Out of Phase, But Back on the Path

Life has been kind of strange this week.  I had my first full week of work back in the land of Morningstar since May, working on various shows and generally learning the ropes of being an assistant editor.  The sheer volume of information is a little daunting sometimes, but I figure as long as I keep scribbling my notes down, drawing diagrams, and a hell of a lot of repetition it’ll all eventually sink into my incredibly thick skull.  And if that doesn’t work, I’ll try trepanation and just cram crumbled up sticky notes filled with madly scribbled information into the carved hole.

I thought Kimbo would be cool, he said he'd be cool, but two hours and twenty beers later and the fucker attacked one of our producer's legs.

I didn’t think that bringing in that posse of Hawaiian midget cannibals to the yearly “Bring your kids to work” day had any effect on my standing here at work, but apparently the higher-ups around here were not amused and can smell the wrongness all around me and as such, banished me to the late night shift comprised of the hours stretching from 6PM until 4 AM. Which is ok, I like the quiet, the other AE’s hanging out here at night are both helpful and fond of keeping to themselves for the most part so I spend a lot of time in solitary confinement, staring at the dark walls of my Avid editing bay, watching TV (well work tapes) and when work allows,  listening to music.

Of course this schedule has completely cut me off from the rest of humanity.  I mean more than being a misanthropic caveman normally separates me from the herd.  Other than a couple of minutes this morning, where I was awakened just by the sound of other human voices in the house, I haven’t actually seen my roommates in days.  And we won’t get into everyone else who thinks I’ve abandoned them for the wolves when really, all I’ve been doing was trying to get my shit straightened out.

It’s been a pretty lonely existence, I won’t lie to you dear readers, but there are worse things in life than loneliness.  You know, things like starvation, bill collectors, and Ed Hardy shirts.

So there’s that.

So I’ve been spending my days at home in the fortress of solitude, cleaning up after the party and sleeping in terribly shitty small doses while my husk adjusts.  Today was the first day I really felt I had had enough sleep, had taken care of just about all of the pressing real-life issues requiring attention, and was just allowed to sit and relax in literally months.  And it was exhilarating.  Borrowed Joker’s hand wraps, went and beat out my aggression on the bag we set up out back.   And while I ended up doing a shitty job wrapping my hands, resulting in several of my knuckles looking like I took a cheese grater to them, was a lot of fun and helped vent some of my eternal, volcanic inner rage.  So I have a new thing to do during the day, in addition to our awesome Fontana Mexican Work-Out Patio we set up to make it feel like where we all grew up.

Who photoshopped Michael Landon out of this "Highway to Heaven" promo?

After that I had a chance to catch-up and watch ‘V’ which I thought ended up being pretty great.  With just a couple exceptions the acting was good and the special effects outstanding for a weekly TV show.  I have some issues with some of the melodrama reeking of day-time soaps, but this seems to be a recurring problem amongst this newer generation of network TV sci-fi shows.  Hell, ‘Heroes’ might as well just move to the 2PM time slot with all of it’s spaghetti plotlines and bad acting is crying for.  But I digress.  So I liked ‘V’ quite a bit, with ‘Lost’s Elizabeth Mitchell really winning me over, a miracle in itself after the bad blood I had developed with her after her first couple of seasons on the Island.  Yeah, having a female FBI agent dealing with something very off the charts crazy might sound a little too close to Anna Torv’s ‘Agent Dunham’ on ‘Fringe’, but so what.  And I could be talking out of my ass, I’ve seen one episode and I should probably reserve judgment for later.  Oh, and the alien woman, Anna (Morena Baccaran) was something else – damn.

So that’s what is going down.  Arent you glad you sat through all of that?  I’m not sure even I am.

Song for this post are:

Old Fashioned Love Song – Three Dog Night (dedicated to my mom, who I talked to for the first time in months yesterday and was a favorite of hers when I was very little)
Bittersweet Symphony – The Verve
TV Party – Black Flag

Guillermo Del Toro talks ‘The Hobbit’

I wonder if it's the beards that gives them the power of awesome, maybe I should grow mine back....

Total Film has a great interview with one of my favorite directors and personal heroes, Guillermo Del Toro about the movie I am probably more hype on than any I have been in… well maybe forever.  I used to read The Hobbit every year like clockwork when I was a kid.  In fact, it’s the book I remember reading first in life, coming from a family of huge Tolkien nerds it was thrust into my tiny hands at the young age of 6.

It’s a dream of mine to work on ‘The Hobbit’, I dunno if I’m going to beat the clock on this one but you can bet that who ever is handling post-production for this film is going to start hearing from me weekly come Spring.  And even if I don’t make it, I couldn’t be happier with what the man is saying already.  Here are a couple excerpts:

You mentioned the structure. Will the book make up the first movie, with the second movie plucked from the appendices and maybe even your imagination? Or will parts of the book be saved for the second movie?

