Each year for the last five years I’ve kept statistics on the number of trick-or-treaters who graced our doorstep during the Halloween celebration of neighborhood interconnectedness and benevolent snack donation. Up to 2007 we lived in a secluded section-8 apartment that roving candy-hoarders easily overlooked. After we became first-time homeowners, our first Halloween in the new house blew us away as the head count soared without warning from zero to dozens. Our supplies were exhausted so quickly that a few poor stragglers were cursed with rejected Easter leftovers. Three cheers for the eternal freshness of American preservatives.
Monthly Archives: October 2012
Disney Acquires Lucasfilm, Announces “Star Wars: Episode VII”, Steals Headlines from Horrible Hurricane Whatsitsname
The Internet cracked in half Tuesday afternoon when the Walt Disney Company announced it would be spending $4.05 billion on the acquisition of Lucasfilm Ltd. lock, stock, and blaster barrel. Compared to the $4.24 billion that Disney paid for Marvel Entertainment in 2009, Lucasfilm was quite the sweetheart deal. Though many legal approvals and compliance processes are still underway, Disney sweetened the deal by announcing plans to have Star Wars Episode VII in theaters by 2015, just in case government officials needed more incentive to permit the existence of a Disney/Marvel/Pixar/Lucasfilm supercorporation.
The Internet has already spent hours brainstorming the potential ramifications of this creative business arrangement. The usual social networks instantly lost interest in the upcoming election and any major death-related news events. Any long-dormant Star Wars message boards just received a massive defibrillator shock they never saw coming. Within a month or so, expect the mainstream media to hop on the bandwagon and regurgitate all our online blurbs.
Alas, without further elaboration from the parties involved, all we have as of today is unfounded speculation and a long list of questions. So many random thoughts, so little confirmation of what to expect:
“Revolution” 10/29/2012 (spoilers): Charlie vs. the Poppy-Pushing Pig
I had assumed that this week’s new episode of Revolution, “Sex and Drugs”, would begin with Nora perfectly fine and her stab wound from episode five healed over nicely. Instead, last week’s fake episode recap turned out to be 10% prescient, as her wound became infected and demanded serious medical attention. Rubbing dirt in it just wasn’t working. Maybe she was doing it wrong.
Area Man Marks Six Months of Consecutive Daily Blogging with Self-Promotional Solipsism
After long deliberation and some preparation, I launched Midlife Crisis Crossover on April 28, 2012, with “The Train Job“, my satirical plan to unite all the incongruous neighborhoods of Indianapolis with a haphazard subway plan that would still be more functional than the marginal mass-transit options of our reality. With that entry serving as my ribbon-cutting ceremony, I committed myself to creating one new piece every day for as long I could keep finding reasons to write and ways to test myself. If I were ever to be serious about finding a purpose for this alleged writing talent, then I needed to knuckle down and see if I could activate it on a regular basis without waiting for other Internet users to provoke or co-opt it.
2012 Road Trip Photos #26: Pueblo’s Arkansas Riverwalk, Part 2 of 2: Art of the Riverside
Previously on Day Six: While my son held down the fort back at our Pueblo hotel room, my wife and I spent a romantic evening strolling along the city’s Arkansas Riverwalk, which domesticated and decorated a stretch of the same bumpy river that we’d watched bubble and babble beneath the Royal Gorge Bridge mere hours and miles prior.
As with any well-executed riverwalk, art is a key contributor to quality of leisure. Clean sidewalks, neatly trimmed grass, and vivacious flower arrangements are to be expected, but artistic expressions are a much-appreciated means to enliven any pedestrian attraction. One of the key pieces along the Arkansas Riverwalk is Walks Among the Stars, a Lakota Sioux woman cast in bronze and clad in an actual quilt.
