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I've been anticipating the Summer 2008 movie season ever since I found out that's when The Dark Knight opens. When I read that's also when The Incredible Hulk and IronMan open, as well, I realized this might be the most awesomest movie ever for us comic nerds.
I loved Batman Begins, so I can't wait for the next installment. I hated Ang Lee's Hulk(no matter how many no-it-was-good lectures Doug makes me sit through) but now with a new director, new cast(Liv Tyler, Tim Roth, and Edward Norton as Bruce Banner!) and a new direction I am eagerly awaiting it. And even though I never was that big a fan of IronMan in the comics, everything I've heard about it makes me think it might be pretty darn good. So, the potential for three good, maybe even great comic book movies in one summer just thrilled me to no end.
But then, after coming across the first photo of Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones for Indy IV, I checked out the release date--May 2008.
Oh.
My.
God.
Batman, The Hulk, IronMan, and Indiana Jones, all in a few months?
I am speechless.
Ok, I've been listening to--and thoroughly enjoying--Bob's role as DJ on XM Radio's Theme Time Radio Hour show. I open one of the shows I have on my harddrive and then sit down to work, and Bob is no better companion to work to. He's funny as hell, silly, and obviously wildly enthusiastic about the music he's playing. It's like having the coolest music professor in history give you personal lessons in What To Listen To.
Anyway, occasionally Bob reads "e-mails" from fans. I put that in quotes because I can't quite tell how much of a put-on these are. One time he was reading an email supposedly from George Clooney, more frequently someone will be writing in leading him into the exact song he's about to play. Other times they sound very real, like they just might be from somebody out there in Radio Land listening to the show.
But during today's show, the subject being "Fools", he read a supposed email from someone named Matt Murdock.
Ok, some of you reading this are thinking "Matt Murdock? aka Marvel superhero Daredevil?" (a lot of the people who read this blog think in declarative sentences) Anyway, yes, that's what I thought! But then I figured, hey, there could be somebody with that name. It's not like its Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne, names that everybody, comic readers or no, would be familiar with.
Anyway, Bob goes on, reads the letter, asking about who the first person was to go down Niagara Falls in a barrel(that being a foolish thing, you see) and then he claims this Murdock guy is from Hell's Kitchen, NY.
*
*
*
Ok, Bob, now wait just a god-darn second. Matt Murdock from Hell's Kitchen, the setting of the Daredevil comic? This has gotta be--
...and then Bob gave a history of the Niagara Falls guy, ending it with "He was the first famous daredevil."
Well, that settles it.
Does Bob Dylan, my hero, read comic books? This is almost too much to comprehend. What's next, he leaves comments on my Aquaman Shrine?*
*Let's hope so!
dear hardball-
i did what i said i would do--not watch the 6/26 show because of ann coulter's appearance. i thought i'd give matthews and the show a chance, so i tuned in for a little bit for today's show.
but after having to mute the sound for ten solid minutes, i gave up. having ann coulter on, and then continuing to talk about it the next day, to me means hardball is not interested in any sort of meaningful political discourse. i'm done with the show, for good.
rob kelly
I don't care what the context, no way would Captain America (or Spider-Man, even) pose next to war criminal Donald Rumsfeld. Cap represents the best of America, Rumsfeld the worst.
And on a side note: I think Marvel needs to protect their characters' images a little better. What's next, Ann Coulter joins the Avengers?
I didn't watch it, but its all over the web and the news how Elizabeth Edwards called into Hardball and ripped Coulter a new one.
She's got guts, this lady. I like Elizabeth Edwards way more than I like her husband, actually. Can't we get her to run for president, then women could vote for her and not Hillary and still feel like they're breaking the old-white-men-as-president thing?
Good for you, Elizabeth. Don't let that Sack of Crap That Thinks Its A Human Being get you down.
This is the email I just sent to hardball@msnbc.com:
dear hardball-
with the booking, and relentless plugging of, ann coulter on today's show, you've guaranteed that i will not be watching it! and who knows? maybe i'll just stop watching the show all together.
thanks for freeing up my late afternoons!
rob kelly
I know that Indiana Jones IV is not going to be as good as Raiders(what, after all, could be?). We all know that.
Nevertheless, this photo makes me positively giddy.
I listen to a lot of audiobooks. I'm in my car a lot so I can listen a seven or eight-hour-long audiobook in about a week. I like non-fiction and hearing(literally) people's stories. After a really good one you feel like you've spent time with the protagonist and it can be a very personal experience.
This is the one I just finished--If I Am Missing Or Dead, a true-life tale of a woman growing up and navigating through the world of relationships with men, and about how her one of her sisters, Aimee, had the same problems, but they ran so deep that she ended up being murdered by her boyfriend. And she left an envelope directed to the authorities because she had guessed ahead of time that it might happen.
