Monthly Archive: July 2007

Bid on dinner with Joss Whedon at Comic-Con

Bid on dinner with Joss Whedon at Comic-Con

There are some parties at San Diego that are impossible to get into. Sometimes, it’s better to get into a nice quiet upscale dinner, and even those can be amazing — I happened to be at one two years ago where the food was great and the stories were stunning.

But this might be the topper for the year: Joss Whedon (Astonishing X-Men, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Captain America’s surrender in Civil War) is auctioning off five seats at a dinner table with him at the San Diego Comic-Con this year. Bidding is up to over $4000 a seat with a week to go. Here’s a link to one of the seats, but check on eBay as there are five separate ones and eBay didn’t set this up as a Dutch Auction.

Dinner will be on July 27th in San Diego, and 100% of the proceeds will go to benefit Equality Now. Here’s Joss making a speech for them:

Hat tip: Heidi MacDonald.

MOVIE REVIEW: Transformers

MOVIE REVIEW: Transformers

When this summer hit, only one image popped into my head, and it wasn’t a black spider, a drunk pirate, or a dorky kid with glasses. All I saw since day one was a semi truck that turned into a 50-foot robot. So as you can assume, going into the film my expectations were a little high, and you had better believe they were met with bells on.

Seeing as this film is truly the ultimate summer blockbuster (thanks, Mr. Bay), I’m going to have to break down this film like I do all others with the acting, the plot, and of course the one thing that ties the entire movie together: the effects.

Starting with the worst note and working our way up, the acting wasn’t the worst I’ve seen in a Bay film, but wasn’t exactly Gone with the Wind. I don’t know about you, but I expect when I’m going to see a movie about giant robots from space, I want Gone with the Wind.

Putting aside my disdain for Shia LaBeouf, I was just like every other fanboy out there on the Internet that rolled his or her eyes when the list of cameo’s for the flick got released. Bernie Mac’s presence in the film was completely superfluous, other than about eight seconds, his entire sequence should have gotten well acquainted with the floor. As well as John Turturro’s scenes. Turturro plays the cocky secret government agency role very well, but after about 10 minutes, it becomes too much to handle, and he needs to go away. When doing the entire exposition scene of Megatron and the plot-focusing All-Spark cube, there was no need for a cocky government type. Just faces of awe.

LaBeouf and Megan Fox did a decent job of playing the frightened kids… at first. But once the imminent threat of world domination became second priority to LeBeouf’s parents finding him alone in a room with a girl, the film kind of lost its head. As scary as chracter actor Kevin Dunn can be, a gigantic robot with a sword is far scarier. Finally, Jon Voight, Josh Duhamel, and Tyrese “Hero For Hire” Gibson played roles that were both aiding in the “Bay” way of showing the how disasters effect people on a human level, but these characters were effortlessly forgettable in comparison to the robots.

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Science Fiction/Fantasy Magazine News

Science Fiction/Fantasy Magazine News

The fifth issue of Helix, a free on-line magazine dedicated to publishing stories too extreme for regular print SF/F magazines, has just been published, with new stories by Esther Friesner, Brenda Clough, and others.

Locus, the newsmagazine of the SF/Fantasy field, has mailed their July issue, and posted a profile page about it on their website. The July issue includes interviews with Peter S. Beagle and Paolo Bacigalupi, results from this year’s Locus Poll, and lots of news and reviews.

There’s a new issue of SF Site for July, with lots of reviews, a listing of new books received, and whatnot.

Strange Horizons has an update every Monday, and this week is no exception; new this time is a story by Jerome Steuart and a poem by David Lunde.

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JOHN OSTRANDER: Fireworks

JOHN OSTRANDER: Fireworks

It’s America’s birthday and what better way to celebrate than with fireworks? Yeah, I know – the Fourth of July was yesterday but if your neighborhood is anything like mine, people have been setting things off since last weekend and will probably continue through this weekend. So let’s see if we can set off a few here.

I hold these truths to be self-evident.

