Big Blue Arndt: February 2008 Archives

I know it's not totally topically appropriate but Monitor Duty is more than comic books and WFB was, is, about more than politics. I was e-mailed this by Fox News, stamped at 11:22 AM

CONSERVATIVE WRITER, COMMENTATOR WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. DEAD AT 82

ABC Radio News informed me between 11:30 and noon. I found a post at National Review Online's The Corner announcing it and currently on the online representation of the man's legacy there is an ongoing series of tributes and wonder posts. If you have any thoughts or well wishes about it for the family or the magazine, send them here.

Expect a proper send-up, as proper as can be formulated by a relative untermensch such as myself, late by evening. I probably will not post a copy here but I might.

Obviously I am not worthy. Obviously I know not nearly enough to write a tribute or obituary. I would have to lie to say that WFB did not affect me.

It is morbidly funny and appropriately sad that my heroes tend to die from diseases of old age before I can meet and thank them.

I will also point out that "Pinky! Act like William F. Buckley!" is still one of my favorite lines from the Pinky and The Brain Animaniacs shorts. There! It's relevant now!

My brother and his kids showed this to me this evening.

All should be required to take this test.

Which image suits best?

American Idol has insisted since its premiere that it is all about making stars of regular old street folk.

Radar is publishing a report, or rather a cursory overview that more than suggests that rather than sweeping up gaggles of promising and practicing amateur singers in various cities, that the program American Idol, like NBC's Last Comic Standing, is picking up (in some cases deliberately so) some low-key non-celebrity professionals, many of whom had large, expensive failed attempts to be high-powered successes in the music field already, including dropped contracts.

American Idol has been exposed by a longtime nemesis and the mainstream media as being nothing but a "boring hash of recycled pseudo-celebrities who weren't good enough to make it the first time around."

I don't watch AI enough to really care what sort of performer the contest gives chances to, and I can only care who wins when I visit people who are watching the program. That any program is not what it claims to be is usually a shame. especially when (even though a talent show) it is a glorified GAME SHOW.

The kid doesn't understand sarcasm and God helps an earthly baseball team cheat.

The book makes this movie look and smell like over-simplistic crap made for undereducated children.

That said it is a terrific movie. Read the book and realize that the movie is (almost) nothing like it.

Original Flixter review - Fine movie. Too short.

Expanded: This cinematic posthumous manifestation of Douglas Adams' magnificent multimedia plotline (strictly speaking the first medium that The Hitchhiker's Guide canon appeared in was a radio program) was disappointing to the majority of the fans of the novel series, the first novel, or Douglas Adams' stuff in general. The difficultly of adaptation from prose to screen, and from British atheistic wit to general interest American audiences' interest becomes readily apparent when watching this movie. I also would have made different choices when the creative license was exercised. The film was also too short.

It's simple! There are three sorts of movie reviews I have written, attempted to write, or actually had published in one form or another.

I have written normal formal movie reviews in my high school newspaper (this was nearly ten years ago) and a few on Monitor Duty (although there have been far less here than I had intended, thanks to my poor habits and discipline level at times), which is why there are no reviews of Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3, or Cloverfield. That sort of movie review is where I assess the quality of a movie, summarize a bit of the plot and the execution thereof, the performances of the actors and technical aspects of the film as well as other details. In those sorts of writings major spoilers, especially of an intensive or extensive nature (let alone of a nature of both kinds) is frowned upon.

What I intended to do with X-Men: The Last Stand, yet failed to do, was a traditional movie review, and the second kind of review immediately afterwards. The second kind of movie review is what I know as the Spoilermaker. It launches into the movie vengefully telling you what counts, what matters, and bringing up the dumbest and most horrific (surprising) points of/about the movie as like a traitor's head jammed onto a pike. You the reader will know ahead of time that it is a Spoiler-filled article right away because the sort of review is told to you so thus you have no room to complain that I spoiled the movie for you. The first sentence will contain a massive spoiler which will remove all reason to see a movie if the movie truly sucks and perhaps may contain extra incentive if the movie is awesome, although a Spoilermaker is more fun to write and more worthwhile to read or even to exist in the case of bad movies. I have never successfully pulled off a Spoilermaker that my increasingly senile mind can recall.

The third kind of movie is a capsule review. These are the stuff you usually see on Amazon and are what I (and other users) have worked in with the Flixter application on Facebook. These are short reviews that generally only hit on one or two points that really seem exceptionally relevant to the writer. What the reviews say present a specific idea or a laserlike focus on one or two or three aspects of the film, stuff that jumps out quite right.

In part it is important that I introduce all of these concepts in this short order and prepare all supposed readers for my intentions.

I intend to dump all of my Flixter-prepared Capsule reviews on Monitor Duty for the rest of this month.

They will be short; it will be sweet. No one will complain. Least of all me.

http://www.monopolyworldvote.com/en_US/

If no one else can remember to do so, I'll have this done by 9 AM.

Now that I think about it, I suppose it stands for "Political Zoo". I don't know.

The only point is.... has anyone ever heard of this site? I have been propositioned to write for the thing by a complete stranger, with purported claims of future money. Has anyone been reading it now, so how could I get noticed more often and by more folk with this one more blog visibility place in particular?

WRITERS GUILD VOTES UNANIMOUSLY TO RATIFY DEAL TO END 3-MONTH-OLD STRIKE

Honestly I could not care less anymore.

