RETRIBUTIONAL SODOMY: February 2009

Thursday, February 26, 2009

We are the Sprocket Holes vol. 64

Double You, Tea F.: the Movie

ladies and gentlemen.... JAPAN:

We are the Sprocket Holes vol. 63

Next Up On The Remake Train: 'Total Recall'

hur-umph.

you can't top Total Recall. it's a film that literally has something for everyone. wild gore, nightmarish characters/effects, surreal setting, insane action, morose one-liners, gun-toting midget hookers, an omnipotent Krang looking thing emerging from the abdomen of a man, Tri-Tits, a pre-sanctimonious insanity Sharon Stone, and Michael Mother Fucking Ironside. add in psycotauer Paul Verehoven fresh from Robocop, Ahnuld in his prime, and Philip K. Dick roots and you have... well... absolutely everything.

the only way i could possibly dig a remake if they just call it by the original title of the Phillip K. Dick story; We Can Remember it For You Wholesale, and they get David Cronenberg to write/direct (he was supposed to do the original);

from Wikipedia;

"David Cronenberg was attached to direct but wanted to cast William Hurt in the lead role. Cronenberg described his work on the project and eventual falling out with Shusett: "I worked on it for a year and did about 12 drafts. Eventually we got to a point where Ron Shusett said, 'You know what you've done? You've done the Philip K. Dick version.' I said, 'Isn't that what we're supposed to be doing?' He said, 'No, no, we want to do Raiders of the Lost Ark Go to Mars.'""

this could be a perfect opportunity for Cronenberg to go back to his body-horror roots, but that's just yet another one of my cinephile pipe-dreams (alongside Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau and Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune). i know this won't happen, because to do that would require taking a risk on something that might lose the moron in the back row.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Just Needed to Share vol. 29

i'd like to talk about the most fun i've ever had in a mosh pit.

I was 16 years old at Ground Zero in Bellmore. I can't remember what the show was. I was in the pit with 3 really cute girls.

just me and 3 really cute girls.

they jumped, shoved, pawed, essentially manhandled me. I did my share of "oh you too" shoves, but i behaved myself otherwise. I just enjoyed the scenario.... a lot.

So we all had fun.

afterward, i get accosted by one of the people we were hanging out with.. this Rocky Dennis looking clownshoes, who made it a point throughout the day to show off to the very same group of girls by acting all "wacky" and "silly"... you know the type; the needlessly extroverted loudmouth goon who acts over-the-top and goofy at shows or bars whenever he feels too much attention is being placed on .... you know... THE BANDS. He's determined to make you talk about his antics when the night is over, not the music. Selfish, Needy, Narcissistic, and most importantly UNFUNNY. not intelligent/insightful enough to be genuinely comedic, and not imaginative enough to be anti-comedy. He's just a fucking manboy attention-whore.

Anyway, this asshouse was doing his asshouse thing all day; namely being a routinely obnoxious cancer germ... and all the while i muster up all the disgust i have in my perpetually blackened and broken 16 year old heart, moving it to my face, looking how i know we all feel whenever one of this shit-eating-rictus-grins tries to take command of the room. I'm amazed my face wasn't frozen forever in a Lawrence Tierney grimace. beyond amusing pity, These girls were not interested in this microwave accident of a human being, but they were too nice to tell him what a fucking zero he was, and he'd probably be better to us if he went ahead and deep-throated the exhaust pipe of a running short bus. I know that what they were thinking... word for word.

Anyway, i was my usual "staring through the type of my eyelids while hugging a wall" self, and didn't really converse with these girls. I was still pining about you-know-who, and just wanted to hear some tunes, hang out with my friends, and whatever. So the show was going on, and by some divine miracle, i found myself in the pit, being circled by three of the ladies Michael Berryman Jr. attempted to win over earlier. before i knew it, i was being passed around like a keg (if only half-way so... nyeah).

So for a beautiful ten minutes, i didn't care about school or you-know-who or that joy-raping wafflehead. I was 16 years old and i was being playfully manhandled by 3 cute girls at a hardcore show.

Like i said... i got my share of shoves in, but i behaved myself... no groping, no hitting... i literally did everything in my power not to spoil what very well could be the most perfect moment in my life up to that point. "I'll never be this happy again!!" played in my head in a whiny, Milhouse Van Houtten voice.

So yeah, after the set was over, we were all smiling. I don't smile very often, and even this case i only had a little smirk, but in my head i was jumping up and down, squeeing like Anime Jailbait.

Then the moment was ruined by Mongo McTamponSocket.

"You were HITTING GIRLS! you're a jerk! how could you do that to GIRLS!"

I think i just smiled my best Sabretooth "fuck you, Logan" smile... as if i was flashing the fangs that would nip at his jugular while my new harem beats and rapes him with large tree-branches.

Guys are Cunts.

Just needed to share.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

NEERRRRRRD! vol. 7/Quotant Quoatables vol. 24

segments from Wired's interview w/ Alan Moore

"It does seem to me that massive tactical superiority might be a key to the superhero phenomenon. That, if it's a military situation, then you've got carpet bombing from altitude, which is kind of the equivalent of having come from Krypton as a baby and to have gained unusual strength and the ability to fly because of Earth's lesser gravity. I don't know, that may be a simplistic interpretation, but that's the way I tend to see superheroes today. That wasn't what it used to mean. That wasn't what it used to mean to me when I was a child. What I was getting out of it was this unbridled world of the imagination, and the superhero was a perfect vehicle for that when I was much younger. But looking at the superhero today, it seems to me an awful lot like Watchmen without the irony, that with Watchmen we were talking very much about the potential abuses of this kind of masked vigilante justice and the kind of people that it would in all likelihood attract if these things were taking place in a more realistic world. But that was not meant approvingly. I have to say that I haven't seen a comic, much less a superhero comic, for a very, very long time now—years, probably almost a decade since I've really looked at one closely. But it seems to be that things that were meant satirically or critically in Watchmen now seem to be simply accepted as kind of what they appear to be on the surface. So yeah, I'm pretty jaundiced about the entire "caped crusader" concept at the moment."