Item: Democracy is a radical experiment and one that could still fail. The notion that all men – and, as we have come to understand it, all women – are created equal and are endowed with certain inalienable rights was certainly a radical notion in a world where the right to rule came by birth or by force of arms. Instead, we maintained that People could, should, and had the right to govern themselves and the right of any government to rule rested within the consent of the People. That’s just crazy talk – or so much of the world in the late 1700s thought. That was chaos – anarchy. Heck, it scares a lot of people today and that includes our own citizens, a lot of whom would be more than willing to trade freedoms (well, certainly OTHER peoples’ freedoms) for a little more security for themselves and their own. In the overall scheme of things, folks, two hundred twenty five years is nothing. We blow it and it’ll just be noted as an interesting aberration.

And we’re really close to blowing it. Voting is a pain and we can’t be bothered to turn out in real numbers even for the Presidential elections; we abide rigged elections and voting machines; we let ourselves be led like lemmings by polls and attack ads.

I’m not a political innocent; I was raised in Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Chicago. I know the difference between political theory and political reality. We, the People, increasingly vote for appearances rather than bother to look at issues. We assume that, because America has been around for two hundred years, it will be forever. History says the odds are way against that. We are an experiment and the results are not yet in, folks.

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John Rogers on the Cheney Administration

John Rogers on the Cheney Administration

On this American Independence Day, Blue Beetle and Transformers: The Movie writer John Rogers has a post that sums up the feeling that many have in America today: 

We are faced with utterly shameless men. Cheney and the rest are looking our representatives right in the eye and saying "You don’t have the balls to take down a government. You don’t have the sheer testicular fortitude to call us lying sonuvabitches when we lie, to stop us from kicking the rule of law and the Constitution in the ass. You just don’t. What’s beyond that abyss — what that would do to our government and our identity as a nation — terrifies you too much. So get the fuck out of our way."

And to a great degree, the White House is right. You peel this back, and you reveal that the greatest country in the world has been run, for the last six and a half years, by men who do not give a shit about the Constitution, or fair play, or honesty. No, not just run by corrupt men, or bribe-takers, or adulterers or whatever, we could handle that –no we’d be admitting It Went Wrong.

There is a sizeable population in America that just does not, cannot wrap their head around the fact that the President may be a Bad Man who does Bad Things. He’s President of America. We’re Americans. We’re the good guys. Remember, the Nixon mythos in America is that the system worked. "See, in America, even the President is not above the law."

As they say, read the whole thing.

Stuff to Read for Free Online

Stuff to Read for Free Online

Harper’s magazine has an excerpt from Karl Schroeder’s Crisis in Zefra in their July issue, but the whole thing — a fake non-fictional account of a near-future African peacekeeping mission that Schroeder did for the Canadian army a few years ago – is also available online, in a form that makes it look creepily real.

Eric Flint posts “snippets” of all of his current novels on his blog – that sounds like little bitty things, but each day he posts good-sized chunks, and he does dozens of “snippets” for each book. For example, today there’s snippet 30 of 1634: The Bavarian Crisis, snippet 17 of The Mirror of Worlds, and snippet 52 of Pyramid Power.

John Scalzi (the most recent winner of the Campbell Award for Best New Writer) posted a list of his work that’s available for free online, which includes his entire first novel, Agent to the Stars. (Agent is pretty good, actually; it’s the first thing I read by Scalzi, and it made me want to track down his other books.)

Tobias Buckell has posted the first third of his current novel Ragamuffin on the ‘net for everyone to read.

BestSF.net has posted Jonathan Sherwood’s story “Under the Graying Sea,” originally from the Februarty 2006 issue of Asimov’s.

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Be a patriot! Support the First Amendment!

Be a patriot! Support the First Amendment!

Contribute to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund!

