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Three Hobbit Films for the LOTR Fans = Trouble

Three Hobbit Films for the LOTR Fans = Trouble

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ew-hobbit-bilboFans of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings should be thrilled that The Hobbit, originally planned as two feature films, is now slated for three.  More Tolkien on screen is a good thing, right?

Surely yes, if what we are getting is indeed more Tolkien. But Jackson’s “bridge” film is not going to be more Tolkien, but more Jackson. And that is not necessarily an encouraging thought.

Due to contractual issues with the Tolkien estate — Jackson is unable to use material from The Silmarillion, The History of Middle-Earth, or Unfinished Tales — this “bridge” film will come from the appendices of The Lord of the Rings. Jackson wrote on his Facebook page:

“We know how much of the story of Bilbo Baggins, the Wizard Gandalf, the Dwarves of Erebor, the rise of the Necromancer, and the Battle of Dol Guldur will remain untold if we do not take this chance. The richness of the story of The Hobbit, as well as some of the related material in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, allows us to tell the full story of the adventures of Bilbo Baggins and the part he played in the sometimes dangerous, but at all times exciting, history of Middle-earth.”

The appendices are certainly a mine of information, but the stories they tell are scattered, patchy in places, and not written as straightforward narrative. To bridge the events of The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings in a film that neatly connects a series of disparate dots, Jackson must fill in gaps, construct dialogue from scratch, and so on. And that could spell trouble.

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Art of the Genre: When Music and Gaming Mix

Art of the Genre: When Music and Gaming Mix

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329302-rotk_2_3242_mouth_sauron_superI’m still far away from home, four weeks into a seven week stint that takes me all over the U.S. During the trip, I’ve had my fair share of adventures, but something I’ve truly enjoyed during the vacation is time spent sharing memories of my life with my son.

Many of these came in the form of gaming memories during my stay in my home town last week. For some reason, an old fantasy song got into my head as my son was jumping with my DM’s, Mark’s, niece on a trampoline. The song, ‘Towers of the Teeth’ is one of the two greatest Orc lyrical masterpieces ever. It comes from the Rankin/Bass version of The Return of the King.

Now in my mind, especially this version today, this is a very weak film, but the music is another story entirely. For those of you that don’t remember, or haven’t checked the link above, the song goes:

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Return to the Golden Age with Tales from the Hanging Monkey

Return to the Golden Age with Tales from the Hanging Monkey

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hanging-monkey4Tales of the Gold Monkey only lasted one season in the early 1980s, but the series has developed a steady cult following in the years since its brief network run. Dismissed as nothing more than an inferior small screen knockoff of the contemporaneous Raiders of the Lost Ark, the series has finally started to earn the recognition denied it at the time. While it took a Hollywood blockbuster to convince network executives to green-light the series, the proposal had been around since the 1970s and the show was conceived, like Raiders, in homage to the serials and classic adventure stories of the past.

As much as Republic Pictures cliffhangers were an inspiration and the tall shadow cast by Humphrey Bogart in the classic Treasure of the Sierra Madre undeniably fell upon both properties, the longstanding tradition of South Seas adventures from James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific to the fondly-remembered Adventures in Paradise series from the Golden Age of Television left an even more indelible mark on Tales of the Gold Monkey.

The concept of a bar in an exotic location which serves as a literal and moral crossroads for travelers, expatriates, and fugitives had its roots in Casablanca and Old Time Radio’s nearly forgotten Rocky Jordan series. Tales of the Gold Monkey’s pedigree and neo-pulp credentials establish it as far more than just another Indiana Jones clone as the short-sighted and uninformed wags of the day insisted.

Similarly 30 years later, the newly published South Seas adventures anthology, Tales from the Hanging Monkey is more than just an imitation of the 1980s cult series whose title it recalls.

The exotic South Seas bar serving as the nexus for the adventures of strangers whose paths would never otherwise cross is present here as much as it was in numerous Golden Age scripts, but Bill Craig has created something enchanting that is at once familiar and pleasingly fresh. The delights of New Pulp works such as this one are similar to discovering an OTR series you’ve never heard of and wondering why it isn’t better known.

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Goth Chick News: Going for a Ride with Ichabod Crane

Goth Chick News: Going for a Ride with Ichabod Crane

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image0061Until recently, we here at Goth Chick News have taken a long hiatus from commercial television. Although we readily agree there is nothing quite as frightening as reality TV, shows aimed at our particular genre were largely absent; that is until the viewing public fell in love with the likes of Walking Dead and American Horror Story, to name a few.

