"Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Curtain Theater in Austin on Saturday

A work colleague is part of a production of Bill Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in Austin this Saturday.  Curiously, the theater holding the show is owned by spaceman/ software entrepreneur Richard Garriot, who decided to build a replica of England's Globe Theater on the shores of Lake Austin. 

So, if you're interested, Jamie and I are headed down there on Saturday and we'd love to have you join us for a play in the great Fall evening weather Austin is currently enjoying.  And:  to see Eva in a lion mask.

here.

For a little more on The Curtain Theater.

More on the Zack Snyder Superman Movie Thing

 It was odd to see the news about Zack Snyder getting the Superman gig when I popped open my laptop in Brownsville at the hotel.   I think i09 had a pretty solid set of recommendations for the movie.  And, of course, the rumors are now bouncing around about General Zod of Superman 2 fame named the villain for the movie.

I am as much a fan of Superman 2 as you're likely to find, but its an odd choice from a comic fan's perspective.  Zod has traditionally been a minor villain in the comics (and the movie Zod is more like villain Jax-Ur in many ways than the oddly-hatted Zod).  From a movie-making perspective, it makes more sense.  Zod can demonstrate and play out all those bad impulses that fans can say they think Superman would be unable to stop himself from demonstrating as some sort of totalitarian alien/ diety on Earth.  And, of course, Superman standing up against Zod doesn't just logically make sense, but it should define what Superman does and why.

It's that whole "equal opposites" thing you wind up getting in a lot of action movies.

Signal Corps regular Horus Kemwer sent me a link to the start of a web discussion about the philosophical issues surrounding Superman, and while I am no student of philosophy, I'd suggest that if Zack Snyder would like for his movie to carry the weight of The Dark Knight, starting with the problems inherent in a superbeing (not necessarily Superman himself.  After all, we've got a cadre of superbeings to choose from out of the comics for a "compare and contrast" session for the movie) and what the morality and responsibility of that superbeing might be...  and, of course, explosions.

But, to that point, Nolan's second Batman film was quite literally about the boundaries and limits of retaining one's morals in a city seemingly gone mad, from Batman to doomed Harvey Dent to the boatloads of people with the ultimate "would you rather" scenario put in front of them.  And I think you can use Superman to explore issues of power (something Americans don't think about wielding, but which we do flaunt across the planet like titans every day) in order to tell a compelling story and imbue the myth of the alien-christ-immigrant with relevancy and impact beyond a popcorn flick.

Can Zack Snyder do this?  It depends how closely he chooses to work with Chris Nolan and Nolan's team, I think.

And I know I've said this before, but...

I am still not sure we'll seee Snyder take this through to completion.  Prior to Superman Returns, flashy directors like McG and Brett Ratner known for their ability to put together neat action sequences and exciting car chases both wound up dropping off Superman after signing up to do the movie. Tim Burton tried to do another "outsider" movie and walked away.

It would be great to get another Superman movie in front of the lens, but at some point directors as successful and well-intentioned as Snyder have been on Superman before, and they couldn't quite find the hook. It doesn't matter what anyone says:  do not believe its happening until you see the first publicity stills.

The guy who botched "300" and "Watchmen" to take on "Superman"

Ho boy.

Look, I only half believe this story, but folks are reporting that Zack Snyder is going to direct Superman.

If you wonder why I'm skeptical, its because similar reports were issued prior to Superman Returns with Brett Ratner, McG and Michael Bay attached.  And, Justice League was slated to go into production about five years ago before someone at WB noticed that the idea and casting for the movie were absolutely terrible. 

