(almost) 10 Werewolf Hotties

(in response to this)

James Spader, Wolf

Micha Bergese, The Company of Wolves

Hugh Jackman, for about five minutes towards the end of Van Helsing

Seth Green (and Paige Moss), Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Russell Tovey, Being Human

Eddie Munster, The Munsters (who can resist that Little Lord Fauntleroy get-up?)

Any more suggestions?

Believe it or not, I'm not dead, I just haven't had much to write about over the last five months or so. Plus there was about three months in there where I was just travelling around Australia and henceforth not really focusing on blogging.

Still, just to prove that I'm still about in 2010, and to keep a promise I made last year, here's a photo of myself with a Buffyfest bag, courtesy of the lovely peeps at Buffyfest, which they gave in return for some writing I did for them last year. Thanks again, y'all!

Red Hot Riding Hood

I just happened to come across this whilst searching for material for a certain other blog of mine and I thought I'd share it here. This article is about a Russian strip club that caters to het women. It raises some pretty interesting questions about "the gaze", the role of feminism and consumerism in sex culture and the essential differences (or lack thereof) between men and women.

The thing that really stands out to me is that the article constantly asserts that this whole thing 'isn't gay', which to me implies that we've come so far from being able to accept the female erotic gaze that we automatically see male nudity or male displays of sexuality in terms of homosexuality. See also this SocImages post on a related topic.

Jaws

At about 18 seconds in, a slow-motion sequence starts that shows this beast doing something that I honestly thought no real creature could actually do!

Yes, that's right, this thing shoots its own mouth outside of its head, Alien-style. I think what's so impressive about this is the scale; this is the sort of thing that I can imagine insects doing, but not notably larger animals like sharks. Eww.

Skin trade

This video from The Onion neatly captures exactly what I hate about PETA. Like the very best of satires, this sketch is only a hair's width away from the bizarre truth. Incidentally, PETA's "response" at the end of the video practically had me in tears from laughing so hard.

Advocacy Group Decries PETA's Inhumane Treatment Of Women

Really? My toaster is a power bottom too! What a coincidence!

Random thoughts on "Obsessed"

Ok, it's another Mariah Carey "what the?" moment. In her latest video (which I'm not going to embed as I can't find a decent embeddable version at the moment, but here's the link to her official site where it plays within a little widget on the left), Mariah Carey not only dresses up as a man and plays her own stalker (a nice way to get double the screen time for MC, as opposed to say, what would happen if she brought in David Boreanaz to play the part, and also giving the whole video an Austin Powers/Dr Evil vibe), but we then see him/her get run over by a bus. Now that's a surprisingly violent climax for a Mariah Carey video, no?

Incidentally, I've always been fascinated by the presentation of Mariah Carey's race in all of the media pertaining to her. Mariah Carey is mixed race, with Irish-Caucasian on the one side and Black-South-American on the other, yet was famously made to "play down" her "blackness" (as well as any explicit portrayals of adult sexuality) whilst working under husband/manager Tommy Mottola. Upon her separation - personally and professionally - from Mottola, you suddenly see a massive upswing in the amount of cultural signifiers of "blackness" in Mariah Carey media, including a great deal of collaborations with rap/hip-hop/r&b artists (and hey, Spike Lee too). I also find it telling that Mariah's "evil alter ego" - appearing in the videos for "Heartbreaker" and "Boy" - is called "Bianca", although maybe that's a bit of a stretch.

The reason I'm thinking about all of this? Simple. When watching the video for "Obsessed" I couldn't help but wonder, Mariah Carey can certainly get away with playing a white man, it seems, but if she'd been playing a black man, would she have been accused of 'blacking up', despite her own black heritage? It's all a moot point, obviously, as she's not done so, but still, it makes me wonder.

And in case you're wondering why she gets hit by a bus in the new video, well, it's all a big "fuck you and I hope you die" to Eminem, apparently.

Meet Buddy

I was wondering how long it would be before I'd come across a picture of a gender-reversed Buffy the Vampire Slayer cast on deviantart. A certain section of fandom loves to play around with cult media archetypes, amalgamating them, reimagining them as part of different genres (I've also seen pieces that show the Buffy cast as bona fide spandex-clad superheroes) and yes, gender-reversing them. Just go and search for "gender reversed Teen Titans" and you'll see that I'm not kidding. Again, all I'm saying is, I'm surprised it took me this long to find an image like this.