Lately, this tiny spark of cautious optimism has started looking like it just may catch. I mean, you can only watch so many reruns of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Twilight Zone before you give up hoping that anything made for the small screen will ever be worth staying awake for again.

Then this week comes word that the Headless Horseman may be cutting a bloody swath through not one but two television networks in the near future.

Insert tentative happy dance here…

First up is an adaptation from the gents over at Fringe, which itself has become a cult hit for Fox.  The network has given a pilot commitment to an adaptation of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow from Fringe creators and idea wonderboys, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci.

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No The Dark Knight Rises Review This Week

No The Dark Knight Rises Review This Week

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dark-knight-risesDear Black Gate Readers and all my friends at the site,

I’ve decided not to post a review of The Dark Knight Rises this week as I originally promised. I had planned to get a review up later today, after watching the film in the morning. Although I watched the film as planned, the horrible events in Colorado at a midnight screening of the movie last night have made it impossible for me to write about it at this time. A tragedy in a movie theater, a place where I’ve spent so many happy times in my life, strikes close to me. I tried to begin writing a review, and found I couldn’t. I hope, perhaps at the end of the summer when I do my wrap-up for the season, to speak a bit about The Dark Knight Rises. My thoughts are with the victims of this horrific tragedy and their families.

Goth Chick News: Get the Lizard Guys on the Horn: We’ve Got Them a Gig!

Goth Chick News: Get the Lizard Guys on the Horn: We’ve Got Them a Gig!

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image0021I only remember two things about the 1998 remake of the pop culture film Godzilla (and that’s saying quite a lot since most people don’t remember it at all).

The first is that it starred Ferris Bueller, I mean Matthew Broderick, in a role that was in no danger of making us forget his previous day off.

Second, I remember thinking how nice it was for Tri-Star Pictures to put the lizard effects guys from Jurassic Park back to work. Their unemployment benefits had very nearly run out since The Lost World wrapped in 1997.

Godzilla movies and their collective cheesiness have always been fun in an Ed Wood sort of way, but the 1998 version was cringe-worthy on a whole different scale: which is why I have always fantasized about ambushing Sarah Jessica Parker at a red carpet event to ask her how it feels to be married to the star of a cinematic pile of lizard poop.

And though such a statement might cause Ms. Parker to fall right off her $1200 pumps, it is clearly no such deterrent to the rest of Hollywood who apparently has never met a remake they didn’t like.

Get Industrial Light and Magic on the phone and let’s hope they haven’t chucked those velociraptor puppets…

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Black Gate Goes to the Summer Movies: The Amazing Spider-Man

Black Gate Goes to the Summer Movies: The Amazing Spider-Man

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amazing-spider-man-posterWith directing great superheroes comes great responsibility. I wish director Marc Webb knew this. Or perhaps directing superheroics on screen isn’t something the man is capable of.

Webb’s re-boot of Sony’s Spider-Man franchise is not an utter elevated train-wreck. If all you want is a bit of comic book action during the summer between The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises, then The Amazing Spider-Man is adequate to the task. I certainly can’t give it a worse rating than something like Battleship or Dark Shadows. It’s not a Batman and Robin. There’s that.

But as a Spider-Man film, and me speaking as a Spider-Fan, the The Amazing Spider-Man is a huge disappointment. It’s even a bit depressing. I’m glad I have the Sam Raimi films to bolster me, knowing that somebody has already done Spider-Man right, because otherwise this very unnecessary (except for keeping a lock on film rights) re-do of Spidey’s origin would be… okay, an elevated train-wreck. And to hear Sony, and even some fans, try to do revisionist history on the Raimi films as if they were off the mark — that’s painful. Yes, Spider-Man 3 had many problems, most of which were forced on Raimi by the studio, but it is still a better “Spider-Man film” than this one. The first Raimi film is a well-crafted, dead-on origin story, and Spider-Man 2 is just a goddamn great film. Raimi balanced Spidey’s drama with the crisp fun of his comics.

The Amazing Spider-Man is an overall mess, but there are two major problems that injure it. Before getting into that, here’s a fast rundown on its many other problems:

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Samurai 7: Swords and Sorcery with Killer Robots

Samurai 7: Swords and Sorcery with Killer Robots

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samurai-7It was my daughter’s 13th birthday yesterday. One of the things she wanted was the 2004 anime series Samurai 7, which her brother Tim gave her in a handsome Blu-Ray package.

As the parents of most young girls will tell you, it’s not enough to get them a few presents and a hug for their birthday. What they really want is attention. And what Taylor really wanted was for Dad to watch Samurai 7 with her.

