DC loses Alan Moore.

My respect for Alan Moore has increased a lot today.

First I encountered an interesting interview that Alan Moore did of Brian Eno on a Bittorrent site I frequent. I thought it was an odd combo so I felt compelled to download it. It was apparently from a BBC radio 4 show called Chain Reaction in which a figure from the entertainment industry is interviewed and then has the responsibility of conducting their own interview for the next show. Really neat concept. I tried to find a recording of the show where Alan Moore was interviewed but could only find a clip where he claimed that the Killing Joke was his worst work. Which surprised me, but other statements I've read imply that he finds the whole concept of Batman ridiculous.

Then, today, an article on Boing Boing popped up that claimed that Alan Moore has sworn off DC and has pulled the third volume of the League of Extraordinary Gentleman from the publisher. In fact, the article they link to has a lot more interesting information as well. I knew that he had decided to have his name removed from all film adaptations, but apparently he has refused all money they offer him as well. Through this article I found a transcript of his Chain Reaction interview (without the Killing Joke statements I had listened to earlier)

To make things even more interesting, He was apparently sued by 20th century fox because they felt his LoEG was ripping off some America screenwriter.

From the article -

"after the films came out, I began to feel increasingly uneasy, I have a dwindling respect for cinema as it is currently expressed." This came to a head when Alan Moore was sued as part of a suit against 20th Century Fox for plagiarism of the screenplay "Cast Of Characters" which bore heavy resemblance to the movie version of "The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen" starring Sean Connery.

From the interview transcript -

So, I said, right, that's it, no more Hollywood films. And if they do make films of my work, then I want my name taken off them and I want all the money given to the artists. I thought, God, that sounds principled (audience laughs) and almost heroic! (audience laughs) Then I got a phone call from Karen Berger the next Monday, she's an editor at DC Comics, and she said, "Yeah, we're going to be sending you a huge amount of money before the end of the year because they're making this film if your Constantine character with Keanu Reeves." I said, "Right, OK. (audience laughs) Well, take my name off of it and distribute my money amongst the other artists. I felt, well, that was difficult, but I did it and I feel pretty good about meself. Then I saw David Gibbons who I had done "Watchmen" with and he was saying, "Oh Alan, guess what, they're making the 'Watchmen' film." And I said, with tears streaming down my face, "Take my name off of it David. (sniffles)" (audience laughs) "You have all the money." Then I got a check for the "V for Vendetta" film. It was just, this was within three days!

Despite his noble efforts. He is still having trouble stopping his name from becoming a Hollywood selling point.
From article -

Earlier in the year, Moore received a call from "V For Vendetta" writer/producer and "Matrix" director Larry Wachowski, but told him politely, "I didn't want anything to do with films and had no time this year, being in the middle of work, my day job, writing, I wasn't interested in Hollywood."

Shortly afterwards, Alan Moore was made aware of a press release sent out covering a press conference producer Joel Silver and the cast had held.

In this press release, Joel Silver, as well as announcing that the release date November the 5th 2005 was the 100th anniversary of Guy Fawkes attempt on Parliament, instead of the 400th anniversary, also said of Alan, "he was very excited about what Larry had to say and Larry sent the script, so we hope to see him sometime before we're in the UK. We'd just like him to know what we're doing and to be involved in what we're trying to do together"

Alan felt, basically, that his name was being used in vain. Not only had he expressed the opposite to Larry, but his endorsement was being used as a selling point for a movie - the reason he'd requested his credit and association be dropped from all of these movies.

Poor guy. I will make it a point not to pay money and add to the box office statistics for any of these upcoming films. Of course, that doesn't mean that my curiosity won't compel me to view them through slightly less legal means.

EDIT A mysterious anonymous person pointed out that I had misread the article. Moore wasn't sued by 20th cen fox. He was sued with them. My mistake. The error above will remain because I don't want to seem like I was hiding the fact I made a mistake.

-Brandon

I think I may be becoming a Uwe Boll Fan

I loved the SciFi channel when I had access to cable. I really enjoyed watching the awful films they would put on in order to fill up airspace between Star Trek, canceled 80's action shows and their limited original series selection. They were filled with terrible "science" and awful acting. There was something captivating about them. I can't say why exactly. Perhaps it's the comedy value, like an mst3k episode minus the wit (my fault). Or perhaps it's some sort of "I could do better" feeling I get that makes me feel superior to these creators.

I saw House of the Dead a while after it was in theatres. I'd heard about his "brilliant" idea to splice in shots from the video game into action scenes and knew I had to see it. The film was exactly what I love about terrible sci. fi. The acting was atrocious, the plot was filled with holes. The premise alone is enough to get it nominated for a razzie. A bunch of kids go to a rave, on an abandoned island in the middle of the Caribean and are forced to battle their way through hordes of zombies, while ignoring multiple chances for escape. The ending highlight? The hero purposefully zombifies his dead girlfriend so that he doesn't have to lose her. That is wonderfully retarded.

