Name the television show and win a prize...

As if you even need a hint, Burgess Meredith had a starring role. If Hollywood is so out of television series and movies to remake, they ought to give this show a go.

Yo, Santa...

Look who's coming for Christmas. It'll probably suck like a Hoover (or a Dyson if you like) but it's hard for me to be a total Sly Stallone hater. Rocky 2 is one of my favorite movies. There, I said it.

Static until further notice

Sorry about the lack of posts. This sinus thing refuses to go away. Tomorrow I'm going to have me skull electroscanned. I'd love to post that image.

Now that we have our Iron Man, who will play Happy Hogan and Pepper Potts?

Tony Stark
Makes you feel
He's a cool exec
With a heart of steel.
As Iron Man,
All jets ablaze,
He fights and smites
With repulsor rays!
Amazing armor!
Iron Man!
A blaze of power!
Iron Man!

...and nothing but the tooth

In case you’re wondering, one of the few things worse than having a three-week-old sinus infection that makes all the teeth in your mouth sing in pain every time you move, is coming down with an honest to goodness toothache that reminds you what real pain is.

Wisdom teeth aren’t smart but according to my dentist they’re a dying breed. Not to brag or anything, but I have a huge bite radius. This means that I have plenty of room in my mouth for all my teeth, including my wisdom teeth. My dentist, who only yesterday did a snappy and relatively pain free root canal on my lower left wisdom tooth, says that even though Americans as a whole are getting fatter, our mouths are getting smaller, and many of us don’t have room for our wisdom teeth. (There’s another school of thought that believes that we’re losing our powerful grinding teeth because the food we eat is so much softer than it used to be. It doesn’t take much effort to chew up a Quarter Pounder.)

Due to this lack of space, lots of wisdom teeth grow in cramped or crooked and need to be yanked.

The only problem I’ve ever had with mine is that they are so far back inside my cavernous mouth that I have trouble reaching them with a toothbrush and my fat fingers have a problem getting a loop of floss next to them. As a result I’ve had cavities in a few and just yesterday needed a root canal to save one.

The last time I had a root canal was ten or eleven years ago and I was stunned by how technology has improved the process. The advent of new drills with super sharp tungsten files along with real-time X-ray viewing has cut the treatment time, which used to eat up most of a day, to under an hour!

With me, there’s always been a massive degree of shame associated with going to the dentist. I never seem to find the time to go in for regular, preventative check-ups, so when I walk in the door it’s because I’ve gone and let one of my precious teeth succumb to the ravages of decay. Maybe it’s because I had a horrible dentist when I was a kid (which I did), or maybe it’s the overpowering position the dentist has, looming over you when you sit in the chair, or maybe because it’s just so easy to put off dealing with. I don’t know, but I’ve never gotten over the curve and started going in before a problem develops.

Just like smelly feet, dental problems run in my family. Most of my relatives come from the old country, where dental hygiene was apparently never a high priority. My uncles were a hearty bunch and I recall a few of them were fond of popping the caps off beer bottles with their bottom teeth, and one of them was so adverse to going to the dentist that he used to yank is own bad teeth with a pair of pliers.

Ow. Just typing that hurts my mouth.

Do I look any different to you?

A big strong deliveryman came to my house yesterday. He had legs that were thick as tree trunks and he looked strong enough to tip over my car if he wanted to. He brought with him a new computer so of course I welcomed him heartedly.

I’m not exactly certain what specific model computer this is. It’s a Mac. I know that much. I also know it’s got a more sophisticated version of OSX than I have on my iBook.

Hmmm, I just did a little looking and discovered that it’s an iMac 5.1 dual Pentium core nitro-burning funny car. I’m certain that it can crunch numbers like crazy and juggle sixty-two graphics files at the same time, but I mostly like it because it looks like a gay Scandinavian college student designed it as his Industrial Arts thesis.

It’s a skinny little thing, which I like, because that means the cats can walk behind it, as opposed to climbing gracelessly over it or tripping drunkenly over the keyboard like they usually do with my iBook.

Technically it’s Valarie’s computer. An old friend of the family (she wrote and delivered our wedding vows some fourteen years ago) does a lot of political consulting work and Val pitches in donates a lot of her time to help out. This had becoming increasingly difficult with the limited equipment we had here which is why the big strong man showed up yesterday with the box.

It’s situated in the home office that Valarie and I share, and it’s much nicer to work on than my iBook—still, I feel funny using it. It’s not mine. I feel strange.

I’m sure, like most things in life, this guilt too shall pass.

Does anyone have Dennis Quaid’s telephone number?

I haven’t been the happiest camper of all the campers out there for the past few months. I’ve struggled with a handful of silly/stupid illnesses and it’s tough to keep yourself on an even keel while spending extended amounts of time loafing around trying to heal from something as idiotic as tripping over wheelchair.

My sleep has suffered immeasurably. While stretched out waiting for cracked ribs to heel, and goofed up on painkillers, napping becomes a common habit. Which of course screws up your nighttime sleeping schedule, which results in sleeping during the day while the rest of the world is active, which leads to copious amounts of guilt and embarrassment.

The latest ingredient into the mix is a painful sinus infection that appeared out of nowhere. For a week or two I was pretty dizzy and it felt like I was wearing a hat that was two sizes too tight. During a normal visit with my MD she poked and prodded and concluded that I had an infection. She sent me home with a big bottle of antibiotics. For some reason antibiotics kick my ass harder than cheap vodka. I feel terrible when I take them. A week later the problem is back and she ups the dosage and changes the spectrum, or something silly like that, and now I’m on a new brand.

I’ve had nothing but Franz Kafka dreams for the past two weeks. I must be near the point of losing my mind but I don’t know how much further I have to go. Which is why I need Dennis Quaid’s telephone number.

Dennis (the Quaid brother blessed with the looks) starred in a1984 semi-cult classic film called Dreamscape, where he and other government-funded flunkies were doing experiments in entering test subjects brains.

[Hollywood drones—if you’ve run out of ideas and are looking for a reasonably solid movie to remake with all your CGI toys, this one should be in the running.]

My dreams are fraught with anxiety. Buckets of anxiety loaded into a cannon and fired right in my face. There are large chunks of what takes place during the dreams that I can directly connect to something I read in a book, saw on television, or discussed during a conversation the night before. The thing is, being able to dissect them later, doesn’t make waking up from these dreams any less stressful.

One common thread that runs through a lot of my dreams involves large contained places. Whether it be at a big consumer electronics show, or the San Diego Comic Con, the offices of a new company that I’m working for, or even an especially large house. I always seem to be in a hurry to get to one corner of the building to the next and my legs seem to be slowing me down, like I’m running through sand and mud or pudding. I’m always late getting to where I’m going, and a lot of the time, when it’s a new job I’m left on my own to figure things out and to get things started. Nobody expects me to do very much during the first couple of days, but I’m sitting there in this new office; I really need to be getting something done.

As if we needed yet another reason to watch 24 this season...

James Cromwell has been signed to play Jack Bauer's father, while acclaimed British comedian Eddie Izzard will play a "villainous accomplice" named Darren McCarthy.

I don’t like The View from where I’m sitting…(will the puns never stop?)

The other morning I watched Live with Regis and Kelly and then some of the new and improved—The View (G’bye Star—Hello Rosie)!

During the day and at night I listen to 70s pop and rock when I write, but early in the morning I love coffee chat shows. Perhaps I should delve into this with my therapist one of these days.

I feel this odd attraction for watching/listening to Live with Regis and Kelly for a number of reasons. For starters, over the past year or three it’s become abundantly clear to anyone with at least three of their five senses that Regis is rapidly slipping into old age dementia. It’s most noticeable during the part of the show where they interview guests—the ones who have been nice enough to stop by to visit. (They do this bit during almost all the talk shows, especially Conan O’Brien, who should know better by now, and it drives me 100 percent bonkers. It happens at the end of the interview and it goes something like this…“Thank you so very much for finding time in your busy schedule to come by and visit us, Mandy Moore. And thanks for telling us all about your new movie that’s opening this weekend and maybe we’ll see you soon—perhaps you’ll visit us just in time to tell us all about the next new movie/CD/Afternoon Special that you crap out of your talentless ass!”

Please don’t treat us like we’re three months old, guys. Nobody does anything for anyone out of the kindness of his/her heart in Hollywood. The closest thing they’ve got to impromptu out there was planned three to four months ago.

So like I said, It’s fun to watch the decline of Regis. Seventy years of having his brain baked under those hot studio lights has taken its toll. He can’t pronounce the names of most of the guests, even if they’re sitting right there in front of him. Fantasia Barrino becomes Anastasia Burrito, Amy Lee and Evanescence becomes Effervescence, and desperate housewife Nicollette Sheridan somehow turns into Nicole Ritchie. The cool thing is to watch Kelly Ripa sitting next to Regis. She knows perfectly well who the guests are and she probably knows perfectly well which names Regis is going to botch and mangle, but she always waits until he’s buried his foot deep into his mouth and has floundered a while before coming to his rescue.

Ripa sits there laughing AT Regis just as much as she laughs WITH him. As she cackles and pats his liver-spotted hand, she does her impression of a family member stuck talking with an ancient relative at a family affair.

Another fun thing to watch for on Live with Regis and Kelly is when Regis zones out. He just flat-out drifts away to his happy place while Kelly is busy gabbing with Jessica Simpson or someone important like that. After a few minutes his internal timer kicks in and in a mad panic his eyes do that auto focus sort of thing and he’ll repeat the last thing he heard Kelly said and will suggest that they look at a clip from Jessica’s latest movie, even though they just did.

