Blogstop.com, volume 2
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I recently subscribed to Res magazine because I figured it might give me a little creative boost every once in a while. And then I got my credit card bill and wondered why I did it, and then I got the first issue and remembered. The mag's even more pump-y than I wanted it to be (if fairly different in mission statement from what it was the last time I read it), but better still, each issue comes with a free DVD of relevant short films and music videos and whatnot. The girl and I popped that one into the juicemaster a few days ago and pretty much fell on our asses with glee over the Chemical Brothers' video for "Believe," wherein a dude is chased around some Europolis by a gigantic pneumatic arm that moves like a cross between the Alien Queen and a wounded rattlesnake. The whole thing got me so excited that I have mentally concocted a completely unshootable (but very, very tasty) short film script that knocks off the concept in just about every single way. But I feel okay about it, given that (especially with its wrist-casted lead character) the video is an unabashed visual and tonal ripoff of Night of the Centipedes. My reach is long.
Happy wedding to you
Aug 13 2005 - 10:25
a.m.
To Milena and Chris, with the deepest regrets that I couldn't be there personally, may today not be the best day of your lives, but the beginning of the best part. Congratulations, and all my love!
Harry the Horcrux
Aug 12 2005 - 4:29
p.m.
I did indeed finish Half-Blood Prince for the second time today, which puts me in the track of things more gynecological. I really enjoyed the book the second time around, possibly more than the first time. (The first time was too much of a skull-fuck.) And I really want to read Order of the Phoenix again; that one has leaped up in my awareness significantly since seeing Prince play out. All in all I'm quite Potter-satisfied.
The scariest theory I've heard since the book came out comes from one of Bex's campers, who advanced the notion that Harry, himself, is one of Voldemort's Horcruxes. This just about blew my mind. Once you start thinking about it, the pieces begin to fall into place with alarming snugness. Voldermort has a fondness for creating Horcruxes through "important" murders; surely the death of James or Lily would have qualified. Voldemort uses objects of special personal or historical significance to make his Horcruxes; I would imagine that he would have found great delight in the notion of using Harry's dead body - or more likely, his skull - as his seventh and final Horcrux. Voldemort has already demonstrated (with Nagini) that Horcruxes can be made out of living subjects, even if his intent had been to kill Harry shortly thereafter. Rowling has dropped two significant hints along these lines: she has said that we still don't know the greatest point of significance of Harry's scar, nor do have we learned why Voldemort was in the shape of a skeletal, fetal baby when he was put in the cauldron at the end of Goblet of Fire. Both of these could be Horcrux-related.
After all, Harry's scar has always been assumed to be the result of a rebounded Avada Kedavra curse cast upon Harry by Voldemort, but there's really no reason to arrive at this determination: Harry's protection from Avada was in his skin and his blood, so why a single, lightning-bolt shaped scar on his forehead? What if the scar, instead, is the result of a successful Horcruxing of Harry by Voldemort - the remnant of a piece of Voldemort's soul being implanted into Harry, moments after Lily's death? With the Horcrux spell complete, Voldemort could then have attempted to murder Harry, and failed. If his final Horcrux before "death" was created in the form of a baby, this might give some form of explanation to Voldemort's unusual physical form before his reincarnation in Goblet.
Not quite a grand slam, obviously, but enough matching corner pieces to at least frame out the puzzle. I, as ever, await the conclusion.
Do you want some of my bladder shake?
Aug
12 2005 - 1:18 p.m.
Best midnight run ever - to the SDM, like a beacon in the night, an oasis of clean aisles and ABBA music. Vanilla shaving cream. They even had Star Wars figures; I'm looking at an R2-D2 better than any R2-D2 I own, and I'm thinking, "I've had this dream. Only without the stench of garbage between Donlands and Coxwell." Got almost no sleep last night at all, but don't mind; it's rainy and gross today and I don't even want to muster up the energy to continue work on the Hunt DVD right now, although yesterday's delve into the footage from the 1994 splatter-festival was mightily cathartic. I figure I've got all this time right now anyway and none of the jobs are biting (but congratulations, Chris!), so I'm going to try to trim off the rest of the DVDs in short order, just to get it out of the way and done. But there's a lot of work between here and then.