But the majority of the book is about the author, Janine Latus, and her history of relationships with men; about how badly they treated her and about how she didn't have the self-reliance to realize she didn't need to put up with it.
It begins with her father, who was insenstitive at best, cruel more accurately. He would belittle his daughters, about their appearance and makes sex jokes that were wholly inappropriate for a man to make to his children. When Janine is almost molested by a neighbor and she tells her parents, the father's reaction is "don't tell anyone else otherwise people will think your a slut." This was when Janine was thirteen.
She goes from man to man, each new one promising only love and then quickly turning into controlling monsters, one even going so far as to beating her up so bad he broke two ribs. The book is, as you can probably tell, pretty rough-going. But Latus' writing style is tight and effective, and within just a few minutes of listening to the first disc I was hooked. Janine was born about ten years before I was, so she was living in pretty much the same society I was, which made it seem even more compelling to me.
After each disc, I would start reflecting about how these men's behavior made me feel. Lord knows I've tried--try--my best in the relationships I've had, but of course I'm blind to some things. Listening to one horrible story after another, I got mad at men at general for being such sex-driven, insensitive, controlling pigs.
Hopefully it'll make me a better man, seeing the world through this woman's eyes for a while.
I think I need to stop watching Chris Matthews' show Hardball. I pretty much watch it every day to catch up with what's going on, even though I don't agree with a lot of Matthews' conclusion or style. But what the hey.
But he's having Ann "Smell of Brimstone" Coulter on Tuesday's show. That's bad enough, but I've had to endure the last two days where he's practically foaming at the mouth promoting her appearance, talking about the "wonderful" Ann Coulter and "how great she is."
I know TV shows need ratings, fine. But it made my stomach turn watching him fawn all over her. Anyone who has Coulter on is simply not serious about debating politics in an adult, constructive manner. They'll have her on, hoping/praying/knowing she'll say something outraegous, and then they'll pretend to be outraged. How does she calling some Democrat a fag or a terrorist or perhaps (if Ann's testosterone is really raging) a fag terrorist help people figure out what's really going on?
You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding.
I owe George Harrison a lot.
It was George who was the driving force behind the creation of the Traveling Wilburys, being the calm center of a group with an impossibly legendary line-up: himself, long-time pal Bob Dylan, new friend Tom Petty, co-producer Jeff Lynne, and idol Roy Orbison.
I had never really heard any Dylan music until one of the guys who lived in the Clinton House(think a crack den with a working pay phone) during our first year of the Kubert School played their then-fairly-new album Volume One.
After listening to it a few times, I found that I really loved it, but that my favorite songs--"Dirty World", "Congratulations", and "Tweeter and the Monkey Man"--happened to be all sung by the same guy, Lucky Wilbury aka Dylan. I soon bought this album for myself, then after really getting into it, I bought my first solo Dylan album--1989's Oh Mercy--and I was off and running to finding the soundtrack to my life! And all because George Harrison needed a new B-side to a single and didn't want to do it all himself.
The two Wilbury albums, Volume One and 1990's Volume Three(ah, that George), have just been reissued after being out of print for years, along with a mini documentary and some Wilbury videos.
The music is as good as always, and the documentary--shot by friends of George's at the time of the making of the first album--is really neat because its about as real as you're gonna get with these guys. You see them kid around, walk around the house they were recording in, and sing together in the studio. You even get a glimpse of something that, even after hundreds of hours of watching Dylan on video, I don't think I've ever seen before--Bob, in a recording studio, singing a song, changing the words as he goes. Way cool.
I am a little perplexed at how this set was composed, since its been marketed as a sort of "complete" Wilburys set, yet it makes a few mistakes--it lists the outtake, never-released songs "Maxine"(sung by Harrison) and "Like A Ship"(sung by Dylan) as being recorded for Volume One, when in fact they were recorded for Volume Three. It leaves off other outtakes that I know exist('cause I got 'em!), like an all-Dylan-vocal version of Volume Three's opening song "She's My Baby".
Even more strangely, on the Wilburys Videos DVD, it doesn't include the video for the song "Nobody's Child"(I have that, too), which was done for a charity benefit album. And the final video, for Volume Three's "Wilbury Twist" is an alternate version that pretty much just features the Wilburys playing the song. The version that played on TV at the time, though, featured lots of fun celebrity cameos and even had Bob dressed up in a funny costume, hands over some headphones during a verse in the song about turning your lights down low and your blindfold on.
