Good times.

Here's something spectacular for my fabulous fiftieth post.

To Comfortably Go Where We've Already Gone Before.

Just got back from seeing the new star Trek movie, and it was a pretty decent movie. But...it's not that great. The biggest problem I had with the movie was that it was called Star Trek. Somewhere in the middle of the movie it dawned on me that there was no reason for the movie I saw tonight to be tethered to some 50 year old science fiction franchise, when it would have served the movie better had it been called Sexy Teenagers in Space. The entire film I sat there and dissected and compared and contrasted this flick with the original series, and I never even gave it a shot as its own independent thing. Technically, it isn't its own independent thing and therefore the comparison must be made.

It reminded me of when I go see the super hero movies that and I sit there and think about how much better I like the source material than what I'm watching on the screen. Star Trek suffers from the same thing. It has awesome laser gun noises and the spaceships look wicked as hell, but no one that utters a line even matches up to their original counterpart. Sure the inflection might be there or even the occasional he sort of looks like Kirk there, but you never really see Kirk up there.

The whole idea of the movie is a little lazy in that it doesn't have to establish anything new. We already know these characters by heart, si there's no need to do anything but stay on the surface. One thing that struck me about the movie was how there weren't any great one liners you could walk away quoting. Then it dawned on me there were great one liners, it was just that I'd been hearing them all my life and they had become routine. I've already heard "Dammit Jim I'm a doctor not a clit masseuse" a thousand times. Gimme something new fellas. The archetypes work just fine, we'll trot them out in some shiny new shirts, but they'll say the same things and people will think they're seeing something they ain't never seen before. Therein lies another problem.

Star Trek is about boldly going where no one has ever gone before, except this time we've already been to Myrtle Beach. It doesn't mean Myrtle Beach isn't a bad place, it's great actually, but we've been going there for a few Summer's now. I hear Virginia is for lovers, lets see what the poon tang is like in that direction, it might be great.

The argument could be made that I knew wasn't going to get anything new out of something called Star Trek anyways, that if I want new I should go see something else. and you would be correct, but that outer space big budget sci-fi movie didn't get made, because they went for the sure thing and remade Star Trek instead of giving me Sexy Teens in Space.

There's a line in the movie about star Fleet needing guys like Jim Kirk that'll give it a boot up its ass and make it exciting and not so self assured and routine. Maybe this was a little aside about Hollywood. It needs something to come along and make something new for the kids today. It's great that I like Superman and Batman and my nephew does too, but it saddens me some to see that a lot of the same toys I played with are still popular today. I know there are some new and great things out there, but sometimes it gets hard to see them with the old ideas mugging for everyone's attention.

Questions that kept running through my mind is why not Star Trek? and when do you change things to the point where it's no longer Star Trek. If you're making a movie about the space navy that journey's around having adventures you might as well call it Star Trek, but if but if you start tweaking a few things maybe it's no longer Star Trek. To me Star Trek was much more cerebral than this movie. Star Trek is less laser guns and more philosophy. Less rocket engines and more dramatic intensity. This of course is partly due to the limitations of 1960s TV, but for better or for worse, that's what Star Trek is. Well, not this movie anyways, this movie is just Space Navy pretending to be Star Trek, but maybe in it's heart of hearts it wants to be Sexy Teens in Space. If you call the ship the enterprise, but you never really wrestle with any moral dilemma or philisophical question, is it still Star Trek?

I ate a lot of pop corn, I saw some some cool blinky lights, and I generally had a good time. There's certainly worse things I could have spent my money on, but in another time line my $8 went to Sexy Teens in space, and I had a blast.

Here's a video from Cartoonbrew.com about the early/forgotten history of Superman in animation before his Tv show in the 1950s. For those keeping track it's about 7 minutes long, but I still found it to be a lot of fun. Lately I've been thinking about my love of super heroes and how I really seem to enjoy "off model" or parody versions even more than the genuine article, so it wasn't a huge surprise when I liked the Little Lulu portion of this piece the best. Maybe someday I'll get around to doing a post on my love of parody and cipher versions of my favorite heroes. The video opens with some clips from the Fleischer studios Superman cartoons of which I have been a big fan of since I saw a bunch of them on Nick at Night back when I was like 11 or 12. I used to really hate Superman but the slick animation and darker look really made me like the Man of Steel.



Notice the differing "S" shield with the black background instead of yellow. I have quite a fascination with the evolution of the symbol, and I've bought a few Superman comics just because they've used that "S" symbol as opposed to the standard version.