Might go downtown, might spend my last two TTC tokens - weird to have not taken the TTC more than five times since the middle of June. Might drink coffee. Might finish Harry Potter for a second time so I can finally, belatedly, hit that vagina book, before the Kurosawa tome I just ordered shows up at the door on Monday. Don't know yet. I still want Vader on the operating table. I'm in a spending mood.
Meantimes: River sez go listen to Frameline at 2:00 on CKLN 88.1 FM.
...and you'd best not be ignoring River.
Field of Blood
Aug 11 2005 - 12:35
a.m.
Holy shniekies, I just got the e-mail about my 10-year high school reunion. I feel like a crazy old hermit. And in spite of half a decade spent professionally in "the internet," I'm somewhat amazed that such a massive mailing list of people who I haven't even thought of since 1995 were actually successful in tracking me down.
I had an absolutely terrific time tonight doing an impromptu double bill: Field of Dreams and Throne of Blood. That might seem like a tenuous pair to hang an evening on, but given that they're both just freakin' outstanding films, it made for a very high-quality viewing experience. Dreams, for my money, is one of the three or four best-made motion pictures of all time; I mean, that thing is just a solid-as-a-shit-brickhouse textbook on how to make a film, for everything from basic camera blocking to editing and sound design. Then there's Blood, which I don't think I've seen in about ten years (hey, another reunion), and which I have been seriously undevaluing in all that time. This thing is mighty. It was my "must own" DVD purchase for the month of August, and I would now put it as the second or third best Kurosawa title I have on my shelf. I'm fairly wowed right now.
[straining and grunting] Must... purchase... more... Criterions...
She's kind of like you, only with a different bra size
Aug 10 2005 - 3:31 p.m.
I think my comic-reading standing goes from "light" to "moderate" with a third week in the past four where I've bought four books or more. This will all become easier once House of M and its spinoffs end, but until then, it's been a surprisingly heavy summer, after a surprisingly light spring. Here's what happened today:
I bought Ultimate Fantastic Four #22 because I enjoyed #21 so much, but I gotta say, with House of M flitting about (including House of M: Fantastic Four) I'm getting my alternate-universe sagas a bit mixed up. In this one, young Reed Richards breaks through into a parallel existence where superheroes have become zombies and are eating everybody. He gets rescued by Magneto, who is one of the last five uninfected people on the planet. (The rest are non-mutants, leading to the delicious Magneto line, "The end of the world is a great leveler - beggers can't be choosers when you're down to the last few people alive.") Superb art, decent story, but not nearly as good as...
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House of M #5. This is becoming a real champ on the Marvel side. It's not quite Astonishing, but it's a freakin' terrific X-book, and it's getting better with every issue. After co-opting Emma Frost over to the side of people who know what Magneto has done to the universe, Logan and his gang go about freeing the minds, Matrix-style, of the other superheroes. It's fantastic, particularly Peter Parker's near-collapse when he realizes that everything he has in his life (married to Gwen, Uncle Ben still alive, etc.) is going to go away. So yes, as much as losing House of M from the schedule will clear my mind up a bit, I'm going to miss it when it's gone.
Finally, DC launches Supergirl this week. I read the Supergirl arc in Jeph Loeb's Batman/Superman, and while that wasn't brilliant, it was decent enough (and the artwork is purdy) to get me over here. Today they release Supergirl #0, a reprint of a Bat/Supes issue that lays the groundwork for the new title, and Supergirl #1, the first issue proper. They're both pretty good but have not tipped over into great. Loeb is trying to write Supergirl like an actual confused teenager, which is either going to start clicking like crazy in a few issues, or is going to completely destroy this title. We'll see. It's going to be difficult to mix a "realistic" take on superherodom into the (as usual) hyper-stylized superverse of DC. But the artwork is still purdy.
