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.
Chip Zdarsky (Hearts) Comics
Mar 04I’m sure you’ve seen this already, but just in case you haven’t, Chip Zdarsky (hearts) comics and is a genius.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love comics, but that’s mostly due to the fact that I can’t remember anything that happened to me before the age of eleven. There are flashes of events and feelings, of course, like seeing Uncle Alan and Crazy Carl wildly swinging knives at each other on our front lawn, or the sense memory of my mother’s wine & corn dog breath as she would lick my face to wake me for school in the afternoons.
[not for the easily offended, the squeamish, or those with a puritanical boss hovering over their shoulder in the workplace and reading every word that passes over their screen]
Graphic Novels to the Big Screen: What Next?
Mar 02The Onion’s AV Club has posted an article today suggesting 24 graphic novels that, hot on the heels of the super-hot Watchmen, should be turned into movies. And it’s an interesting list, with some good choices, some bad choices, and a missed opportunity.
I’ll start with the bad choice – I don’t think Ronin would make a good movie. I realize Frank Miller is a big thing in H’wood these days (slightly less big, after The Spirit, but a Sin City sequel supposedly in the works could offset the damage), but Ronin is one massive mind firetruck. 3/4 of it is begging to be made into a film, and the final chapter is enough to make any screenwriter toss an award statue through the giant picture window of his home on the Hollywood hills, and jump out after it. But hey – Lord of the Rings and Watchmen weren’t supposed to be filmable either.
The rest are up for debate – which do you like? (I think Concrete would be a great, if hard to pitch, film.) Which do you not agree with? Which do you think are missing?
Manga is conspicuously missing from the list, and that’s a shame – while it’s often assumed that manga can only become anime, I don’t know that this list discounts that possibility, but there is a strong suggestion that this is a Hollywood list – Japan isn’t invited. But the list also doesn’t discount the possibility of manga to live-action. And I’ve got a good possibility;
Written and drawn by Katsushiro Otomo two years before Akira, Domu: A Child’s Dream is a beautifully story self-contained in a Japanese apartment complex. A new child has moved into the the apartment with her family, only to find that strange things are happening. The strange things are being caused by a psychically powerful, and terribly senile old man, who is driving those with weaker minds to do terrible things. And then the little girl stands up to him, as she’s as powerful as he is. And all hell breaks loose on a level that puts The Matrix to shame.
I think a straight adaptation is long overdue, but I also think that a live-action version would do well. Even if the money-men can’t wrap their heads around a movie set in a Japanese apartment complex, there are American parallels to be found in the various apartment projects and inner-city projects. This story would work just as well there, maybe even better.
OK, your turn – what’s right and what’s wrong with their list?
