ECCC 2012

"Hold on a second, dude. I DON'T HAVE YOUR FUCKING RING, MAN!*"

I pretty much summed up all the reasons why I love going to the Emerald City Comicon in this post last year. Well, the time has come yet again for Con-life and I am friggin' PUMPED.

Highlights this year will hopefully include, but will not be limited to:

• DC's new 52 panel
• The 20th anniversary "Batman: The Animated Series" panel with Bruce Timm and Kevin Conroy
• George Takei's panel
• Wil Wheaton's panel, of course
• Edward James Olmos' panel and hopefully some "Blade Runner" stories
• "Firefly" and "Serenity" panels for Summer Glau and Adam Baldwin (pushes up glasses)
• Resisting the urge to throw something at Robert Kirkman

Stoked to hang with my bro Keith and hopefully some other Bellingham dudes, eat some good food, maybe peep some movies and just generally be a goon all weekend. Git 'er done.

*Yeah, that's a corny BASEketball/LOTR combo joke, bro. Deal with it.

Sometimes you don't realize how badly you want something until the option is taken away.

The 2012 Seattle Mariners

The 2011 Seattle Mariners fell just short of 100 losses last year. The fact that I see this a semi-positive thing is definitive proof of the abusive relationship this team has with my heart. I don't have many rational reasons for optimism for the 2012 Mariners, but I've got a few irrational ones so that's good enough for me.

The big offseason move was trading Michael Pineda to the Yankees for catcher/DH Jesus Montero and pitcher Hector Noesi. I'm sad to see Pineda go because he is already awesome and will probably only get better if he stays healthy. Seeing his Safeco debut and a few of his other starts in person were some of my only positive memories of last season. Assuming Yankees fans and New York media don't eat him alive for no good reason, he'll be a star. Or maybe this will be like the Jay Buhner trade and there will be jokes on Seinfeld about it some day.

As I write this, we're about 12 hours away from the Mariners opening the season against the Oakland Athletics for 2 games in Japan. MLB has done this with other teams in the past, but none of those teams had Ichiro so no one cared. Now, I'm sure Japanese folks are stoked, but literally no one outside of Seattle and Oakland gives a shit about the AL West's 2 worst teams playing games that will air live at 3:10 am PST. On one hand, I understand. Come August or so, watching the Mariners play the stupid A's will seem about as appealing as a warm Bud Light. But, then again, it's Felix Day! Er, morning. Same thing. I do so love watching Felix pitch. Then we go back to a few days of meaningless spring training games before the season starts for everyone else around April 4th. MLB seems logistically-challenged to me, but whatever.

Back to the crappy Mariners. As has been the case since like 2007 or so, literally EVERYTHING will need to go right for the Mariners to even win 70+ games. The rest of the AL West would need to die in simultaneous plane crashes in order for the Mariners to finish above .500 even. I'm excited to see if Montero can do some mashing in Safeco and I'm hoping for Ichiro to bounce back now that he'll be batting in the 3 spot instead of leading off. Ackley will be get to play his first full season and I'm sure he'll do great. If Smoak can maintain the power he showed during his hot start last year, it will be a huge boost to the lineup. And maybe known ginger Mike Carp will prove he's not destined to be a lifetime minor leaguer.

As usual, I'll be there at the home opener on April 13th with my dad. Bad baseball is better than no baseball.

"The Hunger Games" (2012) dir Gary Ross

Too much bad CG, not enough Temple of the Dog

Hollywood studios, like nature, abhor a vacuum. With the Harry Potter movie series dead and buried and the Twilight series coming to an end soon, a new young adult fiction series was needed to fill the gap for all the teeny-bopper PG-13 movie-goers. Luckily for them and kinda fortunate for the rest of us, Suzanne Collins wrote a trilogy of entry-level dystopian science fiction books complete with a strong female character and not terribly obnoxious love triangle. Since "The Hunger Games" demolished the weekend box office, we can rest assured that we'll be hearing about the movie, the books and the now guaranteed sequels for the next 4 or 5 years. It could be, and has been, a lot worse.

The movie itself is just okay in my opinion because I have absurdly high standards for this particular genre. Everyone has heard by now how liberally it borrows from pretty much every sci-fi movie/book ever made, but particularly from "Battle Royale," "Death Race 2000" and "The Running Man." Not that those 3 movies were the first stories to ever feature death matches between humans for society's entertainment, but it's worth noting when a huge cultural phenomenon has obvious predecessors. "Battle Royale" is actually a pretty awful flick and anyone who gets stoked to watch it because they heard it was like "The Hunger Games" will be pretty bummed out. "Death Race 2000" and "The Running Man," however, I cannot recommend highly enough. Classic stuff.