Regular visitors to the show like NASCAR’s Jeff Gordon or maybe Queen Latifah are in on the joke and they play along, but every now and then they’ll have a politician or an author on. Suddenly from out of left field Regis will ask them if they work on a computer or an old fashioned typewriter, and then he’ll ramble on about his AOL account and how he can’t check his email or phone messages, and then ask whatever happened to writing someone a letter on a piece of paper. The guest being interviewed will look around like he’s being Punk’d or something and then will visibly mouth, “What The F**k?!?”

Plain and simple, this is too much fun to pass by.

About halfway through Regis and Kelly I would normally switch over to music, or just turn the television off, but then one day I stayed around and watched The View. I’ve had a minor crush on Meredith Vieira since she was on Chicago news during the early 1980s. My wife doesn’t get it; just like she doesn’t understand my attraction to Susan Sarandon or Jamie Lee Curtis. That’s fine. She doesn’t need to understand. The only thing she has to ‘get’ is that all three women are on my list, so if the stars align and I find myself locked in a hotel room with any or all of them, she can’t complain. (Just like I can’t complain if she finds herself hooked up with Bruce Willis or Justin Timberlake. Willis I can see, but come on, Justin Timberlake?)

If you’ve never seen it, The View has a somewhat interesting format. When the show begins the four or five ladies will sit around politely slurping coffee and talking about hot topics of the day. It starts out slow, but five or ten minutes in they’ll all be shouting and clawing for camera time. After they’re done with their Hot Topics and a stretch of commercials for feminine products, the featured guest (normally a man) will nervously climb into the viper pit and try to look as comfortable as possible while dodging meat hooks and puddles of estrogen.

I don’t miss Star Jones a whit. She annoyed me to no end and made my stomach roil. See ya, wouldn’t want to be ya.

I don’t really miss Meredith Vieira as much as I thought I would. Her role on the show was as a player/coach who worked hard to both keep the peace and to keep the show moving along at a lively pace.

Barbara Walters has positioned herself between the two potential powder kegs, Rosie O’Donnell and Joy Behar, but that won’t last too long. Everyone has been playing nice since Barbara unleashed her power by cutting Star Jones free. It’s crystal clear that this is her show and people are going to play by the rules or there’s the door.

She’s only a couple of weeks in but O’Donnell’s comedy isn’t meshing with the other women. She used to make me laugh years ago, but not so much now. She talks about her kids a lot, which wouldn’t normally bother me, but when she recounts their activities she has to narrate what happened talking in baby talk. Her kids are almost teenagers and they still talk in baby talk? Baby talk by adults should be outlawed. I hate it with a passion. My wife and I never talked to our child like she was an idiot, so she never did it in return. God, I hate baby talk. It’s like my kryptonite.

To boldly go where we’ve all been before…a bunch of times….

I’ve heard the story of how Paramount is sprucing up the original 1960s Star Trek series for another run on broadcast T.V.. They’re doing some CGI shots to cover the special effects that they feel are a little too embarrassing for today’s audiences.

The photo I’ve pasted somewhere in this item is a sample shot from one of the contractors trying out for the job.

My first impulse was to wonder why they’re wasting their time? I’m not a massive Trek fan but just about everyone I know has seen the original episodes a couple of dozen times each. I’ve seen all the episodes of Next Generation at least once. I started getting my fill of Trek around the time Deep Space 9 and Voyager came along. I think there’s still a Trek series currently in production. I believe it’s called Generations(?) and it stars that guy from Quantum Leap, Scott Baklava.

So why make the effort to release the original Trek series—especially with G4 doing their fun Trek 2.0 show?

And then it dawned on me. I hate it when obvious things clobber me over the head when I’m not looking. When I was young I used to watch WGN TV on Sunday mornings. For the longest time the Sunday AM lineup included The Wild Wild West, Secret Agent Man, and then Star Trek. When baseball season was in full swing the Cubs would play around lunch time, after Trek. When there was no baseball WGN would pull out their collection of Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chan movies. Each week they would switch back and forth between the two detectives, and every once in a while they would switch things up with a Mr. Moto movie featuring the always-creepy Peter Lorre.

So why is WGN or some other Chicago UHF channel going to start showing the old Trek episodes? It was kind of embarrassing when the answer hit me. It is so easy to forget that there are more people in the United States who don’t have basic cable than those who do. They can’t watch the original Trek episodes on G4 because they don’t know what G4 is. And besides, even if they do have basic cable, they can’t set their TiVo or cable company digital video recorder to snag it when it’s on each Thursday night at 3:00 a.m. because they don’t know what a DVR or TiVo is.

There are only three people who live in my house, yet we have three color televisions, two cable digital video recorders, two CD burners, one DVD video recorder, and all kinds of assorted MP3 players and digital cameras, and a couple of clunky PCs in the garage that may be slow by today’s standards but they probably had a hundred times the computing power that the computers aboard the first couple of Apollo moon shots had.

It’s the whole embarrassment of riches thing that socks me in the gut every once in a while. Valarie is talking about a new Mac she’s getting too do some work on, yet there’s a good chance that a handful of kids my daughter Dakota goes to high school with, not only don’t have a computer or digital video recorder, but they probably go to bed at night with nothing more nutritious than a bowl of Ramen noodles in their bellies.

Forget about television sets and iPods, I learned the hard way that it’s a whole lot easier to get help in this country if you need a lot than if you simply need a helping hand.

A few years ago my family was in serious trouble. I called in every favor I had saved up but I still couldn’t get a scrap of writing. We had been selling off a lot of our old books and toys and crap on eBay to help pay the rent, but we needed to get the car fixed and we had some major bills to pay so I did something that I never thought I’d do. I walked into the local welfare/public assistance office, laid all my cards out on the table and told them that we needed help. Cash would be great, but even if it were some food stamps or help with paying the utilities would make all the difference.

The robot sitting across the desk from me took down all my information, did a little math and talked with someone on the telephone. Things were sounding pretty good until she told me that she was sorry but my requested had been denied. I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t understand what she was saying so she gave me a brochure with a toll free number on it that I could call for a full explanation.

When I didn’t get up and move out of the office quickly enough a supervisor and a security dude came over to pry me from my chair. The supervision was a tad more understanding than the robot who had been helping me. He looked over my application and told me that the reason I didn’t qualify for any sort of public assistance was because of my current lifestyle.

His words were bouncing off me like bullets off Superman’s chest. The two big reasons we were declined was because we were paying too much money in rent on our house each month (I think it was around $1200 a month) and our car was too valuable (we had a Honda Civic that we were still paying for and was only worth five or six thousand dollars).

So, in essence I was being told that the government wasn’t interested in helping me if I was simply stumbling around trying to get a hand up. On the other hand, if I were nearly down for the count, inches away from falling down into the gutter, they’d be more than happy to help.

I don’t have the figures in front of me but there is a large portion of the population of this country that doesn’t have a single black & white or color television in their houses (there’s probably a substantial lack of milk and bread in those households as well). There are even a higher number of people who don’t have a computer, and even if they did there’s a high likelihood that they wouldn’t know how to use it to get a job in today’s society.

I know that Bill Gates is doing fantastic things with the billions he’s accrued over the years. It might not put too big of a dent in his budget to make sure that there’s a computer in every school classroom in the U.S.. Perhaps if a student demonstrated and affinity or aptitude toward using said computer, how much more would it cost Mr. Gates to put a PC into that child’s home?

He knows that he can’t take the money with him, and apparently he’s not going to make any of his children or heirs instant billionaires, so why not? The man has the resources to change the world. Isn’t it his responsible to do so?

I blame society...and the SciFi Channel

Normally I'm more than capable of making a fool of myself with no outside help, but this time the SciFi Channel has pitched in to give me a hand.

A couple of weeks ago I sang the praises of the BBC import Garth Marenghi 's Darkplace that SciFi had been playing at midnight on Sundays. I told everyone I know to tune in for a good time, but before they could the SciFi Channel pulled the rug out from under us. Bastards. They show Mansquito three time s a week, but they hold back on Garth? Again, bastards!

I shot an elephant in my pajamas last night. They fit him quite nicely...

I’ve never personally been a big fan of Gus Van Sant’s films, but if you happen to be flipping around the movie channels late at night and you see the film ‘Elephant’ listed, do yourself a favor and tune in.

The film was released in 2003 but I don’t believe it got a very wide theatrical release, due to the Columbine similarities.

The movie is chilling and very violent at times, but the violence is not exploitive in the least bit. Van Sant’s best call was using a no-name cast. They walk and talk and act like real teenagers. That’s part of what makes the film so chilling.

Check it out and see what you think.

Demon Days...

During my limited time writing comics I was lucky enough to work with two artists who were either dead on or pretty darn near the same wavelength as I was at the time.

The first was Titanic Tom Morgan. Tom and I tried to break into comics at the same time so he read everything I wrote and I saw most of what he drew. Over time I think this practice helped further our almost psychic connection. We would often work on stories together, and in the beginning I was writing Marvel-style, or a paragraph or two of description for every comic page I wanted Tom to draw.

After doing enough stories together I pretty much stopped writing the plots all together. All I had to do was outline to Tom that; the Hulk is acting crazier than ever before, and while not toppling skyscrapers he holds his head and roars in pain. Reed Richards designs a microscopic medical scanner that Ant Man flies up into the Hulk’s nose and detects that the Hulk has an impacted wisdom tooth. Tony Stark gathers the mightiest heroes on the planet to hold the Hulk down while Thor uses his Uru hammer to knock the Hulk’s aching tooth out.

