Peter David's Blog, page 38

Ron Perlman Better Watch Out

In her life, Kathleen has portrayed three fictional characters as part of the Shore Leave Masquerade.

The first was Jareth from “Labyrinth.” The second was Professor Snape. And the third was Vincent from “Beauty and the Beast.”

We lost Bowie only a few days ago. Now we just lost Alan Rickman.

I sure hope Ron Perlman has had his health checked recently.

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I Won the Powerball

Okay, not really.

But hey, have you gotten my book Artful?

State of the Union: Here We Go…

9:00–We’ll be watching the State of the Union on PBS. We figure that’s the equivalent of non-denominational.

9:08–You could cook an omelette in the time it takes him to work his way down the aisle.

9:09–I noticed on “Robot Chicken” whenever they do stuff set in Congress, the flag is always backwards. They should fix that.

9:10–I’ve never understood the need to introduce him twice.

9:11–Starts with a joke. Bold choice.

9:12–Yes, because bi-partisan has been the watchword for the last seven years.

9:13–I wonder if he’ll quote David Bowie at some point.

9:14–Who are those nuns and why do they look like they want to slap somebody?

9:16–The guy sitting next to Nancy Pelosi looks asleep.

9:16–What’s wrong with his skin tone? He looks jaundiced.

9:17–Seriously, Ryan? You can’t even applaud for marriage equality?

9:17–He said he was going to ask four questions. I thought sure he was going to ask why is this night different from all other nights.

9:19–How can we make politics reflect what’s best? That’s easy: shut all the conservatives up. Problem solved.

9:21–So the entire GOP is peddling fiction? I can see that.

9:23–We agree that Jon Snow shouldn’t be dead in “Game of Thrones.”

9:24–Ryan won’t applaud MAKING COLLEGE AFFORDABLE?! Jesus Christ.

9:24–Bernie Sanders has been saying community college should be free for years.

9:30–Nice comment about food stamp recipients.

9:32–“We were walking on the moon.” Which to this day some people still refuse to believe, so it all goes around, I guess.

9:34–I remember the West Wing episode where Bartlet wanted to say that we were going to cure cancer in his state of the union.

9:35–Uhm…because we’re insane?

9:37–Remember when Obama’s critics declared that if he were reelected, gas would be up to $5-$6 a gallon by this point?

9:38–A 21st century transportation system. Damned right. Where are the flying cars and hover boards that actually hover?

9:40–Or they call the Ghostbusters.

9:45–And, oh yeah, we killed bin-Laden.

9:46: THERE we go.

9:48–“Quogmire?” Is that like quagmire?

9:52–That’s pretty much what Jesus said. “That which you do for the least of my brothers, you do unto me.”

9:54–So there goes Donald Trump’s campaign.

9:57–So it’s never gonna happen, is what he’s saying.

10:00–Yes, but one of the main reasons for the divisiveness in DC is the GOP’s determination to stop everything that Obama does, no matter what. It’s no longer about serving the people. It’s about stopping government.

10:08–But he doesn’t see it on the Internet, that’s for sure.

10:09–Crap! They ALWAYS say the state of the union is strong. I was so pleased he avoided the cliche and then at the end, boom, there it was.

Pretty decent overall, I believe. Thoughts?

Yes, I will be blogging the State of the Union

Swing on by PeterDavid.net this evening and feel free to comment.

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BADGER

So Mike Baron posted the following on Facebook:

My friends, the orders for Badger #1 came in and they were pathetic. One of the reasons is that retailers believe they have to purchase every Marvel and DC title, which are now flooding the market. My friends, if you believe in independent comics, do me a favor. Contact your local retailer and ask them to carry Badger. Thank you.

So let’s see what we can do.

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SPACE CASES returns on Teen Nick tonight

Teen Nick is a cable channel that, from 10 PM to 6 AM, runs something called the Splat. On the Splat, they air series that ran in the 1980s and 1990s. Tonight, finally, SPACE CASES shows up. They run the pilot at 10:30 PM and then another episode every two hours. So set your DVRs and tune into the series that Bill Mumy and I created back in the 1990s which featured Jewel Staite as an engineering genius in space. Yes, that’s right, we ripped off Joss Whedon ten years early.

