A little gift for my Whovian friends: Monsters

Every now and again we stumble upon stuff, silly putty, penicillin, fish fingers and custard. We don't intend to invent something new, but sometimes in doing what we do we find ourselves making something useful. Doctor Who does this with it's monsters.

Doctor Who is famous for it's monsters, the phrase "hide behind the couch" has become sin-ominous with the show, which some might find funny in retrospect as many of the monsters are from an era where the best they had to scare you with were an upended trash can a plunger and an egg beater. Still they found a way to make those things to the now famous Dalek in the 1960's, and the Cybermen soon after. Those two stand out as the major monsters of the show, they both have been around for near on 50 years now, and they are still scary. How did that happen?

Things that last the test of time have something extra to them that help them live, something outside what they are that they tap into to refresh themselves for new generations that allows them to become iconic. For the Daleks that's how they act, they are essentially a fascists, space Nazis squids in a tin can with a creepy voice obsessed with "EXTERMINATE"ing those deemed less than them. In so being they represented the enemy of the past when they were introduced, one that many of those watching still had living memory of, and they have stayed in our zeitgeist because we've never had a better villain in the 20th century. 

The Cybermen, robotic men of metal bend on spreading their "upgrade" to the rest of the world and lead by a Cyber-controller were a perfect stand in for the then current threat of Communism. All will become like us or be deleted. It was the idea that you could be over taken and remade into something radically different
from yourself, that was the national panic at that time, the red scare made sliver. All were the same, all were emotionless and sure that their way of living was better, and they were coming for you to make you agree.

Most recently the show has stumbled on a new villain, a new icon for a new show in a new age. The Weeping Angels, statutes that would come alive when you were not looking and either snap your neck or displace you in time to then feast on what would have been in your life. They are a wonderful mix of the mundane and creepy, grey angels in a pose as if they are weeping, but look away just for a second and they will be right on top of you with sharpened teeth and a hungry glare. They don't talk, they just take you away. The fear that they represent is that of Terrorism. That one day you could be walking about, not playing attention and BAM, your life could be taken away. The idea that we constantly need to keep an eye out for them and an eye on them is also a telling part of modern cation or paranoia depending where you fall.

I would love to write a Weeping Angels episode, I have one in my head right now. So far the Doctor has advised men on how to avoid them, has cast them into a void, and has survived them, but he has yet to stop them in a way in which he wins his way. He has yet to understand them, to fight them in the way they need to be fought, and he has yet to truly beat them. I would love to give the Doctor that victory, a victory where he faces our fear and once again does what he was made for, shows us that its OK to be afraid and OK to live with that fear because that fear isn't so big that it can't be beaten with the right set of wits about you.

Stay Tuned and Merry Christmas.

Agents of SHIELD

Some of you may know that last year I made a little movie, I made it in the hopes of getting a job with Joss Whedon on the new Marvel universe show we now know as Agents of SHIELD. This was before the show was announced by the way, all I knew at the time was they were making a show set in the Marvel Universe, from there I knew it either had to be Shield or Heroes for Hire, and they had already introduced Shield in the Avengers so I took my gamble there. I made my villain Ultron, who is one of the great Avengers villains and because robots are cool, and I turned out to be right there too because low and behold the next Avengers film is going to be Avengers: Age of Ultron.  I had a budget of about 400, I had friends who knew what they were doing, or at least were willing to help me. I made this.


Sadly I think there are large parts of it that are better than the ABC show that now exists. I mean I know it's rookie film but if you consider the budget and talent pool that the Disney corporation have to draw upon and compare it to 400 dollars and some people I know, I did more than alright here.

There have been plenty of people writing articles on how to fix this show, the characters are uninteresting, the plots are harmless, it doesn't seem to be adding anything to the universe. Some of these are problems that come with making a show like this, it's fair to ask people to watch some movies, but to keep up with an extra show as well may be too much. Still none of these are anything more than story problems, and those can always be fixed. Its not like the show is always bad, there have been some that I would even call good, the bionic eye was good, the trapped behind enemy lines one was good. Then there are others which are just bad, like tonight's which featured a "ghost" and a weepy girl and a ruminations on God which were harmless.
They told the story of Melinda May, but they didn't show us it, it felt lazy that they did that, "oh yeah the mystery of the angry girl, here's what that's about"

So this is all really disappointing, so what am I going to do about it?