A few days later Tom would have the story penciled, complete with sound effects and dialogue suggestions. Tom would change things, but they were changes set within my sensibilities. It was always fun because he would add amazing things, like move some of the action to the inside of a SHIELD helicarrier. When the Hulk rips the side of the structure open, instead of being one mile up, we see that the helicarrier is rust pocked and missing a rotor or two and is parked in a SHIELD helicarrier graveyard of sorts. After pages of fantastic action Thor would finally knock the aching tooth out of Hulk’s mouth.

I don’t know if Tom and I will ever work together in comics again, but I’m pretty certain that we could pick up right where we left off—having fun the second we hit the ground running.

Besides Tom, the other artist that I was on a parallel wavelength with was the fantastic Tony Akins.

Tony and I met through a mutual friend, Paul Mounts, someone that Tom Morgan had introduced me to. Tom and Paul had gone to high school together. Years after that, Paul Mounts and Tony Akins had worked together doing television commercial storyboards which neither ever seemed too excited about. Paul was also wearing many hats at a new comics publisher called Now Comics. One night Tom and I were visiting Paul who told us about what was going on at Now Comics. They had the rights to do Astro Boy (yawn—never saw the show, didn’t care), plus they had the rights to do Speed Racer and Racer X comics.

Hmmm...

I dropped out of the conversation for a few minutes to imagine what I would do with a Speed Racer comic. I pictured Racer X having to steal Speed’s Mach 5 to evade some evildoers in the middle of the desert. At one point he gimmicks the steering wheel controls of the Mach Five and when an enemy helicopter comes in for the kill he pushes the button that controls the buzz saw blades, only instead of sticking just a few feet out in front of the car, the saw blades fly off toward the enemy helicopter like Ninja stars and neatly shear off the copter’s tail rotor.

I came back into the conversation when Paul was telling us about another book that Now was publishing called Rust. It featured a cop who falls into a pit of corrosive acid. He survives, but his body is horribly scarred from head to toe, plus, in times of turmoil or if he’s injured he bleeds acid.

Bleeds acid? That sounded kind of interesting.

Paul continued on that at the end of the first or second issue this horribly scarred and corrosive man climbs into a garbage dumpster in an alley to get out of the rain for a few minutes sleep.

That was a pretty cool visual that sticks with me today, some fifteen years later.

I sniffed around the Speed Racer book but found out that just like they’d gotten Ken Stacey to do Astro Boy, they were looking for more of a ‘name ‘ to write Speed. I think that year at San Diego they talked to people, like Mark Evanier, but came up empty.

Meanwhile, there was some trouble brewing with the Rust book and Paul tossed my hat into the mix to try and help straighten things out. Paul is always doing that and I never thank him enough.

A few issues later Rust was going along on a pretty smooth path. Nobody told me to stop writing new stories so I keep at it, and after a handful of capable but temporary artists, Paul teamed me up with the astounding Tony Akins.

I think I’d only met Tony once or twice by that point. Nice fellow, but fond of talking about his personal demons. I’d never met anyone with any sort of demons. I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. I sat and smiled like I understood what he was talking about. Today I do,of course. Several of mine are wandering around the room as I type this.

I believe at this time Tony was rooming with Rich Powers, a talented fellow that my path would cross with on more than one occasion during the years that followed. Rich took me out to his studio, which was on the back porch of the apartment that he and Tony were sharing. The view from his studio was the alley of a mortuary/funeral home. A couple of guys were wheeling what looked like a body or a casket into the back door. Rich said that it happened frequently, night and day.

Tony was very excited about working on Rust with me. He hadn’t drawn a large number of comics at that time in his career, but I think he was pretty adamant that I not write it full script, because that might handcuff him. At the same time I got the feeling that he wanted more instruction than a typical Marvel-style plot, so I wrote it in a hybrid style that seemed to work. Each page of art took a double-spaced page of plot. I would give Tony a fairly concrete idea for an opening panel on a page. Then I would write a couple of fat paragraphs of what I’d like to see happen in the bulk of the page, then give him a fairly concrete idea for a closing panel on the page.

Tony took what I gave him, and in some insane and probably arcane ritual he peeked inside my head and saw what I was really looking for. It was always kind of frightening. He would draw things that I'd wanted but hadn't typed in the plot. Have you ever tried explaining something to someone and said, “Well, I think you know what I’m trying to say.” That’s the way it was with Tony. He knew what I wanted to say, based on the plot that I had written and him being so in tune with what I wanted. If a specific scene or plot point was important he would leave it alone and draw it just as I'd written, but most of the time if he knew a shortcut or a scenic route to getting the job done, he’d take it. I was never sorry that he did.

It would always be like Christmas morning when Paul would give me new pages that Tony had penciled. Most time it was three or four at a time, but sometimes it was as many as six or seven. I would have to stop whatever it was I was doing at the time and study each page. I haven’t noticed if he still does it today, but Tony used to be a big one for combining panels. There was rarely a single action going on in a single panel of Rust. Action and elements tended to overlap from one panel to the next. Talk about keeping a writer on his toes!

While Tom Morgan and I connected on something of a Stan Lee/Jack Kirby level when it came to goofy superhero comics, (oh, my, god, did a tanker truck of pretentiousness just crash into the building?) in which we were always just sorta fooling around and having fun. Working on Rust was different with Tony. A lot of it revolved around what Paul Mounts told me that first night he was explaining the comic to me; Rust isn’t a character, it’s a state of mind.

Sure, former cop Scott Baker was horribly scarred and bled acid every now and then, but that was never what the comic was about. It would have been pretty silly if it had. I didn’t know all that much about Scott Baker, but I was deeply invested in the people he encountered along his path in life. Scott was so horribly deformed that once they got over his ugliness they felt unusually comfortably around him. He became invisible and we saw the people who gathered around him through his eyes. We never talked about it and I never described it in the plots, but Tony and I were definitely on the same page with this notion.

And then Tony started to flake. It could have been those personal demons he spoke of, or it could have been the princely sum of fourteen dollars a page that Now was paying pencilers—when they had the money to pay it.

Of all the comic publishers that I’ve worked with that have suffered through a case of the financial shorts, it was never as ugly as it was at Now. I begged people to get them to letter or ink pages knowing full well they weren’t going to get paid for their work. I never knew if Tony flaked because of lack of money or if he had other reasons.

A fan favorite issue came from Tony Akin’s tardiness. It was the Talking Eds issue. The issue was way-late and Paul and I had to fly to New York for a signing with Jim Higgins at Jim Hanley’s Universe. I came up with the notion that Tony would only have to draw five or six full page splashes, and then the remainder of the pages would be 9-panel grids that would be little more than talking heads. We would use the same heads, flipped and flopped and reversed and enlarged on the copier, and then I would write a script that would pull it all together. I know we started in a jail cell with two fellows named Ed who were talking about something that had happened, but I don’t remember what the issue was really about. That’s probably for the best. The capper was us not having a cover, so I typed up a note to Paul Mounts explaining that I wanted exactly what I described in the note that followed to be on the cover to that issue. The gag was that we printed the note from me to Paul on the cover, instead of a rendering of what I described. Funny stuff. I think the cover was yellow, with lettering that started, “Dear Paul, Here is an exact description of what I want to be on this cover of Rust. Follow my directions to a ‘T’ and put exactly this on the cover. I want to see Scott Baker in a bathing suit sitting in a public swimming pool…” But of course there was no drawing of Scott Baker, only the note that I had written to Paul Mounts, which is what I said was exactly what I wanted on the cover.
Things got really weird when Now snagged the rights to do a Terminator comic book. This was well before T2. Somehow the notion came up that if Tony Akins worked in house, in the Now offices, that he would get more work done. We got him a drawing a table and a chair and a tape dispenser and all that, and even so I only saw him there one or two times tops.

I was mad as a wet hen. Maybe madder. He kept promising and kept not showing up. One day I found a stack of cassette mix tapes that he had brought in on his first or second visit. On one of the days that Tony was a no-show I flipped out and started snapping them in half like they were Pop-Tarts. To this day I’m ashamed of what I did. I have never been more frustrated with anyone in my life, but that was still no excuse for my behavior.

Working with Tony Akins on Rust and on the Terminator comic was a standout for me.

If they ever get this whole time travel thing figured out I’d like to go back to that time and tell my self to take more time scripting the pages before getting them off to be lettered in such a hurry. I would give up a lot to be able to go back and script those pages with the attention they deserved. I was writing a bunch of plots and scripts and stuff, most of it on the fly, but that’s no excuse. My run on Rust was fun, the issues generated a lot of fan mail, but I have trouble reading them. The scripts should have been up to the standards of the artwork, no matter how late it was.

Another problem concerns the inker of most of Tony's issues, Jim Brozman. Damn that kid was dedicated. He worked for months without seeing a single penny. He wasn't the most talented inker on the planet, but I have to give him massive props for delivering art fast and when it was needed when no other talent would return my telephone calls.

I’ve got a couple of projects that I’m currently working on that are horribly overdue, and that I just can’t get a handle on, and a thought crossed my mind the other day that maybe I’m being plagued by my personal demons. And sure enough,therethey are. Well, Tony Akins overcame his so I guess I can do a little ass kicking of my own.

My Love Affair with Alec Baldwin…

Alec Baldwin. I just love the guy. I don’t know him personally, but I’m certain that if I did he wouldn’t disappoint. I know more people who dislike him than like him, but that’s their loss.

Baldwin is a great over-the-top style actor, and with an industry full of moody, mumbly actors, it’s refreshing for someone not afraid to make a little noise when he walks into a room. He’s rambunctious, a little scary, and has that kind of edge that even though you’re watching him on a television screen in a movie he made ten years ago, there’s a chance that he could still reach out and grab you by the balls and nearly pop them if you’re paying attention.

