My most recent newspaper column about the resurrection of zombies as a pop culture phenomenon generated a lot of solid - and fun - feedback (in that way, it was unlike most of my columns which tend to generate lots of right-wing hate mail). The basic premise of the column is the thesis of World War Z author Max Brooks: namely, that our interest in the entertainment industry's fantastical undead - whether zombies, vampires or other ghouls - is connected to a more general sense of apocalypse in our real lives.
To that end, a few people pointed out to me this post from the great website io9, which looked at this idea in empirical terms:
There's been a huge spike in the production of zombie movies lately, and many of them seem to be inspired by war. Everything from 28 Days Later to Zombie Strippers make explicit reference to wartime, as did seminal 1968 zombie flick Night of the Living Dead. Is there really a connection between zombie movies and social unrest? We decided to do some research and find out. The result? We've got a line graph showing the number of zombie movies coming out in the West each year since 1910 - and there are definite spikes during certain years, which always seem to happen eerily close to historical events involving war or social upheaval...
You can see that there are distinctive spikes in zombie popularity - and they always seem to fall slightly after a huge political or social event has caused mass fear, chaos, or suffering. That's why World War II, Vietnam, and the current Iraq War are all followed by a zombie rush at theaters.
In other news, I saw Zombieland last night and loved it. A good mix of horror and comedy (more of the latter, really).
Making a good movie trailer is clearly an art unto itself - one very different from making a feature-length film. What's so interesting is that two previews for the same movie can make that movie look entirely different.
I wasn't able to attend the local Lebowskifest here in Denver this year, but I encourage everyone to watch this local news dispatch on it. As you'll see, the local reporter, Eli Stokols, incorporates the movie's most famous lines into his report. He's a good man...and thorough...and his report is absolutely hilarious. Check it out.
I watched Flashdance this weekend while sitting around and doing absolutely nothing. It just happened to be on TV, so I watched it (yes, I am that lame). My major revelation in watching the film is that the lead male character, Michael Nouri, looked in 1983 just like Adrian Grenier - the dude from Entourage - looks today. In fact, the resemblance is so striking, I think Adrian Grenier might be Michael Nouri, which would, of course, make Michael Nouri a real-life Christopher Lambert from the Highlander, or Richard from Lost.
Like most nerds, I'm a huge believer in the power of Star Wars and the Star Wars ethos. However, I never knew Star Wars had become an official religion.
As you can see over at io9, there is, indeed, a growing collection of religious art around Star Wars - and it even includes icons from the Empire (which I would have thought would be part of a Satanic anti-Star Wars religion).
When I saw District 9 last week, the movie previews were, ahem, pretty scary. The most frightening of them was for a film called The Fourth Kind - a Blair Witch Project-style thriller that purports to be based on real events in Nome, Alaska. Watch the preview here - it's straight-up terrifying:
Obviously, billing the movie as based on real events makes it extra-horrifying. Count me in among those headed to see this flick when it comes out in November.
I used to think Ghostbusters II was a good movie. Then I watched it again recently, and realized that - except for the persistent hilariousness of Bill Murray - it's actually pretty awful. However, one thing that still remains cool about the film is its fantastical descent into the old Manhattan subway system.
I don't know - something about old infrastructure - and particularly old subways - is just cool in a retro/nostalgia kind of way. Which is why I was so intrigued by this photo display at The Infrastructurist. It looks at the old subway systems of the world - and it's like looking back at ancient archaeology.
Poltergeist really scared the living shit out of me, to the point where I get a bit nervous around the sound and sight of fuzz on a television. That's why I'm pretty pumped to read this news:
For anyone still haunted by a little girl's voice intoning "They're here" in the '80s horror film "Poltergeist," be warned - they're coming back.
MGM will remake the classic fright fest, in which a family moves into a new house to the anger of some very old residents, reports ShockTillYouDrop.com.
The new version of Tobe Hooper's haunted house blood fest is set to be released on Thanksgiving Weekend 2010.
When Poltergeist was originally made, the television was the major piece of communications equipment in the American household. Today, it's more and more the Internet - so I wonder if they'll involve the Internet in the remake. We'll see.