First I am going to find a better title for my Film, Hydraed is terrible. I don't know what I was thinking. I think Agent of Shield may work better.

Then I guess it's my job to write a better script for them. Try my hand at it. There is no point in back seat driving by saying what should be fixed, may as well just build that better mousetrap myself and see what I catch with it. 

How Man of Steel should have ended, but didn't.

Superman is fighting Zod, they are in the train station and Zod is firing his laser eyes at that family. Superman has his neck in a choke hold but the beams are still slowly making there way towards those helpless people. In voice over Superman hears Zor-el, his fathers words. "You can save them, you can save them all."

INSTEAD of snapping Zods neck he flies up, through the roof, into the sky, flying higher and higher, and taking Zod with him at incredible speed. We see below them the smoking hole that is Metropolis, about a six block chunk of a major city has been destroyed with various smoking parts in the rest of it.

"Nobody dies today Zod. Not even you"

Zod gets free of Superman somewhere in the clouds and they fight, their punches so powerful they dissipate clouds as they land. Zod tries to go after an airliner but Superman won't let him get to it. Flying under and up at Zod, pushing him further from the surface. It's a game of keep away with the planet.

They are now far above the clouds, Zod fires his eye beams at Superman, Superman meets his gaze, the lasers pushing against each other in the middle. From earth we can see it as a close star in the sky. They are at stalemate.
Superman breaks his gaze flies quickly to Zod and punches him again. Then he speaks.

"I'm the Last Son of the Krypton you are sworn to protect and preserve. If you want to get to these people, you'll have to kill me first."

Zod angry. " You think I can't"

Zod flies at Superman in a rage, his eyes with flame in them.

Superman lands a mighty punch, standing like a wall where Zod was flying to meet him, sending Zod reeling.

"I think you won't. Leave. Go and find our people."

Zod tries again. This time moving fast to other areas, Superman moves just a little faster and meets him every time. Zod never gets closer.

"Leave. Don't come back."

Zod tries a third time. Superman repels him a third time.This time he says nothing because they are now too high for words to be heard. Superman is just standing there. stern. His arms crossed. His eyes say it all. You are not getting passed me. Leave.

Zod, turns flies off, towards what we see is the the small remains of his ship. He leaves, as his ship opens to the phantom Zone and disappears.

Superman flies down to earth. To the smoking wreckage of the city. He picks up a large support beam that is trapping people and reaches down to help them out.

" I'm sorry about this. I'm here to help."
The person takes his hand.

Then you do the rest of the movie.


What makes Superman super isn't his powers, or the sense of Hope that he stands for. He has one job, he saves us. Not just friends and family, not just the people in the way, not just himself, he even saves the bad guy.

"Nobody dies today Zod. Not even you"

Myself as a student.

I'm going back to school, and for once I'm going to do it right. I've had an interesting academic career, I didn't follow the model, was shifty and to be honest I did it all wrong, but I still feel as though I have found for myself an amazing education, more than going the usual route could have ever provided. Still I am without the one thing that matters about going to college and that is a degree, it's been the great shame of my twenties, the reason I feel uncomfortable when I meet peers or have to talk about my life with others, it's a glaringly incomplete part of myself. People who know me expect that I should have already completed it a while ago because I seem like the type that would, I'm smart and I pride myself on my wit and passion for the thing I studied, English. I may have fallen out of the school structure but I never stopped learning, never stopped teaching myself, because at some point along the way I discovered how to do that, in so doing I've given myself a masters in comic books and storytelling with minors in film, philosophy, and comedy. On paper that isn't true, on paper I'm a failure. I would like to change what's on that paper.