Incidentally, I'd be horrified if I found that someone had written gender-reversed Buffy fanfiction. The reason being that, hopefully, any amount of thought on the part of the author would make them realise that a gender-reversed version of the BtVS plot would be exactly the same, unless of course one happened to hold some bizarrely sexist beliefs about the differences between the sexes. 'Alexandra' would still be a clumsy, horny teen; 'Will' would still be a shy geek with an interest in the mystical... And yet, a part of me just knows that some idiot somewhere has written this thing, and that it features tonnes of purple prose about how the newly-female characters are just "so much more sensitive" and other puke-worthy rubbish.

So yeah, this works as a visual experiment, but please tell me there isn't crazy, sexist fanfiction about all this stuff.

Whoever wins...

I promise I'll do a more substantial post sooner or later, but this just made me laugh, so it gets posted.

Crazy Mariah Carey art

Bonus! One of my favourite weird Barack Obama images:

That Mitchell and Webb Post

This is just far too good...

...and, as one commenter on Pandagon put it, also "sadly appropriate," considering how Edward's stalkerish actions are commonly construed as so utterly romantic. Oh, thank you Rebellious Pixels for reminding me how - even though it may not have been perfect - Buffy was still head and shoulders above a lot of similar shows out there.

P.S.
Oops, sorry about the weird size of the thing.

A very 'not good' comic

Hey, remember that bit in Kill Bill where Bill (speaking of whom, let me just say "RIP, David Carradine") says "This is me at my most masochistic?" Well, for some reason that quote just kept popping up in my head while I was reading through the latest volume of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic. 'Cause yep, masochism really is the only way I can explain why I'm reading it at all, really.

It's not to be wholly unexpected. A common, if unfortunate side-effect of any fandom is that sometimes one will continue to invest in something long after one has become no longer, well, invested in it, just as a way of supporting it, or perhaps just out of habit, or some kind of anterograde amnesia-style perpetual forgetting of just how bad it's gotten. Perhaps it can just all be chalked up to a very misguided sense of what exactly 'fan loyalty' means. Maybe it's just Emotional Branding.

Anyway, to sum up, what I'm getting at here is that I really did not enjoy Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Time of Your Life. To summarise, ToYL is a story in which Buffy is brought into the future by a centuries-old and apparently evil (although in actuality, really just very confusing and seemingly confused about her own motivations) version of Willow, who, for some reason or another, opts to start a fistfight between Buffy and her far-future counterpart Fray. Buffy then kills future Willow before coming back in time, the end. Somehow this took four issues and for some more apparent reason, I felt a little ripped off. You know what's a good deal if you like both superhero-versus-superhero punch-ups and Joss Whedon? That Astonishing X-Men special he penned a short for a little while ago that also collecteda bunch of old comics in which the X-Men met, fought and then teamed up with other Marvel super-heroes like the Fantastic Four, the Avengers or Spider-Man. This new, Buffy/Fray one on the other hand, is a confusing mess that seems to ultimately lead nowhere and really perhaps is just an excuse to get people to shell out $15 for a very brief and poorly justified fist fight.

Oh, and don't even get me started on the non-entity that is the story's so-called sub-plot. Some magical monsters attack our heroes, who then fight back and win. Yes, it really is that simple, and yes, it somehow took four issues to tell. Damn you, decompression!

One interesting curiosity though is that this collection also contains a one-off story based around the Buffy animated series that never was, which is slightly weird, because surely that makes it a spin-off of essentially nothing. Sure, the unaired pilot is still floating around the internet for those who wish to find it, and yeah, I think they may have released some toys/statuettes/maquettes 'based on the series' before, but those may have just been solicited and then disappeared into the ether like that BtVS tarot deck that was solicited a while back (and I must admit, I so would have bought, in probably not my wisest of purchases), but still, I find the whole thing a little odd. So yeah, there's that little curiosity there.

Anyway, I guess that's me done until I inevitably buy the next volume of this stuff and then begrudingly review that.

Ooh, luckily I picked up the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen too to help cleanse the pallet (ThreePenny Opera references for the win!).

"How do you like my new uniform?"

