Francisism has moved! (Kind of)

In a moment of moral weakness and/or possible lapse in sanity, the fine folks over at FFWD have bequeathed me some blog space on their (higher traffic) website. Click here if you care even a little bit.

Set phasers to obvious jokes

 

A new Star Trek trailer materialized on Apple Trailers today, and I’m willing to tentatively assign it descriptors like “thrilling,” and “sweeping.” But really, it’s pretty much what you’d expect. It highlights the action and the mystery of JJ Abrams’ reimagined universe without giving too much away, and introduces all of your old favourite characters as (emintently more salable) hardbodied young actors. The only question it raised for me (Trekies [and ers] are veritably shitting their pants) is why any government would place a spaceship in the care of a bunch of hot young people. I mean, even Lee Adama looks like he’s in his early thirties. Or maybe in the future the only requisite for command of a spaceship is driving a car at a cliff and then jumping out, only to be saved by obvious wirework. Whatever. Go watch.

C-Drive Refuse: Dead hobo jokes never go out of style

This is a piece I did for my university paper’s yearly funny-mag a few years ago. I came upon it accidentally while searching for an ancient set of questions I worked up for a Weird Al Yankovic interview that was supposed to happen a year ago, but never did, and I thought that it was prime blogging material. It was originally designed to spoof the style of our city’s leading newspaper (and the city’s hilariously offensive turbo-capitalist culture), so residents of Calgary may get more out of it. But, as the title of this post implies, hobo jokes are fairly universal. So here you are, internet, a five hundred word dead hobo joke. You’re welcome.

Hancock is harder to make nob jokes about than you might think

Completing my workdump all over this page, here is a link to my review of Hancock, wherein I have a huge nerd meltdown. This is the second paragraph, which is easily the dorkiest, and also gives a pretty good sense of how I felt about it:

Borrowing tropes and imagery from the asshole superheroes of modern comics, The Authority (circa the Mark Millar-Frank Quitely run), and the grown-up badassery of Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, the first part of Hancock stands up to the best superhero movies Hollywood has on offer, franchise or no. Unfortunately, a mid-story twist pushes the film toward the mythology-infused nerdfest of Neil Gaiman’s Eternals or Miracleman, and while this more sober, action-oriented affair is still handled with care and competence by director Peter Berg, all of the film’s initial charm slowly bleeds away. The high-concept of the film’s second half never delivers, and by the end it amounts to little more than a slightly-more-clever Heroes.

I WANTED this movie to be nerdier, but was alright with it anyway

My official review of WANTED is up over at FFWD, though I had to shorten it by 300 words to get it into the space. Published here, for your viewing pleasure, is the unabridged review, which I like more, but what do I know?

Jump, and all will be revealed.

The Ruler Zig-Zag-Zig Allah

My interview with the RZA is up over at FFWD. Actually, it was up last week, but I’ve been playing this free game about murdering aliens, and have been forgetting to do things as a result. The image accompanying the story and cover illustration are also totally The Sex, and were done by Travis Sengaus, who is awesome and makes me look good though I have never met him.

Bioshock VS Jacobean Theatre

I don’t often bother linking to theatre writing here for two reasons:

1) The limited number of people interested in such dross already know exactly where to find it.

2) Despite the fact that I enjoy it more than pretty much anything else I do, I feel a slight pang of shame every time I write anything about local theatre. I think it’s just about the most cliche, “bad/failed writer” activity possible.

That said, this article is interesting for reasons quite removed from the usual “intimacy of theatre” load, and quite in spite of my mediocre abilities. In it, Director Scott Roberts talks about his current mount of The Duchess of Malfi, where he draws aesthetic influences from comic books and–God’s teeth!–videogames. Beyond the nerd explosion that happened in my brain when I found out about the confluence of Jacobean theatre, Big Daddies and Frank Miller, I thought it was very cool that working artists–however small-time–saw no distinction between pop culture and the canon. Basically, their position is that it’s impossible for us to appreciate classic works as they were intended, because we’re so far removed from the original context. So rather than updating the work itself in a kitschy or banal way, they’ve opted to update the reference frame instead. This wouldn’t work for everything, obviously, but it’s still a refreshing perspective.

Right to Narnia

My review of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian is up over at FFWD. I’m linking to it for three reasons:

1) It was a stupidly expensive film, and that (whether you like it or not) makes it noteworthy. Art is a business, and ignoring that is naive.

2) I’m reasonably happy with the way my review turned out, though there was one minor error introduced in editing that will hopefully be straightened out soon.

3) It’s opening weekend, and if I link to it, I’ll get lots of traffic. This is important because I quantify my self worth with my readership statistics.

GO!

Speed Racer is a tale of corporate espionage as told by a cartoon parrot on methadone that is also on fire.

Film versus cinema

I’ve noticed this recently. A few years ago, movie snobs who wanted to set themselves apart from the vulgar intentionally used the word “film,” wherever they could. This didn’t bother me too much because, elitism aside, it is technically more correct. “Movies” is an anachronism borrowed from a time when a distinction had to be drawn between movies with sound and those without–”movies” and “talkies.” I never bothered to adjust my own speaking when someone politely corrected me once–I still use the two interchangeably–but I couldn’t begrudge those who did. But now it’s just getting out of hand.

Now I’m seeing “cinema” start to replace “film” in everyone’s vernacular, and it’s almost indefensibly pretentious. You could make the argument that it’s a reflection of the current shift toward the discussion of film now centering around the way we watch movies rather than their textual content, but I’d counter that argument by calling you obtuse.

There’s more to this.