ROCKY BALBOA and retconning movie series

Apparently Rocky Balboa - which premieres in theaters tomorrow - references ever single previous Rocky movie... except Rocky V. Sylvester Stallone is now being quoted in a few places as saying the reason he wanted to make Rocky Balboa was to make people forget about how bad Rocky V was.

In other words, as of this week, it's possible that Rocky V should no longer be considered part of Rocky continuity at all.

Remember a few months back when Superman Returns came out, and how it "wiped out" the third and fourth Superman movies from "really" happening? Now the same thing is happening to the Rocky saga: the biggest mistakes are being erased. They're being eliminated by "retroactive continuity", AKA "retconning". And I think it's terrific!

In hindsight, there are a lot of movie series, that were otherwise brilliant before getting tarnished by mediocre sequels, that could be getting this treatment. F'rinstance: Burt Reynolds should play the Bandit one more time... and play him throughout the movie this time... in one final installment that makes us forget that the series ended with Smokey and the Bandit Part 3...Then there's this possibility that comes to mind...King Conan: Crown of Iron was an actual movie project about five years ago. John Milius had written the script and was set to direct it, with production by the Wachowski Brothers (of The Matrix fame). I was able to read the script in 2003 and it was one of the most beautiful and brutal screenplays I've ever found... and it ties in perfectly with the original Conan the Barbarian, like the scene where he's again praying to Crom. Had it been produced, King Conan: Crown of Iron would have made us all forget that Conan the Destroyer ever happened. Sadly, with Arnold Schwarzenegger now in politics (with no signs of returning to acting), and now that both Mako and Basil Poledouris have passed away, this one doesn't stand much chance of ever getting made. But it would have been a wonderful thing to have been able to behold.

And then, there is this: the movie series that I think most deserves, if not outright screaming for, a chance for a make-over...Alien 3 went through something like 40 writers: that should tell you how big a mess the movie was even if you've never seen it. Alien Resurrection had moments of pure genius, like when the queen is giving birth with a human reproductive system (and it didn't hurt to have Ron Perlman in it either). Otherwise, it really didn't resonate along with the first two entries in the Alien series. In my mind at least, the last thing we saw of canon story from the Alien saga was Ripley and Newt and Hicks and Bishop turning-in for the long journey back home. I believe they're still en route to Earth and whatever happened in Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection are just bad dreams that Ripley is having while in hypersleep... if even that. There needs to be a new Alien movie: one that completely repudiates the events of the third and fourth installments. Heck, William Gibson wrote an awesome script for Alien 3 almost twenty years ago and it was never used: why not just adapt that and set the story 20 years later after the Sulaco returned to Earth? Actually, I would love to see the alien be brought to Earth and start multiplying, and an older/more world-weary Ripley get called back to help eliminate the creatures. Even if Sigourney Weaver wouldn't agree to return to the role of Ripley, I think a top-quality Alien story that picks up the story from the end of Aliens would definitely be appreciated, so long as it does away with Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection.

There's probably more movie series that would benefit from the treatment that the Superman, and now Rocky sagas are getting. In the long term scheme of things, this might be the one strategy that will ensure that these movie series would still be discovered and enjoyed by future generations, instead of writing them off wholesale because of lackluster sequels.

Read More

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE is 35 years old today

On December 19th 1971, filmmaker Stanley Kubrick unleashed what – I believe so anyway – is the greatest movie he ever made. So let's hoist our glasses and raise a toast to the 35th anniversary of A Clockwork Orange!

This is definitely my most favorite movie that Kubrick made: even more so than 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dr. Strangelove (although I love those also quite a bit). But none of his other works have had the influence on my life as A Clockwork Orange has.

So how did I wind up coming across it? I'd heard of A Clockwork Orange for years and thought it an oddball title but didn't have any inclination toward watching it, until one day in English class during my high school senior year a classmate talked about seeing it the previous weekend. "That's the most torn-up movie ever made," Joel told us. That was all it took: not long after I went into Action Video and rented it.

To a seventeen-year old mind that had wound up staying fairly pure so far as cinema brutality went, A Clockwork Orange was like being splashed in the face with a bucket of warm blood. To say that I was "shocked" would be a vast understatement.