A quick list of pros and cons

Pros:

• Zack Snyder has a great eye for production design
• Snyder loves original source material
• This will actually get a movie going rather than simply circling the drain
• The dude loves a good action sequence, and he may have some keen ideas for how to take what makes Superman super cool in the comics and translate that to movies in a way audiences have not previously seen
• I am not too worried about anyone thinking a Zack Snyder directed Superman movie is about a weepy, wimpy superhero as folks felt about Superman Returns
• If that whole "look at this in slow-mo now in fast motion" thing could apply to any two superheroes, its The Flash and Superman

Cons:

• Snyder has a terrific eye for design, but I have yet to see him tell an original story
• His choices on Watchmen, when given latitude beyond the page, almost always seemed... wrong
• In short, he seems technically competent, but he hasn't shown deftness or understanding of how to do much more than present a story in a sequential manner.  He hasn't show an ability to creatively infuse life into a movie.
• Watchmen was a critical dud, didn't exactly set the box office on fire and is still routinely cited as "what's wrong with comic movies" for a variety of reasons

I'm going to just be zen about all this until... well, later.

Headed to South Texas/ Simple Machines

So,  I'm at the tail end of our Sunday night ritual of late.  We join up with Matt and Nicole for dinner and then Mad Men and a cocktail (or two).  Lately, we've also added Boardwalk Empire to that formula, and it makes for a pretty good evening, I think.

Tomorrow I drive down to Brownsville in the afternoon, and then I'm talking to folks at UT Brownsville - Texas Southmost College on Wednesday.  On Wednesday I'm in Corpus Christi, and then I'll be home that evening.  Its some driving, but I've got two audio books from my book bucket list that I'm going to try to get through.

At any rate, between the game on Saturday, errands and the employment of a pulley AND going ahead and decorating for Halloween today (because, man, was the weather nice...), I don't have much in the way of an update.

Kudos to Jason and Jamie (and neighbor Chris) for helping us get the chairs onto the upstairs balcony. 

Last weekend, after thinking we might do this for about two years, we purchased some adirondack chairs on end-of-season closeout.  We have a second story balcony on the front of the house.

This is actually an old picture, but that's the front of our house.

For me, the upstairs balcony was a big selling point for the house.  Fall and Spring in Austin can be very, very nice (and parts of winter), and we've never had any good seating up there since we moved in (which was just about four years ago, when this picture was taken).

Anyhow, we got the chairs home, but when I carried them through the house, it turned out the chairs wouldn't actually fit through a standard-sized interior door.  So, back through the house they came.  We considered some different options, and in the end I called my father-in-law, who usually has some pretty good ideas about how to do this sort of thing. 

I'm not saying DocDik endorsed my plan to install an eyehook and hang a pulley from the hook, but he did add the crucial factor of "have someone stand downstairs and pull the chair away from the house with another rope" that kept me from just slamming the chair into the house.

Sure, the whole operation seemed a bit iffy, but there's a reason people employ pulleys in this day and age, and I can report "Operation Chair Lift" was a success.  Plus, now we got a pulley.

I'll be back soon enough.  No idea if I'll find time to check in with you guys.

Hope the weather is as beautiful there as its turning here.

Wonder Woman to TV?

Rumors are now popping up that Wonder Woman may be headed to the small screen.

Here.

The CW Network (formerly the WB Network) has had Superman going for 10 years (ten years, people!  That's crazy!), but the season which began last week is the final season of the program.  Word on the street is that Warner Bros. quite likes the money Smallville has generated and has been looking for a replacement once Clark puts on the cape and flies off into the stratosphere (the Big Bad for this season, btw, is Darkseid.  This should be... interesting.). 

Will Wonder Woman work on the small screen? 

Well...

Ladies and gentlemen, my argument FOR a televised Wonder Woman

I own the complete run of the Lynda Carter Wonder Woman series on DVD, so I am pretty sure I'm not the right guy to ask. 

But...

The interesting thing about Wonder Woman is that there's such a flexible mythology to the character that the writers could muck about quite a bit and even the fanboys would barely bat an eye.  I know what version I prefer, but...  you know, if you start with a young enough Wonder Woman, and basically have her oppose her mother in order to leave the island, you're most of the way there as far as cannon goes.

Wonder Woman doesn't even always have a secret identity, and I sort of prefer the version that doesn't have a secret ID, but I don't see that playing terribly well on TV.  Unless it does, and then, there you go...


But as I was previously pondering, Wonder Woman has a pretty bizarre bunch of arch-nemeses.  But I think if you had the weekly format to build on, especially with her ties to Greek mythology, you could possibly build up a unique world for Wonder Woman to deal with.

