her along the broadloom in a kind of dance; one lilted this way, while another cut deftly to the left. Passengers, former occupants, scions of the rose bushes, dead giveaways. She felt the panic bubble up from the depths and saw the shaking get worse, but she forced herself to breathe. In. Out.

She sat down and began counting.

When she had balled up the dirt inside her shoes which were themselves crunched and distorted into as small a form as she could make, she pounced jackrabbitlike across the room, back to the window, and threw the shoes and all their damp earth back down into the hedges below; she would deal with thorns later, but right now she was getting stronger, feeling the blood pulsing in the base of her throat. Her eyes darted around the room to make ready, and then she exploded into a dead sprint, vanishing up the distant stairs. One flight. Two flights. Ripping off a bandaid all the way up to the second floor before she could fully process that she was doing it.

She stopped on a dime and clung to the bannister post and practiced her breathing. In. Out. In. Out. The throb was wild in her ears now and her lungs were filled with cotton from the run; she saw her hands draining to dull white and the complete spectrum of colour before her eyes fading to pale blue and patchy spots. Her brain was singing.

One flight, two flight, red flight, blue flight.
One flight, two flight, dead might, glue fight.
One flight, two flight, you're right, it's night.

"David?! Is anybody home?"

She felt her skin jump, then her bones, and then all the muscles and cartilege and suet; she was across the landing in two shakes and shaking in a corner by the third. The voice was bigger and louder than her own father's, which so often just sounded tired, especially at 4:32 in the afternoon. It boomed.

"Hello?!" it came again. Boom. Boom. Boom from downstairs, lying resolutely across the path of escape, stamping feet, snorting foul fussy air. Untold thumpings, rattlings, and clips. She tried not to guess, desperately forcing herself not to run the jumble in her mind like axe knife machete machine gun hand gun broadsword broadloom automatic camera tentin' pole large head-bearing pike pike scythe regular scythe handgun footgun elephant gun elephant generally many many fire ants and a bag to put them in.

Her head was looking to her right; she couldn't remember having asked it to. She scrunched open her eyes just a peep. Through a cracked door she could see blue; she could see glossy black and white hung from sticky paste and shelves sagging with CDs and a floor covered in flannel boxer shorts and discarded cellophane wrappers. A gumball-coloured computer downloading porn. A bin full of discarded paper; half a homework collection, so distorted by doodles as to be useless to anyone but she. She was standing in it; she was running her fingers across the surface of the pages, feeling the impression where the pen had been pressed into the paper, smelling the acrid ink. Stumbling backwards, tumbling backwards, catching the back of her knees on the bed and falling into heaven. An entire downy planet made of nothing but blue and a thick scent like old locker before it was old, and it was surrounding her, and it was her, and it was all there was and she was everything. And there was the place where the head was kept, and here then would be his back, and there the legs, and if she angled herself just so, she could see stars through the ceiling and knew that from this one place, there was only one other person who ever saw them, and now they had a guilty secret, like they had robbed a bank or cheated on a chemistry test.

She thought of taking the pillow, but then the secret would be broken and he would never be able to see the stars from quite the same position again. She thought of signing her name in one tiny corner of a discarded homework page, because he'd never see it, because he'd never look at it again, but she knew some horrible mother would come and clean this place out someday and throw it all away and then there would be no imprint, nothing left of her at all. She thought of the boxer shorts but it made her giggle like soda pop and she knew she couldn't get away making that kind of ruckus. So instead she got up and turned off his computer, cancelling all his downloads and deleting all the files with too many x's or an ungraceful o. Hugs and kisses, in reverse. One last click and the hum was gone. She could hear the outside again.

The beast was making clattering noises in the kitchen. The front door had materialized four long paces from the foot of the stairs. She made it in two hops, bashing her knee loudly against a cabinet and making marmalade stars explode out of her eyes, but not crying out, at the expense of many tears flowing instantly down her cheeks. Shirley couldn't chance the door now, so she went out the window.

I would tell you if I was horny (The Process, pt. 4)
July 14 2004 - 3:41 p.m.