We are respecting the structure established by Professor Tolkien because the order of the adventures in The Hobbit is well known to generations and generations of kids. You don’t want to be moving stuff like that.

But we will be integrating Gandalf’s comings and goings because he does disappear in the book quite often.

So, as opposed to the book, we see where he goes and what happens to him

Presumably working with Peter (Jackson) is not that much different to working with Mike Mignola on the Hellboy movies?

You nailed it. I’d say Mike is as opinionated as if he was another director because essentially he directs on the page. And Mignola, like Pedro and Peter, knows the process – they all know that at some point you’re going to be alone with the beast [laughs].

You’re going to be the guy and you can only trust your own instincts.

You’re not going to be making a phone call from a remote location to ask a question; you’re going to have to make a decision yourself.

Secret Plan of the Masters of the Internets is Leaked.

I haven’t been as vocally active in my distaste about the direction the powers that be have designed for our future interactions with the internet, but then I haven’t really been active in general lately.  Seeing as how I’m attempting to rectify that, this is as good a place as any to start tossing in these bits that help detail the scary plans the government would love to enforce, if allowed.  From Boing Boing:

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama’s administration refused to disclose due to “national security” concerns, has leaked. It’s bad. It says:

• * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn’t infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
• * That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet — and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living — if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.
• * That the whole world must adopt US-style “notice-and-takedown” rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused — again, without evidence or trial — of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright
• * Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)

  The ACTA Internet Chapter: Putting the Pieces Together

‘Lost’ Locks Down

I’m jazzed about this bit of news, as a ‘Lost’ fanatic I don’t want to know what’s coming up this season, one of my favorite parts of the show is how many times my jaw can drop and I can drool the words – “Whaaat?” in a single evening.    With it being the final season and all, I just want to revel in every silly twist and turn as they come my way.  From Dark Horizons:

Many who are keenly hanging for the final season of “Lost” will be both frustrated and happy with the news today that promotional material for the upcoming season plans to remain spoiler-free.

E! Online reports that every single shot of the first few episodes are “so revealing” that the showrunners have convinced the network to take a bold strategy – no promotion other than bare bones graphics.

That’s right – no clips, no photos, not a single frame of the new season will be shown before the season premiere in mid-January. Why? “The twists they’re planning are so good, you will WANT to be surprised.”

The teaser trailer below gives you an idea of what to expect in the way of promos over the next two months – graphics and reused old footage:

Halloween – The Post Report

So Halloween has come and gone.  Two days of preparation, decorating, and cleaning lead up to a wonderful witches night.   The front of the house was adorned in cobwebs, a sunken hand complete with it’s own “Caution” sign, and a few jack-lanterns.  And in back we had a small, modest, yet impressive graveyard.  Hell, we even painted symbols and mad writings all over the hallway, turning it into something that came straight from the pages of some insane Lovecraftian protagonist’s padded cell.  And they ate it up.  A little goes a long way and the guys and I have become old pros at this stuff.

I take Halloween parties very seriously.  Like some astronomical planetary concordance, it’s the one night of the year that the rest of the world is line with where I spend most of my time.  And I have a long history of, if I do say so myself, and I have a lot of opinions to back this up, being involved with the best Halloween parties.   From the early days of the North Redlands house, to the massive undertaking Andrea and I threw at the San Bernardino house, and especially the now infamous Halloween 2 shindig at the Porn Palace, these things have a way of becoming entities unto themselves.  So it was a matter of great pride that this one came together so well.

As for the party itself. We had a steady flow of people all night, making the conversations fun to bounce around to-and-from as I am wont to do as a (fairly) good host.  We had a ton of  cheap beer and good liquor, some dried ice and a good mix of people and costumes.  And generally the  party went off without a hitch.  I’m  hoping I can cull enough pictures that others post for a a visual run-down as soon as they start to surface.

My evil surgeon costume evolved, as these things do, into more of a Hellish Surgeon.  Complete with an apron of human flesh, some nasty tools,  twine, a lot of fake blood, and a sex toy we have lying around the house doubling as a severed fist, it came out much better than I had originally planned.

In theory we were supposed to clean yesterday, but everyone was beaten down from the night before and except for a token effort, massive cleaning is still in order.  So as these things go, we watched a couple of movies and lazed about a lot.

And now it’s the week again.  Hoping for some real work this week, and in the meantime beating myself into a writing mood.  I have a lot of personal work that has been slacking recently, what with the move, the party, sporadic work, and some bad black moods giving me way too much wiggle room on my creativity and I plan on fixing that.

And for the record, there was a full moon in the sky.