Although I do hope they will finish 24: Day 7 before the end of summer and that the second half of Heroes second season gets completed.

I was watching the Late Late Show, which stars Craig Ferguson, whom I admire and enjoy watching.

Jon Favreau, director of Iron Man(!!!!), which is a movie that I am practically shaking myself apart with anticipation, was on the talk program discussing taking his son to the Super Bowl in a private box (in part because he directed Iron Man and there was that Iron Man advertisement in the Super Bowl commercials) and in part because if I recall correctly Vince Vaughn was the one hosting the party.

Jon Favreau mentioned offhand that the Writer's Strike was over, and the conflict has been resolved.

Then he thanked Craig Ferguson on the grounds that the Late Late Show's strike suspension in part put pressure on the other parties involved to resolve their tender issues.

I really don't care except that Jon Favreau lost 80 pounds while creating the awesome movie, which is exceptional for a human being working alongside craft services.

Oh, and various blue collar workers' jobs will be saved by the resumption of work. I don't enjoy the prospect of starving white-collar workers, starving writers, either, but I have no empathy for frustrated writers. I should but I do not .

One of my favorite comics-related weblogs, and most underrated weblogs has ended as of the last day of 2007. Loren Collins' Suspension of Disbelief has been there to correct the record and lend advice whenever the creators of our fictional worlds committed major and noticeable errors regarding the real world elements that are included in these fantasy universes. One of my favorite (albeit guest-) posts is this one, which although the image is broken, indicates a moment where George Perez is drawing New York and putting two famous buildings in close visual proximity whereas in real life the two famous landmarks in such geographical disparity that you would have to look in two different directions at once to see both edifices simultaneously. In theory the geography of the Marvel Universe's 616 earth is nearly identical to the real world, that is, the fictional world is a pastiche... and George Perez didn't research the real world skyline before creating the fictional view.

Just as Dr. Scott from Polite Dissent is a doctor correcting medical errors in comic books, Loren Collins used his legal training to correct the legal errors in comic books, actively seeing trials depicted in issues and then criticizing how realistic the trial portions were, as we have little choice but to imagine that many of the legal structures of the comic book universes are the same as the real world, except when explicitly declared otherwise. In which case there is speculation or conjecture as to how the law is different, where the differences are never explicitly stated.

In many instances the mistakes actually detract from the quality of the comic, and distract the reader. It works that way for some lawyers, doctors. For Phil Meadows he cannot merely enjoy a building without deconstructing it in his head and I could not watch Smallville's political election plot lines without getting a sense of nausea. President Luthor did it to me worse.

My buddy Jim MacQuarrie often covers stuff that Loren misses, although his usual mission in the course of the weblog is/was to correct the many archery errors that crop up because pencillers who draw Green Arrow, Hawkeye, or Speedy often mess up royally as to how it actually happens, regardless of the ease of research. Even writers screw it up sometimes. Archery can only work in a certain way to even work, and despite that we can let little things go, some things we would not and should not. MacQuarrie is in a good position to catch that stuff, given that he "is an NAA certified archery instructor. Naturally, his arrows are green." He also did other things, whatever he noticed, and is Christian enough to notice when the Simpsons screwed up Ned Flanders in a Super Bowl episode.

Suspension of Belief was meant to be a group blog, but that never quite worked out. For one thing most of the registered group guys aside from Loren or MacQ posted one or two articles at best. For another I never registered as I intended to, to write about a few of the things I noticed. Hopefully if my short attention span can maintain cohesion I can write about that stuff here on Monitor Duty. (Although sometimes Loren got to it eventually, as he did with the question of whether Jonathan Kent was running for State Senate or US Senate). Another one like that is one that should been done long ago and this particular article should have been proliferated to the far reaches of the internet: Loren's logical and legal dissection of Civil War's Registration Act. As it is it was the lack of relevant topics near the end which led to a lack of regular posting which led to Loren Collins ending the weblog. He will continue the purposes of Suspension of Disbelief over at "the CBR blog, Comics Should Be Good." That is unfortunate, as I do not read that weblog regularly, or anything at Comicbook Resources. I do not intend to. (Well, I will make exception for the work of August deBlieck, Junior and some other stuff as it pops up). I do not read Comics Should Be Good for several reasons, despite the weblog's quality. However in a few months I will make it a point to go back and review all of Loren Collins' work on that blog, to see that disbelief remains effectively suspended.

I hope I can keep my mind straight long enough to affect parallel work here.

Also: us professional comic book readers, sophisticated adults that we are, are well-aware that Suspension of Disbelief is what we engage in so that we can truly enjoy a man who can fly, without saying to ourselves, "wait! a man cannot fly!" That is part of why Superman Returns was awful. It had non-Superman moments that rendered proper disbelief suspension impossible. The weblog I eulogize was so titled because it addressed the bits and pieces that were incorrect from the standard that we view a world, and thus interfered with the Suspension of Disbelief.

Read the Head of Vecna.

I liked it. It's not nearly as laugh out loud funny as the Gazebo, but either the writing style is worse or it's just too hard to imagine subterfuge in a world that exists only in a dozen guys' heads.

I must again tip my hat to Shamus Young.

I was flipping through a particular category of the weblog of my new idol Shamus Young and came to the RPG story of the Gazebo.

Apparently it is an old one. I am not an RPG guy so it's new to me.