I know that last part seems unfathomably obscure, but I remember even at the time, thinking that the "Wilbury Twist" song was really silly, and I sort of pictured the other Wilburys having to badger Bob into actually singing a verse on this thing. But when I saw Bob dressed up for the video--the only one who does--it made me feel good, that Bob was still enjoying himself, willing to be just silly. So when that part is missing from the video included in this set, it made wonder who was in charge of putting this set together!
News just broke that NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg has officially changed his party affiliation from Republican to Independent, which everyone seems to think means he will run for President.
I have to admit I don't know much about Bloomberg, from what(little) I've heard, I like. When there was the occasional possible-terrorism scare(the time a small plane hit an apartment building, the time a weird chemical smell wafted over parts of the city), I saw him on the news handling the scare calmly, and rationally. He told people not to panic, and that if something broke that indicated there was a threat, they would announce it. Wow--a leader actively not trying to keep the electorate in a perpetual state of fear. Imagine.
Also, he's done a million times better at race relations than the Gestapo-like feel of Guliani. When there was a police shooting, he didn't always hunker down and side with the police, if the evidence indicated they were at fault.
And in more minor matters--he doesn't take a salary as Mayor(sure, he doesn't need it, but he could take it if he wanted to), he lives in an apartment in the city, not in the Mayor's mansion, and he's actually listed in the Manhattan Telephone Directory.
Plus, the citizenry of New York--a famously liberal city--actually likes him and the job he's doing, from reports I've seen. And not like him the way they liked Guliani--i.e., hated him until 9/11.
I don't know if I'd vote for him(tho I think I would if the Dems picks Hillary), but I hope he runs.
God, I love this picture.
Saw this on SuperheroHype, courtesy Entertainment Weekly: the new Bat-Suit to be seen in next year's The Dark Knight.
Looks pretty cool, a lot more functional than the suit he had in Batman Begins, which I guess is the idea--Bruce Wayne is constantly refining his equipment as he gets more experienced. Apparently it's also more comfortable to wear for Bale, which is good since that'll probably help him want to keep making these Bat movies and not have to be replaced by Val Kilmer.
One quibble, though--will we ever get to see the classic bat-in-a-yellow-oval chest thingy?
Dear Sara,
I've never heard of you before, but I just found out on the news that you and Harriet Miers are being called to testify about this whole attorney-firing thing.
For your sake, I want you to do something when you go. If Harriet is there when you are, take a good hard look at that face. That's your future, Sara. That's your future if you decide to chuck all notions of integrity and decide to buy into the Bush Loyalty Oath crap, because once you do its for life.
You're still young, Ms.Taylor. You can testify honestly, get the hell outta the White House, and go do other kind of work, and forget about this sad chapter in American history.
Or you can cop a squat and piddle all over the Constitution, all in the name of loyalty to King Dubya, like all his loyal subjects have to do. And then when you're sixty, you can realize what a sad joke you've become, and strain hard to remember the young woman who went out into the world and wanted to make it better, and wonder "where did I go wrong?"
It occurs to me its been a while since I did a Johnny update!
She had her sixth and final water therapy session last week, and after her evaluation the doctor concluded that she's about as recuperated as she'll get for now. Her muscle mass on her left leg is now almost as much as her right, and he said the remaining will be done normally over time. She's running, jumping, and moving like she did before all this.
We can continue to take her to water therapy if we'd like, just to give her extra exercise, something I think we're going to do. And she may even go back to agility training in August if everything goes smoothly.
But she seems to be on the right track. She's even been eating her Mommy's shoes like the old days!
Someone hypothesized on Andrew Sullivan's blog that, dream of dreams, Colin Powell could/would/should switch parties and run as Obama's VP.
And just yesterday on Press the Meat, Russert asked Powell would he support the Republican nominee? Powell's reply? "I will support the best person I can find." Hmmm.
Powell is the pretty much the only guy from the Bush team to come away not absolutely despised by the 60% of this country and, you know, the rest of the world and probably even the Universe. He's got experience. And while he still has a lot to answer for (that UN presentation--I've done grade-school book reports that were better researched), this might be a--dare I say?--unbeatable team.
There's been a lot of fun made of this logo for the 2012 Olympics. And sure, its deserved--this thing is hideous.
But I feel for the poor graphic artist who came up with it. I, like most of the other professional artists I know, are pretty quiet folk and don't want to cause a lot of attention. Most of us just want to be home, working on our stuff, and get paid for it. Sure, we want our name to get out there, but mostly just to insure we get more work. I can only speak for myself, but my first thought when I landed my NBA 2004 All-Star Game gig was, "hey, this'll help me get more work."
