Big Damn Heroines
Mar 12
When Iron Man came out last year, I overheard this exchange between two women:
“The Gwyneth Paltrow part was particularly…blah.”
“Yeah, but that part always is. In those movies.”
The thing is, it doesn’t have to be. There’s a reason why so many people were thrilled about Karen Allen returning to the Indiana Jones franchise: she’s the only co-star who presented Indy with an equal, a fully fleshed-out partner in crime. There’s something to be said for taking “that part” — and let’s be real, we mean “the girl part” — and making it whole and interesting and something more than a collection of sighs and looks and pretty hair. There’s something to be said for making it matter.
But really, this is but a small piece of a more hulking issue in geek moviedom that’s been frustrating the hell out of me for a while now. Simply put, I thought we’d be beyond “the girl part” at this point. I thought that, you know, by the year 2009 we’d be seeing some legit superhero/big-time genre movies with female headliners.
Or, hey…scratch “some.” How about one.
The Dream eComics Reader?
Mar 11In my idle moments–all three of them–I spend time contemplating what it would take to provide me with the ultimate eComics reader.
I’m not thinking of webcomics, per se–I’m speaking of this huge stack of material I’ve "obtained" from the "internet." Also, the many PDF electronic comics now available from publishers like IDW, Slave Labor, and others.
Right now, I use my laptop and I tilt it on its side like a book, and I turn the screen orientation sideways, and it’s such an intriguing deception that I have actually FOUND MYSELF REACHING UP TO MY MONITOR SCREEN AS THOUGH TO TURN A PAGE THAT DOES NOT EXIST IN REALITY. Scary, I know!
This, though…were this to happen…damn. This would be, as they say, "teh schizz."
(Mock-up from Gizmodo via CNET)
Coming March 30…
Mar 10An event so historic, so massive, so all-encompassing that it cannot be contained on the Alert Nerd internet presence alone.
Holy Shit – Indiana Jones Story Notes?!
Mar 09
Via the Pulp 2.0 blog, Mystery Man on Film has an insane kind of holy grail PDF–a transcript of five days’ worth of brainstorming featuring George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Lawrence Kasdan breaking the script for the original Raiders of the Lost Ark. 126 pages of George & Stevie riffing with Larry Kasdan probably taking furious notes.
I cannot believe this exists. I can’t wait to read it.
Swamp Thing: Tefe, Not Alec
Mar 04
Confession: back when I was reviewing single issues of comics with some regularity, I didn’t really know how said comics were being received by the nerd masses. Well, at least “the nerd masses” beyond the five guys I went to the local comics emporium with every week.
This was because 1) I didn’t have very much time to dick around on the internet (or at least not as much as I do NOW, apparently) and 2) I didn’t really want my opinions to be influenced by anyone else’s and 3) there wasn’t so much stuff out there. Blogs were not A Thing yet, websites only sort of were, and message boards were…I don’t even know. They were there, but they still felt like something that only ten people actually knew about (and therefore, were probably home to a lot of sentiments I wouldn’t think of expressing anywhere now, not even on a padlocked Twitter account under a clever, not-related-to-my-real-name-AT-ALL alias).
All this is to say I had no idea that Brian K. Vaughan‘s Swamp Thing — circa 2000/2001 — wasn’t all that well-regarded. In fact, I don’t know if that’s even an accurate statement, I just know that it only lasted 20 issues, it doesn’t appear to have ever been collected in trade form, and Vaughan says something on his “farewell” page about how his next series will feature “more likable protagonists.” From what I can gather, some of the grumbling was less about what the series was and more about what it wasn’t: it wasn’t Alan Moore-esque and it didn’t focus on Alec Holland, who most folks think of as the Swamp Thing. Instead, it was all about his prickly teenage daughter, Tefe.
I’m glad that I didn’t know what the general reaction was at the time, because maybe it would have colored my from-the-gut perceptions. And I was totally freakin’ into the Tefe Holland Swamp Thing.