From a nerdy visual standpoint, I pretty much hated the way "The Hunger Games" was filmed. It embraced all the horrible trends of modern film making: rapid, ADHD-riddled editing, over-the-top shaky camerawork and SyFy channel movie-of-the-week caliber CG. When you're setting the scene of District 12 as looking like an Eastern Kentucky poor coal mining town, you really, REALLY don't need to edit it like a fucking Aphex Twin music video, okay? Let me soak in the visuals instead of making HUNGER GAMES: CRANK STYLE. Not to diss the "Crank" movies, as there is a time and place for such manic style, but dystopian sci-fi is not such a place. It basically made a movie with an estimated 100 million dollar budget look unfinished at times; like you're watching a rough cut. It's one visual saving grace is that the outdoor shots were filmed in North Carolina instead of overused British Columbia like most other Lions Gate productions. So the forests look more like "Last of the Mohicans" than "Twilight." Solid choice on that.

An instant red flag for me was when I noticed in an early, very positive review that this movie was 140 minutes long. Are you friggin' kidding me? You can speed read through the first book in less time than that if you're so inclined. This isn't "The Godfather", this is a young adult fiction adaptation. And yet many folks have remarked that it felt rushed, even at nearly 2 and a half hours long. The movie, as with the book, has 3 distinct sections: District 12, The Capitol/prepping for the games and then the games. My god, did that middle part drag. Should have been 10 minutes of screen time tops. Setting up Katniss' relationships in District 12 got shortchanged badly and even the games felt kind of rushed. They especially rushed the Katniss and Rue friendship, which I felt was the emotional highpoint of the book. So, the movie suffers greatly from being too enslaved to the source material when it could have cut out a ton of smaller things and really knocked it out of the park for the big moments instead of pulling punches.

Jennifer Lawrence deserves every single bit of praise she's getting for her role. Her performance in "Winter's Bone" was clearly not a fluke. She's the real deal. Due to the rapid pacing and editing, she had to do a lot of subtle quick non-verbal reaction shots and just kind of generally emote in order to make a lot of scenes work and for the most part she succeeds. In fact, the movie basically lives or dies by her performance in my opinion. Had they chosen a less experienced or talented lead, disaster may have ensued. But J-Law killed it and thus saved/created a successful franchise, so I guess blame her for kicking ass if y'all hate it.

"John Carter" (2012) dir. Andrew Stanton

Originally titled "Shawn Carter" but Jay-Z bailed at the last minute. Hov!

 When you saw the trailers for "John Carter," you may have thought, "Wow, that looks pretty similar to 'Avatar' and a million other other sci-fi flicks." Then some bespectacled neck beard in a Battlestar Galactica t-shirt jumped out of a bush and said something like, "Mmmm, yes, well you see the 1917 pulp novel "A Princess of Mars" by Edgar Rice Burroughs is pretty much what inspired everything from 'Flash Gordon' to 'Star Wars' to 'Avatar' so, yeaaaah," while pushing up his glasses and farting. Hopefully, you punched said nerd and continued on your merry way to see "John Carter."

The other narrative surrounding this movie is how badly media critics bashed it before it was even being screened. It cost a kajillion dollars. Mars is stupid. Those aliens look ridiculous, etc etc. It reminded me a lot of how everyone flipped out about how much over budget "Waterworld" was way before it came out and how terrible it was going to be. You know what? "Waterworld" is fucking awesome. My dad took me to see it when it came out. I must have been about 11 and was eager to see what all the fuss was about. Well, it delivered big time and I was way into it. In all seriousness, if you never saw "Waterworld" as a kid or you haven't seen it in a long time, watch it again. They don't make movies like that anymore. A totally go-for-broke, post-apocalyptic survival story almost completely shot on the ocean. That is ballsy, man.

This nerd wrote a spot-on rant defending "John Carter" for similar reasons:
"JOHN CARTER is not a debacle; it's an earnest attempt to evoke wonder, and it largely succeeds despite its narrative missteps. Maybe you don't agree. That's fine. But choose your fucking battles, people. Having it out for a film like JOHN CARTER hurts the art form; it makes it harder for our best directors to follow through on their dreams. For a long time, BLADE RUNNER was considered a horrendous flop; now, it's one of the most influential films of my lifetime. No one at Fox was proud of THE ABYSS, but I'm pretty sure at some point it'll be considered Cameron's masterpiece. In any event, register your disappointment and move on, and save your vitriol for the films that deserve it."

