Ugh. Just…UGH. No, this won’t do at all. #ICC2014 #failtag
As part of my prepping, I thought I’d check in on the Twitter scene and gather impressions from the three-day attendees who edged ahead of us in joining the fray. I saw a fair amount of evidence that my sincere hopes for everyone to enjoy themselves are largely being realized. I’m looking forward to joining the discussion tomorrow myself.
That’s assuming I can figure out where the discussion is. Continue reading
Art by Val Mayerik, co-creator of Howard the Duck. I promise he’s done far, far better work in his time.
Most collectors who consider themselves organized and serious about collecting certain collectible things for their collection have a want list. Sure, you could attend conventions or flea markets and simply buy random issues from whatever boxes lay in your path. The dealers and older collectors who have hundreds of pounds of pamphlets to unload won’t stop you.
There’s something to be said for spontaneous browsing and impulse buys up to a certain point. By adding the element of goal-setting, though, suddenly your hobby becomes a full-fledged quest. Now you have bragging rights because you’ve made it all seem so noble.
I’ve been reading comic books since age six. I’d say I began Collecting with a capital C around age twelve, when I first discovered comic dealers at a local antique show. I was used to buying comics off the spinner racks at Marsh or Hook Drugs, but the dealer’s approach was a radical new paradigm to me. All the comics stood in longboxes, were alphabetized by title, were filed in order by issue number, and went back several years. It was a mind-blowing moment to discover that I could buy old comics that went with my new comics. Years’ worth of them, even.
Not long after, my comics want list was born.
The lead photo from an upcoming True Romance article titled “Will Our Love Be Ruined by Underage Enemy Soldiers?”
Tonight’s new Revolution episode, “Exposition Boulevard” (a common street name in California? I guess?), picks up where we left off two weeks ago, with a Mexican standoff between the Mathesons and the Nevilles. Once that threat fades into nothingness, the road beyond it runs afoul of Patriot Youth, a belligerent Chief of Staff, a love triangle, a new alliance, and more screen time than usual for Steven Culp as Ed Truman, Patriot at a crossroads.
Official flyer handed out at my local comic shop. No idea what the QR code does.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover, back in June 2013:
This week the Indianapolis Star reported that someone out there wants to make my pipe dream a reality. A young Florida-based company called Action3 Events and Promotions has scheduled a comics convention for March 14-16, 2014, in our very own Indiana Convention Center. It’s as yet unnamed and not yet listed on their official site, but official enough that they’re proclaiming its proposed existence in public interviews. That much alone is a positive sign.
A name was assigned shortly after I wrote that. Nine months later, its time is nigh. March 14-16 sees the world premiere of the Indiana Comic Con, a three-day meeting-of-the-minds for connoisseurs of the graphic storytelling medium, and/or a temporary point of interest for autograph hounds. For once, local comics collectors will have someplace massive to converge that’s not Chicago, Ohio, Louisville, or some faraway land reachable only by air travel.
In our previous installment, you saw signs of the forthcoming spring as heralded through the exhibits at the 2014 Indiana Flower and Patio Show. While flowers were the star attraction, they weren’t the only uncommon objects on site. The two buildings that contained this year’s show were filled with various examples of gardens, patios, spas, tools, local repairmen, self-employed salespeople, As Seen on TV hucksters, chocolate stands, and concrete constructions we’ll never be able to afford.
Also, someone turned a piano into a fountain. See, music lovers, this is what happens when you walk away from your talent and abandon your instrument: someone jams a hose in it and turns it into their patio centerpiece.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
Twice per year my wife and I escort her grandmother to one of two special events at the Indiana State Fairgrounds. Each November we visit the Indiana Christmas Gift and Hobby Show. Each March the highlight of her month is the Indiana Flower & Patio Show, which features numerous displays of colorful flora, booths where gardeners and homeowners can peruse and pick out their new seeds, plants, implements, and accoutrements for tending and cultivating their yards in the forthcoming spring and summer. Assorted horticulturists and lawn care companies show off bouquets, sample gardens, and ostentatious flowers you’ll wish you owned.
It’s that time of year again! Today we three traipsed around the fairgrounds and gazed upon tiny, fragile parts of God’s creation, manifest through the works of people with much greener thumbs than ours.
[Special note for this historic occasion: 70% of the following entry was written by Midlife Crisis Crossover’s very first guest contributor, my wife Anne. She knows I welcome her input anytime — above and beyond her ongoing, invaluable photo contributions — but she’s never taken me up on my standing offer on a writing basis till now. Remember: the more you applaud and embrace this entry, the more leverage I’ll have in wheedling her for more contributions in the future.]
