Doomsday ain't what it used to be, only more so

When I was much younger I was into role-playing games and wargames. I was also very concerned about the threat of nuclear war. A friend of mine told me “The Road Warrior” was the most awesome movie ever, but I was too young to go see it on my own, and my mom wouldn't take me. Then I found the game Car Wars. And I thought that this must be what the Road Warrior is about. Then finally I was old enough to see the movie in a revival theater in a double feature with Blade Runner (which I had also never seen).

I was totally blown away. This may have been my first post-apocalypse movie ever, and it was certainly the most exciting. Who knew the end of the world could be so exciting? The fast pace, the sense of speed, the production design, the action, it all left a very big impression on me. I watched that movie every time it came to the revival theaters (this being years before owning a VCR. I hunted down every bit of information I could fins about it,and when I was at a friend's house who had cable, snuck down to the living room to watch Mad Max for the first time.

I can quote chapter and verse on those movies. I would talk about nothing else for years. I even adapted Shakespeare's MacBeth to tell the story of the Nightrider. At one time I had three different Road Warrior T-shirts. My girlfriend called me her “Little Road Warrior.”

I then hunted down post-apocalyptic films like a fiend. 42^nd street gave me “Warriors of the Lost World” “Warriors of the Wasteland,” and “Steel Dawn.” Revival theaters gave me”Night of the Comet,” “A Boy and his Dog,” and repeated showings of “Mad Max” and “The Road Warrior.”TV gave me “Damnation Alley,” “Dead Man's Walk,” “The Day After,” and “Weeds.” Videotapes gave me “Defcon 4,” “Radioactive Dreams,” “After the Fall of New York,” “Wheels of Fire,” “Six String Samurai” and many more. I still have yet to find a copy of “No Blade of Grass.” I would judge every movie by how realistic the post-apocalyptic landscape was, how believable it was that the world had gone to hell, and how exciting it was compared to “The Road Warrior.”

In time, the Cold War ended and the fear of nuclear holocaust faded. With it, the post-apocalypse genre fell out of favor. Recently, however, it has come back with a new scourge: zombies/plague.

I am not the sociologist/historian to fully analyze the whys and wherefores of this development, but I suspect it has something to do with th acclimation of the world to the AIDS epidemic and the popularity of the zombie movies created and inspired by George A. Romero. There is probably something about the purity of zombies as an adversary: they have no soul so there is nothing wrong with killing them (again,) they are unstoppable, and they are ugly; like vampires without the sex appeal. Thus they can appeal to horror fans who don't want their terror interfered with by soul searching and sexual tension.

There is also something appealing about exploring the story of last survivors of mankind. They pick through the ruins of the old world, using familiar items in unfamiliar ways. Stylings frequently have a s&m/punk/heavy metal look, which is exciting to look at. There is usually a lawlessness that resembles the Old West, and who doesn't like a good western? There is also the opportunity to explore fright and terror, as with the collapse of civilization, there is nothing stopping the rampages of the truly depraved.

So put the appeal of the post-apocalypse film together with the modern concerns about disease and the popularity of the living dead, and you've got a new genre of film, the zombie/plague post-apocalypse film, who's most notable entries include “Land of the Dead,” “I am Legend,” “28 Days Later,” and the “Resident Evil” series.

Now put all these films together into one, and make that film not quite as good as the best of them,. And you've got “Doomsday,” which I saw last night at a midnight screening. Just about everything in it is borrowed/stolen from another movie. All of Scotland in quarantined due to a plague, like New York in “I Am Legend.” 20 years later, the land is scorched, like in “Reign of Fire,” and the plague appears in London, like in “I Am Legend” again. A team is sent in to Glasgow to find the doctor who had stayed there working for a cure, like the search for the last fertile woman in “After the Fall of New York.” They travel in large armored vehicles like the ones in “Damnation Alley” with a crack military team equipped with two-way video devices, like in “Aliens.” Also like in “Aliens,” most of the team is killed and their vehicles destroyed early. The survivors are led through a “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” type culture but escape, and find another society living in a recreated medieval culture (one of the few bits I could not place the inspiration of). There is a “Gladiator” fight scene, and then our heroes escape again, which leads to a “Raiders of the Lost Ark” type storehouse, which leads to a highway battle scene that is straight out of “The Road Warrior.” There is also a subplot involving the government that echoes “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes” and “Dr. Strangelove.”