My start was at a seminary at a very nice school in Minnesota, the University of St. Thomas. I had convinced myself in High School that I was never going to be good enough for marriage or love and so therefore should stick to the one thing I saw myself as good at which was church. Upon arriving there I discovered that somewhere buried in my low self esteem was a desire to be loved and have a family which I was ignoring, and so I eventually left the school. That school wasn't so much about schooling as it was about discerning my vocation, but I did love the academic part of it. I loved writing papers and was astounded that I was in school at all, college seemed like such a cool place and I liked the pretension of the ideas and professors and the chance that I might write something big and meaningful.

I had to leave there once I decided that I wasn't going to be a priest, and ended up going to Louisiana on the invitation of a friend. At this point I thought that all schools were the same, my professors would prove that wrong almost immediately, not that it mattered since I arrived there 10 days before Katrina hit, so the school year was a thrown into chaos anyway, but also because at that time I had the existential dilemma of not knowing what I wanted to be when I grew up anymore. I knew I liked English in high school and comic books so I just started there, I wanted to write comics, but that's not an easy profession to find yourself in and I knew that. I was just studying for the love of it, and living in post Katrina Lafayette was enough adventure to keep my mind busy. Still I ended up leaving after only a semester because I knew I wanted a higher level of learning than that school was capable of offering.

Benedictine College is where I did the best part of my learning and where I was truly a student. It was a small school in Kansas, had a decent English program and offered a strong campus faith life, "the college experience" and also the chance to make my first comic books. I was truly challenged there, both educationally and in my faith. I got along very well with the English department there and was even head of the English club, which wasn't much of a club but I did organize some events. I immersed myself in the classes and readings there, and outside of classes worked on a project that I received funding for through the school, the first ever comic book music video. I said I was also challenged in my faith and that is true too as taking a class there on proving the existence of God caused me to lose my faith and I found myself a non believer in a world built by believers. So I left. I admit this was a mistake.

I came home to Colorado depressed. All things which I had thought true, which were the bedrock of me had been disproved. I felt defeated, and yet still had to finish my degree, and so I turned to the University of Colorado Denver, as my sister was going there and I didn't have any better ideas. I thought at the time that the comic I had made would get me noticed. It didn't. I still didn't really know where my major was headed, or what my future exactly was. So at that point I was just going to school for schools sake, for the sake of the degree that would help me do....I wasn't quite sure. People had told me I should teach, but I felt that was giving up on a dream of being a writer, that to teach was a cop out for greater things, I felt I could be more than just a teacher. I went to school and in the process found a full time job, did the thing I was supposed to do. Then I had a bad semester, I had a girl friend, the first really meaningful relationship, and she left me suddenly and without warning on my birthday. This was heartbreaking. Then a woman at work fell down some stairs and I ended up getting all her hours. Then the economy crashed. I tried to save my semester by doing something big and important, because I thought that would be impressive but I buckled under the weight of everything and it was all terrible. I felt like I had to choose between school and my job and at that point, with the economy where it was I wanted to keep my job. I still have that job like a noose or yoke around my neck. Anyway, that dropped my GPA like a stone and it took a couple years to get back in.

My problem so far has been this. I was walking towards nowhere. I had no purpose to what I was doing at school, and so I underperformed, or would try to over perform in a spectacular way so as to be noticed in the hope that would spur on some kind of opportunity but would fail at it because that's not what they were asking for. So there is the second lost semester, though not as bad as the last. Then came more time in the wilderness. I made a short film, in that time, which has so far predicted all of what the Marvel Film universe is doing. It was a short for Agents of SHIELD, which at the time wasn't a show and hadn't been announced yet. The villain I picked for the piece is going to be the bad guy in the next Avengers film. It also went nowhere thought and hasn't really been noticed. What that film was, was an final attempt to break into film. After it went unnoticed I fell into a depression again and finally found my way out of it with the help of a friend and spiritual director, who eventually said the same thing that other people had been saying but I had steadily ignored, I should teach. I had never allowed myself to consider that before, because I super focused on storytelling and basically wanting to be Joss Whedon. Once I allowed myself to consider that as a possibility my brain exploded with ideas of how I would do it, what it would mean, and I liked the idea.

So now here I am, with a strange history and a goal of becoming a teacher. I used to sit and think about how to tell a story that I would never get the chance to tell, and now I sit and think about how best to teach the things I love. I'm a lot happier, but now comes the hard part, I have to get that degree and I'm not sure who is going to allow me to do that. So basically prayers are something I'll take now. 