Since then I've probably watched A Clockwork Orange two or three dozen times over the years. Sometimes alone and sometimes, it's been watching it with other people just to see their reaction to it and what they think it's about. My first year at Elon, I kept telling my friends Gary and "Weird" Ed that they should check this movie out. So one Thursday night they came over to the apartment for pizza and I put A Clockwork Orange in the VCR. It had a strange effect on Gary: the entire time we drove back to campus he kept repeating the word "kill" over and over again. After watching it with another friend, he found himself addicted to speaking "Nadsat" (the weird mixture of Russian and English that Alex and his gang uses when they talk). I showed it to Lisa a few months after we'd started dating... which probably wasn't the smartest thing in the world considering I was trying to keep this girl, not scare her off. She didn't think I was a pervert for liking this movie, but I don't think she's ever wanted to see it again either. But that's understandable: Even after all this time, A Clockwork Orange still barrages my own senses every time I see it.

I don't think that "torn-up" is really the right adjective to describe A Clockwork Orange anymore though. "Torn-up" would be a movie that's bizarrely violent for violence's sake, and that's not A Clockwork Orange at all. Neither is it a very complex tale: it's actually a pretty simple story. Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) is the young leader of a gang of remorseless hoodlums in an England sometime in the future (we are never told when exactly this story takes place). Life for Alex and his gang means drinking milk laced with drugs before heading out into the night for "a bit of the old ultra-violence". This usually means stealing cars, kicking the crap out of defenseless old men and forcing a husband to watch as his wife is gang-raped. One night one of Alex's pranks on innocent people results in the death of a woman and he's left wounded at the scene after being betrayed by his gang members. He's arrested, put on trial and sentenced to prison. He spends a few years behind bars and then comes to the attention of the government. Alex, it seems, is the perfect subject on whom to test "the Ludovico technique": a psychological procedure that renders the person incapable of wanting to commit acts of violence. I won't say anymore than that, to keep the story from being "spoiled" for those who haven't seen it yet. But in spite of the unbridled violence that permeates A Clockwork Orange, I've never found that to be the focus of the film. The story of Alex, and what he goes through and what is done to him, vastly outweighs and even justifies the visual trauma that is inflicted upon the viewer of this movie. And from the very beginning, every time I finish watching A Clockwork Orange it's not the violence that occupies my mind... but a sense of sympathy for Alex and what he's gone through.

What A Clockwork Orange has meant to me has changed considerably over the years. When I first saw it, I saw it simply as a movie about youth out of control, and then youth wasted without purpose. Today my understanding of it is much more profound.

The most central theme of A Clockwork Orange is moral choice: Can a person be made to be good, or is being good something that he or she must choose on their own? In that regard, A Clockwork Orange stands as an indictment against those who believe that it is the role of the State to create morality. A conscience is something that a person must want to have. It cannot be initiated or even nurtured by government if it's already there, because that would either corrupt a man at best or completely destroy him at worst. As we see in A Clockwork Orange, the government's meddling in things best left to God almost results in Alex being killed.

In recent years I've come to see a theme in A Clockwork Orange about how in spite of the "morality" it tries to enforce, that government – no matter who is running it – really doesn't care about the life of the individual. To the state, individuals are mere tools to be used at whim to maintain the state's hold on power. The government in A Clockwork Orange does not really care about what happens to Alex in the long run: they want results now that will impress the voters enough to keep their party in office. Which it doesn't matter if that party is "liberal" or "conservative": to either, Alex would be an expendable asset. I think this kind of commentary about the dehumanizing of the individual for sake of the political party was way ahead of its time in 1971... and something we would do wise to consider today.

As a Christian, I have also come to see A Clockwork Orange as being about what the world is like without the virtues of grace and forgiveness. Alex finds that out after he's released from prison and discovers that though the state may have forgiven him on paper, his victims did not. Alex's sins come back to haunt him and when they catch up with him, they are unrelentingly cruel and vicious... just as Alex had been before being sent to prison. I can't help but think to myself "This is how the world really is without the willingness to return love for hate". If you want to get a glimpse of what a world devoid of God is really like, go watch A Clockwork Orange. And I don't think that I'm seeing too much in this story so far as Christian metaphor goes either considering that Anthony Burgess, the author of the original novel, was a devout Christian himself.

Well, I could go on, but to do a really full analysis of A Clockwork Orange would take probably another fifteen pages, so I'm just going to leave it at this. So in honor of this, the 35th birthday of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, I suggest that a celebration is in order: Either watching the DVD of the movie or if there's no time for that, at least listening to a bit of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

However it is that one chooses to commemorate it: happy anniversary A Clockwork Orange!