In the near six decades since the post-apocalypse film first appeared, action, horror, and violence in films has seen a steady increase in intensity. This has been due to improving technology, makeup technique, and the drive to one-up each previous film. “Mad Max” and “The Road Warrior” were breakthrough films in that regard, and future car chases and post-apocalypse action films were all compared to them, frequently failing.

“Doomsday” does not fail in trying to be harder, faster, and more intense than any similar film before it. Where earlier movies may have tastefully or strategically looked away from a beheading or a body on fire, this one showed it right on screen, front and center. With the fast pacing and quick cuts of the car chae, the pace was made even faster and the cuts even quicker. However, this extreme graphic violence and frenetic camera work and editing did not really improve the film. Instead it distracted from the story and sometimes made it too confusing to know what was going on.

I must especially say this about the car chase scene in the end. Several notes that were hit in “The Road Warrior” were blatantly copied, but were either lost in all the chaos, or were simply not done as well or were too obvious.

The thing that I thought was most specifically interesting was the medieval culture. As a well-known medievalist, I of course dug the idea of a post-apocalyptic society that chose to bring back an age of chivalry. However this culture was not one of goodness and hope that the heroes had been looking for. Instead it was ruled by a cynical madman, and ultimately was just as ruthless and evil, in its own way, as the Glasgow cannibals. Whereas in every medieval movie you would see a skeleton in a cage hanging from the castle walls, in this one, you actually saw people on the verge of death in cages right next to them. The cruel Darwinian philosophy of the ruler of this kingdom was just an excuse to kill, in as entertaining a way as possible, outsiders. The modern primitive tribal punk s&m-styled culture in Glasgow also killed outsiders in as entertaining a way as possible for them, they were merely more simplistic about their reason, their hatred of the outsiders.

So the film gets point for effort, and for showing that they know what they were trying to do, and the film did not lack pace. But if there was a lesson in there, something about a warning for the future and about how it is bad to kill people, or even let them die, that in that way we lose our humanity, but it was kind of lost in the graphic violence and hyper-kinetic editing.

Hipsters on the Hill

First, let me say that “King of the Hill” is the most respectable of the Sunday night cartoons. The characters in it all based in reality. Although they are caricatures, they are not impossible characters. As such, you can come to truly like and respect them, as opposed to simply being amused by them, as you would just about everyone in “The Simpsons,” “Family Guy,” and “American Dad.”

The lead character, Hank Hill, is the “anti-Simpson.” A reviewer pointed out that he, and the show, genuinely represented middle-class virtues. This is true. The man works hard in one of those jobs that you never think about but society as we know it could not live without. He sells and delivers propane. He believes in his product, and doing his job well. He accepts people for who and what they are, warts and all. He tries hard to see the good in people, no matter how little he understands them. And he genuinely appreciates things that he likes because he likes them, not because it is “cool” or “hip” to like them.

In tonight's episode, Hank's wife Peggy sells a house in a largely Mexican-populated neighborhood to a “hipster.” This hipster had wanted a house that was “real,” in other words, a neighborhood with no white, non-ethnic people, much like the neighborhoods I have moved into every time I have moved since I was 18: Harlem, Williamsburg, and Greenpoint. This, of course, was immediately followed by a wave of young people with questionable fashion sense playing kickball, skateboarding, and opening art galleries.

It seems that “real,” meaning “non-white” implies that there is a phoniness to white culture. That you can only be “real” is you are in a minority Perhaps this attitude is in the tradition of middle-class teenage rebellion against the apparently stifling limitations of middle class culture, against the emphasis on moderation and predictability that the suburbs became when WWII veterans came home, got married, and started raising kids. They felt that by moving into an “ethnic” neighborhood, the could get more “real.”