So I can only sympathize with the embarassment at being the artist(s) behind this piece, which is now being derided on places like YouTube, CNN, and all over the world. That's the kind of fame you don't want. I can imagine how many people had to sign off on this, tugging and pulling on it. I've worked on projects that have been so fussed with by editorial(and beyond) that at a certain point I was so sick of the thing I was willing to do whatever they wanted, no matter how ugly I thought it was, just to get it over with. I'm betting that's what happened here.
I just hope they got paid well.
Wow, two a-hole homophobes lose their jobs on the same day!
But I thought you had to be, like, smart to work at NASA.
I couldn't stomach sitting through the whole thing, so I watched it in bits and pieces.
So after Tancredo practically foamed at the mouth talking about making English the National Language, and McCain followed it up with "Muchas Gracias" I remembered why I still sometimes like John McCain.
This is the leaked first poster for I'm Not There, director Todd Haynes' "bio-pic" of Bob Dylan.
This movie seems so uncommercial, I can't believe it really got made--Dylan is portrayed, over the course of his legendary life, by no less than seven different actors, like Christian Bale(Batman as Dylan!), Heath Ledger(The Joker as Dylan!), Richard Gere, and Cate Blanchett. Yes, Cate Blanchett.
Dylan allowed Haynes full access to his music, so obviously Haynes did something right. I guess my only fear is that the movie is too inside, understandable only to those who know Dylan's life/career inside and out. After all, the title of the film itself--I'm Not There--is taken from one of the rarest, least-heard, never-officially-released (or even finished!) songs in Dylan's catalog.
And this poster, while really neat visually, probably doesn't tell anyone anything unless you're familiar with Bob's legendary "Subterranean Homesick Blues" video. From left to right, we've got someone I don't recognize playing Contemporary Bob, Blanchett as mid-60s "mod" Bob, Bale as late-50s rockabilly Bob, and Ledger as a Bob I don't exactly recognize.
But of course, just like I was for Masked and Anonymous, I'll be there!
Biden: I like a guy who seems pissed off sometimes--trying to work in the government under Chimpy and Darth Vader for six years would probably do that to you. He has some great ideas and forceful way of getting his point across. I like how he had the guts to refer to that idiot Gen."Gays Make Me Nervous" Pace as "dead wrong." You go, Joe.
Clinton: She seemed good tonight, I have to admit. Relaxed, yet serious, at times actually controlling the debate.
Dodd: He seems like a nice man, with a long respectable career, but frankly he puts me to sleep. His answers are pretty dull, in both style and substance. I think he needs to pack it in soon.
Edwards: He still seems a bit phony to me. Every time I see his wife, who seems genuine and direct, it makes me reflect how slippery he can be, and tonight was no exception. And anyone who voted for the war back in '02 has zero moral authority to look down on other candidates. Just saying "I'm sorry I voted that way" on the biggest vote of your career doesn't cut it.
Gravel: The Crazy Old Man act is officially tiresome. I like the idea of someone on stage being able to say non-electable things, like Ron Paul does, but Gravel just sort of insults everyone every chance he gets. Time to go.
Kucinich:He's ok, and it's important to have a guy on stage who can be the uber-left guy, to remind people how moderate the other ones are(despite what FoxNoise Channel might say about them). Plus his wife is hot.
Obama:He has yet to catch fire at these debates the way he does at campaign stops. I think he's better at long-form speaking so these sixty second bits work against him, for now. I think in the long run--when it gets closer to the time when primary voters actually have to choose--this will help him learn how to do quick answers and hone his chops. To me, he's still far and away the best candidate out there, period. When the herd thins a little--say, when its down to just Clinton, Edwards, Richardson, and Kucinich(who never gives it up)--I think he'll really start to shine, debate-wise.
Richardson: I still like him a lot. He spent too much time going over his resume, but I still say he'd be a very effective vice-president, and an excellent guy to send abroad and work with other countries.
I've read some criticism that overall, the Dems still seem too hesitant to really let it rip, thus playing into the caricature that has been drawn of them("You Dems like roller-skating, right? Everybody likes roller-skating!"). But I think that's still better than the Roman Coliseum-esque spectacle that was the Republican debate, where everyone was trying to outdo each other on how bloodthirsty they can be.
I think some knucklehead like Romney will get his funny Mormon underpants in a twist if he goes up against Clinton or Obama, and finds out on stage just how tough they can be mano a mano.
There's an online petition going around, from the Humane Society of the United States, about that a-hole football player who was running a sort of dog-fighting training camp in his house.
You can click here to send a petition to the NFL's president to tell him that the couple of his players who have said there's nothing wrong with dog/animal-fighting are not to be humored or causally dismissed.
I'm butchering what is an important point, so go to the link and check it out.