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So…STAR WARS. My thoughts.

I’m figuring that pretty much everyone who is going to see it has seen it already. So off we go. There are copious spoilers attached.

I have seen any number of pompous diatribes deriding the film because of many parallels to the first one. There is, I suppose, some validity to the observances. In both films, a youth on a desert world comes into the possession of a robot that is carrying a piece of information that has to be carried directly to a rebellion movement because they have space ships, flying vehicles and light sabres, but not email. This young individual is strong in the Force and uses that ability to attack the Empire/First order, but watches helplessly while a father figure is cut down by someone he was once close to. And the entire film climaxes when the best pilot in the galaxy blows up a massive planet destroying weapon belonging to the Empire/First order. If anything, there are far more parallel story beats to “A New Hope” than there were between “Star Trek: Into Darkness” and “The Wrath of Khan,” and people decried the resemblances relentlessly.

Yet there are sufficient differences between the source material and the newest film to satisfy me, really. First and foremost, which no one seems to have pointed out: the dialogue is better. Much better. Lightyears better. Of the previous six films, the only one with good dialogue was “The Empire Strikes Back,” and this dialogue is on par with that. There are moments of genuine levity, and there is no dialogue evoking wretched hives of scum and villainy that make you say, “Only Alec Guiness could have sold THAT line.” And the characters are very different. They’re better written, better acted, and have intriguing back stories that we are convinced (or at least I am) will slowly be revealed as the story progresses (let’s remember we didn’t find out about Luke’s parentage until the end of the second film, so I’m content to wait to discover how Rey does what she does.)

Ah, Rey. The character decried as a Mary Sue simply because she is at Luke’s level of force manipulation by the end of the film rather than taking three movies to get there. Because how riveting does it sound to watch her go through the exact same voyage of discovery at the exact same pace? Screw that. We know what a trained Jedi can do now. So let’s just get to it. It took Luke three films to be able to defeat the bad guy. She did it in one. That makes no sense! How could she defeat Kylo Ren? Because he’s not on Vader’s level and he was suffering from a crossbow blast to his gut, nimrods, that’s how. Do we have to spell out everything?

Who is Rey? Well, before the film opened, I opined that Kylo Ren was Luke’s son and Rey was Han and Leia’s daughter. Got that exactly backwards. Although yes, they haven’t established that she’s Luke’s daughter, but they’ve sure hinted at it pretty strongly. She’s wearing his old fighter helmet and she has an old doll that looks like fighter pilot Luke. I figure her dad is either Luke or Wedge Antilles.

All I know for sure about Rey is that my teen daughter absolutely adores her and wants to role play as her, and that’s really all that matters because back in 1977 thirteen year old boys were all putting on their karate outfits and using flashlights as light sabres. Every generation needs its filmic heroes, and if Daisy Ridley’s Rey gets the job done, I’m fine with that.

We don’t know anything about Finn’s background, or Poe’s background, but that’s okay as well. “Star Wars,” which simply started off as a “Flash Gordon” rip-off that many contemporary directors thought was an appalling waste of Lucas’s time, was always less about the environment than it was about the characters anyway. They trusted the Force implicitly, so much so that when Luke shut off his targeting computer during the climax of “A New Hope,” the rebel alliance just took it on faith that he knew what he was doing rather than reacting the way you and I would have: ordering him to stop screwing around and turn the damned computer back on.

So overall “The Force Awakens” is a big sweeping attempt to get back to basics. Yes, the prequels didn’t have a single planet destroyer to blow up, but they didn’t have anything else to recommend them either. That’s partly because Abrams went back to basics, rendering this film with practical effects whenever possible, as opposed to Lucas so embracing CGI that even damned Yoda became freaking computer animated instead of being a puppet. That’s why the look and feel of this film gives us the warm fuzzies: because it FEELS like a Star Wars movie in a way that none of the prequels did. There wasn’t even lens flare.

