This is the Avengers Entry

I just got out of Marvel's The Avengers (or if you're from Europe Marvel's Avengers Assemble) and I will get to my opinion of the film, but in light of the things that

Here are the facts:
I went to beverages and more and ran into my friend Simon Estrada. He is a talented artist. I then bought a Tsing Tao and a bottle of Cutty Sark.

I got a burrito, ate that burrito, filled my flask up, and watched half of Community (sorry, I will check it out on Hulu).

I went and watched Marvel's The Avengers (because I refuse to not spell out its stupid, stupid title).

Afterwards I went to the adjacent Yard House and got a Guinness.I thought about getting two, but then again I drained that Sark flask and had to get home to a dog and a cat and hell.

I chatted with a couple.

That is always precious. Talk to people. That is why I hate clubs and trendy bars. It casts off basic humanity. Nobody should or would or could talk to anybody there. That is why I talked to this couple.

Damnit. We are none of us misanthropes.

Side note: Is friendship necessarily a thing? Must it be?

We move on.

After befriending said couple and chatting about sports (they agree that the Yankees are Hitler youth and the Red Soxes are from Boston) the bar hit last call and I gave them a tour of Old Town Pasadena and ended up at Barney's Beanery. We talked. We touched hands. He went to the bathroom.

And that is when I was informed that I was leading him on. Suddenly one or two stray comments made sense. As it turned out we were due for a threeway. I was the catalyst for the threeway. Alright. I let the lady know that, sorry, that was not my scene, hon. I was, unfortunately, straight. The fellow returned. Then I went to the bathroom.

Holy crap, dude, I am in a bathroom. I do the bathroom thing and finish up and walk back up the stairs. There is a local looking dude. I appraise him. "Hey, man, I don't know. That sounds like a situation." I know, right. "Yeah!" Yup.

I am in a situation. It is official.

I rejoin with said couple.The guy pays the bill and we head out and I decide to guide them to their hotel, them being out-of-towners to varying degrees. There is no way I'm letting people tell their neighbors that LA (Pasadena) is full of assholes. Never that. Also, hey, if Israel can find peace so can we. I am no ideologue.

We part ways.

I call up my friend Alex and talk to him about this. We do. Then we talk about other things. That goes on for some time.

I decide to write about this.

And here we are. Afterwards, I write about this and then decide to write a worthwhile version of this story in addition to a short story based on this experience because, man, what the fuck vibe is it I am giving off?

Apparently not a vibe, but A Vibe. The Vibe, even, something that makes Chaos Theory a doctorate.

It's weird.I don't even get carded anymore. And that preclude the Ralph's on Colorado. They know my ass by now, shamefully. They know me for my dad too. But bars I have never been to don't even card me> The hell? And first of all, what hell?

I realize this comes hot on the heels of a woman my mom's age (but not looking like it) propositioning a situation where she might teach me things that younger women do not know. This happened at the Rancho. This is a fact. There is more to this. I'd tell you what but it'd get in the way.

My life amounts to something 19 year old me would have begged for. It is madness and I am grateful that he never ran into these things.I could never make up this shit and as I get older and less creative the only things I can truly put to paper are the mistakes that I remember not making, because, seriously, this might as well be the Gomorrah that killed Lot's wife. And she had not tales to tell.

It'd be a curse if it wasn't so silly.

Let this be a place holder

I want to talk about the death fo MCA and how much the Beastie Boys mean to me, but, currently, I don't have the energy for it (I am writing other things).

I just want to post this because I like it



And for the record I do love the Beastie Boys more than you. So don't fuck with me on this one, pal.

Life is too precious and wondrous and the work of the Beastie Boys don't deserve any sort pause for qualifications. They were great. Any and all tributes are welcome. If you don't like it, then move on. But, anyways, an American treasure died on Friday, let's try and act like human beings about it.

They lived and died to party, so let's go do that.

