10-23-09

-------We are looking at a Peoples Comics first today. This is the first time I have been able to review a movie before it’s wide release. Now I would like to say that I got to see and review this movie early due to the street cred of The Peoples Comics, but that is simply not the case. I got the ticket from my guy at the comic book shop.

-------The Movie I am talking about is The Fourth Kind. Now I don’t usually go to this kind of movie. I got suckered into The Blair Witch Project back in the day and have since avoided fake real movies. However a free ticket is a free ticket, and the opportunity to review a movie before it came out proved to be a tempting target. So I went to the sneak preview and I brought my girlfriends eleven year old son. I figured he would get a kick out of it. He likes bigfoot, ghosts and aliens. All the stuff that some people believe in yet has no scientific proof, he believes. Which is cool, it’s good to be young in a wondrous world.

-------So let’s get into the movie review. First off let me give you a bit of advice. In retrospect it might not have been the wisest decision to bring an eleven year old boy with an over active imagination to this movie. There was a lot of hype going into this. There always is. That is how these movies get people to actually see them. Think about it; without the hype would anyone have wasted their time with The Blair Witch Project. I sure as shit would not have wasted my time. However I did go out and check out The Fourth Kind, and let me tell you. It was better than The Blair Witch Project by a light year. Now was it real? I don’t know. I didn’t see anything in the movie that couldn’t have been faked by the most meager of movie studios. I am a cynic when it comes to this stuff and usually just assume that it is a fake. To me it doesn’t matter if it was fake or not, I found it to be entertaining enough. It was a fun ride with some shocker moments. I would recommend seeing it if you are into the whole alien abduction kind of thing.

-------It is hard for me to believe all these videos, that they claim are real, would not have found their way into the pop culture mainstream. UFO geeks are very resourceful and footage showing “proof” would not have been ignored. In my opinion life on other planets is as close to a mathematical certainty as there is. There are billions and billions of stars out there. It seems foolish to think that ours is the only one with a planet capable of sustaining life. Now do we have aliens visiting our planet, grabbing up people and shoving probes up their asses? That seems like less of a mathematical certainty. All I can say is this, there sure are a lot of people who believe this is the case.

-------So lets move on to online comics. I just found another one this week that I really like, The Adventures of Doctor McNinja. This comic strip is straight up awesome! Just straight up hilarious. The artwork is definitely at a professional level. I have read the first three issues and have every intention of finishing out the rest of the issues within the next week. This guy knows how to write and I highly recommend taking some time and reading this free online comic. One little thing that he does that I really like is every page has a little comment to the reader in the tag. It’s like you have the artist chatting with you while you are reading his comic. I am tempted to borrow this idea when I am writing my comic book. There truly is nothing new under the sun. Which brings me to my next talking point.

-------Amazing Spider-Man issue #298 introduced one of the most popular super-villain to come out of the eighties. Venom. When this guy was first created he was as cool as they get. Back in the day Todd McFarlane could make Mysterio look cool, with an IP as hot as Venom it was just unfairly ridiculous how awesome he could make it. Amazing Spider-Man will go down in history as one of the greatest comic books of all time. I always thought Venom was a truly original concept that Marvel comics rode into the ground. I first started losing respect for Venom when they started drawing him with a gigantic jaw and tongue. To my teenager sensibilities it seemed stupid that a symbiote that coated the outside of a person would change the entire structure of its host’s face. Next up they started running the concept into the ground with Carnage and like twenty something other symbiotes.

-------I guess I just got Venom on the brain, I got my hands on some Amazing Spider-Man issues from a couple years back and he goes up against The Thunderbolts before they became the Dark Avengers. Now Venom is the Scorpion and Eddie Brock is Anti-Venom, a white healing simbiote. Anyways I am getting off the point. There truly is nothing new under the sun. I got Venom on the brain meanwhile I am reading through the Dune books. I am rereading the original series and am currently on Children of Dune when it strikes me. “My skin is not my own”, is a quote of prescience by Leto the second. Eventually he sticks his hand in a pool of sandtrout and they crawl up his arm covering him in a living suit of armor. Sandtrout are to the Gigantic Worms running around The Deserts of Arrakis what tadpoles are to frogs.

-------Now who knows if the guy who invented Venom,David Michelinie, ever read the Dune books. It’s highly probable. If he did who is to say that he was influenced by the Leto character. More than likely, and this is all speculation on my end, it is likely enough that the creation of the whole symbiote concept influenced subconsciously by the Dune books. I was just reading the Wikipedia page on the creation of Venom and all the drama surrounding that when the thought occurred to me that it was the creation of the symbiote suit in Secret Wars is where the influence from Dune may have come into play. Who knows I could just be blowing smoke up your skirt here. One thing I will tell you is this. As cool as Darth Vader is, he is a straight up Knock-off of Doctor Doom. That’s right. I said it.

-------So what is the Deal with the Matt Parkmen story line on Heroes? I have never cared for the character or his whiney story lines. However they finally start up with a story line that isn’t completely lame, mostly because it is a Sylar storyline, and then drop it out of nowhere. Lame! Still now we got Sylar in the Flesh, and faster than I thought. I thought they would drag out the whole Nathan/Sylar drama longer. Now its all about Sylar and his journey back and forth between villain and hero. In my opinion Gull Dukat from Deep Space nine is the greatest TV villain of all time precisely because of his journey back and forth from bad guy to good guy and back again. Also I detected a huge lack of college lesbian making out in this episode.

-------I started catching up on Fringe these last couple days. I am now three episodes in and let me tell you. Episode one sure cleared up a lot of questions I had after watching episode two first. This show is cool. I command you to watch it.

-------I am going to end this column with my review Cirque De Freak: The Vampires Assistant. The movie, not the book. This afternoon my girlfriend, her son, two of his friend and I all went to catch this new release. My girlfriend son has read ten of the twelve books in the series. My girlfriend has read half of the first one. They were both very excited about seeing this movie. I myself have not read any of these books. However the trailer looked cool and I have been a huge fan of John C Reilly ever since Boogie Nights. I enjoyed the movie. There were some laughs, but it was not a comedy. It wasn’t necessarily my kind of movie so to speak, but it was fun. It’s kind of like a Harry Potter for vampires. However I did like it more than I liked Harry Potter. Now I am not going to race out and read the books, I am a little bit busy with my full Dune Retrospective. I guess I am a little turned off to the status of kids books that this series enjoys. All in all, the movie was all right and if they make a sequel I will probably drag the family out to see that one as well. Don’t expect me to buy popcorn though, people who use the concession stands at theaters are suckers. That’s what backpacks are for.