Some of my favorite Alec Baldwin movies, in no particular order, include: The Cooler, The Aviator, The Edge, Pearl Harbor, The Shadow, The Getaway and Glengary Glen Ross. He also does funny well, as demonstrated in his many appearances on Will & Grace and hosting Saturday Night Live.

This past weekend I caught a good chunk of the first Alec Baldwin movie that really caught my attention, 1990s The Hunt for Red October.

There’s been a hubbub going on over the cat that’s playing the new James Bond. I haven’t wasted much energy worrying about this debate. I recall reading a few of the Ian Fleming Bond books as a teenager and being bored to death, but as far as who played the best Bond in the movies to date, I am a card-carrying member of the microscopic minority who like Pierce Brosnan.

Alec Baldwin was the first actor to play author Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan on the big screen. Lots of people think that Harrison Ford played Ryan better, in the following movies, but lots of people are wrong. Sure, Ford was good at the action sequences, but what I walked away from the Clancy books was that Jack Ryan did more problem solving with his brains than his fists. When jammed into a corner with no way out, you can see Alec Baldwin running through countless scenarios in his mind before deciding on a plan of action based on a CIA memo he’d read four years earlier about the firing mechanism of the X-18 Soviet SAM missile. If pressed into a similar situation Harrison Ford’s Ryan would probably kick loose a steam pipe, blinding his captors, then escape the submarine by firing himself out of an empty submarine tube.

I have hope for the Ben Affleck’s Ryan, as seen in 2002’s The Sum of all Fears. He’s got the moves, but you can also tell that he’s a thinking action star as well.

The last and possibly he least reason why I like Alec Baldwin so much is because he has brothers. A whole bunch of them. I wish I had a brother. Older would have been great, but I would have settled for younger. I had two older sisters and they were great, but they were sisters. If I had grown up with a couple of brothers I probably wouldn’t be such a big wuss. I would have started dating, drinking, driving, and a whole bunch of other things earlier. My sister Nancy tells me that after my Mom and sisters got back from taking a train trip to visit my aunt in San Diego (this was from Chicago) that she had a horrible miscarriage that almost killed her. Ever since I heard this I think that perhaps the baby that she lost was the brother I never had. That would have been great. Or, he might have been an even bigger wuss that I am.

Rescue Me ramps up for a scorching season finale while Entourage goes out with a whimper.

In my opinion this has been a bit of a bumpy year for HBO’s Entourage. Last year the show was hot as a pistol, leading up to the Aquaman movie, but this season things seemed to flounder. I thought things were going to take off with the arrival of Dom from the old neighborhood, but he was gone as fast as he arrived. Martin Laudau’s riff on Bob Evans was fun but it was too little too late.

I’ve expressed in an earlier listing my disappointment at HBO prematurely cutting the legs out from under Deadwood, leaving the show to swirl to a clumsy end like a school play lacking adult supervision.
The pleasant surprise of this television year has been FX’s Rescue Me, which continues building up a full head of steam for the upcoming season finale. The secret to the show’s success is Dennis Leary’s willingness to share the screen with a bombastic supporting cast of characters.

Limping to an early grave…

This past Sunday HBO aired what is apparently the season AND the series finale for Deadwood. For the past few months there has been talk of HBO ordering up six more episodes to bring the show to a proper end. Then that changed to two two-hour movies. Now apparently HBO has gone back to its original decision and there will be no more new episodes.

If this is true it’s a horrible shame.

If you haven’t seen the final episode yet I won’t ruin it for you. Someone’s done that already.

Proud to be an American? I was too.

Spike Lee’s devastating new documentary ‘When the Levees Broke’ is currently playing on HBO to coincide with the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Watching it is an eye-opening experience if you’re lucky enough to have premium cable service, and a television to watch it on, and a home to watch it in.

The United States is one of the greatest countries on the planet to live in. For some of us.

Mmmm...roasted ham!

The biggest shock of Comedy Central’s recent roast of William Shatner was that it was freakin’ funny! Of course the pro roasters like Jeffrey Ross, Lisa Lampanelli, Patton Oswald, and Greg Giraldo killed, but even the newbies like Betty White and Nichelle Nichols were hitting them out of the park. They must have had a gang of hired guns writing material for some of the roasters.

Shatner took it all in stride, even the hairpiece and fat jokes, and he seemed to be enjoying himself. Don’t be blue if you missed it—Comedy Central has more reruns than a What’s Happening!! Convention—so set your machine to grab it—especially if they run it late enough at night when they don’t edit for foul language.

I should be late to disappointment...

I just finished the new Scott Smith book, The Ruins.

I’m not a trust fund baby, and my plans for being a high-priced male escort never panned out, so I usually have wait for new books to come out in paperback before I bite.

There are exceptions to every rule, of course, and since it’s been twelve years since I read Smith’s previous novel, A Simple Plan, I figured I’d cough up the eighteen bucks. (I figured it was a safe bet. I really dug reading A Simple Plan—I more than enjoyed Sam Rami’s film version—and the reviews for The Ruins have been through the roof)

But here I sit, brokenhearted.

My recent track record for being disappointed by movies/records/books that are supposed to be surefire hits has been unusually high for some reason. Especially with regards to movies.

I seem to be the only one who thinks that Cars was Pixar’s first dud (artistically, that is. I know the movie made a mint at the b.o.). Pirates of the Caribbean; Dead Man’s Chest was fourteen times more complicated and dull than it should have been for a fun summertime romp. Superman Returns bored me to tears (toward the end I was actually hoping that they would digitally insert Richard Pryor and Robert Vaughn into the movie). Even after giving it all sorts of latitude for only being a fairytale, Lady In The Water still made me sad. And X-Men 3 was a stupendous waste of everyone’s time and money. My cracked ribs kept me from going with the family to see Talladega Nights, the one movie that might have broken this summer’s string of mediocrity. (Valarie tells me that the film was no Ron Burgundy, but she suspects that I would have laughed heartily through most of it.)

Is it just me? Have I set my expectations too high? I don’t think so. I’ve enjoyed some of Bryan Singer’s other movies, and on Superman he had a QUARTER OF A BILLION DOLLARS to play with. I don’t think it was out of line for me to at least expect to get my $7.50 worth.

Entertainment, in disguise..

They’re making a Transformers movie, which is definitely cool for fans of the toys and the animated series—and who knows, it may make a few new friends along the way.

I like it when loyal fans get what they want. Earlier this morning I saw a few minutes of the film Serenity on one of the movie channels, which was a nice send off for fans of the Firefly television show.

I never watched the Transformer series with any sort of regularity, which is weird, what with my love affair with robots and toys. I think the show became popular during a weird time in my life when I didn’t have a lot of spare time. Another thing that threw me was the similarity between the Transformer show and G.I. Joe (Go Joe!). If I came across either show while flipping around the channels it would take me a few minutes before I knew which show I was watching.

Something that bothered me about both shows was how easily they had rolled over on their backs when the Moral Majority, or whoever it was trying to make the world safe for children with sloppy brush strokes of sanctity. The bad guys never succeed in their crimes and they were never shown in a favorable light. Oh, and bullets were replaced with energy beams, and nobody ever got hurt—unless they were robots.

This same mentality was being embraced by the weak-minded primetime television creators at the same time. Stephen J. Cannell was one of the first out of the pool. Your average episode of The A-Team had more firepower than a stack of Tom Clancy novels. Everyone and their Aunt Sophie was walking around with AK-47s, but despite thousands of rounds of ammo being fired in every which direction, no one ever seemed to get hit or even grazed. Car tires would get shot out during high-speed chases, but after the cars would flip, skip and tumble down embankments, the camera would linger long enough for us to see everyone climbing out of the wreckage, shaking the dust off their clothing.

I guess if I ever take up a life of crime, I’ll track down a group of mercs like the A-Team to fight it out with. Mr. T. can be a bit crusty around the edges, but nobody gets their toes hammered flat while being pumped for information.

Errr...ummm....well....no....

I think I'll pass, but you go ahead...

It's summertime...

Why not enjoy an ice cold root beer? If you haven't had one in a while, give it a try--It's darned good!

Noir, noir away…

I have a movie rental suggestion, if you give a hoot.

The film is 2005’s ‘Brick’ and is a noirish, teenage detective story set near and around a high school in the coastal town of San Clemente, CA.

The direction and the dialogue are highly stylized, which might turn some people off, but keeping up is certainly worth the effort. Brick features a talented cast of young actors. The shining star of the movie is the protagonist, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who you might remember from the sitcom 3rd Rock From The Sun.

Brick isn’t perfect and it gets a little muddy toward the end, but I think some of you might enjoy it greatly.

Hero worship and other things...

Growing up, my take on things was that there were actually two worlds.

Really.

I thought there was the world I lived in with my mom and dad and two sisters on Chicago’s south side. And then there was the world I experienced in old television shows and old timey movies on the television. For the longest time I thought that my neighborhood and everyone and everything I knew was sort of an individual cell of the overall world. Like a single kernel on an ear of corn.

I thought that Wally and Beaver Cleaver were real. I thought that Fred and Ethyl Mertz really lived one floor up from the Ricardos. The Brady Bunch really lived in that cool house and that there really was an advertising agency in New York called McMahon and Tate.

I used to marvel at how kids lived in movies and on television. The Little Rascals had some of the coolest clubhouses ever. Wally and the Beaver may have had to share a bedroom, but they had their very own bathroom. Kids had paper routes or stocked the shelves at the local grocery to make money. All the kids, even the fat ones, could play on the school football or basketball team and they got a uniform with their name stitched on the back. Moms wore high heels and loads of jewelry while cleaning the house and cooking the dinner, and after dads got home and had time to down a few glasses of scotch and browse though the mail and the newspaper headlines, he would join his family at the dinner table, not the kitchen table, and he’d still be wearing his suit and tie.