At this time last week, everything subcultural was starting to fall apart. I got caught up in certain structural qualms and proceeded to completely lose the story, lose the mission, lose any sense of why I was doing this at all. I made a few tiny bits of progress, re-staging an important opening scene, and drawing endless maps of the three acts. But for a great while I was beginning to think that the only way out of this mess was a costly ground-up rethink. And that had me, to coin a phrase, "completely outta my mind bat shit crazy."

The biggest problem with this point in the revision process is the sheer momentum of everything I've written before. Scenes have their own certain life, and to try to rethink them, or skew them in a new direction, or even just add new flavours, can be immensely difficult. A lot of the writing at this stage of the game is what I call "plug and play:" taking existing scenes or elements and putting them in new places in the draft, and then trying to smooth out the rough edges from the transplant and make things seem as though the piece was meant to be there all along. I'm constantly fighting with myself to maintain a new course in the turbulence of what I've previously completed, so it's violently hard work. My written draft looks like the cat got at it. It's been ripped apart, taped back together, stapled, hole-punched, drawn all over, and soaked in coffee so many times that I doubt any living human could make heads or tails of it.

The best way around all this trouble is a fresh draft from scratch, but the residue of the previous work haunts a redraft process just as strongly as it does in the revisions. Many of the narrative elements remain the same, many of the scenes from the old drafts will have to be in the new draft, and trying to redraft a scene without plugging and playing it can be immensely frustrating. I always feel like I've lost the spontanaeity or originality of the original version, and end up trying to write an impersonation of myself... which is, first of all, impossible, and second of all, really strange.

Just to try to find the story again, I did indeed plough through a fresh draft from scratch on Friday night, just to see what I could do with it, just to throw out all the rules of the existing script and have a bit of fun with the original concept. I got through about 30 pages of it, threw in the towel for the night, and spent the weekend thinking that the entire project was pretty much fucked beyond retrieval.

Monday, without giving it a lot of thought, without even meaning to work on the script that day, I wrote the first half of the first act, which introduces the characters and the basic premise. Then, Monday afternoon, still without giving it a lot of thought, I wrote the second half of the first act, which introduces the complications and gets us to the "go" point in the movie. It came to 29 pages, which I revised down to 28 the next day, and I think it's just about the most perfect thing ever. It's not, of course, and there's a hell of a lot of work yet to do, but the structural clarity of this tract of writing gives me the happy. I'm in a very good place right now, and will be plunging into Act 2 - informally subtitled "Ashley vs. Heather" - this afternoon.

We'll see how it goes. I can almost taste the baby!

Aforementioned Trek rant
July 14 2004 - 1:29 p.m.

I watched Nemesis on the weekend, or rather the director's commentary, which turned out to be the ideal way to watch the flick because I couldn't hear any of the dialogue. The whole thing just made me enormously angry. As I recall, when I first saw the movie, I actually liked about half of it and disliked the rest; now it's just a giant sinkhole of evil because I am so gigantically apalled that they would go to the emotional extreme of killing Data, in such an otherwise pointless and misappropriated movie. And what occured to me, as I was watching the surviving members of the Enterprise crew toast Data's memory, is that for me as a 16-year-old, this would have been the biggest thing ever, and that in the time since I was 16, Rick Berman has so successfully butt-raped the Star Trek franchise that any emotional poignancy of the death of this incredibly significant character was completely absent. And then I found out that Brent Spiner - who should know better - is doing a guest spot on Enterprise this season as Data's great grandfather, and that Berman - who will never know better - is developing yet another doubtlessly-awful Trek feature film, and basically I'm about as pissed off at Paramount as I've ever been for letting this travesty continue, now, a good decade longer than it ever should have. When Berman handed the keys of DS9 over to Ira Steven Behr in 1995, he should have left the building altogether, or better, a couple of convenient Paramount goons should have damn well thrown him out on his ass. Now, Enterprise gets renewed for a fourth season when Firefly and Angel are both tossed off the air; otherwise good sites like The Digital Bits are applauding the strength of this mystifyingly poor series while Berman waxes philosophical about the great strides they took in the third season; and I'm about ready to start firebombing. Someone, please, for the love of god, put Star Trek out of its misery.