The truth is that, yes, suburban life is limiting. The culture that has built up there is largely a product of commercial marketing. But if you want to find a place to live that is not so much, just moving into one with no white people is not the answer.

The tradition of young people with artistic inclinations moving into ethnic neighborhoods can be traced to the American Bohemian movements of the 20th century. Artists have always lived on the edge of poverty, and thus have sought affordable housing, and showed a willingness to “rough it” in exchange for cheap living space. These spaces frequently turned out to be abandoned industrial and blighted ethnic ghettos. In the 1950's and early '60's, this took them to neighborhoods of New York City like Greenwich Village. In the '80's it was the East Village and TriBecCa. In the '90's it was Williamsburg, etc., etc. What would happen then is the process we now know as Gentrification.

Gentrification is the process by which a “real” neighborhood becomes a product of corporate capitalism. First come the artists, who hold events in the loft spaces of converted factories, etc. Then come the coffee shops and stores set up to serve the artists. Next come the wealthy people who want to see what the artists are doing. Then come the children of rich and middle class people who want to be artists. Then follow the entrepreneurs who open more fashionable coffee shops and boutiques to serve the reich people coming to see the artists and the children of the rich and middle class. By then the landlords have realized that they are sitting on a goldmine and start raising the rents, pushing out the original tenants and the first wave of artists, who now can no longer afford to live in the neighborhood they “revitalized.” By the time that's done, the only businesses who can afford to open there are large corporate chain stores like Starbucks and Victoria's Secret.

This process has become so efficient, streamlined, even, that it can bypass some of the steps, such as the artists moving in, and go straight to the children of the rich and middle-class wanting to live like artists, and that is what happened in this episode of “King of the Hill.” And looking at this particular story, that is what I find annoying about hipsters. In their worst manifestations, they are not really artists, they don;t really want to be artists, they just want to live like them.
There are three types of people. There are those who do things, like artists, cowboys, and recreational bowlers, for instance (doers). Then there are those who think it would be interesting or fun to do these things once or twice (tourists). They take art classes, go to dude ranches, make a date with friends to go bowling. Finally, there are those people who think it would be fun or cool to be the person who does these things. Those are hipsters. They are annoying because the ruin it for the rest of us, the doers and the tourists.

Doers can respect tourists if they have an interest in setting up an industry for them, That's why art classes and dude ranches exist. They take the tourists' money, give them what they paid for, and everyone goes home happy. Then the hipsters come in.

The hipsters walk into a place and say “Look at me! I'm being hip because I am doing this!” without truly digging what it is they are doing. The bad haircuts, aggressively out of shape bodies, and thrift-story little league t-shirts that don't fit are all symptoms of this. Real artists don't have time and money to get haircuts, work out, and buy clothes, that is why they look the way they do. By imitating this look, they are practically insulting the artists, as well as driving up the price of second-hand t-shirts. When they take over the ballfields to play kickball, they are not doing it because they really enjoy kickball over any other recreational sport, it is because of the irony of playing a kids game as a grown-up. They are not saying “I love this game,” they are saying “I love being being the person that plays this game.” When they do suburban middle-class things class things like set up lawn chairs and drink beer and have Tupperware parties, it is not because they are seeking the serenity that comes from a satisfying suburban middle-class lifestyle, ti is because it is fun to be ironic, and it is ironic that these “rebel artists” are doing suburban, middle-class things. And when they moved into the Mexican immigrants neighborhood, it was not because it was all they could afford, it was so that they could say “Look at me! I'm cool enough to hang with ethnic types and I'm bringing hip culture with me!”
Hank was in the neighborhood because one of his co-workers wanted him to say some words about his daughter on the occasion of her 15th birthday (a celebration in Mexican culture). There he discovered the best fish tacos he had ever tasted and other aspects of Mexican immigrant culture that he really liked. However, the hipsters had come in, acted like they were “bro's” of the locals, and playing their weird, depressing music in the local cantina. Then their presence raised the property values, and Hank's friend had his rent raised.

