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Goth Chick News: Checking In at the Hotel Transylvania

Goth Chick News: Checking In at the Hotel Transylvania

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Hotel Transylvania TV-smallIf only this place really existed, I would never again suffer a Black Gate company road trip, trapped in a zeppelin with a load of less-than-hygienic fan boys, but instead would be enjoying my suite in the goth girl’s equivalent of the Four Seasons.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, my all-time favorite animated film Hotel Transylvania will be coming to the small screen, courtesy of Canadian company Nelvana Enterprises.

Debuting in early 2017 (venue pending), the series will focus on Mavis, the daughter of Dracula, expanding on her teenage years and her friends at the world-famous monster five-star resort.

News of the TV adaptation comes ahead of the sequel Hotel Transylvania 2 hitting theaters this fall, on September 25.

And speaking of the sequel…

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Fantasia Diary 2015, Day 1: Miss Hokusai and Ant-Man

Fantasia Diary 2015, Day 1: Miss Hokusai and Ant-Man

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Fantasia FestivalThe Fantasia International Film Festival opened in Montreal on Tuesday night, and this year, like last year, I’ll be covering it for Black Gate. This will be the 19th edition of Fantasia, one of the world’s largest genre-oriented film festivals, and I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of movies. As I did last time, I’m planning to keep a diary-style record discussing the films I see and also recapping some of the special events around them — a lot of screenings are accompanied by presentations, or by discussions with the creators, and I’ll pass along my notes on those.

There are over 135 feature films being presented at Fantasia this year, and looking over the schedule it feels like I want to see almost all of them. The nature of scheduling makes that impossible, but I’ll be striving to look at as many as I can. I’ll be trying to catch films I miss in the festival’s screening room, where I’ll be able to watch them on a computer monitor. That’s a different experience than seeing a movie on the big screen with a crowd, but it’s better than nothing.

Two theatres at Concordia University’s downtown campus serve as the main venues for the festival this year, and on Tuesday I saw two films in the big Hall Theatre. Both movies were warmly received by the crowd, and both seemed to me to be great successes in very different ways. Both, as it happened, were adaptations from comics. The first was an anime called Miss Hokusai from Japanese director Keiichi Hara, an adaptation of Hinako Sugiura’s Sarusuberi, about the daughter of the famed 19th-century artist Hokusai and her relationship with her father. The second was Marvel’s Ant-Man, directed by Peyton Reed. I’ll have more to say about that further below (short version: it’s much better than I’d have imagined an Ant-Man movie could be, and instantly became one of my favourites of the Marvel movies). First, a look at Miss Hokusai, and Fantasia’s opening ceremonies.

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A Brief Guide to Space Race Documentaries

A Brief Guide to Space Race Documentaries

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While I liked the space race movies I wrote about here recently, my preference is for documentaries. Fortunately, there are quite a few good examples of this breed. This isn’t a definitive listing, but rather a few of the better known space documentaries that are worth a look.

For All Mankind 1989-small

For All Mankind (1989)

It’s probably no accident that For All Mankind appeared in 1989, exactly two decades after humans first set foot on the moon. It focuses on the Apollo missions that culminated in several trips to the moon and features the usual array of archival footage, along with comments by Michael Collins (Apollo 11), Jim Lovell (Apollo 8/13), and 11 other Apollo astronauts. All of which is set to appropriately spacey music by ambient music pioneer, Brian Eno.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Sherlock Season 3 – What Happened?

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Sherlock Season 3 – What Happened?

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Sherlock Season 3Now, it’s certainly possible that I’m clueless (and I do LOVE Without a Clue), but I don’t think I’ve got the following all wrong regarding BBC’s Sherlock.

Except for the grumpy old man contingent (‘Get Sherlock out of modern day!’), fans of Holmes, including scholarly geeks like me who make their own newsletter, overwhelmingly liked this new show and the three episode season one.

I don’t know too many Holmes fans (other than GOM group: see above) who disliked this show. Even those who were moderately approving seemed pleased and intrigued with it and willing to tune in for another season.

So, season two came along, and more huzzahs and approval. I don’t remember Holmes friends of mine thinking it was going south. I certainly didn’t: I thought the first two seasons were brilliant and fun updatings of the great detective. I found cool references to Doyle’s tales all over the place.

Once again, no comments that it jumped the shark. Folks were absolutely looking forward to seeing how Holmes survived his Reichenbach Fall. It was one of my five all time favorite tv shows and probably battling Justified for number one.

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Patrick Rothfuss Confirms Bidding War For The Name of the Wind

Patrick Rothfuss Confirms Bidding War For The Name of the Wind

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The Name of the Wind-smallThe Hollywood Reporter is reporting that several major Hollywood studios are in a high-priced bidding war for Patrick Rothfuss’s debut fantasy The Name of the Wind. Perhaps most interesting, the publication notes that, while the book has been around for eight years, the recent frenzy was likely triggered by the upcoming third novel, The Doors of Stone, which presumably provides the series with adequate franchise potential for studios looking to replicate the runaway success of Game of Thrones.

Warner Bros., MGM and Lionsgate are among a group of studios locked in a heated bidding war for Patrick Rothfuss’ mega-best-selling fantasy novel The Name of the Wind, book one in The Kingkiller Chronicle series.