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Blame our 2013 road trip for this entry. We discovered the Food Network’s Chopped while flipping channels late Tuesday night in our Boston hotel room. The concept of this cooking-competition series is cerebral and daffy at once: four chefs are given a basket filled with four different ingredients that must be transformed and worked together into a single course, even if they don’t go together, even if they don’t go with the course in question (e.g., meats in the dessert rounds), even if they’re the vilest substance on Earth (durian!), even if mishandling the ingredients might kill put one of the judges in the hospital. (We’ve never thought that last one was a good idea…) The winner selected by three judges earns $10,000.00. The rest are treated to an empty-handed walk down the Hallway of Disappointment, with reactions ranging from excited letdown to disgusted fury to indignant self-hatred to horrific realization that defeat has destroyed their livelihood. The show can be funny and inspiring and tear-jerking and tragic in the space of a single episode.
After vacation we marathoned every Chopped episode available On Demand, caught many of the Tuesday and Thursday reruns, and are now keeping up with new episodes each week. Even though we’re recent converts, we’ve been taking mental notes along the way of the errors and omissions that occur with the most frequency, from the stupefyingly obvious to the obscure-but-fatal. Just in time for the upcoming Chopped five-part “Tournament of Stars” miniseries (yay celebrity contestants!), the following compilation is our armchair-cook advice for future would-be Chopped competitors based on the dozens of episodes we’ve devoured to date. This list is far from complete, and we welcome any additions in the comments below, especially from those among you who can truly cook. Though neither of us is a fancy gourmet chef by any stretch, we hope this helps anyway.
This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife! Come to think of it, reality doesn’t have those, either!
Is it a hoax? A dream? An imaginary story? A holodeck accident? A parallel world ruined by Walter Bishop? A mess for the Doctor to straighten out? A pilot for a new spinoff series called Leave It to Google?
Tonight’s new Revolution episode “Dreamcatcher” throws brainy sidekick Aaron Pittman into a strange old world filled with working electricity, first-world tech-biz problems, cold beer, product placement, and familiar faces in incorrect places. As with most such stories, the question isn’t whether or not Our Hero has awakened to true reality — it’s about how many levels of unreality he’ll have to escape before he’s back on his old show.
Travel this way inside the mind of Aaron the hapless genius!
Day Nine was the final leg of our journey, from the fair city of Cleveland to our hometown of Indianapolis. By this time my wife, my son, and I were ready to finish our gallivanting, return home, climb back into our own sleeping quarters, and swear off free hotel breakfasts for the rest of the summer. A man can only ingest so many stale mini-muffins before madness begins to creep in at the edges.
But it wouldn’t be our kind of road trip if we let a single pass without at least one stop along the way. Fortunately we found just the place to unwind, wander around, stretch our legs, clear our heads, broaden our horizons, and imagine how daily living might look if we walked in the shoes of another man completely unlike ourselves.
So we went to prison.
Open the door and see what awaited us inside…the Rusty Reformatory of Reckoning!
Left to right: Dorian, Detective John Kennex, and I’m really sorry but after thirteen episodes I still don’t know her name.
Tonight was the season finale of Almost Human, the science fiction series created by Fringe showrunner J. H. Wyman about a grumpy future detective (Karl Urban, a.k.a. Spock or Eomer), his emotional robot partner (Michael Ealy, previously on TV’s FlashForward), and their buddy-cop adventures in a world where all the tech advances seem to benefit the outlaws more than the citizens. Thirteen episodes later, the show’s fate rests in the hands of Nielsen commoners and Fox executives, left to decide whether or not the show deserves a second chance to address any of the questions viewers have had since episode one.
“Possibility #1: 12 Years a Slave wins Best Picture. Possibility #2: you’re all racists.”
Thus did host Ellen DeGeneres conclude her ten-minute opening monologue for the 86th Academy Awards — possibly not as safe and innocuous as the producers might’ve hoped, but not likely to inspire internet firestorms on Monday morning, either. Of all the nominees, three films walked away with the most awards, most of them unsurprising to anyone who kept up with the discussions to any degree. I’d guess Best Original Screenplay probably ruined the most Oscar pools this time around.
Internet tradition holds that any users who say the word “Oscars” more than three times during the months of January or February are required either to prognosticate the winners or to divulge who’d get their votes if they were eligible to exercise that power. This year, the evening before the 86th Academy Awards go live on ABC, I must uphold that custom or else the makers of the Paranormal Activity series win.
If I were a card-carrying member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the following list would represent my hypothetical ballot selections, no less subjective and arbitrary than the average AMPAS member’s official ballot. These are not my predictions as to who will win, because that’s not my forte. Betting on me will bring you misery and cost you your life savings. I’m aware of many of my deficiencies, and Oscar-guessing is one of them. If more than one-third of these match the actual results, it’s because my fifty-year-old self acquired the technology and the bitterness to travel back in time and sabotage the sacred PricewaterhouseCoopers envelopes.
Captain Jack Sparrow. Just because a reader asked.