There is also much discussion about Snoke. No one is saying what I’m saying, which is that Snoke is quite simply the worst name for a villain ever. EV-er. A villain’s name should fill you with fear, a sense of dread. Darth Sidious. There’s a name. Sounds like insidious. Darth Vader. Sounds like invader. Snoke? What the hell? Even putting “Darth” in front of it wouldn’t help. There is also much discussion about whether he is actually a giant. Why? When Vader first spoke with the Emperor’s hologram, HE was a giant. They were just evoking that. Personally I would love it if Snoke were three feet tall. An evil Yoda. That would be freaking hilarious.

Was there anything I disliked? Honestly, yes. The music. That’s right, the music.

Hum the “Star Wars” theme. You know it. Hum Luke’s theme. Han and Leia’s theme. Hum the Darth Vader march. Remember the music when the Falcon flies through the asteroids? Hell, the music of the big battle with Darth Maul? These were all tunes that you came out of the theater with them seared into your cerebral cortex.

Now hum ANY John Williams signature theme from “The Force Awakens.” Go ahead. I’ll wait.

If you can, you are way ahead of me, because I’ve got nothing. Rey, Finn, Kylo Ren: I can’t pull up any musicals cues directly associated with these characters, and I’ve seen the movie twice. When Williams evokes previous musical cues–Han and Leia’s theme when they reunite–they pop right out at you. But if there are musical themes for any of the new characters, I simply cannot perceive them. I suppose that’s a failure on my part, but to me there’s simply nothing there. I shouldn’t have to sit down and listen to the soundtrack with each piece labeled so I can pick them up in the film. I don’t know what the hell went wrong with Williams in this film, but I’m hoping that it’s fixed by the next film.

As for me, I know what I want to do while waiting for the next film: I want to write a comic book about the adventures of Han Solo and his teen son, Ben. I want it to be that Leia is worried about the way the kid is developing and Han says he’s gonna take his thirteen year old son out on some adventures to the Outer Rim, and turn out twenty pages of excitement every month as Han and Ben go exploring and try to reconnect. Which you know ultimately won’t happen, but it would be a great ride.

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Is Rey a Mary Sue?

This will be the first of a few blogs I’ll be doing about “Star Wars.” I’m waiting a little before I do stuff with spoilers, but I thought I’d address this current bit of business that’s bopping around the internet. Namely, is Rey a Mary Sue?

The answer is, Of course not.

A Mary Sue is something very specific: a female hero substitute for a fannish author so that she can interact with Kirk or Spock or whomever. She is generally so fabulous in everything that she does that all the male characters fall in love with her. That’s Mary Sue.

It seems absurd to transform Mary Sue into the current definition that’s rattling around: the addition of a strong female character into an already existing universe. If we stick with that definition, Supergirl is a Mary Sue. So is Batgirl. Of more recent vintage, Silk.

Furthermore, Rey is not a Mary Sue for the simplest reason of all: the authors of the work are male. She can’t be wish fulfillment for a female writer because a female didn’t write it. End of story.

Glad I could clear that up.

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I’m going off line for the next few days

Why? Because it’s the simplest way to avoid “Star Wars” spoilers. I do not believe for a moment that people will attend to the “No Spoilers!” pleadings that I’m seeing everywhere. So I figure the onus is on me to simply stay off line until I see it.

Which will be Thursday evening at 7 PM at a screening arranged by Fourth World Comics, my comics store in Long Island.

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“The Paper”

So I just stumbled over “The Paper” on cable, a wonderful comedy/drama with Michael Keaton and Glenn Close made back in 1994. And in watching it, I was struck again by just how much the world has changed in a mere 20 years.

The climax of the film (it’s two decades old; deal with the spoilers) hinges on the fact that the newspaper has a front page headline that subsequent investigation reveals to be false. Keaton’s character stops the presses so it can replated and changed (thus exonerating two black youths falsely accused of a crime) but Close’s character, the EIC, starts the paper up again and fires Keaton’s character. Later on, though, she has a change of heart, stops the press herself and has it fixed to run the correct headline. Presumably she swallows the expense of destroying the already published newspapers so that they can get it correct.

And as I watched it, I realized that would never happen today. They would send out the incorrect newspaper so they wouldn’t incur the expense of the unused papers, but they would immediately update the website. The printed paper would seem an interesting but inaccurate sidelight while the online version would be out there with the correct story. End of problem.

Kind of kills the drama.

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