Nearly every studio — also including Fox and Universal — is interested in the book, and the pool of suitors is expected to expand. The Name of the Wind centers on Kvothe, a magically gifted young man who grows to be the most notorious wizard his world has ever seen. But unlike most literary bidding wars, The Name of the Wind will see top brass from each studio descend on Comic-Con in San Diego this week to court Rothfuss…

Like George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, another fantasy series of books that sat idle for years before generating Hollywood interest, The Name of the Wind has been around for nearly a decade. The book was published by DAW in March 2007 and spawned a second book, The Wise Man’s Fear, in 2011. A third book, tentatively titled The Doors of Stone, is expected in 2016, and likely sparked the renewed interest in The Kingkiller Chronicle. The fact that the series is seen as having enormous franchise potential [has] stoked the frenzy.

Rothfuss previously optioned the series to New Regency Prods, who were developing it for 20th Century Fox Television, but the option recently lapsed and the rights reverted to the author. Rothfuss confirmed the news on his Facebook page (in a post that’s generated over 1,000 comments in 9 hours), saying “So. Yeah. Here’s some news.”

Read the complete article here.

Goth Chick News: Not All Marketing Immediately Shines…

Goth Chick News: Not All Marketing Immediately Shines…

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It is an amazing time to be a fan of Stanley Kubrick’s body of work, and in my case, specifically a fan of The Shining.

Thirty-five years ago in May, The Shining debuted in US theaters and redefined the term “psychological horror.” Kubrick, the film’s director, was already an unparalleled auteur due to his previous work that included 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange.

2015 has seen a wealth of previously unpublished information about Kubrick and his work, including Centipede Press’s massive 752-page compendium, The Shining: Studies in the Horror Film and the currently-touring Stanley Kubrick exhibition.

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A Brief Guide to Space Race Movies

A Brief Guide to Space Race Movies

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Apollo 13 poster-smallYou could sweat the details, but it’s probably safe to say that the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union lasted nearly 12 years. The Soviets kicked it off on October 4, 1957 with the launch of the little satellite that could, the one known as Sputnik. The Americans fell behind on nearly every front in those early years but then grabbed the brass ring on July 21, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon.

Nowadays, four decades after humans last walked on the moon, space exploration fails to stir the public imagination like it once did. Ticker tape parades for astronauts are a thing of the past, and Canadian Chris Hadfield is arguably the closest thing to a “celebrity” astronaut to come along in decades.

But it was not always thus. If you’d like a fictional perspective on how things were in the pioneering days of space flight, you could do worse than to check out the six movies listed below.

Marooned (1969)

Marooned seems to have slipped into something like obscurity in the nearly half a century since it was made. It’s a movie that concerns an Apollo-like mission which runs into difficulties that prevent them from re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. Thus, they are marooned in orbit around Earth with a limited supply of oxygen.

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Goth Chick News: 31 Shades of Malcolm McDowell

Goth Chick News: 31 Shades of Malcolm McDowell

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31 A Rob Zombie Film-smallYou know how some people talk about seeing something that scarred them for life?

I mean really scarred – like way worse than any episode of My Strange Addiction, or “casual Friday” in the Black Gate offices in July.

This happened for me in my early teens when during a sleepover, my friend snagged her Dad’s secret, “unrated” copy of Malcolm McDowell in Caligula.

Though I’ve seen things since that could be categorized as “more disturbing,” nothing has come close to those vomit-inducing scenes burned into my 14 year old retinas.

Of course, as you probably guessed, in the coming years I got seriously busy seeking out every bit of cinema that McDowell had ever done and eventually found my way to Cat People and A Clockwork Orange. If you only know McDowell from Star Trek or Entourage, you definitely need to check out his earlier work.

It takes a special talent evoke an audience’s gag reflex with that much panache.

So it really came as no surprise that today, Rob Zombie’s Facebook page made the following announcement.

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Is the Grail a Force For Evil? Understanding Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Is the Grail a Force For Evil? Understanding Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

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What better quest story to unpick than this classic Indy adventure?

The Holy Grail – purportedly the last cup that Christ drank from, echo of the zombie-making Cauldron of Rebirth – is it actually a force for evil?

Until the 20th century, its main fictional outing was in the King Arthur cycle when its effect on the Round Table is akin to introducing the knights to crack-cocaine: the fellowship scatters, those who achieve the quest – the best knights – go straight to Heaven (read, die), Lancelot gets badly injured, and Britain ends up littered with the graves of knights who would be more useful protecting the realm from the King’s enemies.

Then we come to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

I’m looking at Pulp and Pulp-inspired stores because I’m working on a retro-Space Opera, provisional title “The Eternal Dome of the Unknowable” (Sarah, this is ALL your fault). What better quest story to unpack than this classic Indy adventure?

What I found is rather odd.

Here’s the plot — I’ve added story questions in the form Question Answer But Now…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: On Screen Before Norwood

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: On Screen Before Norwood

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PreTwentiesGillette1Screen depictions of the great detective have been a staple topic here at The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes. And because you assuredly read this post (actually, you might have: this has turned out to be my most popular PloSH post. I think it’s an error in the counting macro, but I’ll take it!), you know that in 1921 Eille Norwood and Stoll Films began their very popular series of Holmes silent films.

So today, we’ll look at the pre-Twenties career of Holmes in films.

There had been plays featuring Sherlock Holmes in 1893 and 1894. Then, William Gillette made his lasting debut as Holmes in his own play in 1898. Which you know since you read this post (I’m awfully self-assured people read this column, aren’t I?).

The restored Gillette film was screened in San Francisco the first week of June and will be available on DVD this Fall (I don’t plan on paying $34.95 for a copy, myself. I’ll wait until the price comes down.).

Then, in 1900, we saw the first appearance of Holmes in the fledgling media of film.

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