"At the time I thought that a book like Watchmen would perhaps unlock a lot of potential creativity, that perhaps other writers and artists in the industry would see it and would think, "This is great, this shows what comics can do. We can now take our own ideas and thanks to the success of Watchmen we'll have a better chance of editors giving us a shot at them." I was hoping naively for a great rash of individual comic books that were exploring different storytelling ideas and trying to break new ground. That isn't really what happened. Instead it seemed that the existence of Watchmen had pretty much doomed the mainstream comic industry to about 20 years of very grim and often pretentious stories that seemed to be unable to get around the massive psychological stumbling block that Watchmen had turned out to be, although that had never been my intention with the work."

"It was never my intention to start a trend for darkness. I'm not a particularly dark individual. I have my moments, it's true, but I do have a sense of humor."

"I didn't want to spark off another wave of frankly miserable stories about psychotic vigilantes battling it out with equally psychotic villains. I wanted to do stuff that had a fresher feel to it, had a bit of a morning atmosphere. And I think, to a degree, we succeeded, but of course it all ended in tears."

"There was a time I would have said that if any of my books could work as films, it would have been that first volume of The League. It was pretty much structured so it could have been made straight into a film, and it would have been as powerful as it was in the original publication. But that is to overlook the proclivities of contemporary Hollywood, where I really simply don't believe that any of my books could be benefited in any way by being turned into films. In fact, quite the opposite. The things I was trying to instill in those books were generally things that were only appropriate to the comics medium. They were only about the comics medium, in a certain sense. To transplant them to the screen is going to chop off a good 30 or 40 percent of the reason why I wanted to do the work in the first place. Jerusalem, this enormous novel I'm working on, which I'm two-thirds of the way through and it's already got to be somewhere around 1,500 pages, it's something that could only be done as a novel—and as an incredibly long novel. This wouldn't work as a comic strip. It's not got the right pace for a comic strip. It's something that's been designed to work as prose and occasional bits of poetry, just as The League is designed to work as a comic book—or a graphic novel, if everybody insists."

"It's like the idea about the Spirit film that's being done. I mean, I would have thought that it was fairly obvious that The Spirit is not about a guy who wears a blue mask and who fights crime from his supposed grave in a cemetery. What The Spirit is actually about is the panels on the page, the way that the eye moves from one panel to another. It's from the innovative shapes and layouts and designs that Will Eisner brought to the medium. You can't translate that into a film. Much as Eisner loved the film medium and tried to get as many techniques to comics as possible, there are things about the Will Eisner page you simply cannot translate back into cinema. I think Will would have certainly been intelligent enough to know that. I think that adaptation is largely a waste of time in almost any circumstances. There probably are the odd things that would prove me wrong. But I think they'd be very much the exception. If a thing works well in one medium, in the medium that it has been designed to work in, then the only possible point for wanting to realize it on "multiple platforms," as they say these days, is to make a lot of money out of it. There is no consideration for the integrity of the work, which is rather the only thing as far as I'm concerned. I've got enough money to be comfortable. I live comfortably, I can pay the bills at the end of every month. I don't want a huge amount of money by diluting something that I happen to be rather proud of at its outset. That pretty much describes my attitude toward the idea of any of my works being realized in another form, really."

"I've never watched any of the adaptations of my books. I've never wanted to, and there's absolutely no chance of me doing so in the future. So I haven't really suffered through them, although there has been a certain amount of irritation and outrageous behavior on the part of the comic industry and the movie industry that I have suffered through. But I've gone into this at bitter and ranting length elsewhere. I'm sure that people can look up the relevant articles have they a wish to. My books are still the same books as they were before they were made into films. The books haven't changed. I'm reminded of the remark by, I think it was Raymond Chandler, where he was asked about what he felt about having his books "ruined" by Hollywood. And he led the questioner into his study and showed him all the books there on the bookshelf, and said, Look—there they all are. They're all fine. They're fine. They're not ruined. They're still there. And I think that's pretty much the attitude I take. If the books are as good as I think they are, then they are the things that will endure. And if the films are as bad as I think they are, then they are the things that will not endure. So, I suppose we'll see at the end of the day, whenever that is."

"I think that Terry understood my point. When we did meet—which was mainly just because I thought it would be really good fun to meet Terry Gilliam, and so it proved—Mr. Gilliam did ask me how I would go about translating Watchmen into a film, and I said to him, "If anybody had asked me, Terry, I would have advised them not to." I think Terry is an intelligent man and came to that conclusion himself. And I think he said something to that effect, that he thought it was something probably best left as a comic and shouldn't be made into a film. This has been pretty much my attitude for a long, long time now. It's just that my attitude has probably hardened and gotten more ingrained as my arteries have hardened and I've grown older. I'm a bit more vehement and vociferous than when I was a callow youth of around 30."

there is just too much good stuff here... just go to the link and read for yourself.

oh and in case you didn't know; FUCK ZACH SNYDER'S BOTCHMEN.

ps: one last quote to illustrate the point;

"Even the best director in the world, even a person as talented as Terry Gilliam, could not possibly get that amount of information into a few frames of a movie. Even if they did, it would have zipped past far too quickly. Because the audience at the movie theater is not in control of the experience in the same way somebody reading is."