I Can't Say I've Seen Something Like This Before

Alright. I'm down. Bring the release date.

Mad Man Future

Sometimes the dumbest ideas are the coolest.

(This is about a person planning to build an underground park in New York City. Yup. Chew on that, John Carpenter.)

It happened again

I think I found another doppelganger.

So. . . it is just me?

(via this isn't happiness via American Polaroid.)

Prophet is the Tits

I don't know what you heard, but this comic book Prophet is the kipper's knickers.

It is a comic you should be reading.



Look at this splash and tell me that you are not curious.

The above splash page is the tone of the piece. It's about a displaced Conan who rides on a giant bug and sometimes is heavily involved in slime men and eating random bits of creatures he finds on his journey. It's as exciting as a comic can be and it is as completely mad as a thing can be without becoming nonsensical. It's great because for the past ten years or so comics have been immensely concerned with this concept of realism at the detriment of good ideas. Just look at the amount of stitches and seams that have appeared on the costumes of super-heroes lately and think about how creative those sartorially inclined heroes have become.

Prophet, for a relaunch of one of the most infamous comic creators of the 90's, strikes me as an old fashioned way of making comic books. A few months ago I read the original run of OMAC and my friend Beef was recently talking to me about reading Kamandi for the first time and we both basically agreed that as wonderful and as ecstatic of a writer/artist/creator as Jack Kirby was, he was as unhinged and as all over the place as a comic maker could be. This current run of Prophet, I feel takes the best aspects of Kirby's energy and makes it into something modern and wonderful.

I'll get back to that in a moment, but first I want to denigrate comics as they are now. It'll be more fun this way.

Instead of using an issue to go over the various ins and outs of the Avengers going over the new psychological problems of Norman Osbourn for five years or how they should maybe buy a new shelf from Ikea, this comic book has a giant battle involving alien elephants. Then it moves on. Because it can. It can afford to throw those things away and because there's so many of them and there's a story that can wrap it all together in a nice, little package. It's an exuberant comic book.

The art is pretty great, as well. It should go without saying, but it's pretty important that a book as nuts as this not look like hell. It's important that the ideas look as awesome as they are on the page. In this case it does. Simon Roy has knocked the hell out of the crazy plate of junk that King has handed him. It's great looking and it is great to the point that it makes me want to double-down on my own art. I won't ever get to the point that Roy is at, but. . . man, making aspirational art is a serious endeavor. It's a sign of something.

As you can tell the art style simple and cartoony and that somehow melds well with the subject matter. At the very least it's an excellent way to separate it from the muscled madness of previous Prophet. I've been following the work of Simon Roy for a while and I've always liked his stuff. It's cool that his art has shown up in a work that interests me this much. Overall it's a nice melding of a kind of serious art style with a fun and representative style. It's exactly what Jack Kirby would have been pleased to see.
















But I'm babbling.

As we speak I'm fairly certain that the new arc of this comic has come out with a new artist, as well (same writer, though). I've wasted my time here and I've wasted the little time I did put to any use. The point here is you should read Prophet.

It's a good comic. Good comics deserve love, too.

The fact that I'm saying this about a Rob Liefeld production should speak enough to its quality.

Damn your Heiney!

Apparently James Bond is going to be drinking beer in the new movie. Apparently, like everything, this is an outrage, which is strange. It used to be that a woman had to get raped and murdered for an outrage to occur and that came to be because the words "raped and murdered" were too vulgar for polite consumption (the same goes for "white slavery" because no white person wants their poor women to be equated with the half-breeds and such that "prostitute" themselves. I mean, perish the thought).

It's absurd. James Bond has been a tool of corporate consumption since he was first incepted. That's almost the entire point of the guy. He's a violent, glamorous ad exec that saves the world. He's Don Draper with an accent and he always has been. To make a poo-poo out of what he drinks is ridiculous.