Sequential Tart’s Editor-in-Chief Katherine Keller has even made it easier for your money to go farther: if she gets forty people to kick up $25, she’ll match all of their contributions, $1000 bucks out of her own pocket, and Carl Rigney has volunteered to match her donation– so $25 from you means $75 to the CBLDF. She’s got ten more contributors to go as of this writing… but don’t think that you get off the hook if they hit the numbers, they need every dime that they can raise for the Gordon Lee fight. (Hat tip: ¡Journalista!)

Monday’s box-office breaks records

Monday’s box-office breaks records

Don’t people have day-jobs?  Accordiing to Variety, Transformers made $8.8 million on Monday, playing on 3,050 screens around the country.  Today, it adds another 500 screens, and will probably make even more money.  The studios behind the movie (Paramount and DreamWorks) hope to earn more than $100 million by Monday, in what they describe as a 6 1/2 day weekend.

Ratatouille earned $7.5 million.  Live Free or Die Hard made $4.3 million.

Transformers stars upcoming ComicMixer Mark Ryan as the voice of Bumblebee.

Science Fiction/Fantasy News & Links

Science Fiction/Fantasy News & Links

Mark Evanier shows off the cover to his upcoming book Kirby: King of Comics, and explains what this book is (a big, heavily-illustrated look at Jack Kirby’s comics work) and what his next book will be (a much longer, text-heavy biography of Kirby).

Columnist Alex Stein, in the Guardian, likes to argue with a friend about the use and importance of science fiction. (He’s on the side of the angels) Sadly, Stein seems to be content to argue that there’s some good stuff out there amid the dreck, rather than calling the friend on his category error – the unnamed friend stacks the deck by using the new Transformers movie as the SF exemplar and “some new French slow-burner about adultery” as his example of “real life.” The equivalents of a good serious “real life” movie are movies like Gattaca, or 2001, or Blade Runner; if you want a “mainstream” comparison movie on the same level as Transformers, you’ll have to dig up something like Monster-In-Law. Defenders of SF need to point out that there’s just as much “real life” dreck as fantastic dreck – and our dreck at least has cool pictures to go with the lousy plots.

The Baltimore Sun reports on an exhibition of Star Wars paraphernalia at Geppi’s Entertainment Museum in Baltimore. The materials are all from the collection of Thomas Atkinson, who runs the Star Toys Museum.

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ELAYNE RIGGS: I want to believe

ELAYNE RIGGS: I want to believe

"We’re never gonna beat this if belief is what we’re fighting for." – John Mayer

As Americans gather today to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence 231 years ago, many of us find ourselves in quite a different place than we believe our founders envisioned for this country.  Each day brings more tragic results of the radicals currently in power thumbing their nose continually at Benjamin Franklin’s observation that "Those that would give up essential liberty in pursuit of a little temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security" and frightening the populace into constant submission so they can retain this ill-gotten power.  (Hang on — creating a climate of fear, isn’t that what terrorists try to do?  Guess that means They’re Winning.)  And without the assurance that our government will (or even can) do its job of seeing to the well-being of its citizens, many Americans do what people in their situation have done for centuries — they turn to institutions they believe will care for them, mostly institutions that "answer to a higher authority" in which they believe.

We’ve been talking a lot about perception and belief on ComicMix this past week.  First Mike Gold tackled how people misperceive personal threats to their way of life when no such threats exist.  For the life of me, I cannot imagine how these ideas get into their heads, and neither can anyone in the all-pervasive corporate-sponsored conservative-pandering media.  Then I talked more about subjectivity and how some folks amazingly find the exact "evidence" to support their pet beliefs, rather than the other way around (using actual scientific procedure to observe first and then create a theory based on those observations).  And the capper was John Ostrander’s column about dogma, rigid belief systems (whether religious or no) whose adherents will brook no dissenting opinions.  The danger of dogma is the same as that of any fanaticism — that subjective perceptions are suddenly presented as objective ones, and individual beliefs replace reason and compromise with authoritarian systems such as theocracies.

And it ought to be obvious that theocracies are not Good Things in pluralistic societies because they leave no room for diversity of opinion.

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