Warp Section

I’ve been perusing the “Rumors” category on Sci Fi Wire, and have decided it’s a catalog of wishful thinking. A remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still? A film version of Castlevania? Sam Raimi directing a Doc Savage movie? Jake Gyllenhaal playing Captain Marvel? How utterly freaking cool would that be? But how many of these rumors are ever going to pan out? My cynical guess: not many.

The reality of movie making is that thousands and thousands of films enter the planning and pre-production stages, and never make it out again. Financing falls through, production people lose interest and move on to more enticing projects. Hollywood movies involve thousands of people in a complicated process, and not every good idea makes it out alive, which is too bad.

I love movie rumors. And I hate them. They represent all the great movies we’ll never get to see. An Alien sequel written by William Gibson. Batman villains who never made it on screen. Joss Whedon directing Wonder Woman.

One movie rumor I’ve been following for years: a film version of Watchmen, based on the influential Alan Moore graphic novel that changed the way everyone looks at superheroes. It still has an IMDB listing, which even names Gerard Butler (from 300) as a potential cast member. (Ozymandias maybe?)

But this has also become the ultimate movie rumor for me. Casting rumors, changes in directors, release dates — it’s been going on for probably ten years. I won’t actually believe this movie is being made until I sit down in a darkened theater with my bucket of popcorn and the title comes on screen.

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A new season of Doctor Who is underway, with a new companion. You know what I like best? The Doctor’s ability to pick the smartest person in the room and latch on to her. It happened in the episode “Rose,” when we first meet Rose Tyler, and it happens again in “Smith and Jones,” when we first meet Martha Jones. Both of them were faced with weird, impossible situations, and instead of freaking, tried to figure out what was going on. Now that’s the kind of person you want with you in the TARDIS.

Looking forward to more new episodes. This show is so much more cheerful than Battlestar Galactica…

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That’s a quote from George Bernard Shaw, and it’s as true now as it ever was.

I’ve mentioned previously a BBC show, Life on Mars. It’s about Sam Tyler, a 2006 cop who wakes up in 1973 and feels like he’s on another planet. It’s tangentially science fiction in that there might be time travel involved. Or maybe Sam is just crazy. Or maybe he’s in a coma. Or maybe… You get the idea. At any rate, I think it’s surreal and warped enough to count. And it’s brilliant. Part weird mind game, part homage to 70s cop shows (as Sam says in a recent episode, “Starsky and Hutch have a lot to answer for.”), it’s very well acted, and I keep watching because I feel so much pity and empathy for Sam, a sensitive new age guy stuck in rough-and-tumble 1973 with a bunch of hooligan cops. I love watching him in his predicament, and I desperately want him to get back home.

So imagine my curiosity when I learned that ABC is developing an American version of Life on Mars. Part of me is very excited. It’s a great show, and an American version could be a lot of fun. After all, The Office made the transition to an American version quite well.

But then there’s Red Dwarf.

Red Dwarf was a brilliant UK sci-fi comedy about the last surviving human, who’s a complete slob. His only companions are a holographic recreation of a dead crewmate who’s a complete git, and the sentient lifeform that evolved from his pet cat. If you haven’t seen it, run don’t walk to the video store, put it in your Netflix queue, whatever. It’s Douglas Adams on crack.

In 1992, someone though it would be a good idea to make an American version. I can understand the impulse. Lots of little cultural references don’t quite make sense in the U.S. The pilot for the American Red Dwarf was filmed, and it was an unmitigated disaster. YouTube has the proof.

It’s like they stripped away everything that was truly great about Red Dwarf and dumbed down what was left. And don’t get me started on the appalling laugh track. Have you ever noticed that the actual humor of a show is inversely related to the volume of the laugh track? It’s like by laughing harder they can convince us it’s actually funny. Not. Linwood Boomer wrote this — as the creator of the witty Malcolm in the Middle, he really should have known better. Needless to say, the show never got past the pilot stage.

So this is my fear, that an American version of Life on Mars will suck all the life out of the show and reduce its subtle wit and emotional power to one-liners and pratfalls. There’s hope: the producers have delayed the pilot by a year, because they’re looking for just the right actor to play Sam. They at least recognize that whoever plays Sam is going to be carrying the weight of the entire show on his shoulders and he’d better be damn good.

