hoping to over the christmas break, hoping to also avoid spoilers in the meantime!

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Wow. I think she’d be more powerful than Charlton Heston and Will Smith combined!

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Finished the John Scalzi-edited anthology Metatroplis a few days ago. This is an anthology he started by asking the writers to collaborate around a common theme – the future of cities and the dystopian, unusual or unpredictable forms they may take in the coming decades.

This is a great read – all good stories but to me the jewel (acknowledged by editor Scalzi directly in the comments before it) is the final story – ‘To Hie from Far Cilenia‘ by Karl Schroeder– it takes cyberpunk and effectively ‘overlays’ it on the real world we live in – truly an innovative story and i’d be surprised if elements of it aren’t already happening….I will definitely have to seek out some of that guy’s writing!

Anyway, definitely recommended!

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So for Prisoner fans, there is so much, yet so little. Here we have a great, completely enigmatic series that only lasted one season and was on tv the year I was born(!). So far ahead of its time, yet its prescient story is (literally) ever more real to us today, whether people choose to admit it or not.

But with all good stories, we are left wanting far more, and Patrick McGoohan – now sadly no longer with us – largely clammed up on the topic in his life and career after The Prisoner. And the recent 2009 attempt at an AMC remake of The Prisoner – despite a great Six (Jim Caviezel) and a potentially great Two (Ian McKellen) largely foundered in my view – too many attempts at distracting side plots without the deeper meaning(s) of the original, sadly.

But….in the late 80s, DC Comics published a mini-series that purported to ‘explain’ what happened to Number Six and The Village post-TV series. It was later put into a graphic novel – Shattered Visage – in 2000, which I only recently became aware of – I got a copy and have now read it twice (it’s a quick read). But it took the Wikipedia article to really begin to dig beneath the surface – like the series, I think the story is fairly deep, and actually even may shed some light on the VERY enigmatic (and often heavily criticized) ending episode of the series (Fall Out).

I won’t recap anything here, save to say i’ll need to re-read the story multiple times to dig through all the stuff noted in the Wikipedia article, to be sure. But for Prisoner fans, I think this definitely merits a read – or Six. 🙂

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pretty weird…

Welcome to Dismaland: A First Look at Banksy’s New Art Exhibition Housed Inside a Dystopian Theme Park

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William Shatner made an incredible mosaic of selfies in tribute to Leonard Nimoy

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she forgot ‘the’ Spice melange….but I bet the Spice Girls never went to Arrakis…..

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So, a couple years ago I got the Black Mirror 2-season series on DVD from Scarecrow and watched them. All of these shows are very, very dark and take a Twilight Zone anthology approach with a bit of Max Headroom (‘twenty minutes into the future’) and then really take a dark, dark turn. Tales from the Darkside – eat your heart out.

At that time, there was one more episode done – ‘White Christmas‘ that I hadn’t watched yet (it came out a few months after the series season 2) – finally saw it today. This has to be among the darkest of all the episodes, with a double-twist ending that hits you right between the eyes. Boom. Not for the easily depressed, or those that believe all these dadburn dystopian shows lately are actually LEADING us to those same dystopias! This is just really messed up stuff.

Anyway, for those who dare, i found it on YT (linked below, with Portuguese subtitles) or you might be able to actually watch it on demand from UK Channel 4.

good luck.

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One of the baddest of the all-time bad guys passed away over the weekend – Christopher Lee, at 93. RIP, Lord Summerisle…..

Christopher Lee dies at the age of 93

Wikipedia bio
IMDB

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So finally saw the new Avengers movie Sat evening. I liked it, despite my causing us to get there late and having to sit way up front (never optimal) – there were a number of funny parts and as always, the effects were well done. Definitely an entertaining movie overall.

But there were a number of things that definitely make this a lesser movie than the first one, much the same way the two Iron Man sequels are definitely lesser movies than the first one – to wit (Spoiler alert):

1) This movie follows on the timeline from Captain America: Winter Soldier, so SHIELD is dead yet Hydra still somehow exists (if memory serves, they still had Loki’s sceptre at the end of that movie) – and this gets to the first problem – how many big, secret conspiracy orgs STILL exist in the world, for pete’s sake? Especially those claiming to have existed since WWII (started by the Nazis – who else)? So that’s a bit farfetched to begin with.

2) Ultron is a good bad guy, even if a bit too sardonic (James Spader, eat your heart out) but he ‘springs into being’ a bit too quickly for the plot – one minute he’s parts on a series of tables, the next he is a fully-formed, morphable android with hundreds of copies? Where are the Koch Brothers who bankroll all this? Too fast.

3) Why is Thor the only ‘god’ seemingly interested in getting Loki’s gem back? Wouldn’t Loki himself have an interest in it? Wouldn’t Odin have a way to ensure Loki helps Thor and takes the gem back to Asgard where it belongs?

4) As pointed out by Kerewin – Scarlet Witch fulfills the role of ‘Storm’ in this movie – seeming a wimp, then at one point seems to be among the most powerful of all? You can’t have it both ways, guys.

5) The whole fight between Iron Man and Hulk was silly and a distraction. Why didn’t Hulk just run away? And it’s getting WAY too convenient for Tony Stark to just whip yet more Iron Man suits, ever more custom and more powerful, just out of nowhere whenever the plot demands it? Lame.

6) I liked the attempts to give these characters more than one dimension, but really the only three that have their heads on are Cap, Hawkeye and Black Widow, and the latter two are just badasses, not even enhanced. And of course the appearance of SLJ helps right the ship (mentally and then later, literally).

I think the main thing about these comic movies is whether or not they make you want to watch them multiple times. The first Iron Man – definitely yes, have seen it several times. The first Avengers – same. This one, like the recent CA movie and the Iron Man sequels – not so much.

Still worth a watch though….

Other voices:
Metacritic
Rotten Tomatoes

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