Yeah! What he said! Anyways, I was excited to see "John Carter" because A) I love my sci-fi action movies B) it's directed by the same guy who made "Wall-E" and C) it stars my boy Taylor Kitsch aka Tim Riggins from the Best TV Show Ever (Trademark) "Friday Night Lights whose charm can only be described with one word: laconic. Even still, my expectations were not especially high, probably due to all the mediocre reviews. Because of this, "John Carter" surprised the hell out of me by being pretty damn exceptional.


I was impressed by how the movie does not insult its audience's collective intelligence. It chucks you into the deep end with no water wings. I really dig that. Things get explained gradually over the course of the 2 hour running time instead of it all being spelled out for you up front as to who all these different groups of Mars folk are and why they're fighting and how our hunky, I mean, uh, heroic protagonist gets tossed into the middle of all of it and why he can jump really, really far and no one else can.

Visually, "John Carter" is stunning. Andrew Stanton made the very wise (and expensive, I suppose) choice to shoot tons of real locations for the movie and blend it with tasteful CG instead of making one giant green screen turd of a movie like most people do these days. It pays off big time because this Mars landscape actually feels like a real, dusty and generally unpleasant place. The set design is also similarly lush and impressive. The 2 warring humonoid groups on the planet have a sort of ancient Rome meets steampunk (lol) look to their clothing and machinery, which I know sounds really silly, but it looks cool. The level of detail on their airships, which fly on light (duh), is insane. And the four-armed alien race that befriend our boy JC actually look really well rendered and reasonably lifelike. It all makes for an overall immersive moving going experience and it's nice to see that all that money at least went to something that turned out very high quality.

There's one scene in particular that really sold me on the movie, but I feel like it will only register with people who regrettably devoted way too much time to watching "Lost" and appreciated the scores of "Star Trek" (2009), "Up" and "Super 8." I'm talking about the modern king of sappy, emotive scores: Michael Giacchino. Without giving too much away, our boy JC decides to stay behind and take on a horde of dickhead aliens himself in order to let his crew escape and the score suddenly gets SUPER Giacchino-y ("Lost" 4th season spoiler warning, also may cause weeping) and there are flashbacks that fill out his backstory a bit and finally give the movie some depth. I, of course, ate this right up. Loved it.


It's unfortunate that everyone decided to hate on this movie because it's actually quite good, even to someone who has pretty high standards for action blockbusters. It's also surprisingly "hard sci-fi" for a Disney film, which I guess perhaps contributes to the backlash. Anyways, I'll always defend the hell out of "Waterworld" and I'll probably do the same for "John Carter."

Sanford's Austin Travelogues

I’ve been back for a few weeks now but I’ve been meaning to write about the whole experience for my own personal reference. What follows are some edited thoughts I posted on the VLV board (from which I got tons of great recommendations) while I was there, along with newer reflections and whatnot.  This is to serve as a reminder that life can still be awesome at times and to hold on to those joyful times in my memory.

Austin, Feb. 16 - 21

Cassie and I got in on a Thursday right around dusk, which was appropriately Malick-esque. We rented a car, checked into our chilled out hotel and proceeded to Live Oak BBQ because we were starving. Place was empty and had all the charm of a bomb shelter, but the brisket was pretty good. Sometimes it's okay to set the bar low. Then we wanted to check out the 6th St. area, which is the big “night life” area of downtown Austin and where SXSW just takes over the city. We started on East 6th St. which is basically like Bartertown for punks and hippies. Enough food trucks and dive bars in one condensed area to make Portland green with envy. Unreal. Had some really good tacos with some salsa that made me sweat buckets and Cassie laughed at me.

Then we proceeded to check out the other side of 6th St which was like some college freshmen's wet dream. What a fucking sideshow. I can only imagine this area is pure bedlam during SXSW. The bars there were super corny, so I tracked down a good brewpub, The Ginger Man. Impressive selection.

Friday, we started the day off right with breakfast at Mi Madre's. Food of the gods. Ate so much that I wasn't hungry again for 8 hours, straight up. Then the lady wanted to do a lil' outlet shopping down in San Marcos, which was a fun lil' side trip. Cassie showed that Victoria Secret outlet who was boss.

Migas breakfast tacos

Sopapillas!

Thumbs up!

Came back to town, got ready for dinner. Tried to get in at Barley Swine, which I knew was gonna be a bust since it was nearly 8, and sure enough, a 2 hour wait. Must be some food (editor’s note: it is). So we went over to Olivia and had a very nice, fancy meal.

Then, in search of another good brewpub, found the Draught House up by the college, which had a great selection, but hardly anywhere to sit besides the rainy patio. Would be an amazing to hang during nice weather.

Texans are understandably just BEWILDERED by rain it seems. It barely rained at all this winter and fall down there. Girls were walking around at night in shorts and t-shirts just like "WUT IS THIS STUFF?!?"

Lots more after the cut!