For the longest time I thought my family, neighborhood and life were the exception to the rule—especially when it came to heroes. In old movies and on television, people, young and old, would have posters and pictures up on the walls of Joe DiMaggio, Albert Einstein, JFK, Martin Luther King Jackie Robinson, Neil Armstrong, Muhammad Ali, and the like.

Setting the Way-Back machine thirty-five years or so I've tried to remember who I had up on my wall.

Urmm.

Well, I remember for sure I had a little mini poster of the Groovy Ghoulies. Umm. I think for a while I had a picture of Micky Dolenz of The Monkees taped up—only because I thought he was the funniest of the four—with Mike Nesmith coming in a close second. Oh, I think I had my membership to the Archie Fan Club up over my bed.

Does this mean that I didn’t necessarily have any heroes growing up?

I guess so.

In the late 60s and early 70s astronauts were pretty popular, but there were a lot of them to keep track of. It’s not like they sent them up alone, so you’d only have one name to remember--they were shooting them up three at a time. I never had any real aspirations that I might one day be an Apollo astronaut. Even as a kid I was something of a realist and I figured they were never going to make hatches in the command modules big enough for me to squeeze through.

I was never a massive sports fan but we were a Cubs household and I grew kind of fond of Ernie Banks. I liked it when he came up to bat or snagged a fly ball out of the air. I admired him, and I guess if someone had given me an Ernie Banks poster I might have taped it up to the wall, but that never happened.

He wasn’t famous or anything, but I always kind of had heroic feelings about my best friend, Donnie Draves’ father. Donnie’s father was a carpenter who worked at the General Mills plant in Chicago. I could never fathom why a cereal company would need a carpenter. I liked Donnie’s dad so much because he built things. Most weekends he was in his garage workshop sawing and nailing something together.

Mind you, I was no stranger to carpentry. At least two of my mother’s brothers were carpenters. There was my Uncle Paul, who was a massive bear of a man who genuinely filled a room when he entered it. He had a booming voice that would scare a bulldog off a meat truck, and when he got frustrated he would breath in deeply through his mouth and then exhale through his nose and it sounded like you were in a wind tunnel. He smoked a pipe on occasion, which is, I’m only just now realizing as I’m typing this, the reason I took up the pipe at an early age. My other uncle that was a carpenter was my Uncle Beefy. His real name was Joe, but he’d been given the nickname Beefy at an early age and it stuck. He was a loud man as well, but gentle as a kitten. He was also as round as a beach ball. From any angle you looked at him he was round. My wife takes great glee at the fact that one of my mom’s other brothers is my Uncle Willie, who is a butcher. She thinks it’s hilarious that Willy was the butcher and Beefy was the carpenter.

The thing that was attractive about Donnie’s dad was that he had a massive amount of patience for us kids and he always seemed to be building stuff for us. For example, there was an empty lot on the north side of the three-story building that Donnie’s family lived in. Empty lots were a rarity in my neighborhood. These were row houses that Pullman built for the workers in his Chicago railroad factories (it used to be that if you wanted to ride the train in luxury you rode it in a Pullman car), and each butted up to the next. Scars on the sides of Donnie’s building indicated that once upon a time there might have been a house standing where the lot was, and perhaps it had been destroyed by fire or some other calamity. Fires were a rarity in that kind of housing because of the rampant use of brick construction. It wasn’t until we moved away that I learned that houses could also be made of wood.

So anyway, back to the empty lot. It was naturally a bit on the sunken side, so when winter hit Chicago like a sledgehammer and the temperatures dropped, Donnie’s father would open the garden hose in the lot and before long it was filled up with water. The next morning we had our own private ice rink. Most of us couldn’t skate so he built a wide ramp with stairs that he ran water over until it became an ice ramp sturdy enough to hold a sled full of kids.

The summers in Chicago were just as brutal as the winters, so further back in the empty lot, approximately where the garage would have been, he built a wooden form and had a concrete slab poured. Once it was dry he built a wooden platform that he erected a swimming pool on top of. The icing on the cake was when he had a truckload of sand brought down the alley and he surrounded the pool with it.

The man was very cool and I admired him a lot. Maybe too much. It wasn’t until years later that I came to realize how hard my father was working to support my family, while I was off watching Donnie’s father design and build a multi level birdhouse for the roof of the garage. As I’ve mentioned here before, my dad probably only made it through the eighth grade before he had to go out and work to support his family. As a man he worked on ice trucks, hauling hundred pound blocks of ice into stores and taverns. He also worked alongside a lot of uncles in one of Chicago’s famous meatpacking houses. Somehow, I never really learned how, he got involved with radio and television repair. He taught himself and then got an entry-level job at a shop where he learned the rest of what he knew. For a period of what must have been a year or two I never saw my dad. He was out the door before I woke and he got home after I was in bed. During that period he was working at the TV shop by day and then going and pumping gas at night. This was in an effort for us to move out of the city and out to the suburbs where my parents could finally own their own home.

In retrospect, I can’t think of a single person I admire more than my father. He never raised his voice or his hand to me. I got a little further than he did in school, but much of what makes me a moderately successful writer comes from what made him a moderately successful television repairman. It’s all about problem solving. He would take the back off the television set or radio and fiddle around inside, switching tubes and transformers around until he made it work; much the same way I hack away at a story idea, removing bits and switching things around until it works.

My father also had the unique ability to befriend anyone he would meet. I’d walk over to where he was and he’d be talking to a grocery store cashier, gas station attendant, or just someone standing in line behind him at the store like they were long lost cousins. He always had a smile on his face and a good word for anyone he met. I guess he had a right to be a happy man. He had risen up beyond his roots, raised a healthy family, and as far as I know, didn’t have a single enemy.

I’m not saying that he was the best father in the world. He didn’t wear a suit and tie to the dinner table. He never took me to a single baseball game. He snored like the whistle on a steam locomotive. Every day when he came home from work he’d have a couple of beers and a nip from the Crown Royal whisky bottle, and then nap until dinner was ready. But damn, he was a good guy.

In the mid-80s, when I couldn’t get arrested in New York, let alone sell a story, I came back to the Midwest and my dad offered me a place to stay. He had sold the house and was living a quiet life in a reasonably quiet trailer park (not the type you see on COPS). During the two years that followed my dad and I had a chance to do a lot of catching up. We would sit and talk all night long. At that point my mom had been dead a few years and he was keeping the company of a woman he’d recently met at church.

Of course, when I say church I don’t mean Church. If I’m not mistaken I think it was St. Ann’s Church on Ridge Road in Lansing, IL. St. Ann’s was technically our family church, although I can only remember going there once or twice. (We were fallen Catholics and we couldn’t get up) Maybe this happens in churches all over the world, but the evening mass at St. Ann’s was at the time something of a lonely hearts club. There were a dozen or so people, mostly retirees, who would follow along with the sermon or nap silently, and then afterwards they would head out together and hit the coffee shops or bars for a night of chewing the fat.

Anyway, my dad would go out for coffee or dinner or drinks with his lady friend and then come home to find me slumped over my IBM Selectric, my muse MIA, and starved for company. He’d pop a beer and I’d pop a Pepsi and we would talk the night away. I am so deeply grateful for those talks we had. I got to know the man who was my father.

My mom had died of cancer, so we had a heads up that her time was short. That wasn’t the case with my dad. No time for goodbyes. He had been out shopping for a birthday present for me (talk about guilt) when a young lady asked him for help starting her car. He was happy to comply, but while doing so suffered a heart attack that killed him. The kick in the ass was that he had called me at work earlier that day to talk about something, but I cut him off and told him I was kind of busy. He was all apologetic and said he’d talk to me later.

The thing was, I wasn’t busy. I just didn’t feel like talking to him at the time. Again, talk about guilt.

My sister Nancy called me at work, later that day, close to quitting time. One of the guys I worked with had just given me a birthday present. It was a Chicago street sign from Schiller Street. When Nancy called she told me that dad was hurt and that I should get to the hospital in a hurry. I had driven to work that day, so I headed out to the car with my Schiller Street sign under my arm, hoping a cop wouldn’t happen to be passing by. It was a half hour drive to the hospital and I knew deep in my heart what I would find there. My sister’s tone had said it all. I managed to hold it all together pretty well during the drive until the radio played that Bob Seeger song ‘Like a Rock’. Then the waterworks began. I was crying so hard it’s surprising that I didn’t run off the road. By the time I reached the hospital he had long since been declared dead.

Shortly after my mother died I was kind of hung up over the fact that I hadn’t officially told her that I loved her before she died in her hospital bed. That’s what you’re supposed to do, right? Our family wasn’t big in the touchy/feely/huggy department, and as a rule we didn’t use the ‘L’ word very often. A friend of mine, Patricia Nowlan (who is Nowlan-Tunberg now, I believe), was quick to set me straight. She told me that no matter what was said or wasn’t said, if I loved my mother, she knew it. Words were meaningless if there was nothing behind them.

I pretty certain that I never once told my father that I loved him, but I am one thousand percent certain that as he was stretched out on the icy parking lot pavement, with that chainsaw ripping up his left arm toward his heart, he knew his son loved him, just like I know he loved me.

I guess heroes aren’t that hard to find after all. I will die a very happy man if I wind up a fraction of the man my father was.

I know it sounds a tiny bit macabre, but whenever I end a telephone conversation, especially with someone I don’t see or talk to very often, I always let them know how I feel. Because, well, you just never know.

I must tell my daughter and my wife a hundred times a day how much I love them. I never get tired of saying it or hearing it.