This may astonish you after the last two posts, but...
Aug 10 2005 - 12:59 p.m.
I, Matthew C. Brown, am no longer a member of the Star Wars Fan Club.
The Death Star wasn't built in a day
Aug
10 2005 - 8:58 a.m.
Clearly, the Death Star at the end of Revenge of the Sith is not the Death Star from Star Wars. A few weeks ago I was reading this guy's page, where he uses "the mathematics" to show that these two Death Stars are of different sizes, as though that's proof from Lucas himself of the size differential, which of course it is not. The only requirement to discern that they're different Death Stars is to work backwards from Return of the Jedi with a little common sense. Like this:
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In Return of the Jedi, a new Death Star is nearing completion. It is larger than the Death Star from Star Wars. The Death Star from Star Wars was destroyed four years prior to the events of Return of the Jedi. Given the critical military importance of the Galactic Empire owning a Death Star, we can assume that Palpatine ordered construction of a new Death Star almost as soon as word of the Rebellion's successful destruction of the other Death Star reached his ears. At the beginning of Return of the Jedi, the new Death Star looks like it's approximately 60% complete (possibly three-quarters of the surface area, while vast chunks of the internal spaceframe remain to be fleshed out). Also, Moff Jerjerrod has fallen behind schedule and begs Lord Vader for additional men.
Let's consider this. A Death Star is not a small thing; it is a space station the size of a moon, which means you not only have to build an external surface area the size of a moon, but an internal mechanism to fill that volume as well. This would take trillions of workers, almost certainly Geonosians. (Very PC of the Moff to refer to them as "men.") Additionally (and this will become important later), you need to construct a power core that is capable of generating enough energy to destroy a planetary body larger than the space station itself, like an ant lifting a Rice Krispy. That's no mean feat.
Owing to the fact that it's perhaps 60% complete after four years, and yet is approximately 2/3rds larger than the Death Star from Star Wars, let's call it even and assume that the average start-to-finish construction period for a Death Star is five years. There might have been some advantage gained on the new Death Star from having successfully constructed one before, but this probably comes out in the wash of scale differences as well, and as Jerjerrod notes, the project is understaffed. We'll keep the construction time at five years.
So if eighteen years pass between the shot of Vader, Palpatine and Tarkin watching the construction of a Death Star at the end of Revenge of the Sith, and the shot of Luke, Ben and Han Solo flying headlong towards a new one in Star Wars, what happened in those 18 years? Well, let's again assume that the final five years were spent building the Star Wars Death Star. The thirteen years immediately following Revenge of the Sith (and its own appearance of a Death Star) could only have been spent on one thing: bungled Death Star prototypes. Again, the energy output requirements for the Death Star power core are absolutely enormous; it's well within the realm of possibility that the first two or three times they flicked the "on" switch, the core overheated and a massive thermonuclear explosion consumed the wannabe space station, taking a few trillion bugs with it. Owing to the need to repopulate the Geonosian workforce after the loss on the magnitude of trillions of workers, we can assume that the Death Star research & development stage was a relatively laborious affair. The construction of a successful prototype could easily have taken over a decade, before leading inevitably to the first actual production model, the Death Star from Star Wars.
I would like to conclude by addressing another line of mythology that tangentially regards Death Stars: the destruction of the Ewok civilization on Endor, following the destruction of the Death Star in Return of the Jedi. Although the obvious ecological factors of having a planet-sized object explode in close orbit of a life-bearing planet are not difficult to put together, there is one element missing from this line of thinking: the second shield. On Endor, the Empire created a shield generator to protect the Death Star from attackers. According to the Rebellion's hologram of this shield, it protects only the Death Star itself. Why, then, do Han, Luke, and the rest of the crew of the Shuttle Tydirium have to pass through another shield to reach the surface of Endor? Because, of course, there was a second shield, being generated to protect Endor itself from enemy attack, and quite possibly also the natural fallout of the Death Star construction process. (If it took approximately 30 kg of materials to build the computer I'm writing this on, one can imagine how much waste material is generated in building a Death Star.) Since it is strategically foolish to put all your shields in one basket, we can assume that the second shield was being generated from an outside site, and was not deactivated when the rebels blew up the primary shield generator. Thus, Endor (and the Ewoks) would have been protected from the fallout of the Death Star explosion, and would go on living safe, happy lives. Yub nub!