As a sci-fi fan who loves to be frightened by dystopic movies, I've been looking forward to District 9 since I first saw the preview. Certainly, I knew that the gap between the quality of a preview and the quality of the full movie is particularly high in the sci-fi genre (it's easy to make a couple of alien shots look awesome in a 60-second preview, but it's really hard to make a full sci-fi film that doesn't devolve into predictability/stupidity). But the preview for District 9 focused on the film's political edge, and therefore made it seem particularly promising - and I'm happy to report that the full movie does not disappoint.
The plot summary is straightforward and also ingenious: Instead of following the typical War of the Worlds script which has alien invaders coming to conquer Earth, District 9 reverses it: the aliens find themselves stranded on Earth and subsequently subjugated by humans. The filmmakers create this story by setting up the alien craft as a slave ship lost at sea - basically, the ship is filled with worker drones, gets lost on some routine intergalactic journey, and ends up drifting over Johannesburg, South Africa. When, after 3 months, humans break into the craft, they find the aliens starving and weak, and decide to "save" them by relocating them to a section of Johannesburg known as District 9.
Twenty years after the ship appeared, District 9 has become your standard refugee camp - impoverished, high crime and lots of violence. The South Africans - both white and black - have ghettoized the crustacean-looking aliens into a new apartheid situation, barring them from leaving or moving around. And as the movie begins, the goal of District 9's corporate administrators (led by a guy named Wikus, whose hairstyle and moustache is clearly intended to evoke a Hitler image) is to relocate the million aliens to a concentration camp 200 miles outside the city, because the human inhabitants of Johannesburg are fed up with them.
SPOILER ALERT: I'm not going to divulge what happens in the movie, but if you are one of those people who doesn't want to know anything about a film before seeing it, don't read on.
As a child of the 1980s, I was deeply saddened by the death last week of filmmaker John Hughes. His movies, which still populate the cable guide, bring me back to my childhood. But as my new newspaper column this week shows, they provide more than just nostalgia - they resurrect a zeitgeist that is at the center of the biggest political battles we face today.
The media world we all live in - whether we're watching cable news, experiencing big-budget movies, or reading political blogs - revolves around celebrity culture. Since the 1980s, we have become masters of creating mythic gods out of anchormen, actors and politicians - and that can be completely disempowering for the rest of us. What Hughes films all do is remind the world that mere mortals also have intrinsic value.
As you'll see in my column, the competing storylines between the cult of the individual and the belief in the common person - that is, 1980s Reganism and 1980s Hughesism - is precisely what defines the major economic debates we're having in this country right now. Should we as a society only value the titans and continue pursuing an everyone-for-themselves economy? Or should we as a society value the regular person, understanding that we need to take care of one another? Ultimately, that is what we're really discussing when we're discussing everything from the stimulus to unemployment benefits to health care.
The column relies on grassroots support - and because of that support, it is getting wider and wider circulation (a big thank you to all who have helped with that). So if you'd like to see my column regularly in your local paper, use this directory to find the contact info for your local editorial page editors. Get get in touch with them and point them to my Creators Syndicate site. Thanks, as always, for your ongoing readership and help contacting local editors. This column couldn't be what it is without your help.
Seriously, how can you not be completely excited about the imminent release of District 9? The film, based on its previews, seems to have everything - sci-fi, politics, action, and some good old fashioned scary-world-invasion dystopia.
Of course, making a good preview and making a good movie are two different things - and sci-fi horror tends to have a particularly wide preview-to-movie quality gap. I mean, seriously - how many sci-fi previews like White Noise have you gotten psyched about, only to go see the movie and feel totally ripped off?
That said, the initial reviews of District 9 are outright awesome. Check out Rotten Tomatoes - it's at 98 percent right now. That's a serious rating - and so I'm definitely going to see this one.
