The DVD of the movie version of Stephen King’s The Mist came out this week. I think it is interesting that Stephen King is such a brilliant writer, yet his work does translate to the screen. It is rare that a good book can become a good movie. I think the key is the remarkable sympathy in Stephen King’s prose. I find it difficult to read his work because his characters are so likable and understandable. And then, of course, horrible things tend to happen to them, it being horror and all. Having horrible things happen to bad people can produce a certain schadenfreude, but watching bad things happen to people you like, people who make sense to you, can be painful and sad. King seems to have a unique comprehension of the human condition, which allows him to make people see what makes others tick in a sympathetic light. You always know why a Stephen King character would do the things they do and there is a certain strong and unusual comfort and appeal in that.
The movie version of the novel The Mist maintains a good sense of tension, as terrified townfolks try to figure out what is menacing them from inside the fog and try to make sense of why monsters would be after them. As neighbor turns on neighbor, The Mist asks the age old question of who the true monsters are. Bonus points for creepy religious zealotry. Triple word score for casting Emmy award-winner Andre Braugher, known for his role as Det. Frank Pembleton in Homicide Life on the Street, as Brent Norton.
Writer/director Frank Darabont has also done the successful adaptations for Stephen King’s The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption, Nightshift Collection Volume One: The Woman in the Room, and a variety of …
All I have to say is, “woot!” Well, really I’m going to say a bit more, but my cell phone and email have been blowing up with pals who assume I am at the San Diego Comic Con. But I am not and I am quite pleased that I am not. We had a lot of fun last year and I didn’t want to criticize in advance because I didn’t want responsibility for people deciding not to go, but . . .
The cons I initially loved were these amazing (at least for my teenage self) events. Authors and artists I looked up to would share their wisdom on panels during the day and hang out and socialize at night. There were masquerade balls for really doing it up, but lots of people, myself very much included, would run around in crazy costumes all weekend. There was a sense of fun and community and I met tons of new people every time. Occasionally, a convention hotel would give me less than stellar service for wearing (hypothetically) nothing but pins with clever sayings on them over my nipples or not peace-bonding my weapon. But there was always a chick in a corset and elf ears or a guy in painted black leather with a mohawk to agree with me that the hotel was totally unreasonable. Friends of mine who worked con security may recollect slightly differently, but only slightly. The important thing was that the events were extremely social. There was always a dealers room with unusual hard-to-find (especially pre-internet) wares. Eventually, I acquired a lot of items I treasure from exhibitors and BLT and Blue Blood both exhibited at many of those conventions, so I don’t object …
It’s kind of funny that I love love love the aesthetic of the new Captivity movie, yet I’m kinda not cool with the subject matter. I’m not too comfortable with it being censored either, though.
I know people have been complaining, since before I was born, about violence in movies being okay, while sexuality is censored. But I have to say, why is it that if someone puts their cock in a beautiful woman’s mouth, the movie is probably going to get an X and thus limited distro and thus limited financing and production values? But dismember the same woman slowly and the discussion becomes R or NC-17? Is it really okay to broadcast horrors, the likes of which most people will never ever see in person, to seventeen-year-olds, but healthy sexuality, of a sort most people will experience, takes another year of maturing for audiences to be able to handle it? What kind of a society are we going to have when we show teenagers torture porn like Hostel before we let them see, if you can forgive me for invoking normalcy, normal sex?
Full disclosure: Obviously, you all can’t have missed the advertisements Captivity bought on a number sites I work on, including this one. And, yes, if you went to the premiere party at Los Angeles meat market Privilege, you probably spotted around half a dozen hotties you recognized from BlueBlood.com, along with various other contributors.
It bums me out, on a number of levels, that the premiere party was billed as ground-breakingly outrageous and nasty. This seems to show a simultaneous lack of respect for the performers and desire to profit from them. Although the cigarette smoke-stained off-white interior of Privilege generally plays host to …
The Friday of the 2006 Comic Con, I only busted out my camera when really motivated because we’d gone on the Superhero and Supervillian-themed party bus the night before and, after a couple of days in the oppressive San Diego heat, I was slowing down. Still managed to shoot a nice little photo gallery for your viewing pleasure.