Piggledy Pop
Aug 9 2005 - 10:54
a.m.
I finally got around to watching the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award for George Lucas, and yeah, it went ahead and made me all kinds of misty. You already know this, but: I love that guy. He's a big weirdo in a lot of ways, and I don't know if I'd actually want to sit down with him for dinner, but saying that "George Lucas changed my life" pretty much doesn't even cover it any more. George Lucas changed my life once, in a way that only a few people are lucky enough to see happen to them: his films, and the way he made them, spelled out (before I even knew what it meant) that I wanted to be a director of films. What I suppose I occasionally manage to forget about, though, is the sheer number of times that George Lucas has changed my life since that foundational moment. My grade 6 teacher pulling me and my equally-fantastical best friend aside after school one day and saying "you guys have got to go see Willow, right now." The tears in my eyes when that bracchiosaur stepped out of the trees in Jurassic Park. Collecting all the threads of my life back together again in 1999, and finding my first post-school pathway laid out for me by a friendship I made in line for The Phantom Menace. Digitally tweaking Bone Daddy 2 and realizing that for the first time, the canvas of one of my movies was entirely mutable and transformable within my grasp. Editing E-Watchamacallit Un-Amation last week, and realizing (yet again) that it all comes back to GWL.
And he joked about not having made enough films to earn a Lifetime Achievement Award. Zuh?! He's done more, in thirty years, than most of the rest of the recipients have done in a lifetime.
This is not my "Thank you, George." That's still coming.
Red Robot Refund
Aug 8 2005 - 10:19
a.m.
R5-D4 was one of my very favourite toys when I was a kid. He's the robot that blows his stack when Luke tries to buy him. He's the opposite of R2-D2 - blue where Artoo's red, square where Artoo's round, crappy where Artoo's cool. This otherness made him very attractive to me as a child. Now with all the astromech excitement of the weekend, the heat is on for Hasbro to finally do this toy right for the modern line: I want an R5, and I'm not afraid to be an annoying geek about it.
Also: am I right in thinking that we need DVDs of Inside the Actor's Studio? I was watching the Angelina Jolie one last night, and it occured to me that maybe 40% of these episodes aren't necessarily that interesting, but the ones that are tend to be really interesting, and more than that, a valuable archive of technique in this strange acting period, where performers are required to be "stars" first and "actors" second, or sometimes the other way around. The Steven Spielberg episode, the Kate Winslet episode, the Jeff Bridges episode... hell, even the Jay Leno one and the Bruce Willis one... were all informative volumes I'd really like to have in my library. And besides, James Liptons' tattoo-quest is so cute.
Today I've got to build a web site, finish off a movie or two, look for work, and dodge into a free Aristocrats screening, the first dividend of the Mamo/Frameline crossover. I'm in a good mood about it.
Tomorrow promises to be at least partially muppetational.
"We're gonna need a little bit more practice" could be the
motto of this entire goddamn franchise
Aug 7 2005 - 9:48
p.m.
Two film projects were shot today, and for various reasons, neither can be discussed openly at this juncture. I will, however, relay two things overheard through the course of the shooting day:
"Jesus H. Christ, it's humider than a prostitute's vagina in Dodge City!"
"We could have Clovis go down on Shirley. Because I'm trying to work as much cunnilingus into my movies as possible, because I'm so pissed off."
There are a few people out there who might be able to piece together what one, or the other, is referring to. I feel for those people.
Shooting's tonsa fun, and now I've gotta make with the cutting because both of these beasts have to go into the mail this week. It's good to have goals.
Hello; and these are my boobs
Aug 7 2005
- 10:28 a.m.