Get a load at the new look Harley Quinn, as redesigned for the upcoming video game Batman: Arkham Asylum . (Her old look is featured below, in case you need a reference.) Personally, whilst I can kind of understand the thinking that must have gone behind the redesign (a mix of "we need a more realistic costume," and "we need to turn her into something that'll make her more evidently appealing to teenaged boys."), I still think it all looks a little American McGee's Alice for me. And hey, whilst I enjoyed that game back when it came out, now I think I'm more inclined to go with the line of thinking that brought about this particular Penny Arcade parody. Sometimes Todd McFarlane-ising things is not the most sensible way to go.

Consider it just the grumblings of a comic fan, but I just don't think putting a girl in a corset and leather boots compares to the simple yet dynamite design work on display in Bruce Timm's original creation. And hey, if they were worried that people wouldn't find the look realistic, they probably should have checked to see whether people have actually tried to pull it off in real life...

Haskins! Fairy tales! Feminist criticism!

A Mimi joint

Ok, you know what's weird? That a couple of years ago, Spike Lee made a short film about/starring Mariah frickin' Carey.



I mean, am I the only one who finds this odd, who doesn't immediately lump those two together in their head? I mean, I just find it jarring considering some of the subjects of Lee's other, feature films, no?

Oh, and ignore the bullshit about a free iPhone too. Sorry, but this is the only version of this video that I could find online.

Meh, it's ok. Provided you don't get motion sickness...

Ah, fuck it. That new Star Trek movie absolutely defies any attempt to take it seriously at all.

Also, I just want to do my part to make sure that this is making the rounds:


Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

Trekkin'

Ok, I just wanted to quickly jot down some of my thoughts regarding the new Star Trek film before I actually see it later today (I may do a follow-up post once I have actually seen the thing).

Firstly, I imagine that, judged purely on its own merits, this new film is going to be a great success indeed. I can see it being a slick, exciting and fun example of action-scifi-blockbuster fare.

However, my main issue with the film lies more at the conceptual level. In that respect, this film kind of reminds me of Gus Van Sant's Psycho: it's a perfectly good film, as far as films go, when judged on its own merits, but the real headscratcher is why the film even exists at all. Who the hell thought that the world desperately needed a remake of Hitchcock's Psycho?

Indeed, whilst a bold, new direction was very much needed in order to bring life and public interest back to the Star Trek franchise, I do wonder about the wisdom behind harking back to the franchise's Kirk-and-Spock origins, which almost seems to ask us to imagine this film in the same vein as other classic-TV-show-reimagined-as-modern-film releases of the last several years. Is that what Star Trek needs, not a Grace Park Battlestar Galactica but a Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson Starsky and Hutch?

Ok, that was perhaps an unfair comparison, I admit, but my main point remains: what does it say about the future of the franchise that the only way to bring it forward is by looking back, by fetishising the past? Is this 'reinvention' really just a way to sell us on old ideas a second time around? Will we be seeing Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Next Generation twenty years from now when the whole thing goes full circle?

Still, I see that sacrifices have to have been made in order for the money-men behind all of this to have even signed off on making this new film. The thing does have to be saleable, after all. But still, that worry is there: can this new direction actually bear interesting fruit in years to come (they're already working on Star Trek 2, you know) or will the whole thing prove to be a shiny-but-shallow excercise in wistful nostalgia taken to infinite regress?

It's good to see a Nazi and a Communist getting along

Wow, comics sure are awesome, aren't they? You know, I recently discovered a comic book idea so absolutely insane I simply had to bring it up here. Now, I know that using real-world figures as comic book villains is nothing new, but for some reason this particular variation on that old chestnut strikes me as particularly weird for some reason. Readers, meet the Lethal Legion...


Zyklon (Heinrich Himmler), Axe of Violence (Lizzie Borden), Cyana (Lucrezia Borgia (Lucrezia Borgia? Really?!)) and Coldsteel (Joseph Stalin. JOSEPH FRICKIN' STALIN!).

Also: "Zyklon"?! Holy insensitivity, Batman! Did I mention that his superpowers include actually firing poisonous gasses at people? Also: Lethal Legion Lizzie Borden totally has an axe for a hand.

I now know that I must own Avengers West Coast #98-100, which introduces these guys. Luckily, Free Comic Book Day is tomorrow, so I imagine I'll be in the vicinity of a comic book shop.

Real Riot Grrls