Issue 145

News: I'm Ba-ack!
You may have noticed that I have been posting much less frequently in the past few months. Well, that is not due to my writing the screenplay for the Captain Planet movie, as that was my fourth annual April Fools' day post. The real reasons are a lot more complex than that, but also somewhat related to that. One big problem, and one which would not need much more explanation is that I am simply not getting enough material for a blog post. I have not been having a lot of new film ideas, nor have I been discovering enough interesting links for the links section. Fortunately, I have had a lot of interesting movies, and, if I have enough to say on them, I may be putting these in the News section unless I actually get something interesting. The bigger problem is that I have been wading Nipple-deep in schoolwork, whether it be preparing a presentation on Schopenhauer for my Honors Seminar, working on a paper on I Never Promised You a Rose Garden for Abnormal Psych, or working on a huge research paper on School Reform for English class, which has been particularly consuming for me in the past month, indeed, finding enough relevant sources has been very time-consuming, and I was only able to post the Captain Planet thing because I had the idea in my head since I discovered the Nostalgia Critic video on Captain Planet and realized I had a good idea on how to mess it up. Fortunately, I finished the first draft of the Research Paper today and have gotten it up to as well as I could. Now, the only things of note that I need to do for school for the rest of the semester is write two film reports on films I've already seen, and two essays that haven't been assigned yet. The worst part's over now. All I need to do is drudge up some material for the blog.

Band Name of the Day: Middle Child Syndrome.

Film Idea of the Day: Honestly, if Ted Turner is willing to let me deconstruct/mess with Captain Planet as I proposed in my April Fools' day Message, I would do that.

Film Review of the Day: The Brady Bunch Movie. I loved the television show precisely for its extremely campy nature, and I wouldn't be surprised if the show was as anachronistic in the Early Seventies as it is now. When I saw the movie version, I was amazed to see how it was, in essence, written in more or less the same way I would write it; a deconstruction of the show written with the Brady Bunch still stuck in the Sixties, and the rest of the world stuck in the present day, and one moment I found particularly priceless was one not even I could have imagined: Marcia ends up getting snogged by a girl. I am not making this up, just look in the topmost, leftmost panel.

Quote of the Day: "Excuse me, officers, but I hate to ask a law enforcement official to bend the rules, especially for Penal Code 117, Section 33b, but our house is at stake."
____________Bobby Brady, the Brady Bunch Movie.

Link of the Day: Yup, this is how low I'm digging for links.

Tract Review: It's All About You. Simply put, it is Jack's illustration of why you must become like little children to enter the Kingdom of Heaven: Because you have to be so stupid to get behind his arguments that there's no way you ever mentally reached adulthood. Either that or it's about a college girl talking on campus with her grandfather. I don't get it either; I'm currently in college, but I've never seen girls talking talking their grandfathers. And if their relationship was really so close, why didn't he seem to see fit to talk to her about Jesus before she went to College?

Wery Important Message

You may have noticed that I have been updating my blog much less recently than usual, updating twice a month instead of thrice a month, as I did earlier. However, I have an explanation: I have been attached to do the Big-screen Live Action adaptation of 1990s TV series Captain Planet. To get a good idea of what to expect, here's the gist of it: The film begins with a 10 minute sequence set to Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain", with the poem at the beginning set to an entirely black screen. The rest of that section of the film is a montage intercutting scenes of pollution, the awakening of earth-spirit Gaia, and the lives of the Future planeteers while they get the rings. It is important to note that in the original series, while the other four planeteers, (Ma-Ti, Linka, Kwame, and Gi) are all known to have been interested in environmentalism before, Wheeler is one who was chosen for his short temper. This sets the stage for the rest of the film, where it is revealed that, even for the simplistic template of the original series, it is important to note that here, Wheeler's dark side is so complex that he makes most any of the crimefighters from Watchmen seem One-dimensional. I won't go into the specifics of the movie, but I will say that Wheeler often abuses his power of fire, undergoes an addiction to the power of "Heart", and he actually does end up with Linka, with the climax including a scene which mirrors the last shot of Fight Club, with them kissing while a building behind them burns. The film ends with the Planeteers pleading with the audience to help save the world before they make a sequel.