We All Die Screaming

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This video RUINED my brain.

Check Out Industrial Light and Magic’s Oscar Effects Reel for The Avengers

COMMENTERS: Have you ever been completely fooled by subtle CG or other movie FX and astonished when you found out the trickery? The lies? The deceit?

If you used to get HE in your email inbox through Feedburner (a service I stopped using this year because Google stopped supporting it), this service seems to offer the same functionality for free.

Just plugin the HE RSS feed [http://hijinksensue.com/feed/] and your email address.

Parallelogramps

CRUISE FUNDRAISER UPDATE: All 100 “Bridge Collapse” prints are sold, signed, packed and shipping as I type. If you ordered, you’ll get a shipping email soon.

Me and Wil Wheaton made some shirts for you to put on your body.

I have mixed feelings about the ending of Fringe (warning you now, I will definitely be posting SPOILERS]. On one hand, I LOOOOOVED the show, loved the characters, loved the intricate, interweaving plots and subplots and especially loved John Noble’s mushy grandpa face that he wants me to kiss the cheeks of because he is my crazy science grandpa. On the other hand (and this is coming from someone who just said all of those things that I just said), I think they finished telling the story of Fringe a season ago when they finally realized William Bell was the big bad all along and defeated him.

Every mystery established since the pilot: what’s with all the weirdo science crap happening all over the place, who’s this dude David Robert Jones, and what’s his deal, why is Olivia so special, why is Peter so SUPER special, who are the ZFT and are they the bad guys, who are the observers and are THEY the bad guys, who is William Bell and IS HE the bad guy, what happened to Walter’s brain, what’s the deal with Nina and Massive Dynamic and ARE THEY the bad guy? All of these questions were answered to my satisfaction by the time Olivia took the bullet to the head on Belly’s boat.

Everything that happens after that point (and really everything that happens in the first half of season 4) is basically non-integral to the overall story arch of Fringe. Especially considering all the timeline reboots and in-universe retcons that take place in parts of season 4 and the entirety of season 5, those literally do not effect the plot. That said, I did enjoy nearly every episode of the final two seasons. It was great TV and great Sci-Fi. I’m just not sure that all of it was necessary. The argument could even be made that the last two seasons kind of muddy up the mythos of Fringe and detract more than they add. The showrunner already apologized for the “Peter never existed” plot (which should have been 2, maybe 3 episodes max). If you completely ignore the vanishing Peter aspects of season 4, it makes an appropriate endcap for the series (assuming Peter would have gotten out of the machine alive having healed the mutliverse, instead of teleporting to a future war zone). And the “Observers invasion” final season was quite enjoyable, but it was a completely different story from what seemed like a completely different show. It was a ballsy move (skipping 21 years between TV seasons), but I don’t think it was needed.

The Observers might be the one thing that required a bit more explanation by the time Olivia took the bullet and saved the universe(s) once and for all, but I think they could have tied a nice little bow around their existence with one final scene where either Olivia or Walter are greeted by September, who explains how they are from 600 years in the future and how they’ve been intervening in Walter, Olivia and Peter’s lives in order to make sure the two universes were healed. The end. The “we broke the future so we’re going to conquer the past” just doesn’t feel like anything that was ever really planned for Fringe. It felt tacked on at the end. Blah blah blah, still liked it, yadda yadda.

Fringe has been rerunning on the Science Channel for awhile now. I find that I can’t watch single episodes of the show AT ALL. It’s far too serialized to catch a one-off without a definite plan to continue from that point on. Even the early “monster of the week” episodes bother me as standalone adventures because I know too much and I want the characters to know the same as I do. The most satisfying episodes in terms of rewatchability for me are the ones before Peter disappeared where we were alternating between universes. The contrasts between the Universe-A and Universe-B characters, the story possibilities they explored, all of it was just incredibly satisfying. And Walternate… ooh man he was a fantastic character, due in no small part to how my love for Walter fed into my near hatred and ultimate FRUSTRATION with Walternate. That was some expert writing and acting.

Damn, I guess I sort of wish the show had been cancelled after season 4 after all. Oh well. Considering it was primetime sci-fi and ESPECIALLY considering it was on FOX, it’s safe to say I got more quality entertainment from Fringe than I deserved or should have ever expected.

COMMENTERS: How did you feel about the Fringe finale or the last two seasons in general? If you’ve never watched Fringe, what kept you away? Please tag spoilers in your comments with [SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS!!!!!] for the sake of others.