During my radio show on Monday, I had my grade-school buddy Adam Goldberg (now a big-time Hollywood screenwriter) on the show to discuss the lasting legacy of John Hughes. During the interview, which you can listen to here, he told the audience that there's a theory out there suggesting that Ferris Bueller's Day Off is actually an early version of Fight Club. Here's the Torontoist summing up this concept (h/t Cinematical):
Ferris Bueller's Day Off is actually a movie about Cameron. (This much is obvious: Cameron has the dramatic arc and the character development in the movie. Ferris is just Ferris all the way through.)...Ferris Bueller does not, as such, exist; the movie is actually about Cameron's day off and his unresolved crush on his best friend Sloane, and the parts where Cameron is not onscreen are merely the products of his imagination as Ferris, the perfect human being, does all the things Cameron could not or never do, until Cameron finally snaps and decides to live his life for himself. Which, if you will note, is exactly the point where Ferris' luck runs out and he needs his sister's help to escape Principal Rooney.
Basically, the theory is that Ferris is Tyler Durden - and it actually makes some sense. What do you think? Do you believe that was John Hughes' secret subplot?
Last month, I posted a piece here on Nerdivore about Ben Stein's serious conflict of interest. Now, the Huffington Post reports Stein has lost his New York Times business column over it:
Ben Stein has lost his Sunday New York Times column over his appearance in commercials for FreeScore.com, a company Reuters' Felix Salmon described as "a sleazy company which exists only to extract large sums of money from those who can least afford it." The company offers customers a free credit score but charges them substantially to actually review their credit report.
This is good news - at least the New York Times, unlike CNN, has the good sense to recognize an unacceptable conflict of interest when it sees one.
John Hughes, one of the greatest screenwriters and filmmakers of the 20th century, died this week at the age of 59. He was not merely a great entertainer - he was the guy who helped make it culturally acceptable to be different and be a nerd.
His death is a real tragedy - and in honor of the man, take a tour of his greatest work.
At MTV's blog, you can check out some of Hughes' most memorable movie lines.
At Entertainment Weekly, editors there list what they believe are Hughes' best films.
There should really be no debate that the scariest cartoon movie* ever made is The Secret of NIMH. A distant second was the weird 1970s version of The Hobbit, which was frightening not so much because it was made so well, but because it's Japanese anime/Voltron-esque freeze-frame shots and its pastel colors gave it the kind of psychedelic scariness that, say, a clown evokes.
The Secret of NIMH, however, is a Disney flick meaning a straight-up American-style cartoon. And for a young child, it's shit-your-pants scary. This is why I'm psyched to hear this news:
The rats of NIMH may soon be on the move again. Citing sources at Paramount, both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter are saying Neil Burger (The Illusionist) is in talks to adapt Robert C. O'Brien's award-winning 1971 book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH for a new film, though it remains unclear if the updated version will be animated or live action with animation.
In case you want to relive your young days of self-soiling, you can watch The Secret of NIMH in full on Hulu.com. In fact, that sounds like such a good idea, I think I've got my weekend plans.
UPDATE: My bad. The Secret of NIMH was not made by Disney!
AMC's sci-fi blog has a list of it's favorite evil computers from movies. It's a decent line-up, but I think it is missing a few, including:
- The War Operations Planned Response (WOPR): This is the sarcophagus-like behemoth from War Games - the one that almost ends the world, until it averts apocalypse by beating itself in tic-tac-toe.
- Sark: The evil computer from Tron, the ultimate computer movie. 'Nuff said.
- The Robocop Killing Machine: I'm not talking about Robocop himself, I'm talking about that fully-computerized double-barreled At-At looking thing that mows down the dude during its roll-out ceremony. That thing is badass - and scary.
Shit yeah, the achievers! That's right, a new documentary is coming out about The Big Lebowski - perhaps the greatest cult film made in the last twenty years (a close second would be Office Space). The film is called 'The Achievers: The Story of the Lebowski Fans' an excerpt of story in the Los Angeles Times:
Eddie Chung, a former philosophy student who is accustomed to pondering life's deepest mysteries, is still stumped by something that shapes lives by the thousands: Why has "The Big Lebowski" become the most popular and all-consuming cult film since "The Rocky Horror Picture Show"?