I rarely trumpet this service, but Midlife Crisis Crossover maintains an open policy of Ask Almost Anything, which extends not only to regular readers and commenters, but also to constant Likers, silent Followers, and fleeting passersby. If you have a question, a suggestion, a comment that’s constructive or Dadaist, or a listicle request that the mainstream media refuses to attempt, simple reply here or to any other post of the vaguest tangential relevance, and our trusty MCC staff will be happy to escalate it into a Main Topic for a future entry and explore the subject further in depth. Or I might just reply to your comment, who knows.
Every so often we also review queries and curious sentence fragments from passing search engine users, because even the silent, fleeting passersby deserve to be heard, even if they’re no longer around to find the answer they needed. Because I need a break from movies and I’m working six days this week, a quick dive into the ol’ mailbag feels like a nice way to relax for a few minutes.
* the real life of capatian jack sparrow/ not the movie
Few moviegoers realize the character of Captain Jack Sparrow is based on the exploits of real-life pirate Jakub Sperovicz, a pirate from Warsaw who was renowned for his lifelong battle with rum addiction, his eventual arrest on multiple counts of boatjacking, and his CG monkey. During his heyday Sperowicz was in his mid-60s and suffered from chronic psoriasis. His story was tweaked a tad for typical Hollywood purposes.
The years have been rough for Batman and Lois Lane…
My annual Oscar quest concludes at last! David O. Russell’s layered, fascinating American Hustle was the ninth and final film on my playlist, saved for last because I correctly guessed that all the other nominees would exit our local theaters first. A healthy U.S. box office gross of $144 million (and counting) ensured that Hustle would stick around exactly as long as I’d hoped. This week has arrived just in time — after this month-long marathon, my local theater and I could really use a break from each other for a while.
“My name is Connor Bennett. You killed my mother. Prepare to die.”
After a three-week vacation to allow for Sochi Winter Olympics fever, Revolution returned tonight with a new episode, “Fear and Loathing”, in which tenuous alliances are formed, leftover cliffhanger threads are sewn up, Grandpa Gene has the night off, and what happens in New Vegas slays in New Vegas.
For the first few weeks after this year’s Oscar nominations were announced, Captain Phillips was the only nominee within reach of movie buffs who prefer home video to theaters. You’d think this would give it an advantage with the voters; instead it seems to have been handicapped by its October release, quote-unquote “early” compared to most of the other contenders, and hasn’t factored into most of the Oscar-guessing convos I’ve seen. I watched it a month ago and procrastinated writing about it because I figured everything that could be said has already been said, so why bother?
The short answer: Oscarmania completism. I watch every Best picture nominee every year whether they look appealing to me or not. I normally don’t write about everything I watch on home video (though I’m thinking about changing that soon), but it seems silly to devote entries to eight of the nine nominees while arbitrarily skipping this one. Onward, then.
Thanks to unseasonably warmer temperatures this week and a raging thunderstorm last night, the feet of snow that we accumulated over the last several weeks have now been effectively disintegrated. The only remaining clues that anything happened are the new, deadly craters on my commute and the enormous puddles drowning everyone’s lawns. Looking out my window, you’d think we relocated to the Black Lagoon.
Winter isn’t always our wicked nemesis. Back in the days before “polar vortex” became a thing and public schools were open for business five full days per week, sometimes winter could be enchanting. Ah, distant memories.
My wondrous wife, walking in a winter wonderland.
Left to right: Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Jamie Bell, Michael B. Jordan
Today the internet exploded once again (it seems to do that a lot) after hearing the news that Fox had completed casting of the primary roles for their Fantastic Four reboot, scheduled to hit theaters June 19, 2015. Unfortunately Fox forgot to ask the fans to approve their choices first and decided to make its own decisions like an independent adult. The internet responded by leaving nasty notes in Fox’s locker and spitting on its cafeteria pizza at lunchtime.
Fans who feel sole ownership of an intellectual property that’s been around for fifty years unanimously agreed everything about the four actors seen above is wrong. Reed Richards absolutely, positively must be middle-aged. Ben Grimm must begin as a muscular guy, because medical science has proven cosmic rays can’t possibly turn a short, thin guy into a giant rock monster. Johnny Storm has to be white, because all siblings in all Creation have identical skin tones. Sure, Jessica Alba wasn’t white in the last two movies either, but This Is Different. Thanks to these complaints, Fantastic Four has already been given a 5% Rotten rating on the Tomatometer sixteen months before release. That’ll show ’em.
Martin fluffernutterin’ Scorsese, man. Just when you thought fluffernutterin’ Hugo was a sign that he taking his game in a whole ‘nother fluffernutterin’ sellout direction, dude says “Fluffernutter all that,” comes back around to the filthiest fluffernutterin’ script in Hollywood, and presto! He’s back on super-heavy-duty R-rated turf with The Wolf of Wall Street, a flick that makes Goodfellas look like the fluffernutterin’ Apple Dumpling Gang. Dunno why the fluffernutter he changed his mind, but, y’know, what the fluffernutter. It’s his career, am I right?
Fluffernutter-fluffernutter-fluffernutterety-fluffernutter-FLUFFERNUTTER…
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 