Read More

Lots of stuff coming the next few days

A book review, a DVD review, maybe a movie review, another humor piece, possibly more YouTube videos, a holiday tradition, and an announcement. All of this before the week is out.

Read More

THE LOBO PARAMILITARY CHRISTMAS SPECIAL

And now, the most twisted and ultra-violent movie you'll ever see this or any other holiday season...

The Lobo Paramilitary Christmas Special! This 2002 short film was for awhile the most sought-after comic book-related movie on the Internet... but now it's on YouTube! In this torn-up holiday classic, DC Comics' galactic bounty hunter Lobo (click here for more info about "The Main Man") is hired by the Easter Bunny to kill Santa Claus. Seems that Christmas has become too big a holiday so a consortium of competing mythic figures has put a death mark on "Jolly Saint Prick". Lobo takes the job and mayhem ensues at the North Pole! BE WARNED: Although uproariously funny this film is not suitable for small children because of occasional profanity and lots of on-screen death and mangling. That said, The Lobo Paramilitary Christmas Special is a must-see if you're a fan of DC Comics and especially if you're a "fraggin' bastitch" who digs Lobo... or if you're someone who just wants to see what would happen if somebody tried to "off" Santa.

Click here to watch The Lobo Paramilitary Christmas Special on YouTube

Read More

Review of ERAGON

"I liked the part where Darth Vader rides the Balrog."

A long time ago and far, far away, there was an empire ruled by a cruel tyrant. It had been a realm that was originally looked after and protected by an order of mystical warriors, until they were betrayed and wiped out years before by the dark lord. The emperor ruled with an iron fist... but an alliance of rebels threatened his power. As the story begins, a beautiful princess is attempting to deliver something important out of the grasp of the evil forces. She is captured by a malevolent henchman, but not before sending what she is carrying out of harm's way. Her package falls into the possession of a young farm boy who lives with his uncle on a remote homestead. And then the young man is told by a wise hermit that he is destined to be a great warrior, and that a magic force flows through him...

The point where I started giggling during the movie Eragon was when the namesake character (Edward Speleers) is standing outside the farmhouse at dusk and wistfully looking at the setting sun. They should have just went ahead and made it a dual sunset and gotten it over with, because Eragon is not just kinda like Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope... IT IS STAR WARS EPISODE IV!

I'm sorry... I just can't get that thought out of my head. Lisa and I saw Eragon at the Carousel Grande in Greensboro this afternoon and from the very first moments of the movie, the parallels to Star Wars Episode IV were blaringly obvious. Let's see: evil empire, check. Princess on a mission, check. Farm boy dreaming of adventure, check. Evil right-hand lackey to the emperor who can choke people without touching them, check. Rebel alliance, check. Grizzled warrior who has been living the life of an exile while waiting for a new hope, check...

...It was so bad that when Eragon is trying to rescue Lei... I mean Arya (Sienna Guillory) I was almost expecting him to plop on an Imperial Stormtrooper helmet before walking into the place.

Oh yeah, the burning homestead with the dead uncle: that's in Eragon too. So is the trip into – and daring escape out of – Mos Eisley.

The plot may have been ripped-off from Star Wars Episode IV but a lot of the visual elements seem to have been at least partly inspired by The Lord of the Rings movies. There are these guys, I think they're called Ogres in the movie – there are also evil beings called Rajas and Urkels – but they look too much like the Orcs from Peter Jackson's trilogy. There's also this entire horde of big bald guys, I don't know what they’re supposed to be. And then there's that thing that Darza (who's something called a "Shade" and is played by Robert Carlyle made up to look like the moldering corpse of Lucius Malfoy from the Harry Potter movies) is riding on. It looks so much like the Balrog from The Fellowship of the Ring that all that was missing was Gandalf screaming "YOU SHALL NOT PASS!"

The effects were great. Not the best I've seen though. So far as onscreen dragons go the Hungarian Horntail from last year's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire felt more convincing than Saphira (voiced by Rachel Weisz... which to me sounded way too sweet for a dragon) does here.

The thing that I liked most about Eragon was Jeremy Irons. Which Jeremy Irons is one of my all-time favorite actors anyway, so maybe I'm being biased. But here in Eragon Irons is doing his darned bloody best to convince us that not only is his character Brom real, but so is this world around him. Brom was my very favorite character in Eragon. And Jeremy Irons is really good here, even when he's forced to speak dialogue that sounds more like something out of Krull or Yor: Hunter from the Future or one of those other Eighties-era fantasy flicks than from a best-selling novel of the early 21st Century.