I decided after seeing Rotten Tomatoes 0% rating that I had to see Alone in the Dark. It was so worth it. First of all, the plot only makes the vaguest sort of sense. A crazy historian unleashes demons upon the world, and for some never explained reason he is able to control them. He also has control over a group of grown up orphans with worms surgically implanted onto their spine to make them... um... more... controllable. These are apparently Uwe Boll's interpretation of the creatures who attack you in the video game. That is about the only tie into the classic game that I can figure out. Everything about this movie is terribly done. The soundtrack switches, seemingly randomly, from a nonoffensive simple mood sound that could fit in the background of an Enya song, to hard screaming rock. There is not a decent actor in the entire film. The love interest is supposed to be some 80's sexy librarion stereotype, but the actress only manages to pull off timid moron with glasses. Fortunatly she is a useful charecter. Without her no one would have been able to translate the menacing warning on the ancient cave's walls, "Once you make it down here alive, you're already dead." That is her only useful role in the entire film. The warning later turns out to be meaningless, because down the cave a little farther they find the abandoned laboratory where they put the control worm things into the orphans (unleashing demons on the world isn't evil enough, the bad guy needs to perform experiments on orphans as well). The attempts to be dramatic in this film tend to be far funnier then they are sad. I can say that this is the first film to make me laugh at a dead nun with slit wrists. Or how about the memorable moment when the commander learns that all his men have died for nothing. He shouts something to the effect of "My men have died for nothing." Flips a table, and is okay with it for the rest of the film. Apparently the flipped table made up for the loss of his men. Sorry, I'm rambling, there is just so much about this film. I was captivated from the first fight scene. It was wonderful how every time something broke the movie would go to slow motion. Crash through window? Slow down. Break table? Slow down. Knock over trash can? Slow down. 7 minutes into this film, and I already knew that this would be a winner.

-Brandon

Quick little addition of sorts to my last post. I was just reading an interview with Aronofsky about "The Fountain." He mentioned that he had met and talked with David Bowie to see if he would possibly work with Clint Mansell on the soundtrack of the new film. Apparently the main charecter's name is Tom, after Space Oddity's hero. What was particularly intersting was this...

The funny thing is that when I went to meet Bowie, one of the first things he said was, “Oh, are you doing Watchmen?" It turned out that he was developing an opera out of Watchmen. I was like, “If I do this film and I fuck it up, I'm going to piss David Bowie off.”

A Bowie written opera based on the Watchmen? I can't tell if that is incredibly awesome or incredibly crazy. I wonder if it is still being worked on.

-Brandon

More Alan Moore to be ruined by Hollywood

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0434409/fullcredits#writers

V for Vendetta is apparently being made into a movie. The terrible news is that the directors are the Wachowski's.

There are somethings with that story that I have trouble believing would be acceptable by most major movie studios. What do you want to bet they decide to change the "hero's" pro-anarchy message into something less controversial?

I also worry that they would turn V into a good guy. In the story he was not a good guy. The reader was meant, instead, to see him as one of two opposing evils.

We'll see, I'm currently just making paranoid assumptions and imagining the piece of shit it will be. I'm sure I'll have plenty of real information to discredit it in the future.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0409459/
As I may have mentioned earlier, they are also going to ruin Watchmen. I had some hope for this film originally, as I had read that Terry Gilliam was going to attempt it. He eventually bailed though, saying that it would be impossible to make it into a decent movie. The story was simply too long, and it couldn't afford to cut as much as film length would require. He said he might consider it in a 12 part miniseries.

Sometime later Darren Aronofsky picked up the idea, which certainly had me curious, because it is so different then his past projects. Hebailed because of scheduling conflicts with The Fountain. So now the director is Paul Greengrass. Looking at his past projects, I can't get a feeling for how he has done. The only movie that I have seen on that list was Bourne Supremecy. I enjoyed it, and there were certain aspects of how it was shot that I really liked, but one movie really doesn't give me a feel for his overall style.

-Brandon

Manufacturing a Meme

http://www.thetriforce.com/newblog/?p=53
Alright, this is incredibly cool. A while back a lot of press reported on a new practice called "toothing" in which people would participate in random sexual encounters by contacting people through blue tooth devices. Apparently it was a hoax. The original "Toothing" forum was created, and all posts were written by a few people. They then submitted it to a few major blogs and it took off.