Last night I dreamed that I was flying the Millennium Falcon. And if you even need to be told, that shit is fun.
I tasted the Danforth yesterday; I had cheap sushi (mmm... cheap sushi), freeze-dried ice cream balls (mmm... balls), some of Brandy's baked tofu, a fruit salad, and meat on a stick. Yep, I finally caved to the meat on a stick. It was pink (and it was chicken) so I only got a couple of bites into it before deciding that I really didn't want to die from a food product that could never, ever be traced back to its irresponsible vendor. Frankly, I'm astonished that TotD works at all: all that salmonella floating about, and no accountability. Why do so many people think it's a good idea to buy cheap meat products from a dude wearing a "Best Souvlaki in Town [with an arrow pointing at his cock]" t-shirt?
But boy howdy, tons of baked flesh and lots and lots of short skirts. I was out there shooting a plate for E-Watchamacallit, and if I'd just had the sense to keep the camera rolling and dangling at my knee-level, I could have funded all of subculture on the internet profits from the upskirt action. Also, hello boobs: am I just the last man at the party, or is this the Summer of Cleavage? Makes me want to run out to the Danforth today with a bunch of little plastic flags for sticking into the cleavage furrow: "Best Titties in Town (You Can Keep Your Souvlaki)".
Good times with the girl of late. Drinking with Melissa on Wednesday night (who has a blog and occasionally puts pictures of cock on it, so she gets a link). Broken Flowers the other day, liked it very much. Girl got new job: yabba. And even a bit of time for yoga, the current saw bitch workhorse of my life, whatever the hell I mean by that. Oh: and I missed my own damn radio debut. How much does that suck? But there will be another one, next Friday at 2:00 on CKLN 88.1.
The girl also introduced me (belatedly) to the Evil Dead flicks this weekend (though we didn't watch 3), which reminds me: Universal is actually re-releasing The Frighteners to DVD to capitalize on all the PJ-ness of this holiday season, and has still neglected to put the supplemental materials from the old laserdisk set on the damn shinydisk. Give me a fucking break. I'm far more interested in the double-dips of PJ's earlier films that the director has indicated will be wending their way towards us next year, with additional behind-the-scenes material and hopefully a more Lord of the Ringsy approach to the making of the splatter films. That would be sweet. Between my Dead Alive love and my new Evil Dead love, I'm pretty much wishing I hadn't spent my teenage years with the funny. Nope, the buckets and buckets of corn syrup blood; that's the ticket. Stupid wasted childhood (and adulthood).
And finally: behold astromechs. Bloody well done, Adam; I've already ordered mine. (For help determining which droid is from where, visit here.) I'm gonna mass my other astromechs, from R1 to R5, in preparation for the day. Nerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrd.
Happy Nini Day!
Free Comic Book Day
Aug 3 2005 - 4:30
p.m.
I tooled downtown to get the week's comics, on one of those picture-perfect sunshine days that makes you glad to have strong legs and a weird precognitive kinship with your bike. My surprise at finding Alix back at the Snail (a new, improved, astonishingly cheerful Alix) prevented me from noticing that she mixed up my comics with the stack (at least 20 high) of the guy before me in line, so I ended up with my four issues plus a surprise bonus book - accidentally, gloriously free.
I started with Serenity #2, and if there are any Firefly fans out there who aren't reading this thing - whether they be comic book fans or no - it's time to beg, borrow or steal copies of issues #1 and 2 from anyone who has them. They're written by Brett Matthews, who wrote one of my very favourite episodes of the series ("Heart of Gold," the one with the space whorehouse), and they're as singularly unified with the style of the series as it's probably possible to be - you can hear the actors while you read this dialogue, see the episode unfolding in front of you as though it were on television. It's startling. Like some dream of Firefly: the lost episode. Issue #2 of this 3-issue arc brings back Dobson (WHAT?!), features a guest turn from Badger (ah, Badger), and even scores two of the best River lines in history, from television series to movie to comic book. Oh, and Wash and Zoe bang like crazy in the cockpit of Serenity. Buy the gorram book.