Rant ended. [But: behold the power of the comma splice!]

The menfolk were left to stand
July 14 2004 - 10:30 a.m.

Is it possible to dream in reverse? Cuz last night in my dream I was having a conversation, and then I made reference to a very significant prior event, and then I think my brain just filled in a substantial amount of detail about an event that had never happened to me in real life, nor while dreaming. Even in the dream I took a moment and went "whoa... that was weird."

Über-hottie Jessica Alba is the last to join the Fantastic Four; she'll be teaming up with Ioan Gruffudd, Chris Evans, and Michael Chiklis as the Thing. I'm still mourning the demise of Peyton Reed's "retro" take on the material, which I think would have made the flick a real standout among the other, more traditional Marvel properties that are being cranked out at an extraordinary rate these days. Going with Tim Story instead isn't quite as disastrous as sicking the diShrektor on my beloved Narnia, but it's worrisome.

In other wild woolies, Terminator 4 is actually in development, as is a new version of Westworld. Baz Luhrman's Alexander the Great is still going ahead, and in the film industry shocker of the week, some wonk at Paramount has actually given Rick Berman the opportunity to develop yet another Star Trek movie, a prequel flick featuring none of the television series crews, but centering around the Romulan Wars. (The wars that were conducted without one side ever seeing the other. Oooh, cinematic goldmine.) I have a hefty Trek rant coming on, but it'll have to wait for later.

Meanwhile, in the far happier space-climes of Serenity, check out this interview with Alan Tudyk in which he reveals (in the last question on the second page) that the film will, surprisingly, not be centered very much around the "western" motifs that made up so much of the TV series. That's fine, I'll happily take a 2-hour "Ariel" or "Trash," but still... space needs its cowboys!

Cruel summer nights
July 13 2004 - 9:50 p.m.

Another night of limping home with owies in a thousand places, after a furious game of soccer. Tina said that it's a good kind of ache, and she's right; you really feel like you've done something, like you're out there in the world and not just wasting time sitting around waiting for something to happen. Tonight was a glorious night for a game - hot, balmy, clear skies and fresh air. This is what it's all about.

All the sprinting on Sunday, in poor clothing and without warming up properly, fairly well wrecked my legs for the game, so even in D, there was a lot of pain to push through, just to get any kind of speed. And to top it off I took a header in the first half while I was already working on a headache... but at least it was a really good header. One of the guys on our team, Mark (not my cousin Mark; this is English Mark), has taken me under his wing somewhat and is trying to improve my game. I don't really mind, since he's actually good with the positive reinforcement on top of the criticisms, and I'm ready to learn more about how to do this right. Besides, it's giving me good practice in keeping a positive attitude in the face of adversity.

And I sweat. Holy cow do I sweat. I've already started bringing two bottles of Gatorade to the game instead of just one, and I can't imagine I'm a picnic to sit beside on the ride home. Still, this physiological state allowed me to punchline a joke tonight with the words, "What are you suggesting? That it's lymph?" and you can't put a price on those kinds of opportunities.

Ooh! More fun cracking! Gonna heat up some sausage rolls, crawl into bed and watch Firefly.

The Ten Commandments, Part 2: The Revenge
July 13 2004 - 10:10 a.m.

Apartment hunting was a bust; the first place was too small but in the perfect part of town; the second was bloody perfect in every detail but due to an allergy concern, we couldn't bring the cats. So the hunt continues.

Last night I dreamed that I had to get the hell uptown very rapidly, so I just walked over to a car that was stopped in traffic and got into the back seat. At first I was concerned that the people in the front seat didn't know I was there and would be very cross with me when they found out, but as we approached Bayview and Lawrence, it turned out that they'd known I was there all along and were okay with it. So that's cool: trust in the samaritanness of your dream-state Torontonians.

Aslan is angry
July 12 2004 - 4:34 p.m.

Ugh. Ugh, uck, blegh, bah. And then with the curse-words.

The Narnia kids have been announced. Here's (l-r) Peter, Susan, Edumnd and Lucy...