Starbase Indy Clip Show: Memories of 2010 and 2011, Plans for 2012
On and off over the past two decades, Starbase Indy has served proudly and admirably as one of the longest-lived geek-culture gatherings in Indianapolis. Originally a purebred Star Trek convention by design and preference, its scope has broadened over time as organizers and attendees proved amenable to the presence of more than one fictional universe in their midst. Granted, it’s no coincidence that the festivities have grown more inclusive as Paramount Pictures withdrew Trek from prime-time television and lamented the decreasing aesthetic returns from the latter-day movies. The JJ Abrams reformatting certainly didn’t hurt the cause, but SBI today is a smaller, tighter gathering than its earliest incarnations — now run locally and purely For-Fans-By-Fans, not by out-of-town sideshow promoters who fancy themselves the next Gareb Shamus.
My wife and I have attended more than a few SBIs. We took a break for several years during a long, unpretty transitional period, but made our tentative return in 2010 when a few encouraging signs enticed us back. We enjoyed ourselves so much that year, we were happy to attend in 2011 as well. This selection of highlights from our last two SBI experiences is by no means the complete collection of every photo we took, nor does it represent all the SBIs we’ve ever attended. Our souvenirs date back far enough that many were created using the ancient medium that primitive man once called “35mm film”.
2010 Highlights:
Special guests included Ethan Phillips, best known to Trek fans as Neelix from Star Trek: Voyager, also known to even older TV viewers who can remember as far back as Benson.
“Argo”: Heroics More Harrowing Than Hilarious
I can’t remember which reviewer or random Internet commenter gave me the impression that director/actor Ben Affleck’s new film Argo was surprisingly funny, or words to that effect. If I could recall their identity, I’d express mild annoyance in their general direction. My general opinion is in lockstep with the theater-going majority who’ve given it a collective thumbs-up and touted it as a likely nominee at next year’s Academy Awards in some fashion, but for some reason I walked into it expecting something more along the lines of satirical movies-about-movies such as Wag the Dog, Living in Oblivion, or even The Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult. My expectations were a little off-base.
Certainly the film takes its potshots at Hollywood. Affleck is our hero Tony Mendez, a CIA agent assigned to the task of exfiltrating six stranded Americans from Iran during its prime hostage-taking years. His plan: enter the country posing as a filmmaker, build cover identities for the sextet as part of his film crew, and hustle them out of the country via commercial airline. Phase One of his plan enlists John Goodman as an Oscar-winning makeup artist, who in turn recruits Alan Arkin as a longtime director. The three of them create a fake production company, purchase a space-opera script in turnaround for chump change, hire a storyboard artist, and spend CIA dollars on a lavish pre-production advertising campaign and press-party announcing their fake intent to pretend to rip off Star Wars. Goodman and Arkin have all the best scenes as old friends who know the eccentricities of their surroundings all too well as they push their faux-flick Argo upon an audience that will never see a frame of it.
The moviemaking scenes comprise a minority portion of the running time. They’re prefaced with a jolting reenactment of the day the American embassy fell, and surrounded by a subdued political thriller whose searing images of religious conflict aren’t too far removed from the present-day future thirty years hence. The era and situation are rife with all manner of tension and discomfort. The claustrophobia and paranoid isolation of the refugees, forced to hide out for months at the Canadian ambassador’s place. The monotonous grind of the child laborers tasked to reconstruct mountains of shredded American documents. The Ayatollah Khomeini’s loyal followers, furious in their yearning to hold the Shah accountable for acts against Iran in general and Allah in particular. The tumult of an Iranian bazaar, no good place for Westerners. Even Mendez has personal struggles off the job, as he does his best to be a generous non-custodial father when time allows between covert ops.
All of this dovetails serendipitously in the final sequences involving airport security issues, cumbersome red tape, split-second timing, Bryan Cranston shouting at people, Kyle Chandler clogging up the works through force of smugness, and those seemingly futile Argo storyboards, unwittingly chronicling a sci-fi allegory of the Iranian revolution that connects with a command audience at just the right dangerous crossroads.