Anyway, we'll see.  But I'm betting they adjust the costume.

Happy Start of the Halloween Season, Guys and Ghouls

Dr. Acula checks for swollen glands

Hey, Signal Corps!  It's that magical time of the year when swamp creatures, vampires, mummies, werewolves and things that go bump in the night invade our consciousness. 

I'm thinking on a blog-wide participatory venture to celebrate the season.  If you've got any ideas, send 'em in.

Is the DC Universe too Weird to Make it in Movies?

I've been thinking lately about the supposed upcoming slate of movies from DC Entertainment/ Comics.  In the summer of 2011, the Green Lantern (and-all-that-that-implies) is going to hit cinemas everywhere.  Hal Jordan, a cocky, brash test pilot will be given an alien artifact that will enable him to...  not fight crime or overcome a mad scientist...  but to become a patrolman of Sector 2814, one of thousands of green-long-johned spacecops.

Last night I was watching part of 2002's Spider-Man feature, and its all so straight forward.  Guy gets bit by radioactive spider, is more than human, realizes he has a responsibility to use his power for others, beats up thugs and bank robbers, and eventually fights a mad-scientist.  Repeat in Spider-Man 2.  And when they didn't do that in Spidey 3?  It kind of fell apart.

Even the X-Men films boiled down to superheroes vs. Mad Scientist, and Iron Man 1 and 2 both made sure that was the case.

Green Lantern is not this.  I think we'll see some elements of this in the movie, but in the comics, it isn't usually Hal Jordan v. Mad Scientist.  Except that the major villain is Hector Hammond, the lone mad scientist I can think of in Green Lantern's rogues gallery.  And, yeah, he's in the movie.

That said, unlike the masked Green Goblin or the straightforward mecha suits of Iron Man (or Magneto is his dandy maroon finery), DC's heroes and villains tend to tilt a bit more... odd. Hammond may have started off a mad scientist, but for a while, he's been a guy with an giant, immobilizing head that enables him to read minds and project thoughts.

But he has a great personality

While I have no doubt that DC will take a page from Nolan's take on superheroes and try to find some areas where the costumes and suits will look like something somebody might actually do... how does one bring Gorilla Grodd or Ultra-Humanite to the screen and expect for anyone but a kid (or those of us already bought into the idea of Ultra-Humanite) to take the idea seriously?

There's a reason that with multiple movies under his yellow belt and countless hours of TV, too, that Superman's rogues gallery has been largely presented as beginning and ending with Lex Luthor. After all, Lex, unlike Brainiac, isn't a green guy in a pink leotard with USB ports on his head.

Fact:  Brainiac is an intergalactic jerkface

But the real issue to me is that Brainiac's deal in the comics is that he goes from planet to planet shrinking cities until they fit in a bottle, stealing all their data (or copying it, Napster users), and, in some versions, he then blows up the planet. Because Brainiac is a real big jerk.

Brainiac is a villain in his own right, but his original primary function was to bring Kandor, the shrunken, microscopic, Kryptonian "city in a bottle" into the comics. And then you have to talk about Kandor, and just the concept of Kandor is so... well, us Superman fans think its awesome, but everyone else just finds it kind of... weird.

Silver Age villains are always really happy about their evil schemes

Now, does this make sense as a movie? I... don't know. There's a certain level of zaniness you have to embrace in the DCU proper, and when you start to strip that away, sometimes the pieces don't necessarily work together so well anymore.  But I think there are some pretty concrete reasons Superman's movie nemesis is a guy a bit too obsessed with real estate rather than, say, Terra Man.

is America ready for the menace of a cowboy from space and his flying horse?  Terra Man is an actual Superman villain, btw

There's an inherent problem in that:  Would Green Lantern still be interesting if all he did was fight street crime, like Spidey or Batman? When people say they want a gritty, "real" Superman, have they really run the numbers of what that might look like? How interesting is it really going to be watching Superman take out bank robbers for two hours or liquifying people with a single punch?

It's not that Marvel doesn't have weird villains.  It most certainly does.  Have you heard of my pal, MODOK?