It was this look that inspired the Superman from Mark Waid and Alex Ross' Kingdom Come, the first time in comics form I ever liked him. Yes, I followed the Death and Return of Superman and had an issue here and there, but during that I was hoping the Cyborg would turn out to be the real Superman, but when Supes returned with a new mullet in tow my hopes were dashed of ever really liking him. Over the years I've read some really amazing Superman comics that have opened my eyes to the character, and I consider him one of my all time favs now. Enjoy the video.

Save Me Black Dynamite

Trailer

Posted using ShareThis

After about 15 minutes of doing homework, I needed this. NSFW, as if any of the people I know work in real places.

It's probably a trap.

Yer God damn right it is.

"What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end"

There comes a time in a man’s life where he must choose between living life as a whimpering fool or being bold, balling up his fist, and fighting for the right to live as a man. Many of us will never be put in a situation like that, but others, like Jack Harrow, they must make that fateful decision and live with the consequences…

It was snowing on Christmas Eve in Olan, Michigan and there was a rumor on the radio that there was one mythical can of cranberry sauce left in the whole state. Jack Harrow wasn’t a particular fan of cranberry sauce, but his wife was, and it was Christmas and there had to be cranberry sauce on Christmas. So, he set out a couple hours before lunch to try and find the can for the family dinner that night. The roads were slick as glass and a blind man had better visibility, but Jack trudged on, not for the love of his wife, more so he wouldn’t have to hear that nagging about having ruined Christmas by forgetting cranberry sauce when he was out buying the ham the other day.

It took 25 minutes just to make it 5 miles down the road, but Jack finally pulled into the tiny parking lot of Eddie & Mae’s discount convenient store. Even though the exterior of the building suggested a quaint old fashioned convenient store it was really just a nationwide chain. Eddie & Mae’s was a mom and pop chain actually owned by Amir and Mahjub Rahman, entrepreneur brother refugees from Iran that had both fled the country to live the American dream of rock and roll and blond haired, blue eyed, big tittied chicks. In order to eventually become the music moguls they wanted to be, they set up the discount chains. The deal was they jacked up prices from other chain grocery stores, but provided that down home country feel modern America seemed to be missing. Jack Harrow found the last cobweb and dust covered can of cranberry sauce with a $7 price tag attached.

The store was empty except for a bored cashier girl, and silent except for the pinging of her cell phone. Another gentleman had entered the store wearing a long trench coat and a toboggan. Jack, figuring the man was after the same cranberry sauce, crooked his hand, and put the can close to his body to shield it from view. However, the man stepped to the counter and pulled out a small pistol, aimed it at the cashier and asked for the all the money. The young girl behind the counter had been loudly smacking her gum and sending text messages; her two thumbs zipping across the key pad of her Blackberry. Annoyed, she hopped off her stool, rolled her eyes, and with heavy, pounding movements, opened the cash drawer.

The man turned and faced Jack, pointing the gun at him, and warning him not to try any funny business. Jack stuck both hands straight up in the air with the cranberry sauce resting on his palm like a golden display trophy. The gunman, upon seeing the sauce, licked his lips, and poked Jack in the tummy for the tart treat. The cashier, as if the money weighed hundreds of pounds, slammed the cash on the counter.

Even though yellow piss was running down Jack’s leg, he did not give up the can, instead, used his body as a shield to hide it from the grubby paws of the filthy gunman. The gunman, displeased, cocked his gun. In a split second, Jack made the decision to go from ordinary man to that of super hero. He took the can in his fist and hurled it at the gunman, pegging him square between the eyes, then with all his middle-aged might, tackled the man into the ice cream display. The cashier, wisely, took out her camera phone and snapped pics to e-mail to her blog. In the fracas, the gun went off. The gunman, seeing what had happened, fled the scene, leaving behind both money and cranberry sauce. The cashier was in nursing school, and quickly made Jack comfortable, and applied pressure to the gun wound in his arm to stop the blood flow. The bullet had grazed Jack’s arm and burned more than bled, but poor Jack thought it was a mortal wound. By the time the authorities arrived, the girl had just about everything taken care of for Jack except the actual stitching, he was taken to the hospital where the wound was stitched and his wife picked him up to take him to dinner with the family.

The whole way home she nagged him about trying to be a big man and how he’d ruined Christmas by getting shot. Jack slumped against the window of the car with his chin in his hand and watched the snow falling down. The cops had taken the cranberry sauce, for evidence they said. They confiscated it for the good of the case, they said with a smile, but deep down Jack knew those pigs were eating his cranberry cause and having themselves a merry Christmas at his expense.

Haters!

