Speaking Geek

I mentioned a few weeks back that I recorded an interview with the Chippewa Valley Geek podcast, and it's up now! Listen to me pontificate, because reading my pontifications was one sense too few!

5 Popular Movies & How They Should Have Ended

5. Man of Steel
The recent superhero blockbuster "Man of Steel" drew a lot of criticism for its unexpected ending. A lot of people offered their own ideas for how it could have ended instead, but they all got one thing wrong.

How it SHOULD have ended: "Man of Steel" should have ended with a closing credits roll acknowledging all the people whose hard work made the film possible, from the writers, actors, and director to the catering staff and stunt doubles. Despite the criticism, this is exactly how it did end!

4. Flicka
The 2006 feel-good film "Flicka" told a touching story about a girl and her horse, based on the 1941 novel My Friend Flicka. In it, main character Katy and her wild mustang Flicka both help save each other's lives. But is that the way it should have gone?

How it SHOULD have ended: A movie as animal-intensive as "Flicka" should have ended with the note "No animals were harmed in the making of this picture" in the credits. Unfortunately, two horses died in the process of filming "Flicka," forcing the statement to be left out.

3. She's All That
"She's All That" was a popular 1999 teen romantic comedy featuring Freddie Prinze, Jr. and Rachel Leigh Cook. Its classic plot about giving an unpopular girl a makeover was an update of stories like "Pygmalion" and "My Fair Lady." In the end, Cook and Prinze's characters get together, but is that the way it should have gone?

How it SHOULD have ended: "She's All That" should have ended with me and Becky Holt making out and dating for the rest of freshman year instead of her saying "no I don't want to go to the movies with you, loser."

 

2. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
The third installment in the blockbuster Transformers film franchise by director Michael Bay continued the story of Optimus Prime and his Autobot warriors and their battle with Megatron and the evil Decepticons, with humanity--and Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf)--caught in the middle. In "Dark of the Moon," we learn that the Apollo missions discovered alien technology on the moon, which leads to an epic battle and ultimately the destruction of the Transformers' home planet, Cybertron. It's a tragic blow to the Transformers, but that ending could have been very different!

How it SHOULD have ended: With a fire on set, tragically killing the director and star.

1. Back to the Future
Everyone knows the classic movie about teenage time traveler Marty McFly and his exciting adventure trying to return to his own time without accidentally breaking up his parents' marriage and preventing his own birth! We all know Marty was successful in his quest, but what you don't know is how it should have ended!

How it SHOULD have ended: Wait, hold on, Michael J. Fox? Two sequels? No, no, this is all wrong. "Back to the Future" was supposed to be a singular cult classic, the movie that led to the Eric Stoltz geek TV renaissance! Something happened, something changed the timestream! I need to set this right, before... before...

Blasting from the Past

I'm conducting a minor experiment, to see if anyone ever bothered to change the most annoying things about the Internet. I mean, animated gifs are experiencing a renaissance, far beyond what we might have imagined back in the days of:

and:

(and on my old homepage):

But I found myself wondering today: do blinking text tags still work? Those were always loads of fun.

(Answer: apparently not in my browser)

Of course the best kind of tag was the
SCROLLING MARQUEE

Oh! What about rainbow text effects?

THIS IS WHAT THE INTERNET IS FOR!

An Update

Things have been, as they often are, quieter here than I'd like. I've mostly been busy with work, and the remainder of my free time has been looking for other work. I'd much rather be writing blog posts than cover letters, but that's where I'm at right now. But now I have a moment or two to procrastinate, so have some bullet points! Spoilers for summer movies ahead.

• I started reading Greg Rucka's novel Alpha. It's still pretty early in the book, so not much has happened, but I'm enjoying it so far. There are some interesting quirks with how Rucka describes and words things, and I'm trying to determine what's his style versus what's his choice for the narrator's voice. Aside from the way he refers to military minutiae like a seasoned expert, it doesn't feel much like any of the other stuff I've read of Rucka's.
  
  The lack of pictures may be a contributing factor to that.
  
• I picked up "Scribblenauts Unmasked" and beat it in fairly short order. I was going to outline my thoughts here, but I think I'll put together something more substantial shortly. In any case, I quite liked it.
  