Fingers crossed.

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I was recently talking with some friends about favorite canceled shows (the conclusion: if we like a show, it’s bound to be cancelled forthwith), and was reminded of this gem.

Ezekiel Stone is a cop. Rather, he was a cop, and in a rage he murdered the man who raped his wife. Shortly after, he himself is killed, and he goes to Hell for that murder. Because life’s a bitch and then…well, you know.

Then something odd happens. 113 of Hell’s worst offenders escape and are now roaming the planet as demons. The Devil needs someone to bring them back. Who better than a damned cop who has demonstrated he has the chops to hunt down bad guys and mercilessly dispatch them? So he sends Stone back to Earth to hunt down the escaped demons.

Stone is rather enjoying his second chance at life — even if it is as a supernatural bounty hunter for the Devil. He’s catching up with all the changes in the world in the decade or so since he died, and he occasionally checks up on his wife. Thankfully, Stone’s fish-out-of-water story of being sent years into his own future (our present) never overwhelms the core of the demon-hunting plot.

John Glover (who currently does an outstanding job as Lex Luthor’s father, Lionel, on Smallville) nearly steals the show as the Devil, effectively Stone’s boss. This Devil is snide, manipulative, sadistic (of course), and yet harbors a lot of pain. In one memorable scene, he angrily tells Stone, “I loved God! No one loved him more than me!” He isn’t just the Devil, he’s the Devil from Milton’s Paradise Lost, whose every action and motivation stems not from his own evil, but from his pain at being rejected by God. Heady stuff.

It occurs to me that this is the show The Dresden Files desperately wishes it could be: dark, magical, tricky, subtle, and smart. Add another one to the DVD wish list.

And because everything has a fan site: here’s Brimstone’s.

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Shameless self promotion time. This is just to announce, commemorate, and squee over the release of my third novel, Kitty Takes a Holiday.

This is part of a series about a werewolf named Kitty who hosts a talk radio show about the supernatural. As the title suggests, she’s taking a break in this one. But she should have known that going to an isolated cabin in the woods, all alone, was just asking for trouble. (Insert Psycho theme music.)

A little note about how publishing works: the lead time for getting a book into stores is about a year. That means I finished the manuscript for this one about a year ago. Which means I’ve been trying very hard to not talk about it at all, in order to keep secret a couple of rather large spoilers. I’m so happy I can finally talk about it!

But now I have to keep mum about the fourth book which is, of course, finished except for revisions, but won’t be released until next year. Grrrr.

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If you’re like me, you have wonderful memories of lots of films and shows from your childhood that you loved. If you’re smart, you cherish those memories — and never watch those movies again, because you’ll mostly likely be disappointed. Surely the special effects weren’t that bad? And the dialog you remember was so much better!

Then again, sometimes those old favorites stand the test of time amazingly well. I’m happy to report that I love The Last Starfighter just as much as I ever did.

Released in 1984, The Last Starfighter tapped into a huge zeitgeist. This was the peak of the video arcade’s popularity. Games like Asteroids and Space Invaders had become icons, and early generation home systems like the Atari 2600 were taking over the world. So why not offer the video gaming geeks the ultimate fantasy? That innocuous video game is actually a recruitment tool for an interstellar league of fighter pilots. Your high score could win you a trip to space!

It’s a great idea (especially in 1984), and the movie fills that idea out with a solid story and likeable characters. Those are the things that help a movie stand the test of time. The special effects — very early CGI, all shiny surfaces and smooth angles — even hold up. They may not be realistic, but they’re pretty. What the movie really does is let us indulge that old video game fantasy: maybe, just maybe, there really is a battle for justice and freedom going on beyond the stars, and maybe, just maybe, we have a destiny to take part in something larger than an average life.

(And if you’re as much of an SF geek as I am, you can still recite the Starfighter game intro: “Greetings, Starfighter! You have been recruited by the star league…”)

The film lives on:

Sci Fi Channel has The Last Starfighter scheduled for Tuesday night.

In 2004, a musical version was staged Off Broadway. I really want to see this someday.

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…is kind of what I’m feeling after the third season finale. And it’s not just because of that nebula.