If you used to get HE in your email inbox through Feedburner (a service I stopped using this year because Google stopped supporting it), this service seems to offer the same functionality for free.

Just plugin the HE RSS feed [http://hijinksensue.com/feed/] and your email address.

White Light, White Heat, White Guilt

UPDATE: Get a print of panel 3 of this comic HERE!!!

CRUISE FUNDRAISER UPDATE: All 100 “Bridge Collapse prints are sold! Woohoo! They arrive at my house this weekend (a week later than I anticipated) and will start shipping Monday the 20th.

I made a new eBook/iBook! It’s called “Sorry I Ruined Your Book Vol. 1” and it has over 180 pages of HE book 1 preorder/artist edition sketches with commentary on every drawing! Donation subscribers get it free and it’s also available to anyone for a one time “pay what you like” donation.

I had a reader tell me via twitter he was unaware that I had a store where I sold T-shirts and books and such. WELL I CERTAINLY DO.

I absolutely loved Django Unchained. Call it a base, animal reaction, but I really do enjoy seeing histories most egregious hatefucks getting served violent and almost comically gory revenge. I’m not super gung ho on cinematic violence, but how can you argue with Jews carving up Nazi’s or freed slaves cutting a swath of recently face-exploded slave masters across the South? (I guess you could argue plenty if that’s just not your bag, but it certainly hits the spot for me).

Django Unchained is a Tarantino film if there ever was one (Spoilers: There was. There was a few, actually… WERE a few. A couple of them were good.). It’s backdrop is a terrifyingly hateful period in American history and deals with some of the most unpleasant subject matter humanity has to offer, yet wraps all of that in pleasingly witty word choices, top notch performances by all and an L.O.L. (laughables outed loudly) level of cartoonish violence. Jaimie Foxx was surprisingly effective as, Django, the slave turned bounty hunter. I say “surprisingly” because, for the first few minutes he’s on screen you wonder if this movie is somehow below the Ray Oscar winner’s station. It isn’t. The movie and the actor simultaneously rise to the occasion once it gets going, and they continue to compliment each other for the duration.

That said, Foxx is not the star of the movie. Christolph Waltz, just as he did in Inglourious Basterds, STEALS the show. I was wondering if I would be able to see him as the hero, Waltz having so permanently cemented himself as the villain in his previous Taratino collaboration. If you loved to hate him as the monster of the Third Reich, you’ll love him even more as the German dentist who assassinates bad guys and sells their corpses to the government for profit. German Fancy Bastards who has seen the film will have to tell me if Waltz was doing a certain regional German dialect that I am unfamiliar with or just annunciating like a funny little German elf might. Either way, it was delightful. I could listen to that man oddly pronounce words all day.

DiCaprio did a fine job, but I felt his was the part that could have been played by nearly anyone and the movie wouldn’t have suffered. There’s just something about him that I never quite buy into, especially when he’s doing a crazy accent (which is nearly ALWAYS). Couple this with the fact that he was CONSTANTLY upstaged by Samuel L. Jackson’s doting Uncle Tom-esque house servant character and you have a performance that neither detracted or particularly added to the overall film.

Overall it was a very satisfying movie. It’s an action film, a revenge drama, a bit of a heist-flick or con job, a love story, a comedy… it covers all these genres, yet never feels unfocused. I will say that if you are squeamish about hearing the n-word oh… I don’t know… A THOUSAND TIMES, then this isn’t the movie for you. I know Tarantino has taken some flack for trying to make a movie about racism and slavery without somehow sidestepping all the racism and slavery. I’m not sure how he was supposed to do that, but I do not feel the end product was exploitive to anything other than the concept of a Spaghetti Western. Each of his films is a love letter to a certain genre of cinema. Some hit home better than others, but Django is the first “Best Picture” caliber movie he’s directed.

On a side note, every time I hear “Django Unchained” I think about Picard and that Tamarian captain in “Darmok.” Oh, and Thomas Edison is just a slimy ratcock of a villain. Fuck that guy. Seriously.

Outward Bound

CRUISE FUNDRAISER UPDATE: 98/100 prints are sold! Only 2 prints remain! I am expecting delivery of the prints any day now and they’ll start shipping as soon as they arrive.