• I saw "Amazing Spider-Man 2," and was underwhelmed. I quite liked the first installment, but this one was (as I might have predicted) overstuffed and rushed. The Electro plot, Harry's illness, and the mystery of Peter's parents could easily have taken up a whole flick without shoehorning in the Goblin and the bridge scene as well. I frankly would have liked another movie with Gwen in it before the inevitable end, and especially one without the college girl equivalent of being one day away from retirement. On top of all that, it felt like there was just so much dialogue (the entire graduation speech, for instance) that felt too convenient, too on-the-nose, too plot-driven. Sony's clearly on a mad dash to make their own "Avengers," without learning from the mistakes of "Spider-Man 3" or the successes of "Avengers"--specifically, laying the groundwork for that movie over the course of years, through several other films, where the worst of them also happened to be the one that diverted too much of its energy to laying the groundwork for the team film. Argh.
  
• Seeing "Godzilla" made me realize that I haven't actually seen a Godzilla movie outside of the last American Godzilla movie. This new one was better by far. I especially liked how incidental the humans were to everything. They set the plot in motion by unleashing Muto, but humanity went mostly unnoticed by the creatures, which followed the basic drives of nature: mate and eat. Including another monster was a smart choice (making it look like the Cloverfield monster: doubly smart), because it shifts the narrative. When Godzilla is the only monster, the plot becomes humans vs. Godzilla, which in the "Godzilla" franchise, can end in a stalemate at best. "We drove the creature back into the sea! Yay, I guess? But, like, he's still right there. In the sea." Pitting Godzilla against a bigger threat makes us root for the titular monster, and just hope the humans don't screw things up too badly.
  
  I think the one thing I would have changed is letting the generic protagonist disarm the damn nuclear bomb. They were setting that up for the whole movie, only to have him stymied by a panel that he could easily have pried off with the harpoon he found there on the boat. It was tough to watch the happy ending reunion scene at the end knowing the radioactive fallout from the detonation of a nuclear warhead just off the coast of California was going to render half those happy families dead from leukemia within a few years. I get that part of the message is that nature points up the folly of men, but at least let some men solve their own follies maybe?
  
• I was interviewed this weekend for the Chippewa Valley Geek podcast, where I talked way too much and way too incoherently about some topics regarding canon and comics. It was tons of fun, and I'll post a notice here whenever it gets uploaded.
  
• I'm still working on that Superman QuizUp question set, though I hope to finally finish it up soon. If you have any suggestions, I'm all ears.

New Wallpaper

One of the ways I've been busying myself lately is by building a new desktop computer. It's way faster than my last model, and seems way more stable. Hopefully it'll also be able to run games that are more complicated than FTL. It'd become a bit of a tradition among my electronic devices that I give them network names that are Batman-themed, but make the wallpaper Superman-themed. I was having a bit of trouble settling on a new image that I really liked for the wallpaper this time, so I ended up making one. It started with this José Luis García-López image, which I already have on a fridge magnet:

I was surprised to find that on an image search, since I kind of assumed the weird clipart rainbow was added in by whomever made the magnets. I did a little Photoshop surgery, and came up with this nice, minimalist wallpaper background--sized for a 1280x1024 screen. Feel free to use it, if you like.

Collapse

Huh, for some reason the tags to collapse that last post didn't work. Sorry about that, folks. I've noticed that's been kind of hinky lately, but hadn't seen that particular variation. Looks like I'll be trying to clean up the HTML around here soon.

Soldiering On

Spoilers Ahoy for "Captain America: The Winter Soldier"!


Look, I know "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." Isn't very good, but it seems like there are easier ways to cancel it.

Seriously, what a movie. "Captain America: The First Avenger" was easily my favorite of the previous Marvel flicks, and this cements the Cap franchise as, I think, the best superhero movie series going. Some thoughts, in my usual bulleted list format:

• Holy crap, Batroc the Leaper. And with plenty of leaping, too.
  
• The fights in this flick were fantastic. I imagine it's hard to keep things interesting in these films, especially since Cap doesn't have any flashy powers to fall back on, but I thought the choreography was well-done, that everyone got a good moment in the sun, and that each fight felt like an appropriate escalation from the previous one.
  
• I liked how much characterization Black Widow received. She's largely been the River Tam of the series, quiet and badass, but without much of her own personality up 'til this point, so it was nice to see her open up, be friendly, and show some vulnerability.
  
• The same largely holds true for Nick Fury, frankly.
  
• I liked the twists and turns that kept this feeling like a spy thriller. I also liked the little nods to Bourne and "Skyfall," between Steve's parkour antics and his plunge into the ocean. In that latter scene, I half expected Moby to start playing.
  
• I thought the film did a pretty good job of knitting together several different stories from the comics into a coherent narrative.
  