Also a big, giant head.  MODOK, btw, = Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing.  Again, I am totally not kidding.

Now, given the opportunity to make a whole bunch of movies, Marvel didn't immediately say "hey, let's put MODOK out there as a villain!". They could have, and they didn't. Because, seriously... look at that guy.  And when Marvel made a movie about Galactus, they did literally everything they could not to show my favorite Marvel villain of all time.

This they turned into a cloud with no lines in FF2.  One of 1,378 cataloged things wrong with the movie.

But somehow running with this sort of thing and believing that everyone thinks stuff like Batmite (Batman's 5th dimensional fan) and Bizarro (I mean, Bizarro... for @#$%'s sake...) are perfectly cromulent ideas is sort of DC's thing. If the villain doesn't look like something your five-year-old niece scribbled on a Denny's children's menu, then they have a background that sounds completely crazy to a lay audience.

Oh, hell go read up on Reverse Flash (aka: Professor Zoom) on your own, and then come back.

Read it?

That's sort of The Joker for The Flash. This guy is in the comics all the time. Now put that in your movie.  The changes that would be required would essentially water Zoom down so much, he wouldn't be the same character anymore.  And that's kind of okay.

Comic fans get all giddy and they really want to see Brainiac and Reverse Flash and whatnot, but when it comes down to it...  I'm not sure you can do this in two hours and not get some puzzled looks from audiences.

This is why a Flash movie, by its nature, is going to have a hard time putting someone against Barry Allen.  All of the Flash's villains, while awesome on the comics page, are completely ridiculous.  The Pied-Piper?  Captain Cold?  The Trickster?  Mirror Master?  And what sort of bag of madness do you introduce with Grodd and Gorilla City?

And that's just The Flash.  I haven't covered Wonder Woman's slate of bad-guys, such as Egg-Fu and Giganta (an attractive red head who can grow to enormous sizes, and who used to be a gorilla, btw).

The secret to those gorgeous curls?  A strong potassium diet.

In the 1980's the audience for comics began aging, growing up with comics that had a feel that previously had come only from movies and tougher TV shows and novels.  The grittier content allowed by the Direct Market began giving comics a bit of credence as a medium that you didn't need to give up on just because you'd finished middle school and had it in mind to talk to girls.

Certainly DC looked at its slate of comic characters circa 1985, and with Crisis on Infinite Earths relaunching their entire universe decided to clean house to continue to appeal to the readers by insisting that these same characters who once had adorable sidekicks and who were buddies with police chiefs could also be rebels, outlaws, antiheroes and as tough as the criminals older readers must know exist.  And, to an extent, in order for comics to make it to the big screen where they wouldn't be rejected as content for little kids and the mentally deficient, Superheroes have always shed the wackier aspects of their mythos.  Certainly you don't see Beppo the Supermonkey showing up in the third reel of Superman 2.*

I look forward to Christopher Nolan's dark take on the Legion of Super Pets.  Also:  Telepathic horse (sort of.  That's the least complicated part about Comet the Superhorse.)

In the past five or six years, however, on the comics side DC has sort of begun to realize that they were running in place continually because they kept trying to find reasons to do everything BUT use their major characters and the zaniness associated.  And in the past five or six years they found out:  their readership actually likes this stuff.

But that's comics.  If DC is going to bring their characters to the big screen without just making up new villains and environs for their heroes...  they're going to need to go about this whole thing very, very carefully.

It doesn't just make the characters easier to understand when you don't clutter them up with nonsense, it also means that critics aren't quite as likely to immediately dismiss your movie about the man in bat ears punching poor people and mental patients.

Marvel's heroes have the advantage of feeling somewhat more grounded in reality.**  Buying a teenager putting on tights as Spider-Man works to an extent because for the first part of the film he's a smart but normal teenager, and then becomes extraordinary in an ordinary world.  And then his villain is extraordinary, too, and... blam.  Fight.  And I think because so many villains in Marvel's U are sort of warped mirror opposites of the hero, it never feels that odd on the big screen.  Its Rocky vs. Ivan Drago.