When Hank discovered that the fish taco he had enjoyed was now replaced with salmon, he realized that his wife's success as a realtor was spelling the end of a way of life of his friend. Peggy realized her mistake and together with their friends, they made the neighborhood appear as white and normal as any normal, white neighborhood. They showed up at the doorstep of a hipster couple with a casserole saying “welcome to the neighborhood!” They put on sweatsuits and went walking for exercise while pushing a baby carriage. They had their middle-aged white guy in an undershirt act like he had just bought the house next door. Soon the hipsters packed up their lawn chairs, art galleries, and kickballs and moved out.

That's the sort of outcome that could only happen on television.

Captain Zorikh
http://www.captainzorikh.com
http://www.bigapplecon.com

RIP Gary Gygax

A father is gone.

The world that we in the fantasy fan community enjoy, one in which wizards and warriors, elves and dwarves, magic and monsters and yes, dungeons and dragons are common parlance owes a great deal of debt to the man who placed a dragon in a wargame.

When I was 11 year old I had heard of D&D, but had never actually seen the game. Then someone in school brought out the three books and the half-dozen dice and started a campaign. That was it. Everyone in 7th and 8th grade was hooked. Every spare moment of time was taken up by D&D adventuring. Eventually this expanded into Traveler, Boot Hill, Gamma World, Time Tripper, Car Wars, and more games that I can remember. In that school being what we would call today a “geek” or “dork” was cool. It was hip. Social status was based on being the first one to have a new game, or the best game that week.

We designed our own character sheets. We drew up our own characters. We created our own gods and monsters. “The Emperor” was the All-Powerful-Force of Evil (yes, inspired by Empire Strikes Back), “Enigma” was the All-Powerful Force of Good (from the Micronauts comic book, I think). I thought of creating an All-Powerful Force of Neutrality, but kept on going back and forth on it. My character got turned into a Gollum and stretched out to 7 feet tall on a rack. Someone created an assassin with an atomic bomb. Someone else tried to use a saving throw when the bomb went off.

We drew maps. We designed weapons. We collected miniature figures and placed them on graph paper. We designed dungeons. We collected dungeon modules and dice. Our imagination was stoked and our social interactivity was very, very high.

When I left that school and moved to a public high school, I found the social situation there very different. I never was able to get back into gaming, though I still collected everything about Car Wars for some years (as I was a big fan of post-apocalyptic movies like The Road Warrior). Eventually I found the Society for Creative Anachronism and was able to live a historically-based, live action version of D&D, and for a time sneered at those who rolled dice to gain their skills, while I actually worked for it.

I never saw more than a few minutes of the D&D cartoon, but I followed the comic strip advertisements in the backs of comic books in the early 1980's. When the Dungeon and Dragons movie finally came out, I was very excited. For decades there had been films and TV shows that, to one degree or another, I felt were trying to bring the D&D world to life, and I, in turn, had tried to turn those movies into games (you can see a list that includes many of those movies at http://www.geocities.com/historicalmovies). Now someone was actually going to make that movie for real. The movie was poor, but fun. Though the acting was uneven, the writing corny, and the Wayans brother character the most politically incorrect ethnic stereotype since JarJar Binks, it was great to see all the swordfighting, the flying dragons, and lets admit it, Thora Birch in those fantasy costumes.

There was a sequel to that movie, however, Dungeons and Dragons, the Wrath of the Dragon Gon, that finally did it right. A team of adventurers was assembled to go on a quest to retrieve a magic item and save the kingdom. Each character represented a different race or class of character. There was problem-solving, trap avoiding, magic using, and exciting battle action, sometimes all at the same time. Characters of differing alignments had to learn to work together. Some did not make it, but those who did found they had grown and gained skill, treasure, or power. Gygax was interviewed in the “special features” of the DVD of that film, and admitted that he was happy with the way that film turned out.