In fact, it’s 3:21 in the middle of the a.m., but as soon as I’m done writing this I’m going to go wake up Dakota and Val and remind them how much I love them. They’ll probably get mad and throw something at me, but it’s worth the risk, right?

Easier than falling off a blog...

I blog because Stephen King told me to.

Well, sort of.

Years ago I read a quote by King that has stuck in my head for the past twenty years and which is more or less why I’m a writer today. To paraphrase him, “I write my stories for people to enjoy, sure, but mostly I write them just to get them out of my head. Writing down my stories keeps me from climbing up a water tower with a high-powered rifle to thin the idiots from the herd.”

I read that quote when I was in my early twenties. Back then I was a Community College dropout who was living at home and I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. I worked as a packaging designer for products in Sears’ kitchen and bath departments, and was a secret drinker (mild and sporadic but working my way up the ladder). One day my boss, Tom Murphy, was reading the hardcover of Stephen King’s The Stand. I asked him why he was going through all the effort of reading a fifty-pound book. He tossed me a paperback copy of King’s The Shining and later that night I understood.

I instantly connected with King because he made the effort to connect with me. He talked to me, not at me. I really liked that. For some reason I equated his writing to that of Stan Lee, the wunderkind at Marvel Comics, who helped create icons like Spider-Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, and more.

When I was a wee lad the only comics we had in the house were Archies and Harvey. I had tried reading the occasional Superman or Batman comic over the years, but they always left me cold. The characters were flat and the storylines were unrealistic and had nothing to do with my life. My first encounter with Marvel Comics had the opposite effect. Stan Lee is legend for writing about characters with feet of clay. Everyday folk like you and me. Ordinary people sent flying into extraordinary situations. It could have just as easily been me that the radioactive spider bit, rather than Peter Parker. Or I could have been the one accidentally bombarded with radiation that releases the creature that lurks in all of us, if I’m pushed too far. Stan Lee and Stephen King were both on the same page, and I loved reading it.

Writers are strange folks. Or maybe they’re just ordinary, everyday folk who react to the world and what’s buzzing around in their heads in a different way. Each day I see dozens of situations or hear snippets of conversation that I think would be the basis for a good story, or at the very least a part of a good story. Or I’ll make some observation that I’ll forget about as soon as it passed through my mind, but instead of dropping into the garbage chute it keeps bouncing around inside my brain until I have to file it somewhere.

I’ll smell the neighbor firing up his backyard grill and that odor will trigger a memory I had when I was ten, when I heard the song Windy playing on the transistor radio while my dad was cooking some burgers on our charcoal grill in the backyard. The song Windy sticks in my mind because it was sung by Petula Clark, a British singer I always used to get mixed up with Lulu, the gal who sang the theme song to (as well as playing a minor role in) the ‘60s film classic, To Sir With Love. To Sir With Love will remind me of another Sidney Poitier classic, Lilies Of The Field.

I think for most people it would stop there, but not me. I’ll remember that Sidney Poitier also once stared in a movie with Tom Berenger, Shoot To Kill, and that Berenger starred in a different movie with Debra Winger called Betrayed that I saw with a friend while living in Staten Island. In the movie Winger and Berenger rob a small bank in Chicago which was the same bank I used to go to every Friday when I worked at a small printing place down the street. I slapped my friend on the leg and hissed that they were in my bank. A few years later I saw the Jodie Foster movie The Accused in the same theater. In the film she gets raped and the rapists get off pretty easily. I remember at the end of the movie when the lights came on I noticed I was the only man in the audience. All the women seemed to be glowering at me.

Just down the street from the theater was a building that once held a discount toy store. I remember browsing through the store one day and I found some toys for an animated series called The Bionic Six. I was in running to write a comic book series based on the animated show, so I bought as many of the toys as I could and shipped them to my editor in California, Valarie Jones, who is now my wife.

I think most people have the ability to step out of the stream of conscious early on, but not me. I’ll keep slogging on until the threads no longer connect to anything else, and then I’ll continue to chew on the whole mess over and over again, pulling story ideas out and recounting funny instances. I guess my brain was pretty gunked up before I started writing.

My niece is a writer and she’s a big proponent of writing in journals. I’ve tried this off an on over the years, but they’ve mostly turned out to be a place to park chunks of ideas and funny doodles. I’ve never been able to see the benefit of writing for myself. It would be like painting a picture and then stuffing it into a closet without showing it to any one. I know a lot of people do a lot of creative things and never share them, and I just don’t get it.

Maybe it’s that I like being paid for my writing, and if I’m looking to entertain myself, hey, reading a book is a lot easier than writing one. Or maybe my ego is so overgrown that I think every string of words that I lovingly craft should be available for all to see.

I guess that’s why I’m so fortunate that blogging came to be. It’s not paying work, no, but it’s not random scribblings in an ornately bound journal, either. You are reading this and being affected in some way, so that’s okay.

Unleashing the weird and randomly strung together thoughts that clog up my brain is certainly a cathartic experience. Plus it’s always fun to write without a copy editor or project manager looking over your shoulder. This is all about me. Well, me and you.

Vice, Vice, Baby...

Last night I was flipping around the channels and happened upon an episode of Entertainment Tonight. It used to be once upon a time that I loved that show. When I was a lad I think it was on every night right before primetime and I never missed an episode.

Something changed between then and now. Either the show is different or I am, either way, these days I equate watching an episode with getting a shard of glass jammed into my eye.

The thing that made me stop last night on ET was they were doing a fluff piece on the upcoming Miami Vice movie. They showed Colin Ferrell and Jamie Foxx learning how to shoot, duck, roll, and then shoot again, just like real cops NEVER do. Anyway, I like Colin Ferrell a lot (even though he has yet to be in a movie that harnesses his somber yet feral qualities) so I watched for a few minutes.

I’m very curious how the movie is going to fare at the box office. The camera loves Ferrell and Foxx, but neither of them has been strong enough to open an action movie.

I liked Miami Vice when it premiered on television back in the early 80s. I stopped watching after a few episodes because I never bought into the brand of smarminess Don Johnson was selling, Phillip Michael Thomas was such a un-actor to me that it was like there was an empty void on screen where his character was supposed to be, and Edward James Olmos mumbled all the time (he seems to make an effort to speak more clearly these days on Battlestar Galactica). But the show did have a kick ass pilot episode full of enough visual style to choke a grown man, and had opening credits to die for.

I haven’t seen an episode in over twenty years, but I remember the opening credits featured scenes of zoomy cigarette boats skipping over the water, helicopter shots of Miami’s interesting architecture, panoramic scenes of Miami’s nightlife shot from the left rear wheel well of a car, some jai li players in action, a naturally busty bikini girl walking past the camera with her assets in motion, some shots of Rico and Tubbs in action, and I believe the sequence ended with a pair of bathing beauties walking away for the camera. All this was set to a syntho-rock chunk of music with a thundering drum line.

The creator of the show and the director of the movie really blows hot and cold for me. Collateral had its moments and Tom Cruise was fun, but the yoke of the movie was on Jamie Foxx’s shoulders and I don’t think he was up for the task. 2001’s Ali left me sort of cold and The Insider was entertaining enough but I don’t think I’d sit through it again. 1995’s Heat had all kinds of potential, but the script was too long by half (although the bank robbery sequence is worth watching all by itself). I am an outspoken fan of two of Mann’s earlier films, 1981’s Thief (with a wild choice of Tangerine Dream for the soundtrack) and 1986’s Manhunter. I love Anthony Hopkins to death, but Brian Cox will always be Hannibal Lecktor. The supporting cast rocks the house as well. Tom Noonan as Francis Dolarhyde aka The Red Dragon, Joan Allen as the blind Reba McClane, and the always sturdy Dennis Farina as Jack Crawford. Manhunter doesn’t hold us especially well twenty years later, but it remains my favorite Thomas Harris adaptation (I never bought Jodie Foster as Clarice for even half a second.)

Adult SciFi done right!

First Battlestar Galactica and now Eureka? The folks at the SciFi channel are getting their batting average way up there. Let's see how long it lasts.

Fear of the Franchise

There’s never been a better time to make an Iron Man movie—yet there’s never been a worse. Jon Favreau has the technology available to him that directors would have killed to have thirty or forty years ago; but that said, directors back then were primarily making stand-alone movies, and not cogs that are part of monstrous franchises.

One great thing that Favreau has going for him is that if he’s going to cover the origin of the character, Iron Man has a corker. It’s tart and tangy and chock full of irony.

-Playboy billionaire Tony Stark uses his inventing genius to tinker together weapons of death and destruction.
-While field testing his most recent weapons for the army in what was thought to be a de-militarized zone, Stark is seriously wounded—perhaps by one of his very own weapons—and is imprisoned by a petty warlord and forced to design new weapons.
-Stark is imprisoned with fellow scientists, who are also being forced to do the tyrant’s bidding.
-The scientists use their ingenuity to build Stark a chest plate that will keep him alive until a surgeon can remove the piece of metal shrapnel that is lodged dangerously near his heart.
-Stark expands on the functionality of the sophisticated iron lung that is keeping him alive, by expanding the chest plate into a complete suit of armor, bullet proof and loaded with magnetic and repulsor beam weaponry.
-When the petty warlord barges into the work shop and demands to see the great new weapons the scientists have created for him, Tony Stark gives the tyrant an up close and personal demonstration in the form of a major ass kicking.
-Back in the US, Stark streamlines his suit design and decides to continue fighting crime on every level.

Dang, that’s a good story. Forget about trying to squeeze it into the first ten minutes of the movie. You’ve got the whole story right there. Of course it would be a blast to see Stark jetting around in the Gene Colon era armor.

