The Long Road

Archives: July 2004

Monday, July 26, 2004

Bryan Singer, director of the 2 X-Men movies, is the new director of Superman. That’s good news for Superman, who went through quite a few bad directors but potentially bad news for X-Men 3 since it could end up in some moron’s hands. The best part of this is that Singer, unlike the last 2 attached directors, doesn’t intend to ONCE AGAIN retell Superman’s origin story and just get right down to telling a Superman story. What would be the point anyways? We ALL know how Superman came to be already.

Seems like DC based stuff always gets the shaft. Marvel’s movies tend to stay fairly close to the original material but DC’s movies go in really odd directions. Before Singer, Superman was going to feature a Kryptonian Lex Luthor(!); Wonder Woman was going to start with Wonder Woman dying and having her powers transferred to some “new” Wonder Woman. Now Green Lantern is being made. As a comedy. Starring Jack Black. Why!? WHY!? If they wanted a comedy superhero movie, there’re a ton of other characters they could use for that. Why take Green Lantern, who’s all about living up to the expectation of others, triumphing against impossible odds, stepping out of the shadow of his predecessor, and wielding the most powerful weapon in the universe, into a joke? There are no words to describe how frustrated I get when movie people pay huge sums to adapt perfectly good concepts and characters and throw everything away except for the most basic things.

Catwoman has one of the worst ratings ever at rottentomatoes, that’ll teach those f’ers to mess with the comics.

The Batman Begins trailer is going to be in front of Aliens VS Predator in august. Can’t wait.

Darren Aranofsky (pi, Requiem for a Dream) will be doing Alan Moore’s Watchmen, which is considered the best comic series ever written. I liked both of Aranofsky’s two movies so hopes are high even though other Moore adaptations (From Hell, League of Extra…) haven’t fared the text-to-screen translation so well. This is sorta a good time for a Watchmen adaptation since it can only exist after other superhero movies have come out. I wonder if it’ll still be set in the cold war.

The live action Transformers movie is coming from Dreamworks in the summer of 2k6! I honestly don’t care if this is going to suck or not, CGI Transformers interacting with live humans is going to be a really interesting thing to see. The robots in disguise better be in every single shot. It’d be spectacular if they could get the same voice actors as the ones from the original animated series, the nostalgia would be so overwhelming, I’d potentially shed a tear.

Out of this weekend’s San Diego Comic Con, we have 2 fan films like last year’s Batman: Dead End. First up is the great looking Grayson, and the slightly less awesome World’s Finest (by the same team who did Dead End).

Warren Ellis’ Global Frequency is being adapted into a TV series starring Michelle (ensign Ro Laren) Forbes!

You know, I think it’s kinda odd that some directors are doing nothing but superheroes for 2-3 films in a row. Maybe they’re just getting it out of their systems while the public’s still willing to watch these things. Not that I’m complaining. If Raimi, Singer, Del Toro, and Rodriguez made nothing but comic book adaptations for the rest of their careers I’d probably be pretty happy.

Posted by Rayne @ 05:02 AM EST [Link] [22 comments]

Tuesday, July 20, 2004

It’s difficult to pick a “favourite” of anything. When asked, I can come up with a list, (sometimes long, sometimes longer) but can’t commit to just one. Naming something your favourite feels too much like making a statement that you have to stand by. Besides, enjoyment of a book, author, artist, song, food, drink, pizza topping, etc is often affected by contextual and temporal bias. A comedy watched with a particularly good audience probably won’t be as funny as watching it by yourself. A cartoon you loved as a child is probably terrible now.

That being said.

After some deliberation, I’ve decided that Warren Ellis is my favourite writer - comics or otherwise. I firmly stand by this statement. For now…maybe.

Looking at the graphic novels I’ve bought, plan on buying, and have enjoyed reading Ellis comes out on top out of a list that includes Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, Mark Waid, Kurt Busiek, and Mark Millar.

Ellis has Morrison’s knack for short-hand dialogue and mad ideas, except Ellis knows when to rein himself in and has a better idea of where his stories are going as to not leave the reader scratching his head, ass, and nose at the end. The fact that both writers are British means that I get that awesome wry humour that most Americans can’t grasp much less write, and a decidedly more international view.

Back in the late 90s, the man wrote Stormwatch. It didn’t set the world on fire when it first came out but eventually set in motion at least 2 trends in comics that still run strong today - proactive superheroes, deconstructionism, and “widescreen action”. All that plus it was a damn good read. Anything could happen in the book, every story arc changed something fundamental, whether it was the addition or subtraction of some key characters and elements or the team’s political alignments. And at the end, just as everything was coming together, everyone died. It was fantastic. I just read it recently and the book holds up surprisingly well considering everything that’s come since that was inspired by this book.

One of the things I admire about Warren Ellis the most is his diversity as a writer. He writes mainstream superheroes, midstream books, and low-selling, impenetrable independent works. While his indy stuff is a little too out there for me, his midstream books are full of quirks and ideas you’ll never find in a X-Men or Batman comic.

Planetary, for example, is about 3 “archeologists” who go around digging up supernatural secrets of the world. Every issue deals with a different case and is usually done in homage to a storytelling style from other mediums. And there’s also the plethora of spoofs of recognizable characters, they usually die in really disturbing ways.

Some of Ellis’ works that I haven’t read yet but have sitting on my shelf are Orbiter, about a space shuttle that’s disappeared for 6 years and come back; RED, a spy thriller; and Tokyo Storm Warning, Ellis’ take on Giant Mecha Destroying Tokyo anime.

Posted by Rayne @ 10:30 PM EST [Link]

Saturday, July 17, 2004

Having used a total of 4, I can safely say that Gmail is very objectively the best web-based mail client out there. The first and most obvious benefit of 1 gigabyte of storage space means that your mail box will most likely never get full; no more unreceived emails because some moron decided to send you 3 megs worth of attachments.

I like how all emails are grouped into conversations. No need to create folders to store related emails in, Gmail does it for you. That’s my favorite feature. It keep the inbox so nice and tidy, instead of having 100 emails just sitting there, they’re all nicely organized for you so you know exactly where to look if you want to find something.

The auto-complete for email addresses is pretty nice, better than MS' non-firefox compatible contact list-side box and better than Yahoo's seperate-page list. I’m really impressed that there’s no need to navigate to another page to reply to an email. How ingenious is that? It seems like such a simple thing, yet no one’s done it before.

Anecdotally, I sent myself the text from a belief network from A.I. class and Google's AdSense put up newspaper related advertisements next to my emails. Very smart considering it wasn't too obvious what the belief network was about.

Gmail’s appearance also has the added benefit that the two present free email giants both decided to improve their services. Yahoo moved to 100 megabyte mailboxes and a new, sleeker interface. Hotmail is promising to soon have 250 meg inboxes (instead of the ridiculous 2.5 currently) along with a vague set of other upgrades.

Anyways, I have 1 gmail invitation to give out, who wants it?

Posted by Rayne @ 07:17 PM EST [Link] [11 comments]

Friday, July 9, 2004

Neurons can't be constantly firing, after they've just fired they need a rest period. Even if things are happening that would normally cause a neuron to fire, it can't if it has just done so.

If a neuron has fired repreatedly for an extended period of time, its rest period increases over time until it can no longer fire.

Posted by Rayne @ 03:01 AM EST [Link] [9 comments]

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