I’ll be curious to see what sort of attention it garners during this winter’s awards nomination processes. I just wish I hadn’t entered into it with the unjustified mindset that the humor at Hollywood’s expense would be a more pervasive presence, like a Kevin Smith film with a larger budget. In retrospect I’m pleased it wasn’t, and richer for the experience.
Two final notes, in keeping with past movie entries:
1. I caught no veterans from The Wire among the cast, but Buffy/Angel fans should refrain from blinking or else miss a literal three-second cameo from Tom Lenk (Andrew!) as one of several suckered entertainment reporters.
2. The end credits have no scene at the very, very end, but I recommend sticking around through the extras in the first half. Cast photos are juxtaposed with copies of their real-life counterparts’ real-life fake IDs. Several key scenes are juxtaposed with the period-specific photos that inspired them. And the entire movie is capped with a brand new soundbite from a certain erstwhile Commander-in-Chief about this previously undisclosed moment in his administration’s beleaguered history.
2012 Road Trip Photos #25: Pueblo’s Arkansas Riverwalk, Part 1 of 2: Return of the Arkansas
Day Six of our vacation ended in Pueblo, Colorado — an address well-known to anyone who ever saw one of the famous commercials from the ’70s/’80s about the Consumer Information Center and its free catalogs by mail. For that alone, my wife and I assumed the city held world-famous status. Some of our friends disagreed, but that’s their problem, not ours. Believe it or not, TV had more than just toy commercials back then.
The two of us spent the evening visiting the Historic Arkansas Riverwalk of Pueblo, a pleasant downtown diversion that interested my son not one bit. This, we decided, was the perfect opportunity for a husband/wife outing. Our hometown of Indianapolis has its Canal Walk, and we enjoyed the visual diversity of the San Antonio Riverwalk in 2005. Pueblo is much smaller than either city, but its foray into the beautifying riverwalk business is fairly new, still expanding, and worth several moments of time and dallying.
I was a little surprised to reunite with the Arkansas River, the very same waterway that runs beneath the Royal Gorge Bridge back in Cañon City, a few dozen miles west of Pueblo. How nice of the Arkansas to serve as a thematic through-line to our day. Note that Pueblo has succeeded in containing the Arkansas and removing those turbulent rapids and imposing mountainside walls.
MCC Q&A #1: Burning Questions from the Fleeting Studio Audience
Strictly speaking, this morning’s impulse sharing of the freshly minted Iron Man 3 trailer fulfilled my self-contractual post-a-day quota, though it was shamefully light on word count. I normally don’t post before work because I’m not a morning person (vociferously anti-morning, really), but I was excited and wanted to pass along the neat thing, even if I didn’t have time to add 500 words’ worth of elaboration to accompany it while scarfing my bagel.
It was also my hope that my hasty entry would save at least a few of my readers the effort of searching for the trailer on their own. Time is precious, especially when you have entries of your own to compose, an income to go earn, or Angry Birds to hunt down to extinction. If you’re among those who located this blog through the magic of Internet searching — whether yesterday, last month, or three years after this was posted — I thank you sincerely for sticking around for more than one minute.
Part of this evening was spent on light reading and general site tinkering, perusing some of the dashboard sections that provide interesting data on what search terms attracted readership and casual passersby to this humble site. Many are TV or movie fans seeking general info about their favorite creations, but it’s intriguing how many people are driven here in search of specific answers to their burning questions. Because I hate to leave those folks hanging and feel guilty about this morning’s slapdash entry, please enjoy this impromptu Q&A comprised entirely of queries from random Internet surfers who are probably all long gone by now. If they should return, I’ll leave a light on for them right here.
“Iron Man 3” First Trailer: Destruction, Desolation, Mandarin
The first trailer for Iron Man 3 is here at last. Writer/director Shane Black (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, among several other sharp action-film scripts) takes Tony Stark and friends into their explosion-filled darkest hour, while Sir Ben Kingsley and Guy Pearce show up in clips full of foreboding menace.
Cheers!
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 