From there, I moved on to two of the titles that were recommended to me in my Astonishing letter response two weeks ago as being among Joss Whedon's current favourites. The first was Runaways (issue #6 of Vol. 2, in this case), and here I was stricken down by bad luck, because whatever I came into in the middle of, it was the deep code. So I dug it a little bit, and watched the rest of it go way over my head. Still, there was enough of a hook at the end of the issue to put me into thinking that I'll probably consider buying #7 with the hope that it isn't quite as confusing. The second Whedon-y book was Powers (also #6, weird) and this I enjoyed more, even though this sort of artwork isn't usually my thing - it still had enough ball-kicking moments to be satisfying, and wasn't quite as mystifying as Runaways from a mythology perspective.
I'm having so much fun with House of M proper that I decided to check out House of M: Fantastic Four, which published issue #2 (of 3) this week. I've been unsuccessful at finding #1, but I may try harder now. I'm a sucker for a good alternate universe story, which is what House of M is all about, but I'm a real sucker for an alternate universe where everything is evil. So apparently Sue and Reed didn't survive the business in outer space, and Dr. Doom grabbed Thing and called him "It," and made himself a little squad called the Fearsome Four - Dr. Doom, It, the Inhuman Torch, and the Invinceable Woman. And they're evil. Gigglably good times.
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It was around halfway through reading House of M that I noticed that there were in fact five issues in my comic stack instead of four - and the fifth was Wonder Woman #219, which is really weird, because I had been considering buying it anyway, long before it was mistakenly put in my bag. As is often the case (I'm not sure how this happens), my random efforts at reading the WW title always result in me reading an issue where Wonder Woman fights Superman. But then, it's always really cool when Wonder Woman fights Superman, so I can't really complain. I will say this, however: of the half-dozen odd times I've tried to pick up Wonder Woman and like it, this is the first time I was left at the end of the book with the desire to read the next issue. Very cool, particularly the final three panels.
And also, Wonder Woman fights Superman. Bring the love.
Serenity
Aug 3 2005 - 1:53
p.m.
"A ship would bring you work; a gun would help you keep it. a captain's goal was simple: find a crew, find a job, keep flying."
I'm a mercenary right now, a poorly-paid one at that, but I'm feeling better and better about it. It's amazing how splitting your focus among so many varied creative projects occasionally gives such excellent, fulfilling results. First of all, just seven weeks young, our little baby MaMo is now listed on iTunes - if you have the program on your computer, you can search us in the Podcasts directory (just search for "Mamo," or look for us in Movies & Television), and subscribe to the show, meaning that iTunes will automatically download each new installment as it arrives. Yep, I just subscribed to my own damn podcast, and received our latest entry, MaMo #7, which deals with documentaries and was recorded over the weekend at Matthew's cottage. We're even listed as "explicit." Too fucking cool.
Secondly, MaMo jackbooted Matthew and I into a position to do actual radio, guest-hosting on Daniel Cockburn and Barbara Goslawski's CKLN show, Frameline, which airs on FM 88.1 here in Toronto on Fridays at 2:00. (You can also stream the show live from the web site.) Daniel came over last night and we recorded the first two of three radio installments, which will air over the next two weeks. At some point, we may also put them up on MaMo, because it's basically the same show with slightly better music.
And to top all that off, yesterday I solved not one, but two of my movies in editing. First I successfully repaired E-Watchamacallit Un-Amation to such a successful degree that I went from utter lethargy on the project to newfound passion (the exact same thing happened with Leap at around this time last year), and after that, I "found" Far, Far Away at long last, taking the assembly cut of the documentary all the way through to a completed rough cut by the end of the day, which now stands at around 21 minutes and actually has a genuine story, flow, and shape. I'm really happy about that. Nuns That Fuck has been left beggared for the week, unfortunately, but I'm hoping to jump back up on that horse soon, once Mark and I have shot the "No Glove, No Sockfucky" segments... maybe this weekend.
Yup, good times. Pay me!