The rumor mill is grinding out stories about Iron Man facing off against the Mandarin in the movie. I was never a huge fan of the Mandarin in the comics—him and his ten rings of doom. Did he ever actually get around to using all ten rings? It seemed like he was always using either his heat beam or his cold beam. His thumb rings probably had the weakest powers of the lot. One would give you a nasty prickly heat rash and the other beam would shrink your ankles for up to 48 hours. The only good that could possibly come from Favreau using Mandarin for a Iron Man foe would be the appearance of Ultimo.

As with most things, time will tell.

Here he comes...hand him some tissues

There’s been a lot of collective eye rolling going on lately in the entertainment business over news that a possible Speed Racer movie is still in the works. People have been shaking their heads and clucking their tongues over the silliness of it all. Apparently Los Bros Wachowski are working on a script and want to produce the film. Funnyman Vince Vaughn has added his clout to the project, wanting to play the role of Speed’s older brother Rex a.k.a. the mysterious Racer X.

At first glance the very notion of this movie getting made is too silly for words, but when you consider that Michael Bay is currently filming a big screen version of The Transformers, and that NASCAR fans in this country number in the billions, the idea gets less and less silly.

In the mid-1980s when I was on staff at NOW Comics in Chicago, we had the rights to pump out Speed Racer comics. There was a steady stream of buzz in the letter columns and at comic conventions about a possible live action Speed Racer movie. Names were bandied about who could play whom. I distinctly recall someone coming up to me at a convention and telling me that they thought the only person who could play the part of ace mechanic Sparky was Jon Cryer.

When it came to possible actors to portray Speed; flat out, across the board, the only name ever mentioned was Capt. Jack Sparrow himself, Johnny Depp. There was no discussion allowed or necessary (even though I always thot Charlie Sheen or my buddy Tom Morgan could do a great job in the role). Johnny Depp was the only actor for the job. I secretly thought Depp was a bad choice, only because at that moment Depp had been off 21 Jump Street for a few years and his career was starting to tank. I thought he would soon be gone and forgotten. (Which serves to demonstrate why I’ve never made a fortune betting on the horses or playing the stock market)

So here it is twenty years later. If the movie were to get the greenlight, who would be cast today? That’s a toughie. I know there’s a massive new breed of quasi heartthrobs from shows like The OC and Pacific Cove and One Tree Hill and the dozens of other WB shows that I’ve never seen. The studio would want a bankable star to play Trixie, so maybe they could cough up ten or fifteen million for Jessica Alba. Yes, I know she doesn’t look anything like Trixie and is completely wrong for the part, but her being miscast helped Fantastic Four, right?

A fun bit of stunt casting would be getting father and son motorcycle design team of Paul Sr. and Paul Jr. Teutul from A&E’s American Chopper series to play Pops Racer and Sparky, respectively. In that same vein they could use CGI technology to shrink Mikey Teutul small enough to play Spridle.

That’s a movie I would pay nine dollars to see in the theater.

Rule the School!

Years ago during a television interview I heard Playboy Magazine founder Hugh Hefner explain that one of the reasons he began publishing Playboy was because he missed high school so much. He said that he had such a fantastic time in high school he wished he could have stayed there the rest of his life.

What in the hell kind of high school did Hefner go to? I realize that the 50s were a different time and all, but WTF?

Apparently Hef (as I call him) was the editor of the high school newspaper. I guess I can picture him there in the newspaper office. He’d be wearing a starched white dress shirt with a skinny black tie and cufflinks the shape of martini shakers. Over his shirt and tie he’d be wearing a smart navy blue blazer or maybe one of his dad’s old leopard print smoking jackets. There would be a stack of jazz records playing on the phonograph and in the corner of the room, under a sign that read EDITOR-IN-CHIEF would be hanging over a moth-eaten stuffed gorilla with an oversized pair of bongos clenched between his toes. The gorilla would have a Shiners fez on his head at a jaunty angle and one of Hef’s spare pipes stuck between his teeth.

The room would also be populated with reporters, most of which were a regular part of Hef’s crew. They would be writing stories about all the madcap adventures happening all around the school. (Like what happened at last week’s Homecoming football game, when a certain unidentified party kidnapped the opposing team’s mascot, Gus the Mule, and led him onto the field dressed in a brassiere and girdle, supposedly belonging to the frumpy school nurse, Comrade Fletcher.)

Of course there would be plenty of girls sprinkled around the room. Some would still be in their cheerleader outfits from afternoon practice, while others would be wearing tight Capri slacks and form fitting, sleeveless blouses. Some of the girls would be sipping on bottles of Coke through blue and white striped straws. Off to the side would be the official school photographer named Shades, named that because he always wore sunglasses, even at night. He would be snapping photos of a cute blonde cheerleader for a pithy editorial Hef was working on titled “Who Took the Rah-Rah Out of the Sis Boom Bah?”

I’ve had high school on my mind recently because my daughter Dakota is beginning her freshman year in a few months and has been peppering me with a barrage of questions. I’m sure that her high school days are going to be as different from mine as mine were from Hugh Hefner’s. I don’t have the exact answers for a lot of her questions, but the thing I keep pushing whenever we talk is that she’ll get the most out of the next four years if she goes in with an open mind. She’s got a lot of preconceived notions already in place that I’ve been trying to tear down. Most of it is crap that she’s seen on television or stuff that kids just make up out of thin air. Overall, I’d have to say that she’s doing a lot less stressing about the situation than I did when I was in her place. And that’s good.

In the end I’m sure she’ll do fine this fall. Not as fine as Hef did when he was her age, but not all of us can be blessed.

A Little Sun on the Beach?

If you cats and kittens are looking for a a paperback to stuff in your beach bags this summer, here are a few suthor suggestions for y'all. I've only recently stumbled across the literary goodness that Harlan Corben and Greg Rucka have to offer for sale in the used bookstore. (I like Rucka's comicbook writing, but his Atticus Kodiak novels are even better mindless reading.) And don't forget the sunscreen, my llittle toaster treats.

But it's Mamet, dammit!

Once upon a time I was told by a teacher that a primary (albeit rudimentary) gauge of the effectiveness of a piece of ‘art’ was the amount of impact or affect it has on the viewer (or participant).

True or not, this notion must have landed on a sticky part of my brain because it’s remained with me after all these years. Subsequently, if I see a movie, read a book, listen to an album, or examine a piece of artwork and pass over it without a second thought, then the artist has failed. Art needs to stir some up something in the soul or pluck at least a single emotional chord or else what’s the point? Hate it or love it, it doesn’t matter, but it has to do something, otherwise it’s just wasting space.

My cracked ribs had me up really early this morning so I went downstairs and downed a handful of painkillers. I surfed around the movie channels on cable while waiting for the drugs to kick in and caught the tail end of a really interesting movie called Fourteen Hours. It was made in 1951 and tells the story of a disturbed man who climbs out on the ledge of his Manhattan hotel room, intent on jumping. The cops spend fourteen hours trying to talk him off the ledge and during this span of time the story of his life unfolds and we see what drove him to suicide. It was a fun premise that was pulled off pretty successfully.

When the film was over I was about to turn the television off and head back to bed, when I saw that David Mamet’s The Spanish Prisoner was playing. I have a love/hate relationship with Mamet’s films, with a disproportional amount of checks in the hate column than the love.

His script for 1982’s The Verdict was full of snap and remains one of my favorite Paul Newman films, and I have fond memories of House of Games, The Edge, and of course the bombastic Glengarry Glen Ross. On the other end of the spectrum, We’re No Angels, State and Main, Hannibal, Heist, and the film version of American Buffalo all left me with an unpleasant taste in my mouth. The most puzzling stinker of them all, in my humble opinion, is The Spanish Prisoner.

This movie confounds me. I have a long list of friends (people who m I respect and hold in the highest regard) that will check to see if I’m running a fever or accuse me of being a pod person when I express how strongly I dislike The Spanish Prisoner. I’m a big believer in second chances, both in giving them and accepting them, so I’ve tried to enjoy this movie time and time again, but I always walk away shaking my head with disbelief. I always get the impression that I’ve walked in during the middle of a joke. I grin and smile and nod my head in agreement, but I’ve missed the setup so nothing really makes sense.

It would be a waste of time and energy to tick off all the reasons The Spanish Prisoner rubs me the wrong way, but one of the biggest chunks of grit revolves around Mamet’s casting his girlfriend/muse Rebecca Pidgeon. She plays the secretary to Campbell Scott’s character and is so abrasive that the movie grinds to a halt whenever she appears on screen.

Blech!

But that’s just my opinion—apparently.

(How could so many people be so very, very wrong?)

Oh Chucky you're so fine, you're so fine you blow my mind...hey Chucky!

Only the mentally deficient and those of us who can’t resist a Triple-Dog-Dare actually know for a fact what dog poop tastes like, but we do know there’s a reasonably good chance it tastes horrible.

In this same vein, until two hours ago I had never seen a Child’s Play/Chucky movie but I was reasonably certain that I wasn’t missing much, and on my death bed I wouldn’t regret not seeing them.

Like I said, all that was two hours ago, but that was then and this is, as you all know, now. As of this very moment I have tasted the dog poop; I know for a fact the Child’s Play/Chucky movies are horrible.

My daughter goes through phases of types of television shows and movies that she likes, and at the moment she’s tearing through all the DVDs of the first two seasons of Scrubs and wants to watch old and stinky horror movies. The other night she tricked Valarie into watching one of the Freddy Kruger movies with her. Today is was my turn and the price I paid was sitting through Child’s Play III.

I feel like that guy who had to cut his own arm off after it got trapped during a rockslide. It was probably his favorite arm and a lot of things are more difficult to do without it. But, he would have died if he hadn’t cut it off and it’s better to be alive with one arm than dead with two.