• I also really liked how at least a little attention and lip service was paid to the point that Allied actions in World War II weren't all heroic and virtuous. That kind of nuance gets lost when your film's about superheroes vs. laser Nazis, and the shift to the secret war and shades of gray in this film could have turned into a misguided commentary on the changing times, but I think they did a decent job of making it clear that things have never been quite so rosy.
  
• I about lost it when Arnim Zola showed up. Somehow I had both forgotten he was around and forgotten he was announced in the cast some time ago. I love Arnim Zola, and crazy 1970s Arnim Zola is amazing. Though for a second I thought the AI was going to be Ultron.
  
• Speaking of last-minute reveals, I'm really curious to see what the legal fallout of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch showing up here is. Conventional legal wisdom had held that whoever got them on the screen first was going to have the rights to them, which made it look like they were a lock for Fox, but here we are. I can't imagine notoriously-litigious Disney letting "X-Men: Days of Future Past" go by without some legal challenge, and I would be surprised if this weren't going to be leverage to reclaim some of those licensed characters. If there isn't a legal challenge, then you'd better believe Sony and Fox are going to be looking at what other characters they can potentially poach, as per precedent. Spider-Woman's a Spider-Man family character, right? And She-Hulk and Black Panther were in the Fantastic Four. It's gonna be an interesting few months.
  
• Falcon was pretty great. I liked (and didn't notice until my wife pointed it out) the parallel between Cap's status as a man out of time, and the experiences of soldiers returning from long deployments. The war never really ends, and life moves on without you, whether you're in Kandahar or a block of Arctic ice. It's a great take on the character.
  
• Speaking of takes on the character, I really wish we could get a Superman movie like this. You know, one where he's optimistic and inspirational and always doing the right thing, even when the world he lives in would drive anyone else to cynicism and despair. Superman and Captain America should be the unshakable moral foundations of their respective universes, not weepy angsty guys who struggle to be heroic.
  
• I love how many hooks the movie left at the end for sequels. Nick Fury running an underground war against Hydra, Cap searching for Bucky and taking down Hydra bases, Arnim Zola doing whatever he's going to do...they could make Captain America movies forever and I'd be okay with that.

Overall, I loved it. Marvel is killing it on the movie front, and it's even getting me excited to see what happens on tomorrow's "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." Excited. About "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." I know, I'm surprised too.

Ender Bender 12: Chapter 8, "Rat" (Part 3)

*Cough*

So, as it turns out, it's really difficult for me to motivate myself to read and write about terrible books (on top of the real-life stuff I have to do) when I'm not being paid for it. That said, I'm trying to make writing a bigger part of my life, so that means proving to myself and the general public that I can finish things and meet deadlines.

Just don't ask about Superman Sundays. Not yet, anyway.

So without further ado...

Ender arrives at his evening practice with the launchies, only to find that it's poorly attended. Could it be that he's not the effective leader of men that he thinks he is?

"Haven't you heard?" said another boy, a Launchy from a younger group. "Word's out that any Launchy who comes to your practice sessions won't ever amount to anything in anybody's army. Word's out that the commanders don't want any soldiers who've been damaged by your training."

No, of course it's another conspiracy against Ender! And halfway through the practice, some commanders from different armies came in and took note of everyone there! And fewer and fewer people started coming to practice each night, as the Launchies who did show up were harassed and assaulted.

Hey, it must really suck to be part of a group of people whose existence merits disapproval from those in power, which trickles down to abuse, assault, and harassment in the halls of schools. Good thing Orson Scott Card is the sort of guy who'd stick up for people like that, right?

Ender's ready to quit, but Alai talks him out of it. Who's our protagonist again?

Alai stopped him. "They scare you, too? They slap you up in the bathroom? Stick you head in the pissah? Somebody gots a gun up you bung?"

As an excuse to stop reading this book, I decided at this point to look up what awards Ender's Game has won. Turns out it picked up the Nebula in 1985 and the Hugo in 1986, as well as earning a spot on Amazon's Best Books of the Millennium poll.

Think about that for a minute. Think about the books that have been published since 1001 C.E. Let's assume that we're omitting plays, thus kicking out all the works of Shakespeare. That still leaves Things Fall Apart and A Brief History of Time and Newton's Principia and Dante's Divine Comedy. It still leaves all the works of Jane Austen and John Locke and Charles Darwin and Geoffrey Chaucer and Charles Dickens and Emily Dickinson. It leaves Candide and Gulliver's Travels and 1984. Le Morte d'Arthur! Paradise Lost! Frankenstein! The entirety of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the modern age, and that's just the last half of the millennium.

Ender's Game held the number 32 slot. "Somebody gots a gun up you bung?"

I...I don't know that I was ready for this.