[Context for the Nell reference, if you need it]

Jodie Foster’s public coming out may have been unnecessary at this point, but it was certainly a grand gesture. “On the stage of the Golden Globes, accepting a lifetime achievement award for “An especially good job at being one of America’s favorite and most enduring movie stars for the last 40 years or so” is a pretty impressive answer to the question, “When and where did you come out?” If you watch the speech, it’s very odd that the audio drops out just as she says something along the lines of “…this isn’t going to be a big coming out speech…” I wonder if the network got antsy and considering muting her or if it really was just a poorly timed audio mishap.

Her speech may have been an odd, stream of consciousness (albeit joyous and life affirming) ramble-fest, but anyone reporting confusion as to whether or not she publicly affirmed her sexuality or not just weren’t paying attention at all. She spelled it right out and did so with confidence and class.

I’m anxious for the day when a well known woman can get on a stage, talk about her achievements and thank her wife (or ex-wife in this case) for her support without first having to ADMIT to her sexuality. When I (a straight, white man – the lowest difficulty setting) get up in front of strangers I don’t in any way feel compelled or obligated to discuss my sexuality. I don’t feel nervous that they are assuming thing about who and how I love. And if I said “…and my wife was there,” no one would blink an eye. Actually, someone might think, “Oh, he’s married. I didn’t know that.” Which is exactly how the thought process should work when Jodie Foster starts talking about her kids and casually mentions the woman she is raising them with. “I’ve got new information and the sexy details are none of my business.”

I wasn’t really planning on writing a mini-rant this morning, but this is something I think about a lot. Primarily because, while INCREDIBLY close to the the real life truth, panel 3 up there in that comic conceals a lie. When Josh actually came out to me via instant message all those years ago, I was SUPER freaked out. Not because he was gay, but because I didn’t KNOW he was gay. We had been friends for years and I just thought he was terrible with girls. When I received the new information, I made the erroneous and selfish determination that he had been lying to me for our entire friendship. EHHHHNNN! Wrong. The truth, which I understood much later, was that our friendship had not yet progressed to the point that he was comfortable discussing sexuality with me.

I realized what a dick I had been when I started to think about all of my other straight friends who NEVER talked to me about who they desired bang times with or in what ways they wished for said banging to bang. People are not obligated to reveal their sexual details with anyone. The only reason gay people are even expected to “come out” is that we (even the most enlightened of us) still consider straight to the the baseline and gay to be the aberration “I will assume you are straight unless you otherwise inform me,” is the most common attitude when it should be, “You seem to have brown hair and like to wear ironic t-shirts. If I want to know anything else, I’ll have to get to know you better.“

Life With J.J.

Geeky t-shirts by me and Wil Wheaton at Sharksplode.com! Woohoo!

I want to preface this by saying I think J.J. Abrams has done more for elevating geek pop culture in the last decade than anyone in Hollywood, save for Joss Whedon. Thaaaaaat saaaaaaid… he has a bit of a tendency to shroud his projects in so much mystery that over enthusiastic geeks (his core audience) begin to obsess over every nuance and minute detail of whatever information he presents them with (in the forms of teasers, trailers, quotes, etc.). To make things MUCH worse, he KNOWS we do this so he pokes the bear at every turn. That shot of Spock “dying” in the Intro Darkness Japanese trailer was JUST TO FUCK WITH US. And who knows? He might be doing a “double secret fuck you” and having Spock actually die in the movie.

The shroud of mystery surrounding Cumberbatch’s villain character is even more ridiculous. They LOVE that we think he’s Kahn despite their insistance that he isn’t. Then they love that we think he’s Gary Mitchell. Then they release his character name and no one’s ever heard of it. But that could be a red herring too! They know we’re going to be frustratedly guessing until the film debuts, which CAN be part of the fun, but to this degree (as with nearly ALL Bad Robot productions past) the level of mystery and guessing and red herrings and clues and misdirections raise our expectations to such an unprecedented level that NOTHING they present us with as a final product can live up to those expectations. That said, Star Trek (2009) is a not only a perfect Star Trek movie, it is a perfect movie. And with that knowledge stowed away in my brain spaces, I am allowing myself (this time) to have essentially no expectations about Star Trek: Into Darkness other than an anticipation of big big fun.

COMMENTERS: Do you think the secrecy surrounding certain geek movies is getting out of hand? Are we more prone to fanboy disappointment when the layers upon layers of mystery don’t unravel in a way that meets our expectations? When did geek movie/tv pay off or frustrate you the most?

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