Although he lost control of the game and company that he founded, he kept active in the industry, and obviously loved creating games. Role playing games have brought many of us together, given us a common social bond, and in many cases, enabled us to get valuable life experience. Though some make the joke about how D&D geeks are socially atrophied nerds who can't deal with the real world, it has given many lived, and our culture, a richness and vitality, a passionate escape, a source of pleasure and cause for social gathering that the world would be poorer without.

Now the father of those games is gone, and we are poorer without him.

Captain Zorikh
http://www.captainzorikh.com
http://www.bigapplecon.com

A New Highlander?

It seems that the Highlander is back, only this time he doesn't have a sword and he's a cop in New York. Or is it Forever Knight without the fangs?

The latest in a series of immortal adventurers is John Amsterdam, eponymous hero of New Amsterdam, a new series premiering tonight on Fox (Channel 5 in NYC). It seems this fellow saved the life of a Native American girl back in 1642 and was granted immortality as a reward. The further gimmick is that he has not left the colony he was living in at the time since then. That means he has seen the city now known as New York from its earliest days as a Dutch colony to today.

As a New Yorker and a history buff, I think this is a great opportunity to show the history of New York, which is fascinating, if not exactly glorious. I'm certain we will see flashbacks to Five Points since tho popularity of Gangs of New York, but I would love to see the 1950's of West Side Story, the late 1970's birth of Punk, the British occupation during the Revolution, and the corruption of Tammany Hall. It will also be interesting to see if they portray Robert Moses and the way he changed the face of the city.

Since this also reminds me of those other previous TV immortals, I am reminded how similar those two series, Highlander and Forever Knight, were Both had a centuries old immortal who fought agains injustce, had historical flashbacks, and a large car from the 1960's Both had a goofy sidekick and a female co-star in a profession not traditionally occupied by females. Both of these shows came out at the same time and as the years progressed, both wound up moving from one network to another, from one showing time to another, until eventually they died.

I wondered if the similarities were based on what the writers and producers thought the audience wanted, or if it is just a natural balance that such stories are supposed to have. Let's see what this show has, and hope that it does well.

Captain Zorikh
http://www.captainzorikh.com
http://www.bigapplecon.com

A perfect "Wife Swap"

I normally don't watch TV shows like "Wife Swap." As most of you should know, or will know, as more of these media-related blogs come out, I usually watch things involving swords, spaceships, soldiers, or superheroes, but I was surfing through the channels after the News Hour on PBS and I saw a woman in a room filled with swords, dragons, and other fantasy things.

It turned out that this was an episode of "Wife Swap," (http://abc.go.com/primetime/wifeswap/index?pn=index) which actually did a recruitment drive at the Big Apple Convention last November. They toook a "perfect wife" from Kentucky and swapped her with a professional woman with a family of ghost hunters in Illinois. The Kentuckian lived in a family where she did all the work around the house while the husband went hunting and the daughters did whatever they wanted, and the stepdaughter did not get along with the dad. The Illinoisian went to work every day and her husband stayed at home and did everything around the house. For a week each wife had to live as the other wife had.

In both cases the women could not stand it. The Kentucky family expected the wife to do everything, cooking, cleaning, picking up dicarded cloithes, getting the kids ready for school, etc. The Illinois dad insisted on doing all the cooking and cleaning, even selecting the wife's clothes before she went to work in the office. The Illinois family was also vastly more educated than the Kentucky wife, and claimed to be psychic, and she felt very ignorant, even intimidated, in their presence.

By the end of the week both wives had had enough. When it was their turn to set the rules of the house, they insisted that things go the exact opposite. The Illinois husband would go to work, using his psychic abilities to help detectives solve crimes, and she would insist that they use no big words, like "inclusive." The Kentucky family would pick up after themselves, do their own laundry, and the husband would wash the dishes.

These rules met with mixed success. Then the second parts of the "changes" kicked in. The Illinois son, who had actually called the Kentucky wife "unintelligent," was sent on a blind date with a simple country girl. The Kentucky husband and his stepdaughter (who had much unreconciled hostility, had to role-play being each other to see what it was like.