In March of last year two of us were idly messaging about the Stan Collymore dogging scandal, and how this stupid sexual buzzword had (apparently) come from nowhere. We wondered if we could create our own. We wonder a lot of things, and rarely push them past concept, because we’re as collectively creative as we are frustratingly idle. This particularly concept was simple enough to outstrip the temptations of grinning, saying, “Yeahhhhh”, and wandering off to see what was on TV. Merging dogging with Bluejacking, a tech buzzword that had done the rounds a few months earlier, we came up with the idea of Toothing, defined as using bluetooth-equipped mobile phones to find sexual partners in public places.

Despite all the made-up ramblings on websites across the globe, despite the forums and the fan-fiction, the tabloids and the broadsheets, the perverts and the simply curious, no-one has ever ever, ever toothed.

Taken from BoingBoing

-Brandon

This is awesome

Wow, I was just checking Red VS Blue for updates and saw a blog post about a paintball event they are participating in. I wish I was nearby to at least witness this, if not participate. I imagine that ensuring that the players follow the generals orders is difficult, but if everyone plays along it would make for a cool game. Plus vehicles! They have a modified tank to fire paint. That is so incredibly cool.

-Brandon

The Laura K. Krishna case

For the few of you out there who haven't run across this yet, there is an interesting group of blog posts that tell a story of a man being asked to write a term paper for a lazy student, and promptly scamming her, with intent to at least humiliate, if not cause her punishment.
Here are the posts, in order, be aware that at some point he went through and changed her real last name to Krishna at the student's request. I advise reading all the way through before passing judgement on Nate. Feel free to judge the plagerist all you want.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

It it interesting reading through these comments because there seem to be two primary schools of thought. One is that what the blogger has done is good, and that Laura K. deserves whatever is coming to her. The other is that Nate is a horrible human being who is using her one little mistake as an excuse to flay her.

I have to say that at first I was a little hesitent about Nate's actions. I agree that Laura had what was coming to her but learning a lesson that plagiarism is bad will hardly help her when she gets kicked out of school (as this is what I had always heard the punishment was). As I read more of the comments many people claiming experience in the matter said that expulsion is rarely the punishment for a first time offender. A failing grade and a tarnished record were more likely. This seemed far more appropriate. When it turned out that Nate had never actually notified the college, and only intended to if she did hand in the paper, and didn't agree to confess, I gained more respect for him. Unfortunatly for him, and the incredibly stupid student, the blog was linked from some of the most visited websites. People, for some reason beyond my comprehension, decided it was appropriate to track down what school she went to, and call her and her school. This ruined Nate's plans by notifying the officials that were never supposed to be notified in the first place.

Now I happen to think that both of the fringe arguments about the morality of Nate's actions are wrong (as most fringe philosophies tend to be). The bloodthirsy of Nate's "supporters" (who largely complained when they learned of the mild finale) is proof that they have completely missed the point. What was supposed to happen was that she was supposed to be frightened into think her college career was over and then given her "second chance." It wasn't meant to sadistically ruin her life.

The other side who seem to think that Nate is evil and using the suffering of this "innocent girl" for his own amusement are even farther off. Innocent?! This woman is in her third year in college, she has no excuse to think this is okay. Lets go through the story and examine her so called "innocence."

Nate did not ask to write her paper, he in no way implied he did that for anyone, and he didn't even claim knowledge on the subject. Meanwhile this woman has asked a complete stranger to write a five page paper (FIVE PAGE! I CAN PULL THAT OFF IN TWO HOURS!) on Hinduism because his profile mentions that he "eats Hindu statues" as a hobby. Not just lazy, but stupid as well. Then she lies about paying him for the job she thinks he has done (with every intention of not actually following through)(1 lie). She then takes the paper he has written (purposefully designed to be a joke and get her a failing grade) and hands it in without reading it. But her folly doesn't end there. She lies about her school (2), as well as her name (3) and avoids his preferred payment method. He contacts her later and she pretends to be someone else (4), poorly. Meanwhile a reader has notified her college, and she has talked to the Dean, and lied to him. Apparently she did nothing wrong, this random stranger is out to ruin her (5). He gets in contact with her again and she asks for his help. They get in phone contact and he offers to talk to the dean and try to lower her punishment, she says no thanks. She asks him to remove her real name (done, but pointless as it is now posted all over the internet) and then to lie and say it was all a hoax (6). He doesn't agree to that. He continues to offer to help her case with the Dean, and then learns that she actually lied to the dean. This woman seems to be a compulsive liar but if I didn't already despise her enough, she puts on her mother.

Her mother is what one calls an 'enabler.' Nate is under the impression that she is nice. I get the feeling that she is merely a typical mother who mistakingly believes her children are perfectly good. She was also a more succesful manipulator then her daughter. She got Nate.

