* MoCCA is this weekend! I haven’t missed one since the festival’s inception and this year will be no exception, though I will most likely waste at least part of it wandering around the empty halls of the Puck Building wondering where everyone went after heading down there on autopilot. (They’ve relocated the show to here.) I think I’ll have some comics available for purchase courtesy of the Partyka crew and Matt Rota. And if you see me, be sure to say hello–I’d tell you what my hair is going to look like but that’s anybody’s guess at this point.
* Also on the MoCCA beat: Tom Spurgeon suggests 25 things to do at the show, while local yokel Heidi MacDonald recommends some restaurants and bars in the new venue’s neighborhood.
* Clive Barker has a Twitter! On it, he breaks the news that Martyrs director Pascal Laugier is no longer attached to the Hellraiser remake. (This is the second time that the remake has lost the director of a high-profile extreme French horror movie–last time around it was Maury and Bustillo, the guys who did Inside.) He also complains about the obstinancy of Morgan Creek, the studio that cut Nightbreed, either lost or sat on the deleted material for years, and refuses to allow the creation of a Director’s Cut now that it’s been found: “NIGHTBREED will always be ‘that dumb movie where Barker tries to make the monsters the good guys because he’s queer.'”. Mostly, however, it’s a stream of awesomely Barkerian musings about the eroticism of his grandmother’s Bible and suchlike. Go, follow. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)
* Speaking of Barker, The Vault of Horror’s B-Sol shakes his fists at the heavens over the shoddy treatment Barker has gotten from Hollywood recently with projects like The Midnight Meat Train and the proposed Nightbreed Director’s Cut. Barker’s career is littered with similar coulda woulda shoulda incidents, from Nightbreed‘s original handling to the dissolution of the Abarat deal with Disney. I think the sad fact of the matter is that Hellraiser‘s modern-classic status and Stephen King’s endorsement notwithstanding, Barker is simply not a mainstream taste, even by horror standards. I’m sort of amazed his work has as large a following as it does.
* My pal Kiel Phegley speaks to Geoff Johns about Green Lantern and the upcoming event comic Blackest Night for Publishers Weekly. I really like the sell-out of all the various Lantern Corps t-shirts at New York Comic Con being used as a data point.
* Oh, terrific, They’re remaking Total Recall. Maybe they can make it less crazy! Wouldn’t that be nice! (Via Dread Central.)
* Paul Hornschemeier is taking commissions. Extremely reasonably priced commissions at that. I’ve got some ideas.
* Torture Link of the Day: Vice President Dick Cheney personally oversaw at least four congressional briefings on the torture of detainees. I’m sort of amazed at the extent to which he was really personally invested in and enthused about torturing people. (Via Marcy Wheeler.)
* Finally, I’m not nearly as hard on the Star Wars prequels as most people I know. I enjoyed all of them, I thought Revenge of the Sith was an honest-to-god great movie with tons of weird stuff going on, I think the duel at the end of The Phantom Menace is one of the all-time great movie fight scenes, etc. etc. etc. That said, there are any number of missed opportunities a hardcore Star Wars fan such as myself can point to without resorting to insulting George Lucas or Hayden Christensen or Jar-Jar Binks or whoever else you want to make into the heel. For example, the movies were set in a time where there weren’t just two or three living Jedi, but hundreds or thousands, so as a guy with a Rebel Alliance insignia tattoo on my right arm I can assure you that what people like me really wanted to see was a Braveheart-style battle of tons of lightsaber-wielding Jedi against either tons of lightsaber-wielding Sith or tons of jetpack-sporting Mandalorian knights (the Boba Fett guys). Instead there were fights with robots. This trailer for the upcoming Star Wars Old Republic MMORPG delivers something the movies could have and should have but didn’t. Which is awesome to see, finally, but a little heartbreaking that we’re seeing it for the first time in a commercial for a video game.
Remaking TOTAL RECALL?!
WHY MESS WITH PERFECTION?!!!
I am serious!
Yay! That’s prolly the 3rd time I’ve seen that Star Wars trailer today!
This has all happened before. And it will all happen again. 🙂
I remember there was a brief scene in that third Star Wars movie where they showed some kid trainee for a few seconds that I guess had managed to survive being slaughtered and I suddenly wished that we could have seen that kid’s story over any of the stories they decided to give us.
I really need to work on that teleporter. Would love to go to the show, but NY is too many miles from here.
I really need to work on that teleporter. Would love to go to the show, but NY is too many miles from here.
And remaking TOTAL RECALL seems about as sacredelicious as remaking ROBOCOP.
I think something that never gets taken into account is how Total Recall may be a crappy movie when seen at home on DVD but seen on dollar night in a run-down movie theater is high art that no remake could hope to match.
I still remember seeing Total Recall and there’s this thing in this other dude’s stomach and it tells Arnold to grab its hands and some guy in the back screams out, “Jesus Christ! Do I *have* to?!?”
Total Recall is by no means a crappy movie when seen at home on DVD provided it’s the meat in a Robocop/Starship Troopers sandwich and you’re surrounded by other Wizard staffers and you’re stoned.
You buried the lead.
That’s a lot of qualifiers.