parakkum

One of the hallmarks of Final-Fantasy-style computer RPGs, as far as I'm concerned, is convoluted plots that lose my interest along the way.

I don't play FF-style games, mind you. I watch littlestar play them, lose track of what's going on as I wander into and out of contact with the game, then read summaries and find the plots just plain old goofy.

I just read Crisis on Infinite Earths.

It was sitting there in the used book store, where I have a giant pile of credit. I picked up Crisis and American Virgin as I was curious about both.

When Crisis rolled around initially, I wasn't really a reader of DC comics. I was pretty firmly stuck in with the X-Men and G.I. Joe, and read nothing else. My closest contact with Crisis was when I picked up issue 12 of Secret Wars. That's pretty tangential, since Secret Wars was, I've been told, Marvel's attempt to have a similar cross-cutting, all-encompassing comic event in the vein of Crisis.

The goal behind Crisis was pretty solid. DC found itself with a messy complex of older and more recent continuities. While I'm a strong advocate for simply pressing the giant reset button rather than trying to find and "in story" way to fix continuity issues, at the time the idea of actually making it a grand event was reasonably novel and decent. It gave you time to pay proper attention to fans of some of the continuities you'd be removing, effectively "honoring" the characters they loved by writing their removal into the story.

That said, and without meaning any disrespect to Marv Wolfman because it was 1985 and comics were written that way, the overall story reminded me every step of the way of those overly convoluted, hard to follow, hard to swallow plots from Final Fantasy and its computer RPG brethren. Much like the various FF games, the core concept is solid, but the final execution is needlessly labyrinthine. In both cases, I find myself saying, "Really?" rather more often than I'd really like.

It also doesn't help that DC of the time was rife with goofy names. Monitor? Good name. The world-destroying, event-causing enemy being the Anti-Monitor? No. Psycho Pirate?

Psycho Pirate?

So, I didn't find the story all that engaging overall. Some of that comes down to writing that fits its era -- much like the Chris Claremont X-Men dialogue that I loved as a kid but can barely read now -- but a lot of it also comes down to a plot that was oddly overdone for the key story elements it was trying to hit.

Of course, if I were a long-time DC comics fan in 1985, I might well have been completely rapt.

Posted by parakkum at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Opening this weekend, starring the talented Jimmy Tsai, and directed by the talented Jessica Yu.

Interview with Jessica Yu

Interview with Jimmy

I first met Jimmy back in college, as part of the UC Martial Arts Program. I'm not at all surprised to see him showing up as a writer and actor on such a cool-looking movie.

Posted by parakkum at 10:15 PM | Permalink

Over in this entry on the Guide to Literary Agents blog, they're holding a "Worst Loglines" contest.

A logline is the single-sentence blerb that sells a passing audience -- be it people reading TV Guide or a movie producer -- on the concept of your movie.

You can submit up to two entries, each a single logline at sixty words or fewer. The first prize is a professional query letter critique, a phone call to discuss the critique and a plan to get published, and copies of the 2009 Guide to Literary Agents and 2009 Writer's Market.

Sounds like fun. The deadline is the end of August.

Posted by parakkum at 02:48 PM | Permalink

Heidi MacDonald reports in The Beat today that the Garfield-minus-Garfield strip, which has been living in my RSS reader for a while, is coming out in book form.

If you haven't seen it, Garfield Minus Garfield is Dan Walsh's remix of Jim Davis's comic that removes the strip's namesake from the strip (as well as Odie and almost everyone else), leaving simply Jon Arbuckle and his lonely observations about life. Here's the NYT quote:

[the strips] “create a new, even lonelier atmosphere for Jon Arbuckle…Jon’s observations seem to teeter between existential crisis and deep despair.”

Naturally, this is a huge copyright violation, but apparently Jim Davis also thinks it's pretty funny, so Random House -- the publisher of normal Garfield books -- will publish a book showing in parallel a series of G-m-G strips and their unmodified sources.

Pretty cool. We'll give Jim Davis the final word:

Garfield creator Jim Davis was intrigued by—and pleased with—the concept. “I think it’s an inspired thing to do,” Davis said. “I want to thank Dan for enabling me to see another side of Garfield. Some of the strips he chose were slappers: ‘Oh, I could have left that out.’ It would have been funnier.”

Posted by parakkum at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Immediately following the Pushing Daisies panel, the stars of the show were ushered down to the exhibit hall for an hour-long signing session in the Warner Brothers booth. Although I appreciate that they wanted to have a crowd at the booth and to be able to show the stars in the big screens up above, the end result was choked aisles and a generally clogged mass of sometimes cantankerous folks. You can see the swarm around Lee Pace in the second picture below:

The signing line was already closed when we arrived, most likely filled by people who had failed to line up two hours in advance (!) to get into the panel. Even some of those who were turned away from the panel didn't make it into the line. littlestar was initially disappointed, but we hung around the booth anyway, diving in for pictures every so often, until WB and convention security flushed people away from the signing area (and then repeating this cycle several times for the next hour). Following the one-hour signing period, Lee Pace came over to the waiting crowd of people who hadn't made it into the line, said hello, posed for some pictures, and signed some things despite being told not to.

The Daisies crowd was then ushered upstairs for a series of interviews and a bit of general taking in of the convention floor from above.

After the interviews, Lee came down into the crowd again at a fan's request, signing some more things and hanging out as long as his handlers would let him, before the whole group was ushered off one final time.

You can check out the rest of the signing photoset by clicking here.

Posted by parakkum at 03:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

On Saturday, we put a lot of effort into making it into the Pushing Daises panel (on the plus side, the panel preceding it was very interesting, so it wasn't a bad thing that we ended up sitting through that one as well).

The full cast showed up, along with show creator Bryan Fuller and executive producer Barry Sonnenfeld. This post is mainly meant to link over to my extensive Flickr photoset from the panel. Some highlights:

All the major stars, along with two executive producers and the show's creator.

Lee Pace and Anna Friel being embarrassed by Barry Sonnenfeld as he tells the story of how they talked a director into letting them play the kinetic (and potentially calamitous, in context) card game Snap during an establishing shot for an episode.

Kristin Chenoweth singing part of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" at a fan's request. She must be primarily made of lungs, because her voice is amazing and HUGE.

Bryan Fuller answering a question. The majority of audience questions came to Bryan, often from fans of his earlier shows such as Wonderfalls and Dead Like Me.

Also, Chi McBride is a very, very funny man.

Lee Pace explains that acting roles do affect you emotionally, and that's one reason he likes Pushing Daisies so much -- he goes home happy. Throughout the panel, people emphasized that a core concept of the show is that you're just happy to be watching it.

This was a fun panel, filled with people who seem to be happy to be working together and working on the show.

Posted by parakkum at 10:27 AM | Permalink

As reported by Heidi MacDonald at The Beat, Dreamworks is sponsoring free wireless access in the non-Exhibit Hall portions of the Convention Center, as a promotion for their upcoming movie Eagle Eye.

Posted by parakkum at 09:19 AM | Permalink