Even if this was an issue-- and it is because Heineken is a crap beer and what kind of an upper class gent would drink that swill?-- I don't really care because Skyfall is looking to be a good movie. It's got a solid director and more quality actors than you can shake a stick at.

What's more is I believe it is going to be good because of the video below. Look at that gal. She isn't blinking. That's significant. That means somebody put the care and effort into this movie's action. I just watched an action movie (the name of which I cannot remember, sorry) and whenever the characters fired they started blinking. You almost have to when you fire a gun, that's a natural response. Take note of that. The next time you watch a movie go ahead and see whether the actors blink when they fire a gun or not. You'd be surprised how often it happens.

It's maddening.

It takes effort and attention to detail to get over the fact that you're holding an explosion and it is pretty near your face. It takes training. It looks like maybe they took the time and the effort (and the money) to breed that out of this woman.

Watch this--

This is going to be a good one. . . unlike that piece of shit Quantum of Solace. What the fuck was that thing?

Snipe Hunt

Snipe Hunt:
Or Why You Really Shouldn't Watch Predators



Let me tell you: This Predators flick is no darn good. And here's why--

The Look

The visual and special effects are lacking, as well. It's bizarre to think that a sequel could actually look worse than its original 1988 counterpart, but the folks behind this film found a way. It isn't even so much the art design choices (of which I am not a massive fan), but the actual quality of the predator suits and of the digital touch-ups look terrible. The monster suits look like they fell out of a bad theme park attraction. Instead of a big fight, you half expect a sad, ugly child to want to take a photo with them.

The CGI isn't great, either. It's strange, again, that in a world where the highest grossing film of all time is Avatar, an all computer graphics bonanza, that in 2010 there are still movies that can't figure out how to make digital blood not look like crap. They found a way to do it in 1988, yet, like the Roman recipe for concrete, that is apparently lost to the ages.

I realize it isn't fair to compare this movie (an obviously relatively low budget affair) with that of a 500 million dollar film, I just think it would have been nice if they put at least 500 dollars towards some of their special effects.

That Stupid Thing Your Mouth Keeps Doing

And another thing, to speak nothing of the lousy plot, which really just consists of a loose configuration of set pieces and inter-cut with dialogue that sounds like it came from an action movie script template. I don't know how you manage to make a movie about alien hunters running an intergalactic game preserve by rote, but Robert Rodriguez and whoever directed it managed to find a way.

It's sad that is the most remarkable thing about the whole movie.

Then there's the people tasked with delivering these lines. There's the gruff and guarded soldier, there's the hick, there's the disposable black guy, there's Machete, there's Boris, there's the taciturn Japanese guy (oh, good, he found a samurai sword, I wonder where this is going). They aren't characters, they're trading cards.

And I know what you're thinking, "Oh, but James, that's a ridiculous point to make! There weren't any good characters in the original film! It was just Arnie and a bunch of muscle men spouting one-liners!"

Oh yeah? Well, fuck you**.

"Slack-jawed faggots" and other Colloquialisms

Where are the one-liners? Where's the catch phrases? Where's my sexual tyrannosaurus? Gone! Lost to time! Instead we get a bunch of half-assed monologues meant to convey that this hombres (and hombress) are mean mother fuckers that in actuality just sound like someone padding out scenes of intense special effects. The dialogue is terrible, as is the exposition.

The best lines in the movie are a quote from Ernest Hemmingway and when that prisoner calls one of the predators a "space faggot," which is not a phrase I think I'd ever have experienced without this movie.

So, thank you for that, Predators.


I'm 90% sure this didn't happen in the movie.

The Chewbacca Defense

Also, what's the logic of this movie? Are the predators omniscient? Do they perform careful studies of the human species and select from a list of candidates? Is these a board of predator elders that approve or disapprove how much of a warrior someone is? Is there a metric for that kind of a thing? Is it a number or a letter grade?