How to Fly

"Leonna we don't have the trust of the public anymore!"

"GET IT BACK!"

roll credits

I like Aaron Sorkin, he's a good writer. For all the people who don't know he wrote The Social Network, A Few Good Men, The West Wing, and that little snippet I opened with was from his current show "The Newsroom". A lot of people like Sorkin because he writes smart people walking and exchanging witty dialog, in fact that's what most of his shows are about, but that's not what I like most about him. I like that he writes aspirational characters who are trying to do their best to make the world a better place.

It's easy to be cynical, It's easy to get upset when they miscast batman, to think the Obama administration only wants to go into Syria to get back at Russia for the whole Snowden thing, it's easy to see the whole system we live in as mostly bull shit and to write about it as such, but Sorkin doesn't do that. Sorkin writes about a world full of very smart people, who know a lot of things, are witty, capable, and most of all moral, so its fair that the detractors of Sorkin's writing usually say that his characters are unrealistic and to be fair that is true, but it also misses a point. Aspirational characters are not there to be someone you relate to, they are meant to be someone you look up to. Aspirational characters set an example for us all, they set a standard to live up to, Superman is one such character.

You want to know what my biggest problem with Man of Steel was? It was that he killed the Zod in the end and got in a fight that killed who knows how many. Why is it a bad thing, because if anyone of us had powers and were put in that situation that's what we would have done. I want Superman to be better than me, I want him to be the guy who finds a way to save us all from the big bad and does it in a completely morally perfect way. Seeing that is the thing that gives Superman his luster, it's the thing that makes us as impressed as we once were with the idea of a man flying. They didn't give us that, they thought that the reason superman isn't as popular as they want him to be is that he is too powerful, he's too nice, he's too much not like us, but that is the soul of what makes him so important, and they chipped away at that a little in that movie.

I like Aspirational characters and writing, I like believeing that even if I'm limited in what I can do, in what I would do, maybe out there is someone who is doing the right thing and that if I was in that situation I might do the write thing too.

Joy at the Worlds End

I've had a strange week of highs and lows. On Monday I got a chemical burn on my eyes and was blinded for three days until I got glasses. I was stuck in my apartment without the ability to see, watch TV, or write. I have exceptionally bad eye sight so for three days the world was just a bunch of blurred points and sounds. I had to put my surrounding together from context clues. I lost my freedom, couldn't drive, couldn't go to a shop and buy food, couldn't express myself online, go to work or even for a walk because who knows what I could have walked into. So that was hellish and boring.

Then there was today. Today I went to work, meh, not that great....but then I went to the Drafthouse to watch the Cornetto Trilogy. Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The Worlds End. All three of these movies are great, and worth many viewing, they are funnier than even the above average comedy, smarter and most of all more joyful than any other movies. Each of them takes on the form of a genre piece, the Zombie movie, the buddy cop action film and the latest one, a science fiction end of the world alien invasion film, but none of them are actually about those things, ones a romantic comedy, ones a film where the main character discovers "whats most important in life", and this last one is about nostalgia, addiction, and choosing who you are going to be. The one thing that strings them all together though is the thing that made my night. They are Joyful films.

WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE ZOMBIES GUN FIGHTS AND ROBOTS!!!!

I've often been told that I'm a joyful person. Joy is a strange term, it's overly spiritual, which is why my mom likes to use it so much. It fits me though, I have a sort of enthusiasm and sense of wonder at good things, as a girl who I like a lot once said "Like a puppy", I think she was half annoyed and have in admiration when she said that, and maybe if we are lucky she'll post in the comments about it. She wasn't wrong though, I am very much like a puppy, and that can sound immature, but seeing as I haven't pee on my carpet ever, I feel OK about it. So I'm joyful, puppy like, I'm OK with that but it has to mean something more than happy, they are different words they have to mean different things. I'm not happy, I've been stuck in the same job for too long, in a life that is stalled, though I've finally started on a way out of it, life is hard, it's lonely, I was at that movie alone tonight surrounded by others who had people to enjoy it with. None of that makes me happy, it makes me frustrated, upset, anxious, but none of that takes away from the joy of a great experience like I had tonight.
Tonight I had a night where I got to enjoy people having fun, I got to revel in humor, good food and beer. I got to be enraptured in something I wanted everyone to share in because its so much fun, and in all those things it doesn't matter if I'm happy or anxious or fearful or annoyed, because that pure enjoyment of whatever is at hand is what matters, and that feeling at least for a moment makes you happy, even if your not or have no reason to be. Joy is finding that worth while thing, that amazing thing in whatever mundane piece of life and really letting it affect you and being happy in that moment. I had that Joy tonight in sharing in the Joy of the makers of The Worlds End, and the enjoyment of the audience I saw it with. It was a good night.