"I don't think," said Chung, a 38-year-old Southland filmmaker, "that's an answerable question. It's like asking, 'Why did Britney Spears become popular?' "
Maybe so. But as with Spears, the 1998 Coen brothers film is now an undeniable pop-cult force: For many it is a way of life. The mystery of the film's resonance is something Chung has pondered for five years now, since he walked into a Lebowski Fest in Las Vegas in 2004.
He and a friend arrived a bit early, and Chung began to wonder if the celebration was for real. "By then, there was no proof that anyone was gonna show up for this."
But they did: The event -- a bout of bowling, trivia and white Russian consumption following the kind of screening in which audiences talk back to the screen -- drew nearly 1,000 people and sent Chung on a journey from which he's only just now emerging.
Atlas Entertainment's Charles Roven, Richard Suckle and Steve Alexander are ready to form "Voltron."
The producers behind "Get Smart" and "The International" (and Roven of course also produced "The Dark Knight) have acquired the rights to make a live-action feature based on the robot-lion property, pushing the project forward after several years in development with the Mark Gordon Company.
I haven't seen any of the Transformers movies, despite spending a good portion of my childhood playing with Transformers toys and watching Transformers cartoons. However, if/when a live-action Voltron movie comes out, I'm definitely seeing it. Something about Voltron was just way cooler than even Transformers.
As any fan of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home knows, Scotty famously trades the formula for a futuristic material called "transparent aluminum" to a 20th century manufacturing company in exchange for a shipment of materials he needs to build on-board whale tanks. "Transparent aluminum" is so revolutionary in the 20th century that the manufacturing company's CEO almost has a heart attack when he sees the formula, which always made me wonder why the future world that the Star Trekkers came back to wasn't at least slightly different than the world they left. After all, in giving away the "transparent aluminum" formula, they had altered history.
But I digress. The important thing today is the news from New Scientist that we may actually be getting close to real transparent aluminum:
At standard temperature and pressure, solid aluminium is a lattice of ions, with a sea of free electrons in between. The FLASH beam had enough energy to knock an electron out of each ion and set it free, while the photon got absorbed in the process.
Normally in a solid metal, another electron will instantly take the place of the missing one. Flash is so powerful that it can rip an electron out of every atom before others have a chance to replace them. With one electron removed, the remaining electrons around each ion settle into a different configuration, becoming too tightly bound for the laser to remove.
That means the X-ray photons can't be easily absorbed, and they fly straight through the material, making the previously opaque aluminium transparent to X-rays.
It's not full-on transparent to the naked eye, but it is moving in that direction. Not coincidentally, as a 2005 Air Force press release notes, this is an innovation the military has been interested in for years.
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As a sci-fi fan who loves to be frightened by dystopic movies, I've been looking forward to District 9 since I first saw the preview. Certainly, I knew that the gap between the quality of a preview and the quality of the full movie is particularly high in the sci-fi genre (it's easy to make a couple of alien shots look awesome in a 60-second preview, but it's really hard to make a full sci-fi film that doesn't devolve into predictability/stupidity). But the preview for District 9 focused on the film's political edge, and therefore made it seem particularly promising - and I'm happy to report that the full movie does not disappoint.
As a child of the 1980s, I was deeply saddened by the death last week of filmmaker John Hughes. His movies, which still populate the cable guide, bring me back to my childhood. But as my 
Seriously, how can you not be completely excited about the imminent release of District 9? The film, based on its previews, seems to have everything - sci-fi, politics, action, and some good old fashioned scary-world-invasion dystopia.
During my radio show on Monday, I had my grade-school buddy 
There should really be no debate that the scariest cartoon movie* ever made is 
As any fan of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home knows, Scotty famously trades the formula for a futuristic material called "transparent aluminum" to a 20th century manufacturing company in exchange for a shipment of materials he needs to build on-board whale tanks. "Transparent aluminum" is so revolutionary in the 20th century that the manufacturing company's CEO almost has a heart attack when he sees the formula, which always made me wonder why the future world that the Star Trekkers came back to wasn't at least slightly different than the world they left. After all, in giving away the "transparent aluminum" formula, they had altered history.