...and I'm very uncertain. For one thing, they're all way too old; Lucy is 9, Edmund is 12, Susan is 15, and Peter is a whopping 17 years old. God help them if they ever get to Prince Caspian, Peter will be in his bloody twenties. The whole thing makes me sick to my stomach.

This had to have been what it was like back in '99 as the first details of Lord of the Rings started reaching the fan community... the only difference being that in that case, Peter Jackson had a track record that I already respected, and his stated intentions towards the trilogy were exciting and well-thought-out.

Here, we have the director of Shrek and Shrek 2 tackling the funny, funny talking beasts. Does this guy have any freaking idea what these books are about?

My Canada Includes Accordion Guy
July 12 2004 - 1:37 p.m.

Holy crap, according to my horoscope for today, this is the best day ever!

Something long in the making is nearing completion. A sense of purpose is your driving force. The last few pieces fall into place as you close in on your goal. Do not distract yourself with plans for the next phase until you finish this one. A lot can be achieved today if you focus on the tasks at hand.

Yes, I revised 17 pages of the script fairly successfully, but I've got a list of things to do as long as my arm and only a scant couple of hours in which to do them. I hate to argue against prophecy, but I'm just not feelin' it.

Blogging in my sleep
July 12 2004 - 10:59 a.m.

Not for the first time, I had a blogging thought last night before I went to bed, didn't write it down, and now it's gone forever, replaced by dreams of dreadlocked blonde girls who may or may not have been werewolves, trolling the downtown core looking for comic book superheroes. It's your loss, believe me.

In the meantime, Chris, Mark and I shot Leap yesterday, or at least the first unit of same. It went very well; I've just digitized the shots and would say that at least half of them don't suck. It was excruciatingly hard work, consisting largely of endless repetitive sprints down Browning for all three of us, in heat that was nearing 30 degrees, in full sun, in dampening jeans. Not so much with the fun, but at least it was a reasonably brisk shoot, concluding in just over 2 hours. Some pics:

Oughta be able to hash a cut together sometime this week, and then there's second unit stuff and visual effects and all the usual nonsense. The joys of the digital age!

After the shoot, Chris, Brandy and I put some time into finding ourselves a place for September 1; we're looking at two promising candidates in the Annex tonight. Actually, they're "off-Annex," near enough to the Annex to have full Annex-access, without compromising our cool, "don't follow the crowd" anti-Annex street cred. Still, it was surprisingly difficult to find anyone willing to rent for Sep 1; I would have thought that in these bizarre rental times, a sure thing for September is better than a longshot on Aug 1 any day. But it has been a long time since I have rented a house.

Also: since Dave made fun of me last night for my pronunciation of Chiwetel Ejiofor's name, he shall hereafter be referred to as Bob Tuckus. As in: Serenity! Starring Nathan Fillion, Morena Baccarin, and Bob Tuckus! ("Ooooooklahoma where the wind comes sweepin' down the plains...")

Today's stupid link: Alien in 30 seconds, re-enacted by bunnies.

All right, I'm outta here. There's dishes to clean, bottoms to scrub, lives to radically rethink...

The thereness of that
July 11 2004 - 11:05 a.m.

I'll be shooting in just under an hour, with an exhausted vegan, no steadicam, and no air conditioned Airstream trailer waiting to take me out of myself. But that's all right, cuz I'm a virtuous man. Right now I'm just kinda downloading music, getting into the mood, putting the equipment together, praying the weather holds, crossing shit out on my shot list, trying to figure out what to wear, trying to figure out how much of Trainspotting I can rip off without being sued... once again I find myself listening to an outrageously-overlong Oasis track, and thinking to myself, "good lord, self-indulge much?"...

When I was a kid I remember being pissed off that my favourite colour, green, wasn't one of the three primary colours they taught us when we were all finger painting in Miss Cousland's S.K. class. Then I got to high school and Mr. Fox's physics class, and light spectrum theory, and a whole new set of primary colours, and I found out that I'd just been mucking around in the wrong frame of reference, and I knew I was in the right line of work.