The songs are all super gimme’s for last week.  Cut me some slack, I had a lot to do:

Halloween – Ministry
No One Lives Forever – Oingo Boingo
Halloween – The Misfits

Semi-Silent Note of Protest – “The Box”

Ugh,  you know, I (fairly) recently wrote and directed a short film called “The Package” about a mysterious box that changes the lives of those it comes into contact with for the worst.  And it didn’t have Cameron Diaz, which in my book is a huge plus.  But that doesn’t mean I have an opinion on the soon to be released “The Box”.  Fuck, I dunno,  It looks like the genre version of ‘Indecent Proposal’.

So to those out there, all of whom don’t read this anyway making this all just a pointless release of aggression – stop asking.

Thanks.  Heh.

Black to Pen ‘Doc Savage’ Pic

Oh this makes gets me all ten shades of excited, from Dark Horizons:

Acclaimed action film scribe Shane Black (“Lethal Weapon,” “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”) is set to pen the film adaptation of the Doc Savage comic book series.

Because Man of Cocoa Butter wasn't nearly as intimidating.

Black tells AICN that the story will be an original one (rather than an adaptation) that will attempt to encapsulate the feeling of the whole collection of author Lester Dent’s work (encompassing nearly 200 stories).

The character, an adventurer with near-superhuman skills and intelligence, was originally published in 1930’s pulp magazines and Black says the story will be written for that time period and will include the Fabulous Five (five recurring companions who each appeared in different books).

“Star Trek” and “Transformers” scribes Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman are set to produce.

There’s so much good stuff in such a small article I’m not sure I even know where to begin.  Oh I know, Shane fucking Black?  Doc fucking Savage?  Produced by the Fringe guys?  Excuse me while I take a geeky moment to calm myself down.

There.

It’s too bad I didn’t hear about this sooner, my friend Jennifer hung out with Black for a bit at the screen writing expo last week, I would have made her grill the bastard for info regarding this.  Oh well, C’est la vie.

An Afternoon With The Dead

I’m a huge fan of the Mexican Day of the Dead aesthetic, something ingrained in me early on from a love of the macabre, Oingo Boingo, and waaay too many hours spent wandering the underworld in Grim Fandango.  But up until yesterday I had never had the opportunity to go check out one of the festivals in person.  So it was a treat to head down  to the Hollywood Forever cemetery, as grand a necropolis as I have ever seen, for it’s annual Dia de los Muertos festival.  This was my first trip down to the cemetery as bad luck had sideswiped all the other previous chances to go,  and I had never witnessed the grand festival in honor of the dead,  so this was as good a chance as any to knock out two birds with one stone.  It certainly didn’t disappoint.

Trillions upon trillions of skulls, bones, candles, and flowers were used to construct the beautiful altars to loved ones and famous folks buried at the cemetery.   On top of the displays, traditional parades and some fairly good food made the whole event something awesome to behold and experience.  Here are a few stills taken of the event and for those curious enough, the rest are loaded up over at Flickr.  Enjoy!

Lego Nirvana

Check out this cool as hell video of a Lego Buddhist temple, courtesy of Boing Boing:

more about “Lego Nirvana“, posted with vodpod

McKean Adapts ‘Cages’

Try reading this thing when yer 13...

Dave McKean’s last outing in film ‘MirrorMask’ didn’t live up to what I had hoped it would, but it was a hard project to begin with and I cut a lot of slack.  I’ll always have a soft spot for McKean, his covers for The Sandman were masterpieces and his twisted collaboration with Grant the Morrison on ‘Arkham Asylum’ did wonders to corrupt my young mind when I first read it (And every goddamn time since then too).  So I am a bit curious to see how he handles adapting his solo graphic novel ‘Cages’ to the screen.  From Coming Soon:

One project that McKean can proudly claim as completely his own is the ambitious serialized story “Cages,” which appeared as individual issues sporadically through the ’90s before being collected into a single volume by Kitchen Sink and NBM.

It was a very personal introspective piece of work involving creativity and cats and up until now, there was never any word of it being adapted into any other form until McKean made the following statement on his Twitter feed:

“Great first meeting about Cages film; a long term possibility, but good to know all interested parties are on the same page.”

Rage Cages

Obviously, this project is very much in the early early stages, and one would think that bringing the challenging graphic novel to the screen would probably take many years to write, finance, etc. but fans of McKean’s artwork and collaborations with Gaiman over the years surely would be interested to see whether “Cages” is even possible as a film. While the graphic novel is seemingly out of print, one can often find it in hardcover and paperback forms through eBay, second-hand bookshops and the like.

I only vaguely remember ‘Cages’, but I remember it also being a difficult read and visually very, well McKean so we’ll have to wait and see.