She also swore to Laura's diligence as a student, and knew that I was not lying about the plagiarism.

She is convinced that her daughter has never tried anything like this before. I on the other hand, have trouble believing that Laura's first time plaigerizaing was on a small five page paper, and that she would go about it by randomly IMing someone and scamming them. Just a hunch. Mother can convince Nate to trust her by saying she trusts him. This obviously isn't completely true when she follows it up with

She asked whether this was for money or personal reasons, and I told her what I told you blog people, which is that I was legitimately offended on behalf of all the people I know who take their education seriously.

She hints at buying him off. She cares more about making sure her daughter goes unpunished, then allowing her daughter to learn her lesson. And if it wasn't clear enough that Mother didn't understand the real problem here...

She expressed her dismay over the thousands of dollars this was costing her every semester for her daughter, and I agreed that that was a shame.

She completely misses his point about how her daughters actions cheapen the educational system. Unfortunatly instead of seeing that said mother is manipulative, and willing to hide the problem, instead of fix it, Nate only sees her as "being nice." I'm willing to bet that she is the same sort of Mother who would call and complain, at the request of her child, when a teacher gives a deserved bad grade. I am certainly making assumption off little information, but what I have seen is infuriating, and shows where Laura gets her morality problems from.

The way I see it, Nate acted with good intention, and his plan ws decent. There was no way he could have predicted that his post would be so popular, and there was no way it would work if he didn't post the story and his written paper online, as he intended that the teacher would search for her paper online and find his blogpost, showing that she had plagiarized. He wanted to urge her to confession, which would lead to her punishment, a possible lesson learned, but a saved school career. Sound logic. Unfortunatly the blog became incredibly popular and the Dean was notified before Laura could be talked to. Laura, not realizing how deep she was in, lied about plagiarizing. I think that Nate was manipulated into being nicer in his conversation then he needed to be, and I believe he misjudged the mothers charecter, but I think that his actions were sound and had the unlikely not happened, thinks may have turned out okay for Laura. I honestly believe that her getting expelled and having a ruined career is preferable to her getting someone else to write a paper for her, and not getting caught.

-Brandon

Misdirected campus politics

I recently got this email from a student group I mistakingly got on the mailing list of.

Kick the military off our campus !!!!

Thurs. Mar. 31
6PM
Michigan State Room (349) IMU

Across the nation, college and university students are shutting down
military recruiting at their schools.
Join us for a discussion about the new student anti-war movement
that's sweeping the country and how you can get involved.

Sponsored by the University of Iowa Anti-War Committee

I am very liberal. I opposed the war in Iraq. I think it's been handled poorly and has now put the country in a perilous and costly position.

I cannot for the life of me figure out why this is a worthy cause. I understand that a stable country needs a stable military and a stable military requires people. Recruitment is a way to get people without a draft. This way those who are willing to fight do and those who don't want to, will only have to in times of crisis. Recruitment is not a bad thing. So this is an anti-war movement? Wars are not the fault of the military. They are the fault of politicians. Should we be sponsoring a "don't participate in politics" rally? Does that make any sense? I wish that the effort that goes into these rediculous movements would be transfered to something more useful.

-Brandon

Apperently artists can contract out their work and still be the artist.

I was reading through this article I grabbed from Fark and this caught my eye.

The new exhibition -- 29 photorealist oil paintings based on photographs of hospital scenes, drug addicts, suicide bombers and his own artwork -- has been fuel for the fire for those who question whether he is an artist or a conman.

The paintings, which have sold for $200,000 to $2 million each, were largely executed by assistants with Hirst stepping in only to add a touch of blood or do the eyes.

"I don't like the idea that it has to be done by the artist, I think it's quite an old fashioned thing," he said.

"Architects don't build their own houses," he said, adding that his assistants are better painters than him anyway. "You'd get an inferior painting if it's done by the artist."

Let me get this straight. You don't actually need to do any work to be an artist. You can pay people to create for you and you can still take the credit. This man is expecting to be praised for work he didn't even do. This is insane. He is using contract workers to do his work for him.

The architect analogy is hardly fair as an architect has an entire building completely planned before construction begins. He has designed everything. When you are paying someone to paint for you you don't have the same complete control that the architect has. Unless the workers are simply doing paint by numbers and every color is prepicked, the actual painters are going to add some amount of personal style to the work. Construction workers building a house don't have that. They are constructing, these painters are creating. There is a difference.

Madness.

-Brandon

One more addition...

This is an interesting bit of North Korean propaganda. Kim Jong Il has been commissioning flash films as a method of sending propaganda outside of NK for a while now. This is apparently his attempt to put a more human face on North Korea. Very interesting attempt...

I must say that the song kicks ass.

-Brandon