Which I did. All 3.6 hours of Disk One, a full nine episodes. Let’s face it — the days when my teenage daughter will want to hang out with me are coming to an end; better seize them while I can.

I’m glad I made the effort to spend time with her. For lots of good reasons, not least of which was that Samurai 7 turned out to be a terrific piece of animated cinema. A lot more enjoyable than those two hours I spent playing dolls when she turned six, let me tell you.

I knew the basic premise before parking my butt on the couch. Like Yul Brynner’s classic Western The Magnificent Seven, Samurai 7 is directly inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 film Seven Samurai, one of the most influential films ever made.

A small group of peasants whose town is ruthlessly pillaged by bandits every year journey to the city to hire seven masterless samurai to defend their village. Desperate and poor, all they can offer these samurai is rice — and not very much of it.

Seven Samurai is set in sixteenth-century feudal Japan; Samurai 7 translates the classic story to a post-apocalyptic world of towering, decrepit cities and a blasted landscape dotted with the twisted debris of a recent war.

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World War Z Film Appears Headed for Armageddon

World War Z Film Appears Headed for Armageddon

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world-war-zZombie fans everywhere should be outraged at the hot mess that is the film adaption of Max Brooks’ World War Z. Bringing in a new writer to salvage a script after principal filming surely isn’t a sign of a healthy film, nor is delaying the release date by six months. But that’s apparently what has happened to the project.

For those that aren’t familiar with it, World War Z (the book) is written in the style of Letters from Vietnam or the war documentaries of Ken Burns, as a series of flashbacks told by survivors of the great zombie war. The best part is the multiple perspectives from survivors around the globe, which lend it a high degree of realism while allowing Brooks the opportunity to insert pointed political and social commentary. The zombie plague of World War Z is deliberately left unexplained — it starts in the heart of China, half-hinted as the result of some undescribed industrial waste leak. But beginning with “Patient Zero,” an infected, gray-skinned, 12-year-old-turned zombie, Brooks manages to paint a very convincing picture of how the plague quickly spreads and threatens to overwhelm all of humanity. Brooks has done his research on politics, world economics, plague outbreaks, military tactics and technology, combat fatigue, and climate conditions.  The result feels like history, an event that really happened (or, chillingly, could actually happen).

But the one-sentence description of the film on its IMDB page is a head scratcher:

A U.N. employee is racing against time and fate, as he travels the world trying to stop the outbreak of a deadly Zombie pandemic.

Trying to shoehorn the events of the wide-ranging narrative through one character’s perspective (apparently Brad Pitt) because it conforms to the conservative Hollywood hero formula is the safe bet, but an awful idea. According to the film’s Wikipedia page, the screenplay was written by Babylon 5 and Rising Stars creator J. Michael Straczynski, who identified the challenge in adapting the work as “creating a main character out of a book that reads as a UN Report on the zombie wars”.

Huh? Why is a main character needed? You’ve got a book that’s universally loved; granted changes are always needed to convert page to screen, but why ditch the one element that made World War Z so unique? Why even bother acquiring the rights to the book only to completely rewrite it, top to bottom, save for the obvious reason of cashing in on the name value? The conceit of the “UN report” on the zombie war works in the novel, and works really well. Zombies are red-hot right now and World War Z is the hottest zombie property this side of The Walking Dead. People will pay to see worldwide zombie carnage without a hunky male lead. Or at least I would.

Goth Chick News: Beware – The Tall Man Knows Your Name

Goth Chick News: Beware – The Tall Man Knows Your Name

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image008At a recent family function my 11-year-old nephew pulled me aside to say, “A friend of mine at school saw the Tall Man.”

Now it’s common knowledge among all the kids in the family, as well as their friends, that Aunt Goth Chick is conversant with all topics of the otherworldly variety. When they were all a bit younger I had a fabulous time not dispelling the notion that I was a substitute professor at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

As they got a bit older my role was to correct misconceptions about whether or not vampires were really afraid of crosses, or whether wolfmen actually turned all the way into wolves at the full moon.

But now, in that misty gray, pre-teen area between believers and skeptics, the local chapter of the Goth Chick Fan Club – Junior League needs to be handled carefully; take them too seriously and I could easily be sidelined as covertly making fun of them, not taking them seriously enough could result in the same.

And frankly, I enjoy my minor celebrity status as much as I enjoy being reminded of a time in everyone’s life when magic and mystery were still very possible and very real.

So even though I had never heard of the Tall Man, the seriousness in the little guy’s face told me it was something important and a topic that I, of all people, should be versed in. Luckily the arrival of dessert saved me from needing to make an in depth response and bought me the time to do a little homework.

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