I remember the second season finale, when “One Year Later” flashed on screen. I immediately built a shrine to the writers because it was just so perfect. It threw everyone for a loop yet made sense. Just when we were getting a little tired of chasing and being chased by Cylons and dealing with Baltar’s intrigue, the show pulled the carpet out from under us and progressed the timeline along to an even more astonishing situation.

This season finale left me scratching my head. Here’s an interview with producer/creator Ron Moore about whether what we saw is really what we saw. The gist of the interview:

Interviewer: Did that really just happen?
Ron Moore: Why, that’s a very good question. You’ll just have to wait and see.

I wish I had posted predictions because I totally called the reappearance of Starbuck just before the end of the episode. Does it worry anyone else that BSG has become a mite predictable? And what of the discovery of four of the final five? All I can say is if Ron Moore expects me to buy that he’d better come up with a frakking good explanation.

Here’s mine: the fifth of the final five is Jimi Hendrix. It’s the only way.

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I could quibble about details, but that isn’t really why we love the Turtles. There’s two things we love the Turtles for:

• Turtle action
• Turtle humor

The new film has plenty of both. And the animation is tremendous. Dude, the steel bars have weld seams!

The other thing I got a kick out of: time has passed in the Turtle continuity. I’m convinced that they’re now Twenty-something Mutant Ninja Turtles. (Donatello working tech support?) And that’s kinda cute.

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This is a bit of an obsession of mine. I love this entire class of film. The more B-grade the better. You’ve got your blasted nuclear landscape (that usually looks suspiciously like southern California or the Australian Outback). You’ve got hordes of roaming mutants. Motorcycles, sawed-off shotguns, leather jackets and hotpants. And the 80’s hair! The cheesy pop ballads! I love it!

Mad Max, The Road Warrior
These are the granddaddies of them all, the films by which all others are measured and found lacking. Leather jackets, big guns, and souped-up cars. What else do you need?

Radioactive Dreams

When the bombs fall in 1996, two boys are stuck in a bomb shelter with nothing to read but 1940s hard-boiled detective novels. Fifteen years later, Phillip and Marlowe (get it?) dig their way out and emerge into a chaotic, barbarous world, where the various tribes of people are identified by the decade they stole their clothes from (there’s the punks, the greasers, the hippies…it’s actually kind of cute). Then they come into possession of the keys that will launch the last MX missile. As if one apocalypse weren’t enough. The main theme of the film: fedoras never go out of style.

This is where I confess that I had a huge crush on Michael Dudikoff (better known from the American Ninja films) when I was 15.

Cherry 2000

To find replacement parts for his beloved sex bot, Sam hires a tracker (Melanie Griffith, no less!) to guide him into The Zone, the apocalyptic wasteland where the old factory for the — as it turns out — obsolete android is located. Many adventures are had during which Sam realizes that maybe the real woman is better than the malfunctioning robot. Maybe.

Slipstream
This is a must-see in any case because Bill Paxton (”Game over, man!”) stars as the hero and Mark Hamill is his rival. This leaves us with no doubts that Mark Hamill plays awesome villains. Global climate change has caused massive, constant winds to sweep over the land. People use the slipstream to travel along canyons and valleys, where remnants of humanity cling to existence. The story is actually interesting: Paxton plays a scavenger, Hamill is a bounty hunter, and his prey is a mysterious man with a dark secret. The whole thing becomes a commentary, not only on whether humanity will survive, but how it ought to survive. What constitutes the new human culture?

Hardware
The only one of these films that isn’t a road trip. It’s also probably my favorite on the list. It’s about a lot of things — a nefarious government plot, a blasted landscape where a big part of the economy involves scavengers combing the desert for useful items they can sell. But it’s mostly about Jill and whether or not she’ll survive when her soldier boyfriend brings home a piece from a killer robot. The robot rebuilds itself, and chaos ensues. The story owes a debt to Ripley and Alien, of course. But that only means it borrowed from the best.

There are, of course, lots more films than this. These are just my favorites. You want to relive the culture anxieties of the 80’s when we all really were convinced that the bombs would drop tomorrow? This is the ticket.

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Why, at the local post office! It seems that to help celebrate the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, the US Postal Service has developed mail boxes that look like R2-D2. Check out the photos on TheForce.net.

Just remember, if you plan on acquiring one of these beauties for your very own, it’s a federal offense to tamper with the mail. And you wouldn’t want to be starring in the next episode of Troops, would you?

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