Child’s Play III chewed up two hours of my life I’ll never get back, and I’m pretty sure that exposure to the film has caused my brain to become even soggier than it was before. But, I did get to spend two hours giggling with my daughter on the couch, mocking the moronic teens in the movie, and it did mean a lot to her, so I’m pretty sure that my glass is half full.

And it could be worse. I still have both my arms.

Thumper’s mama would be pissed at me.

She always said, “If you cain’t say sumthin’ nice, don’t say nuthin’ at all.”

Since posting my gripe list about Superman Returns I see that I’m not the only one who was severely troubled by the movie; severely enough to post their dismay and heap on the nitpicking.

There were a lot of things I liked about Superman Returns.

--I liked Superman’s boots. I liked them a lot. They look like Frank Miller designed them.

--I was transfixed on Supe’s cape—his whole costume in fact. It was dark and looked like it was made from a material not found on this planet.

--I liked that Superman’s power level fluctuated with the amount of solar radiation he had stored up. One minute he’s having trouble stopping a commercial airliner from crashing, and the next he’s lifting an entire continent and chucking it into space.

--The design of the movie was pretty much gorgeous from start to go. The Daily Planet was an art deco orgasm, and Luthor’s yacht is to die for.

--I like that Perry White’s nephew is wealthy enough to live on the seashore and have an airplane in his backyard.

--I like that Lois smokes Brand M cigarettes.

--And I like that it’s a dog eat dog world even in Metropolis.

Got frustration? Me too!

Did you ever begin to ask a question and by the time you were finished you had already figured out the answer? I’m hoping that this will be the case here.

Last night Valarie, my cracked ribs and myself went to see Superman Returns. I had to get jacked up on painkillers in order to climb in and out of the car and sit in a movie theater seat for two and a half hours, so there’s a good chance that I missed some things because of the Percocet.

SPOILER ALERT ***If you haven’t seen Superman Returns yet, please don’t read my questions. Perhaps you could read a good book, or something. I’ve only recently discovered the author Harlan Coben. You could hit the used paperback store and give him a try***SPOILER ALERT

Okay, for starters, I’ve seen cast members from the movie making the talk show rounds, and what they’re saying is that this movie takes place after Superman II from the 70s. So that means that we’re working under the pretense that:

--Lex Luthor knows that Superman is allergic to Krytonite and that a red sun will take his powers away. He also knows that Supes has a crystal hideout and where it’s located.

--Superman revealed his Clark Kent identity to Lois, brought her to the Fortress, stripped himself of his powers, and boinked her like a rabbit. After he gets his powers back Supes (as Clark) kisses Lois and cleverly sucks the oxygen from the part of her brain that stores short-term memory.

--Superman sees that at least three other residents of Krypton (hey, that’s a cool name for a band. Residents of Krypton) survived whatever it was that made the planet explode, when he meets General Zod and his crew. Superman must know about the Phantom Zone from the teachings of his father, and perhaps he even knows that Zod and the Z-Crew were banished there for whatever unspeakable acts they committed on Krypton. (The arrival of Zod and the Z-Crew on earth gives Superman all the motivation he needs to go away for five years to hunt for others. Maybe Supes thinks that the window to the Phantom Zone has somehow broken open—not realizing that he was the one who did it with the Eiffel Tower terrorist nuke—and he feels compelled to go round up all the bad guys who have been banished there over the years.)

So, that said, here are some points that I’m not clear on:

--I guess we’re supposed to figure out that Superman is unable to fly to the spot where Krypton used to be under his own powers because he crashes back on the farm in a ship, so he either built it himself or had the control panel in his Fortress cook one up for him. That said, why the crash landing? Was there some sort of malfunction or something? Wouldn’t NORAD/Homeland Security/NASA have noticed the arrival of the ship with an impact of that magnitude? Plus, how the hell did Ma Kent hoist her 225 pound adopted son into the house and then change him into his jammies?

--Once upon a time Lex Luthor was the greatest criminal mind on the planet, but now he’s been reduced to swindling little old ladies out of their fortunes? WTF? Are we supposed to believe that there was no fiendishly clever way for Lex to get the job done? In the time and effort he wasted wooing the old bird, he could have robbed a dozen banks and stolen a fleet of luxury yachts.

--Are there really no more competent henchmen and molls left in the world? Lex’s crime crew was downright pathetic. And since when does anyone, especially the irritating Parker Posey, get away with slapping Lex Luthor? The Lex I know would grind her up and feed her to the dog.

--I like the notion that Kryptonian technology is based on crystals. I don’t have a problem with that. I mistakenly assumed from the first two movies that the crystals in the control panel were some sort of storage medium that contained the combined knowledge of Krypton, along with an interactive teaching program. I’m more than a little concerned that Superman came to earth with the tools to completely reshape the planet to resemble Krypton.

--And while we’re on the subject of the crystals, as I understood it, it was Lex’s plan to use one of the crystals to build his own continent. I read this as a throwback/tip of the hat/homage to the first Superman movie. The thing of it is, Lex’s plan in the first movie was dumb (dump most of the west coast into the Pacific ocean so all the desert property he’d been buying up on the east coast of the San Andres fault line would be super valuable) but it was thirty-seven times better than his plan in Superman Returns.

For starters, mankind only inhabits a tiny fraction of the inhabitable land on the planet. There are hundreds of thousands of acres available for the taking if you’re a criminal mastermind. Next up, Lex’s plan involves the obliteration of the United States, one of the wealthiest nations there is. If he was so hell bent on building his own nation from scratch, why not go out to the middle of the ocean where you can build away without destroying your potential clientele in the process? (The only part of Lex’s plan that I liked was his incorporating Kryptonite in the process so Superman would be reluctant to visit)

Also, was only one of the crystals useful for building? I ask because when Lex and his girlfriend are escaping by helicopter at the end, she dunks the remaining crystals into the ocean. Wasn’t she afraid that doing so would be five or six (however many crystals were left) times more explosive than the one that Lex shot out of his cannon?

--Was I the only one confused by Lois Lane’s Pulitzer Prize winning story on why the world doesn’t need Superman? Did she write it as soon as the world figured out that Superman was missing—or did she write it just a couple of weeks ago. What was the point of the story? Was it all a bunch of sour grapes? Was it an attack based on him leaving after the world had grown so dependant on him? I’m pretty sure that they don’t give out Pulitzer Prizes five years after the fact, so I’m going to assume that she wrote it recently. Metropolis, as well as the rest of the world has finally come to grips with the idea that Superman is gone and isn’t coming back. Lois writes that the world got along just fine without him for millions of years, and they’ll survive now.

And yet I kept getting the impression that one of the factors that fueled Superman’s five-year journey home was that he was overwhelmed by the burden of protecting the planet. While you and I hear nothing, he hears metal fatiguing on a roller coaster in Rhode Island, and a toddler clicking off the safety on the pistol he just found in his father’s desk drawer, and the Tony Two-Ton gang robbing a bank in Austin, oh, and death rattle of the thousands of children who die of starvation each and every day.

How in the world could Superman justify leaving us for so long? How many lives could he have saved if he stayed? How many kittens could he have rescued from treetops? The very least he could have done was to build an army of Superman robots to protect us while he was gone.

--I think it was really swell of Perry White to give Clark Kent his old job back after his five year sabbatical, but wasn’t there a single person at the Daily Planet who thought it was suspicious that Superman reappears on the same exact day that Clark Kent does? It seems especially silly for Superman to waste his time pretending to be a newspaper reporter today? He has to be doing it in an effort to get back into Lois Lane’s panties again. While he was looking cute eating a burrito, he could have been saving a small village from being swept away in a mudslide. Superman sees all and hears all, so why’s he wasting time playing human?

--Giving Lois a son who is four years and three months old was just freakishly insulting. The very second that Superman (as Clark) learns that Lois has a son he would have read the kid’s DNA and known immediately that it was his kid. That said, to only have the kid’s power surface once, when his mommy was in danger, was so frustrating that it turned into a major distraction. There were three or four times that she was in an equal amount of danger and the kid does bupkus. If you’re going to put something like a Super-Four-Year-Old out there, you really have to commit to it in order for us to buy into it.

--During the last twenty minutes of the movie it almost seemed like individual scenes were fighting it out to see which could be more ridiculous.

Superman hoists a big chunk of crystal into orbit (at least twenty thousand miles up) and then he passes out, yet he somehow manages to land in Metropolis. Did the planet stop spinning while he was up there?

Superman gets taken to a hospital and they peel his suit off him? WTF? And then they leave it casually sitting on a chair in the corner of his room? OMG! And then earth doctors somehow make sense of his alien anatomy to the point where they can monitor his life signs?

The movie ends with Superman sneaking into Lois Lane’s house where he hovers over his sleeping son in his bedroom. Apparently at some point when he was off camera he figured out the truth. Superman decides to leave at the precise moment that Lois has stepped outside for a breath of fresh air. Does she scream in shock and horror? Nope. Does this mean that she knows that Supes is the father? Was the tossing of the piano the first time her son had demonstrated his powers? Did Lois think her son was immaculately conceived or was she sleeping around a lot four years and three months ago?

It’s so frustrating. Singer had the time and the budget to do it right. The effects were very nice. I was happy enough with the casting. But it simply had no heart. The characters lacked dimension and about halfway through I simply stopped caring.

A lot of people seem very pleased by the movie and I’m glad for that. Maybe I’ll enjoy it more by the time it makes it to DVD. I’ll bet there will be a few deleted scenes that if they were in the movie things would have made more sense. Maybe.

Of course, who am I to complain about superhero movies. I liked Ang Lee’s Hulk.