The boy actually had a good time and thought the girl was an interesting person, but found out that he had hurt her feelings by being so insensitively smarter than her. The psychic dad found immediate success and fulfillment in work with a detective agency. The dad and stepdaughter realized how much they were hurting each other and how much they actually loved each other. The Kentucky family started helping the wife with the tasks they had always let her do.

In the end, the wives returned to their families and the two couples met and post-mortemed their experiences. In both cases, the couples were brought to tears. The Illinois dad realized how much he missed being appeciated and fulfilled the way work at the detective agency made him feel that way. The Illinois wife realized that her family needed her at home helping around the house and showing affection to her loved ones. The Kentucky dad realized how much hard work it is to do what he had always considered "women's work," and becaused he loved his wife, would be a better husband, and a better man, by helping, and not taking it for granted. The Kentucky wife realized that she should not let the family let her do all the work, and that it was actually better to stand up for therself, because she loved them.

My god, that was so frickin' perfect. Why can't all the relationship imbalances in our lives be resolved like this?

Thoghts about Golden Compass

"The Golden Compass" was a "big event movie" by all standards. It had massive media push, a first-rate cast, cutting-edge special effects, and an incredible display at the San Diego Comic Con. By all appearances, it seemed like it would be reaching for the same audience as "The Chronicles of Narnia." It presented a world of early-20th century technology and culture with fantastic creatures and young children on an amazing journey.

But the buzz about the movie was that it was based on a book that was an anti-religious answer to "Narnia." Now I will admit right here that I do not read as many of these epic fantasy novels as some people do. Lately all my reading has by necessity had to be about Captain Marvel, comic book history, and American social history (to see why, go to my website http://www.captainmarvelculture.com). My big reading years for fantasy and sci-fi were in High School, when I worked my way through the Foundation, 2001, and Dune series. I started "The Fellowshiop of the Ring" in 7th grade but found it hard to get into somewhere around the Inn of the Prancing Pony. I read a lot of medieval and Arthurian literature after high schoool due to my involvement in the Society for Creative Anachronism and some courses in college. So I have not read Narnia, Compass, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter or most other famous and popular book series that everyone else seems to have these days.

"The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe" was read to mne in 3rd grade, though, and I do go to most fantasy movies when they come out. I read much of the criticism, and engage in discussions with fans and active readers of these series. I am aware that Narnia was a Christian parable, that Aslan represented Jesus Christ etc.

I am not a Christian, and am critical of certain effects that religious faith has on society. I have seen dogma get in the way of everything from simply having a good time to scientific inquiry to life-saving medicine. I have also seen faith unite people and inspire them to suffer through adversity and do deesds of great good. I also recognize that the story of Jesus fulfills many of the hallmarks of a Campbellian universal hero. The return from death, near death, or seeming death of a great and noble warrior/leader/king/hero is always a crowd-pleaser. Therefore, I can enjoy Narnia as such a magical fantasy adventure.

If the Golden Compass was a story that critiques religion and promotes science, that point was kind of lost in the translation to the silver screen. The establishment of certain story elements, such as everyone having an animal that represented their soul, talking polar bears, flying sorceresses, the seemingly magical "dust" that connected universes, and the McGuffin of the title, the Golden Compass itself, all set up a fantasy world where science as we know it did not apply. Thereofre when the religious establishment in the world of the film tried to stifle scientific exploration of "dust," it seemed as much like a coflict of the state religion against the true faith as much as anything else.

The rest of the movie fulfilled all the requirements of a Campbellian hero journey, and a magical child's adventure, that any science vs. religion debate was just lost.

That having been said, the writing felt a little stilted and unrealistic. I mean would you really trust someone who came along and gave you all that exposition that Sam Elliot gave when he meet the girl? The repeated special effect of the use of the Compass go tiresome. The Polar Bear fight was awesome, though.

First post

Hey folks. I have wanted to share my thoughts about the various medeia that the Big Apple Convention is involved in, including comic books, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and pop culture, TV shows, movies, pro wrestling, literature, websites, games, live-action role playing, etc. So here it is.