A little motivation for your morning
July 11 2004 - 10:21 a.m.

When was the last time you wrote down five random things that you're really good at? Not for any purpose other than to make yourself feel valuable and distinct? They don't have to be big things, they don't have to be significant things, they just had to be things.

Five things I'm really good at:

1. Making peanut butter sandwiches
2. Standing in line for movies
3. Oral sex
4. Encouraging people to follow through on their creative projects
5. Doing a Jasper impression

Oh, I'm gonna be payin' for this all week!

I have many very important leather-bound books, and my apartment smells of rich mahogany
July 10 2004 - 1:03 a.m.

No milk for Mary-Kate. The twins have been pulled from the Got Milk? campaign... you know, because of the coke thing. Silly twins, drugs are for kids!

I'm shooting my one minute movie on Sunday; it's called Leap. I pleased myself immensely this morning when I successfully found an appropriate "Waking Life" effect for the flick, as I promised I would use such a technique when describing my film last year. Of course, after weeks of searching and testing and researching, the solution I came up with was the simplest thing I could possibly do, and it works great. So that's pretty cool.

If you haven't submitted your one minute movie this year, there's still tonsa time. Check out minutefilmfest.com for more information. This is so easy, folks... anyone can do it. You don't have to be a professional, you don't have to know what you're doing, you don't even have to roll more than a minute of tape. This is the essence of the "get off your ass" filmmaking concept.

And for an unrelated film project, a mega-longshot request: if anyone has, or has access to, video footage of a live birth that they'd be willing to share for use in a short film, please get in touch with me through the contact page. Please make sure it's a clip that you actually have the legal rights to; something you grabbed off Kazaa won't cut it. If you have such footage but have some questions or uncertainties, ask away; there's no obligation.

I think that if I were psychic, I would not need an iPod at all, because I could just sit on the subway, tuning in the songs that the people around me have stuck in their heads. Sometimes I worry that a nearby psychic is doing that to me.

That bastard set my hair on fire! (The Process, pt. 3)
July 8 2004 - 10:08 p.m.

I think it's time I came out of the closet: I'm having an affair. And not the fun, slippery-bodies-in-the-summer-heat kind. Nope, I'm cheating on my own damn script.

Matty Price and I have had a couple of screenplay ideas in the fire for a while now, and last week we formally started co-writing both of them. I wrote 12 pages of the script that is still working-titled "The Survivor One" this week, and man alive, it was the most fun I've had in a month. I just laughed myself sick with every single word I wrote. When I was done writing those 12 pages (this was Tuesday), I considered myself damn good and writinged out for the day, so I committed to watching many hours of The Simpsons, but by halfway through the first episode, I could hear a low keening from my writing bag - the one that contains the Big Green Binder of Dire, current home of the subculture draft. So I had to grab the bag, go to the Second Cup, and work on that for another hour or two, just to make all the scripts feel equally loved. And then there was soccer. It was an exhausting day.

"Mass genocide is the most exhausting activity one can engage in (next to soccer)." - Loki

So, right now working on subculture is largely an on-paper experience. This is new for me, but it lets me sit on the patio at the Cup for hours at a time every day, and feel like I'm actually a contributing member of human society. And my arms are getting wicked tanned. Any time I have to stay home and draft on the comp, I feel like I'm not actually achieving anything interesting. The Big Green Binder of Dire, with its coffee stains, loose pages, scribbled notes, and flyaway pen holder, is becoming quite the artifact of this "process" thingy. And for a way to spend your day, this writing shit, when thoroughly divorced from the Big Scary, is a hell of a gig.

The Whole Story
July 8 2004 - 7:26 p.m.

From to , absolutely brilliant.

My retirement kicks ass!

It's all too shocking!
July 7 2004 - 11:23 a.m.