But if we start with "oh, he's the king of Atlantis"...  suddenly an Aquaman movie sounds much harder to grasp.

When Green Lantern is finally released, I'll be curious to see how/ if people bite.  An interstellar police force run by creepy blue guys on a distant planet is quite the pill to swallow, but its also been one of my favorite comic concepts since middle school (which is why I was so bummed that just after I learned about GL, DC went about mucking with the basics of the GL Corps for 20 years).

But he will be on Earth for at least part of the film, and he will have his mad scientist to fight.  So... there you go, mass audiences.



*although this would be, categorically, awesome

**that is until Thor is released as a movie

Tony Curtis Merges with the Infinite

Actor Tony Curtis has passed.

In November, I'm Going to Pay Money for the Chance to see Billy Dee Williams

This November, Austin is hosting a fairly sizable convention, ostensibly a comic book convention, at our Convention Center. Longtime comic nuts (both of you out there, I can hear you breathing) will perhaps tremble when I state that this convention is a Wizard World convention, and all that that implies.

Wizard World Cons sort of play off the goodwill garnered by San Diego Comic Con International (or whatever its calling itself these days) and as misinterpreted by the befuddled mainstream press (ie: non-comics press). But whereas CCI-San Diego is a geek Mecca, the Wizard World cons are sort of the cheap, imitation knock-offs, the Big Lots! discount bin of comic conventions.  It is true that there will be comics-related talent at the convention, but it is also true that this particular con will feature:

• Billy Dee Williams
• Jake Lloyd (this appears factual)
• The cast of "The Human Centipede"
• Buck Rogers and Wilma Dearing from the 70's-era Buck Rogers TV show
• Ernie Hudson
• a Brady
• "Suicide Girls"
• One of the suitcase girls from "Deal or No Deal" (I've never seen the show, so this is blowing my mind)
• numerous people I've never heard of before who seem to be responsible for comics nobody has ever actually read
• a few people of note from the comic industry such as Paul Levitz (seriously. Levitz.)
• a whole mess of washed up wrestling stars and a whole bunch of women with enormous... talent who are part of the pro-wrestling circuit
• Lou Ferrigno, a man who needs no introduction
• The dad from Teen Wolf
• Mimi Rogers*
• ...and many, many more.

I have absolutely no idea what to expect, but from looking at the floor map, it looks roughly like the equivalent of a people zoo.  You walk past tables and stare at people you saw on TV once or twice, and for a few clams, you can get an autograph.

So I've talked Jamie into going for the day one of the three days of the convention.  I will probably not ask her to join me whatever day I actually do stand in line to see if I can get Paul Levitz's autograph.

Yes, that's me... in a room full of models and actors, I'll be lining up to see if I can meet a 60'ish guy in a tie because I like his Legion comics.

There is something sad and wrong with me.

I sort of thought that by now the show runners would have put out more of a schedule.  Oh, well.

If anyone is interested in joining us from The Signal Watch at the Austin Wizard World Texas Comic Convention and Human Zoo, please drop me a line.


*90's me is very excited about seeing Ms. Rogers.  She really makes a spacesuit work.

Things Return to Normal at the PCL

A quick follow-up to yesterday's post.

I think I can safely say that by 10:30 this morning, things were back to normal. Today happened to be my co-worker's birthday, so between 10:00 and 10:30 we had a doughnut or three, sang happy birthday, told our little part of the story, and went back to work.

What is odd is how many people seem to have just decided to shrug the whole thing off. Perhaps I'm a sensitive soul, but... a guy with an AK-47 could have done damage that would have been remembered for generations. He didn't, but he could have.

I haven't seen any new reports yet discussing any why's-and-wherefore's. The family of the shooter seems as genuinely shocked as anyone else. My guess is that its going to pass as one-of-those-things.

You can read the story at the site for the Austin American-Statesman.

But I was correct. Doors were open, and when I walked in with my box of Krispy Kremes for the team, there were all the usual folks doing their usual things. Sheila was at the reference desk and I saw Drew in the hallway. The gaggle of student workers were checking out books.