THEY GOT WHO TO PLAY BATMAN? HAVE THEY SEEN DAREDEVIL?

Elysium Shrugged

I just got back from a showing of Elysium, the new Neill Blomkamp film, he did District 9 for those who don't recall. I don't know what it is about this director but whenever he releases a film I have a bad day. I watched District 9 on a day that had so many things go wrong I went to the theater as a refuge more than a source of entertainment. Today wasn't a particularly good day either, but it's more that my mood is sour and has been for about a week, I can't really tell why, and that's not the point.

When watching Elysium I couldn't help thinking of Atlas Shrugged, a story that shares the exact same plot but from the other angle. The smart and rich people of the world, the 1%, decide they are sick of dealing with all of the people they don't like, they don't like being told what to do by governments or rules who they think they know better than and so they leave. They find a place where nobody can bug them and they go away and the rest of the world suffers for it. Sort of like a kid running away from home, you'll be sorry when I'm gone and then you'll respect me type of thing. So the world falls apart, just barely able to keep everyone from killing everyone else, it's sort of a society but one in which everything is terrible, meanwhile the rich are all enjoying themselves in there little valley.

I've always thought it was a dumb idea.

If the rich were to do this than other smart people would make there way into those places of power which had been vacated, if the king decides to leave his kingdom others will rule instead and he will lose his kingdom. The whole idea also seems to discount that there are smart people with good ideas in the lower classes of society, who just don't have the resources of the rich to get noticed, sure a bunch of rich people could do that, and for the sake of the story lets say they all do, at most the chaos would last a generation before new people would rise and start doing things that would threaten the rich, and eventually remove them.  It doesn't take a super rich person to make a government run, which this world seems to lack. You can tell that the director hates the ideas of Atlas Shrugged but at the same time he does buy into it's premise that if the rich just up and left, everything would suck and there is no way that the poor could or would ever pick up the pieces and find a way to make it work instead of just settling for living in a terrible world of near anarchy and chaos. It makes no sense and it admits the central point which the movie is against, that the rich are amazing people who deserve everything they have, and that the poor are less than they are and also deserve what little they get because they are incapable of doing anything good.

The problem I have with Elysium is that the main point of the film is that the rich are just dicks. They have this tech that can cure anything, but they don't share that tech with the rest of the world....why? I have no idea. They even have ships, multiple ships full of these things, but they have no intention of ever using it to help the people they seem to be designed to help. Elysium isn't just a gated community in the sky, it's a gated community that is withholding the cure for cancer from the rest of the world, and shooting down those who would reach for it. Makes no sense, for one thing there is a lot of money to be made in a machine that can cure anything, why would they not want to make that money? Also what are they doing up there the whole time, we see the same Asian woman sunbathing a couple of times and there is a cocktail party at one point, but what is the point of these peoples lives? Elysium itself is underdeveloped as a place and the people who live there are never given a chance to be people, they are just mannequins wearing sweater vests holding cocktails, surely these people have lives and opinions on things which are worth exploring, but we never get to know any of it.

 Can the rich be dicks? Yeah, I work for them, they live in a different world most of the time, their expectations are way different from those of the rest of the world because for some of them it's rare to be told no or want something they can't have, there are also some of them who are very nice and normal. Are the Rich dickish enough to willingly let people die from cancer and every other malady? I don't know any group of people who is willingly that dickish.