I was super-excited to get to see the very entertaining horror screenwriter and producer Sean Abley. Oddly enough, although he and I live literally across the street from one another, I met my neighbor online first and neither of us remembers precisely how. At any rate, he is a great wit and his Dark Blue Productions darkly humorous science fiction feature Socket is showing at the Los Angeles Outfest this Friday, so I highly recommend Angelenos stop by and check it out. (More on this later.)
Those of you who have been with us and Blue Blood since before the beginning will of course remember Black Leather Times, my punk humor zine, more affectionately (or hostilely) known as BLT. Drew “Vladimir Drakovich, King of Mars” Boyd wrote and, with Max Glick, co-wrote a number of humorous articles for BLT back in the crew’s DC days. I had the pleasure of running into Andrew Boyd in our booth at Comic Con and he hooked me and Forrest Black up with some kindly personalized Scurvy Dogs. Andrew Boyd’s publisher AiT/Planet Lar classifies Scurvy Dogs as a cult classic on their web site. This tale of pirates gone astray, co-written with Ryan Yount, absolutely deserves the status.
Sometimes I find conventions difficult because my …
As this year’s Comic Con looms near, it is time to take a look back at last year’s event. Looking at the gallery of snapshots from the Blue Blood crew’s Thursday at the show reminded me of some of the fun we had.
I was excited to pick up entertaining stuff from Shannon Wheeler of Too Much Coffee Man fame. I loved all the crazy Lego, including Lego Batman and Lego robots. Actually, all robots are cool, not just those made out of plastic bricks for kids. BlueBlood.com hottie Yolanda was in the house as well. The lovely blonde, Em, is almost my namesake and is a real mail order Russian bride. Special thanks to The Brotherhood for sponsoring the megabooth and making sure it came complete with a beautiful and personable mail order bride.
I was pleased to be able to literally buy a shirt off the back of the very kind Gwen from Sighco. Gwen and I are around the same size and she was wearing a shirt which read, “Guns don’t kill people. Supervillains kill people.” Everyone from our spooky ookie artistic folks megabooth was going on a Superhero and Supervillain-themed party bus that night. A bus complete with stripper pole, I might add. Oddly, the booth with the Simpsons costumes and various supergear was just displaying and was not renting or selling them at the convention. I kinda think they left some money on the table there. This meant I really did need that Supervillain shirt right away then and Sighco’s Gwen actually took her own shirt off, right on the Comic Con show floor, let me try …
Estimated opening weekend gross for Accepted is around $10 million, which is hunky-dorey for a movie with a production budget of only around $23 million. I don’t know what percentage of those movie-goers also attended Comic Con or talked to someone who did, but Accepted did the most brilliant promotion at the convention.
Comic Con is the largest convention of its type in the U.S. This year, significantly more than a hundred thousand people showed up. Which is significantly more than the forty thousand or so the city of San Diego could probably handle. It was impossible to park anywhere near the convention center and it was approximately one billion degrees and the food in the convention center concessions started tasting kinda rancid by the second day. And, even for pretty literally nauseating food, the lines were likely to take an hour or so. Which cuts down on one’s collectible-browsing time. So, by the end of the day, everyone was sort of running on empty, streaming out of the San Diego Convention Center en masse, hungry and a long way, under a hot sun, from their transportation.
So the promoters of the Accepted movie threw a collegiate-style beer blast and barbeque across the street. The basic concept of the flick is that an enterprising young man is rejected from every college he applies to, so he creates his own institution of higher learning called South Harmon Institute of Technology. Yes, that acronym is what you think it is. The star-studded event featured a skateboard ramp and a giant banner reading “Welcome SHITheads” with the San Diego Gaslamp district as a backdrop. While waiting in a refreshingly …