Si un condom con coca rompere, sera mui mal.
Aug 2 2005 - 9:50 a.m.
Last night Chandra alerted me to the fact that the word "wog," which I used in passing on the blog a few days ago, is a racist term referring to Indians, Pakistanis, and others of Middle Eastern descent. I had no idea, but then I'm also the guy who had to be told what a spic was. There's nothing I love more than learning a new word, even under bad circumstances. My slur the other day was thoroughly unintentional, because mostly I just made up a word that sounded right and tossed it in where I would otherwise have used "yob," to describe the general gormless public. (I think I'm still fairly safe with "yob.") I have a particular fondness for doing that, even if it gets me into trouble every now and again. Making up new words based on the emotive sounds you hear in your head? Best part of language.
I'm having one of those rare creative spurts today, having already much improved the cut of E-Watchamacallit Un-Amation, and being about to launch myself into further editing of Far, Far Away. And I've got an idea for the next scene of Glow. And tonight Matthew and Daniel and I are going to record some radio. And I'm gonna go see a movie later. So there!
Re last night's Sfoo: that was one mighty fade to white, and oddly satisfying even given that technically, it was the exact same ending as last week's episode. Let's make it for keepsies this time, yes? I only know of one other character on prime time television who had to be killed three times, and that was Dr. Mark Greene.
Don't fuck with Dr. Mark Greene.
Whedon uncut
Aug 1 2005 - 4:36
p.m.
Nice, big, fat Joss Whedon interview right here. Toy Story, Serenity, House, X3: Dark Phoenix, Alien 4, just about every damn thing you can think of. Not enough for you? Do the words "Joss Whedon's Batman" ring a bell? Buy me some kneepads, ma, I'm goin' down!
Our dichotomy opens the combat
Aug 1 2005
- 11:34 a.m.
Apparently when you translate Revenge of the Sith into Chinese and then back into English, it becomes Backstroke of the West, a harrowing tale of one man's ascension to the top of the Presbyterian Church, before succumbing to darkness and becoming more than any hero's geologic change. Or in the words of Darth Vader, "Do not waaaaaaaaaaaant!!"
Not every girl gets to touch my lightsabre
Aug 1 2005 - 9:44 a.m.
It's strange, but I always spell out June and July in my blog dates, but then when I hit Aug 1 not only do I switch back to three-letter contractions, but I also wonder if I made a mistake by spelling out June and July, and whether I should go back and correct them. It's real fun, I tells ya, being obsessive.
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There's a reason why I don't own a 12" Jedi Luke doll, which would otherwise be the crown of my collection, and that's because Hasbro never quite managed to put something this good together. ("He comes with every [accessory] he needs, that being his lightsabre.") Now, with Sideshow stepping in to take over the license, I'm seriously hoping we can get something Stateside that's almost as good as what Medicom's been doing, but without the hefty $175 price tag. I have to say, on the other hand, that my 14" Electronic Darth Vader, which Hasbro did about eight years ago and which I got for Christmas, is still a pretty damned handsome figure, in spite of some small accuracy issues with the cape clasp. Otherwise, I'd call it a mightily viable alternative to the Medicom one, which, like Vader's little boy, carries a hell of a buy price. It's good enough, anyway, that I doubt I'd go running after a Sideshow Vader next year, unless it was really, really, really good (and not $175).
For those keeping score, the only high-end doll I would actually purchase with lottery money remains the Toys McCoy Indiana Jones doll - which, though highly imperfect on facial sculpt, pretty much nails everything else. I suppose one could hope that with the release of Indy IV (now looking so definite that I must italicize the moniker), Sideshow or someone else might get a chance to do some decent 12" Indy dolls at this level of detail, but that's off in the future. And though I may occasionally answer "Stanley Kubrick" to Star Wars-related Kubrick questions that I haven't been asked yet, I cannot see the future.
I ordered the Drusilla doll yesterday, which has me all nervy with excitement. I'm spending way too much time on the Sideshow web site these days, and soon I'll have to stop.