Something happened yesterday that, I think, has pretty much never happened before: I completely lost my cool during a soccer game. There was this guy on the other team who was being a real jackass throughout, and towards the end of the game - with the score still tied at 2-2 - one of our players called him on a handball, and he sorta lost it and started talking all kinds of shit at our guy and the rest of us. And he and I had words. And I was so furious by this point that I actually couldn't keep playing, so I subbed off and watched the rest of the game from the sidelines. And this was the second time we've had trouble from this guy in a game; the same shit went down last season when we played him with USYW. Fucking guy just does not understand the spirit of the league and therefore should not be playing at all, cuz he ruins it for the rest of us. As Kate pointed out, he made me use the c-word. Like a lot.

Otherwheres, James Marsters has mentioned that Joss Whedon is still looking at doing four Buffyverse TV movies at some point in the future - and that one of them might very well be a Spike movie. While the project is dependent on the possible participation of other principals, Marsters is (as usual) rarin' to go. Cuz he's the man and we love him.

Told you Spike got outta that fucking alley.

Happiness Is
July 6 2004 - 2:34 p.m.

River! (don't say reaver) (don't say reaver)	Jayne! Time for some thrilling heroics!	Some guy! Farting around in a brown coat, beside Laurence Fishbourne's wo-man!

Mwaaaaa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!

I can get by on bloney and cereo
July 6 2004 - 11:25 a.m.

There's nothing like putting on pants you haven't worn in three months. You find the most interesting things in the pockets: people you never called, things you never did, ideas you wrote down but never continued onward into anything meaningful. Unworn pants are the archive of lost dreams.

Voyager Season Three review is up in the reviews section. Still haven't finished buying the DS9s, so I'm way behind. Whoever gets me DS9 Season Five for my birthday will actually be my favourite person ever.

And Amazing Race 5 starts tonight; set your VCRs! I haven't had time to review the couples yet but I'm sure whichever seemingly-gay pair of guys are offered up this time around, will be my favourite.

Here's the best wedding invitation I've ever received:

The inside's nice too. That makes two weddings in the next two months; I really oughta buy pants.

Pants, pants, pants. That's all I talk about any more. Oughta change the name of the blog to Tederick dot pants. Well, here's something not pants-related: I got called to the window just now by the sound of a woman yelling "Why won't you give me a shirt to wear, Mike? Why can't I have a shirt?" And sure enough, there was a woman walking down the street topless, screaming into her cell phone. A jogger, passing by, grinned and muttered "Every day, man, every day." My neighbourhood is the best.

The process, pt. 2
July 5 2004 - 10:29 a.m.

I've been getting the question a lot this weekend so I'll just take a moment to review.

subculture is going thusly: I had hoped to have the fourth draft completed for the end of June. The 10-day cottage trip kinda nixed this and I set no further deadline for myself until I got back and got into the guts of the thing, which happened a bit later than I thought it would thanks to a very strange, unproductive, and therefore depressing first week back (21st-25th).

Fortunately I then started getting things moving, in an on-paper revision process that usually takes place at the Second Cup. I have a completed (i.e. exists from start to finish, in spite of the crapulence) fourth draft that is as rickety as that rope bridge in Temple of Doom, which I was drastically revising with multiple colours of pens for most of last week. Then disaster struck on Thursday when I came to be aware of certain severe and serious structural defects in the second act, which (naturally) lead to my awareness of yet more severe and serious structural defects in the first act. So that ramshackle fourth draft I was dilliegently scribbling over was no longer worth the paper it was printed on.

Finnegan, begin again.

Every day since Thursday, I have been running out drafts of a single-page beat outline for the story, none of which were successful. Yesterday, though, I did a version that I would call 72% successful. This is good. I am working from there with a ground-up redraft.

I have written three major new scenes to ameliorate the above-mentioned structural problems. There's also a hell of a new complication in the script for Jared, which I've mentioned previously, which makes the movie just a little bit more about all the stuff it was always (covertly) about. Melvyn fans will be glad to know that Melvyn is back in, at least more so than he was in the first rough fourth draft, where he was out altogether. With him, returns the tasty baby-leg. Yum.

That, my friends, is where this writer currently sits. And it's a hell of a life, the writer's life; I'd have no other. I'm aiming to have this draft done for July 31. For all I know, though, it'll just be ashes on the floor by that point... pray for me! Drink many chocolate beverages!