And if these predators are semi-omniscient, what's with hunting these people down? Is that not sporting or something? (Don't answer that, I'm being facetious)

Even by action movie standards the world doesn't make sense. It isn't internally consistent. People die because they have to and predators keel over because it says in the script that their time was up. In one scene a claymore mine causes an explosion on the scale of a mini-Hiroshima and a few scenes later a big sack of grenades goes off and doesn't even scratch the predator that was standing right on top of it.

This does not make sense.

Daddy Needs a New Pair of Shoes

What's worse is that it fucked up my good movie streak. I went from Elite Squad 2 to Gosford Park to Wall-E to Winter's Bone to this. . .this thing. How dare they.

How dare they.

Credit Where Credit is Due

Of course the best part of the whole movie is when Laurence Fishbourn* shows up as some kind of a mash-up between (guy) and Dennis Hopper from Apocalypse Now. Even though he doesn't fit into the film itself-- he's much too silly and clearly out-of-shape-- but, in this case, that's a good thing.

If I include the crossovers, the predator has been in five films. If I include sanity and taste, the predator is only in one good film. That's a horrible batting average. At this point I find it unlikely that this creature is ever going to dig itself out of the hole that its owners have put it in. The Alien franchise has had its years in the wilderness, but in that case it has an actual curator in the form of Ridley Scott. Predators has, what? People who want to see him fight Freddie and Jason?

I can't help but feel that at this point the predator is now stuck on this b-movie rail line that, at some point is just going to fly off of a cliff. There's a lot of horror movies that

Now it's a sub-par genre flick with dudes in rubber suits lumbering around, fighting stereotypes. . . No, wait. It was always that. But at least in 1988 it was good.


Here comes the thrilling climaaaaaaawn.

The Moral of the Story Is

So, what have we learned? Well, we learned that no matter how many good films or how complicated my tastes may have become over the years, the idea of a bunch of madmen fighting a space alien is still highly attractive to me.

I guess we also learned that a B-movie premise, once elevated, tends to descend right back down to earth if in the wrong hands.

And I think, most importantly, is I want to watch a Predator 3 (or would it be 4?).

Oh well. At least we've got Prometheus to look forward to.

Also, instead of watching Predators, go and watch this movie--



Which is completely insane and ridiculous and about as believable, but, damnit, it's got heart. And pregnant hermaphroditic lizard aliens.

*I have twice mistaken Laurence Fishburne for Morgan Freeman for some reason. Thinking about it now, Freeman's inclusion in this movie would have been amazing.

**Also, the original Predator had that crypto-gay black guy in it who went nuts when his beau died. He died singing.

Fuckin' A

I was reading this interview on Vice and Daragh Hughes, the object of the piece, said something about art that I've felt for a while in a way far better than I have been able to--

I take it contemporary art isn’t your cup of tea, then?
The focus on concept above aesthetics has produced some shockingly ugly work. It seems that it doesn't matter how you paint, so long as there is a clever concept propping it up. The problem is that, because these people can't paint, their concept is rarely evident in their paintings, so you get referred to an accompanying written statement. To my mind, if I can’t get the meaning directly from the image itself, it’s not good visual art. I think contemporary art generally tends toward the trivial, banal, and esoteric. This is presumably an effect of the postmodern refusal to take life seriously.

Ah, yes. Now that's some good theorizin'.

Now Give Me the Dubstep

Finally, my prayers are answered! Now if we can only get Matthew kidnapped by aliens, all would be right!

Or maybe O'Brien stumbles onto some black oil! Who knows where Season 3 will take us!

Hong Kong Tram Ride 1967

ike a massive set for a John Woo movie.
It's hard to believe places like this ever existed-- or even still exist. It looks like a giant movie set for an unfilmed John Woo movie. I'm just waiting for the place to explode in gunfire.

Listen to Your Prophets

This vignette speaks to how I feel in a way that I couldn't ever express in so few words. I agree with him completely. This is what America is. This is the America somebody has built.



Try and tell me I'm wrong.