Instead of actually writing something new, I'm just posting up my recent homework assignment. For my life development class I had to visit various places, one of which was a funeral home, and here's my one page response to the visit. I'm posting it because of certain red headed, excellent gift giving haters out there called me out on some comments my teacher made about the piece. The comments in question were "talented," "gifted," and "you should be a writer." My teacher might be out of her mind, but I dunno it'd made me feel pretty good.


Old Man’s Treasure

I spent about fifteen minutes inside the Hayworth Miller Funeral home. I had called the night before and set up a meeting with a gentleman, and when I arrived at the pre-determined time, they were seeing a customer. It was one of those out of the blue things, which is kind of how death works. They thought that if I waited a bit then they would get a chance to talk to me, and after I flipped through a Winston Salem Monthly magazine Wes came out and told me straight up that they weren’t going to be finished anytime soon, and that his best friend’s mom had just passed away, and it was going to take some time. Even though I didn’t get to see any dead bodies or watch them suck the guts out of anyone, which I probably would have enjoyed, I still had enough info on my impression of this place.

The first thing I noticed is the box of tissues they had laying around everywhere. On every surface was a box of tissues, which was the clue that this wasn’t your everyday office building, that and the church pews. Unfortunately, I’ve been to some viewings at Hayworth Miller before, and I say unfortunately not because it isn’t a nice place, because it is, but because it’s always a bit of a bummer when you go to the funeral home, hence the tissues. The waiting room is also the place where, during a viewing, the people can mingle or hob knob or whatever it’s called that people do at funeral home when they aren’t offering condolences and viewing the body.

The tissues in the waiting room, the interrupted appointment, and the burying of your best friend’s mom, all seem to sum up the life of a funeral director for me. Tissues equal sadness, what should have been a slow day becomes a busy day, meaning death strikes when it pleases, and finally, there comes a time when you have to bury someone that is close to you.

When I was in kindergarten my grandma died from Alzheimer’s disease, and ever since then I think I’ve been obsessed with my own death. In second grade I kept looking at an old science book that talked about the sun going super nova, burning everything, and then slowly winking out; leaving Earth a cold barren place. It’s easy to recall the red skies and boiling seas giving way to the eternal night and frozen land where nothing lives. Then in the 8th grade I was absolutely sure the Earth was going to end, even though the science book reassured me the sun wouldn’t burn out for billions of years. Still, the folks at church kept saying Jesus could come back at any time, cue my reading of the Book of Revelations to see what was going to go down. After that, I kind of mellowed out some, but I still have a fascination with dystopian futures and post apocalyptic literature and movies.
Even though the end of all things always freaked me out, death in my family wasn’t quite so bad. Not to say they weren’t sad occasions, but the events leading up to and after the funeral, usually involve a lot familial bonding along with good food and story telling. When my Grandpa died my cousin’s then wife became very upset at all the laughter going on in the house, because she was more used a dour mourning experience. However, we Cornatzer’s are great socializers and liars, so the events take on a more lighthearted atmosphere.

I was in the third grade when my grandpa died and my mom gave me the option of staying home or going to school, I wasn’t upset at the time about him being dead, but I didn’t know what to do, when my mom said my sister was staying home, I stayed as well, and I played a lot of video games over the course of a couple days. My grandpa meant a lot to me, when I rattled off crap about Spider-Man or ninjas he always listened and put up with me running through his house attacking imaginary super villains.

The weird thing about my grandpa is that he had his leg amputated, which isn’t so weird, until you learn he kept his leg in a freezer in the basement. Apparently there’s a passage in the Bible, or something he believed anyways, about having all your body parts when you get to heaven. Thus, in order to walk around in Heaven, he made sure he was buried with his amputated leg. There were countless afternoons I spent with my sister and my cousin daring them to go look at the leg.
After his funeral there was the rumor that money had been hidden in his house, so for the better part of a week most of my family looked over that house all over before the house was sold, and I remember sitting around day dreaming with my cousins and helping out on this grand treasure hunt. All that mingled up to death not being so bad, except for when I would lay in my bed at night and try to imagine would it would be like to cease to exist, or what it would be like to live forever, both of which scared me equally.

The funeral home just reminds me of people getting together to talk about sports or what’s going on in town, with the unpleasantness of having to hug people you haven’t seen in awhile, and then look at a body, that I keep thinking is going to wake up and grab me. Everyone says those bodies laying there look empty, but to me, they look like they’re about to spring into action, so I avoid the funeral home and funerals, but I love the family gatherings, maybe that’s why I like Christmas more than death. I’ll take a toy over a casket any day.