The rain came
July 4 2004 - 6:03 p.m.

There's a blue-and-white mass throbbing on the Danforth.

There's a man under my window lying in the pavement, surrounded by flashing lights.

There's a colour in the sky I've never seen before, but I think it starts with a D.

There's a letter pinned to my bulletin board.

There's rain, finally, and the window is too blurred to see through.

I think she's full of the lies
July 3 2004 - 6:58 p.m.

Happy Free Comic Book Day everyone! If you haven't been out to get the gratuitous funnybooks yet... you're probably outta luck, it's seven o'clock already. Suckahs. See ya next year.

Which brings us to this first Elektra image, which (one might suspect) could be the summer comic book movie upon which next year's FCBD is hung. Although I suppose it's more likely to be Batman Begins or Fantastic Four, or something else entirely. Still, behold the redness of pants:

Let's see... I went to Golden City, I went to 3Q, I went to the Snail and made a mockery of their "two per every customer" policy on Chad's behalf. I got the Slave Labour sampler which was number one on my hit list; also got the Star Wars book and the Spider-Man book and a surprisingly enjoyable Superman book and a bunch o' stuff I haven't read yet. It was a productive day. Then I sat at the Cup and wrote a whole new scene for the whole new subculture. They say it ain't really a movie until you've thrown away your favourite scene... so what about when you've thrown away your favourite draft?

Attention Browncoats, you may have read this before, but I hadn't before today... this is the rough draft for an unfilmed episode of Firefly called "Dead or Alive." Again, rough draft, and some of the elements were obviously later cannibalized into other episodes ("The Message" being the most obvious), but boy howdy, it was momentarily thrilling to be back on board Serenity and feeling the sexual frisson between Mal and Inara again for the first time in a year. Rockin' pantsless folk.

Yeah there's that: I thought the low-cut jeans fad of last year was gonna be the death of me, but it has been thoroughly and utterly eclipsed by this frilly miniskirt plague that has besotten the city this summer. Since I'm fairly sure that it's still illegal to walk up to someone and say "Thanks for flashing your shit all over town, can I have some please?", this is going to be a fairly frustrating season. Surely there is a superhero capable of saving us from this evil? "Put Some Fucking Clothes On" -Man?

To conclude: the Buffy cashier is back at my grocery store. The spitting image. More so this year than last year. So now the game is to try to get her to reveal her secret identity. It's hard to work "Slayer" into a normal conversation without dressing like a thrashing metalhead, so instead I've been trying to use "stake" as often as possible (easily mistaken for "steak"), and when I buy cranberry juice I go "Ah, blood" in a longing voice. So far, no success. I'll make with the posted-keeping.

BRANDO: 1924-2004
July 2 2004 - 2:30 p.m.

Unk, can you call me Marlon?

The Angela Bower Collection
July 2 2004 - 10:56 a.m.

Everyone is so on their toes today! We gots pictures of Elektra, we gots Adventure Kermiiiiiiiiiiiiwhuaaahh just got a call from my brother have to leave the house right now bye! (Makes Warren's rocket-pack takeoff sound)

It's official: if you can't get laid on the Danforth tonight, you can't get laid
July 1 2004 - 5:13 p.m.

Happy Canada Day everyone! Greece just won the semi-finals; I was jostling for position with a crowd of folks on the sidewalk outside a restaurant to see the last few minutes when the goal went in. The apeshit of right now is already making the apeshit of last week seem like a staid tea party, so I'm going to get back out there... just stopped off at home to drop my books, my iPod, and pick up some cash.

I spent most of the day in the sunshine, on the patio at the Second Cup, struggling with my script, which chose today to hand me my ass. "Crippling self-doubt" doesn't begin to describe it. I don't have the slightest notion where I'm going to go with this thing now. Today was just basically a wasted day of trying to solve problems I don't yet know how to solve... some of which I didn't even know I had until I opened the book this morning. It was a very frustrating, round-in-circles kind of day. I'd be mightily pissed off if I didn't have something to take my mind off it tonight.

Gonna go make like a Greek...

The Deeper Well