No, I haven't actually read the novel, although plenty of people – including Lisa and "Weird" Ed – have told me that I should. I did start reading Christopher Paolini's book several months ago but couldn't get past the first few chapters: think I only got as far as Eragon getting tutored by Brom about the history of the Dragon Riders. I was so occupied with the school board campaign the past few months that time for pleasurable reading was very hard to come by. At the time I really did find it to be a pretty hard book to find very appealing... but maybe I'll give Eragon the book another chance. And perhaps after that the movie will be a lot more fun to watch.

So... did I actually like Eragon the movie?

It was an okay way to spend a Sunday afternoon. But I wasn't overwhelmed nearly as much as I would have hoped. I'm not going to say I was completely "underwhelmed" by Eragon either, though. It was nothing like a Star Wars or Harry Potter movie, but I don't regret seeing it, even though I just wish that I could have enjoyed it more and especially for feeling like there was something here that I hadn't already seen before. Unfortunately, Eragon was way too predictable.

But for a movie that I was constantly snickering at, I have to say that I'm compelled to give Eragon another chance to win me over. Which is something that I normally wouldn't do for a movie like this. And the only reason I'm going to give that much grace to Eragon is because of that very last scene in the movie, when Galbatorix the evil king (played by John Malkovich) slashes the giant map with his sword and what we see behind it. That final scene shows a LOT of promise. For that reason alone would I not only try to watch Eragon again, but I would even say that I hope this merits a sequel.

It would have to be one heckuva good second chapter though, to make this adaptation of the first installment from Paolini's "Inheritance Trilogy" worth watching again in the years to come. I sincerely hope that the producers of this film can pull that off.

Read More

Elon University lit up for the holidays

Late Thursday night/early Friday morning Lisa and I were driving back home from Raleigh after seeing Trans-Siberian Orchestra in concert. We wound up going through Elon University, where I went to college. I stopped and took a few pictures, although they really can't do any justice to how beautiful the campus is lit up every Christmas season.

These photos of Elon University were taken around 12:40 a.m. EST on December 15th, 2006.

On the main road, looking across the "grassy knoll" toward Belk Library:

The front of Mosely Center:

Looking toward the main campus from Young Commons:

The front of Belk Library:

The Alamance Building, driving by on Haggard Avenue:

Read More

Trans-Siberian Orchestra at the RBC Center in Raleigh

Last night Lisa and I hooked up with Chad and my sister Anita at Chad's apartment in Raleigh. We headed out a little after 6, had a bite to eat at a nearby Quizno's and then headed to the RBC Center for a live concert by Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

This was by far one of the most unique musical experiences I've ever had... to say nothing about it being the most lively Christmas concert I've ever attended! Trans-Siberian Orchestra does an amazing job doing a live concert along with various lights and sound effects (we were sitting toward the back and I still feel partially blinded by those huge flames). The first half of the show was the "story" part, where Trans-Siberian Orchestra uses music along with live narration to tell a story: in this case, it's about an angel and these other characters who converge in a bar in New York City one night at Christmas (this tale reminded me a lot about "World's End", the story from toward the end of The Sandman comic's run). The music accompanying this story was from Trans-Siberian Orchestra's The Lost Christmas Eve album. It was a VERY beautiful little show... but that was just the first half. Without any real intermission, Trans-Siberian Orchestra went into the second part of the show after some quick introductions of band members. This time they did stuff like "Carmina Burana" (the COOLEST rendition of that piece I've ever heard), their take on "Layla" by Eric Clapton, and "Christmas Canon" which has sort of become their signature piece in the past few years though this one had no children singing in but that was okay. Toward the end of the show they had a "dueling keyboards" thing between two of their keyboardists and the whole crowd went nuts when one of them started playing the "Linus and Lucy" theme from A Charlie Brown Christmas, before the band wrapped up the show with a spectacular medley of stuff.

All told it was an AWESOME two and a half hours! Trans-Siberian Orchestra is definitely worth seeing if they ever do a show near you (but do your best to get tickets early 'cuz they go fast).

When we were at Chad's apartment I took some pics of him and Anita. Anita took one of me and Lisa together with her camera but she hasn't sent it yet. Here's Anita from last night...

And here's Chad...

I'll let Chad tell the story (if he's so inclined) about how he and Anita went into this convenience store after the show to get Anita a bottle of Mello-Yello but instead wound up with Miller Lite :-P

Read More