Piranha 3D is the first 3D film I’ve ever watched in a theatre. I skipped out on My Bloody Valentine because I was going through a bad brake-up at the time and didn’t need to be reminded that everyone else had someone. I boycotted Clash of the Titans for their abuse of robotic owls. And I said “no” to Avatar after being burned by the first direct-to-video sequel of Ferngully. I think 3D is a pointless bauble fearfully adhered to a medium in hopes of making the years between Christopher Nolan’s Batman films worth living. It costs too much to make, too much to project, and (if Sony has their way) too much to veg out to at home.

My original goal was to boycott the movement until it inevitably collapses under the weight of its own production costs, but I knew that they’d eventually cull together a project just stupid enough for me to ironically go to. Step Up 3D was a strong contender, but after watching the Funny or Die video for Piranha 3D I knew that it would be the one. If I was going to pay near-double for a cosmetic revamp of 1950’s schlock technology I wanted to be assured that it would be used to it’s fullest. What follows is a possibly spoiler laden list of things that I giggled at as they came “out of the screen!”

A beer bottle, some vomit, an underwater tree branch, an incandescent fish egg, someone shooting keg foam out like it was from their penis, a penis, a piranha coming as close to winking at the camera as CG would allow, a wet t-shirt contest, a motor ripped off the back of a boat being used as a handheld weapon, the upper half of a woman’s body, a pair of silicon breast implants, a canal, Panama.

Do you think these sound like shameful wastes of William Friese-Greene’s revolutionary stereoscopic technology? Neither do I.

And I know what you’re thinking. “But wait, with all of those ridiculous sight gags and the promise of over the top blood and boobies how are they going to fit in the environmental messages and well-defined character arcs the genre is known for?” They don’t! That’s the genius of it. Piranha 3D is on a 90 minute laser focused mission to gross and boner you into an oblivion and they wouldn’t dream of wasting your time like that. (Leave that to the eggheads over at SyFy)

Now that I think of it, there isn’t even really a story here. It’s just a sequence of scenes lifted from the outline of the first Jaws film (long underwater exploratory dive, “Everybody get out of the water!” scene, alcohol fueled bonding session between folks on a boat, giant explosion at the last second to save the day) all of which improved by the fact that piranhas are everywhere. It’s like an over sexualized Jaws on crank. Which may not have worked so well for Pamela Anderson’s remake of Casablanca, but she never thought of bringing Matt Hooper out of retirement and Doc Brown back to the present, now did she?

Piranha 3D is truly the Jaws of its time. And understand that I don’t say that in the same trivializing manner that every other reviewer have intended. No, I mean it in an entirely different trivializing way.

While Jaws was a masterful work of character and suspense that chose to turn a string of technical disasters into an unrelenting tone of dread and mystery, Piranha 3D is a film made for the early-twenty-somethings of today that don’t put up with that shit. This is a film for the Latter-Day MTV Generation who are shocked that there used to be music videos on during the day and can admit that Parental Control, while a lot of fun, doesn’t hold a candle to Room Raiders. This is a film for the show-me-now impetuous nature of our thong wearing ritalin junkie youth who consider Scream an old-school classic. And as much as they may enjoy the cruder and more topless portions of the film, old cynics like me get to watch them being disembowled by the razor sharp maws of prehistoric killing machines.  Everyone wins!

It is one of those rare cross-generational oddities like Pee-Wee Herman or Sponge Bob that can simultaneously operate on a level for the infantilized while offering a meta over-joke for sad sacks like myself who can experience the true emotional catharsis that comes from a jackass on an overturned jetski gets Piranha’d in the face.

Ps. We don’t use a rating system around here. Just watch the fucking movie.

Where was I? Oh yes, Scott Pilgrim!

In hopes of complete honesty, let me just say that I watched the film at a midnight screening at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar in Austin, Texas. As things go when you are awesome, as I am, Edgar Wright popped by for our matinee and ran up and down the aisles giving every person in attendance a high five before the film started. Part of me suspects this was merely a cog in a Masonic conspiracy which has spanned decades and at least one presidential assassination in hopes of swaying the subjectivity of my review. While I am flattered that so many clandestine meetings have been held on my behalf I must admit that it was hardly needed. This is a film about a comic book that was about video games. It is every part of my brain having sex with every other part of my brain. I’m good, boys.

First it's like this for awhile.

The amount of plot you could glean from the trailer:
Scott Pilgrim is a somewhat listless Toronto hipster in a band. He falls in love with a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” with a penchant for displaying her unstable and mysterious inner workings through a series of outrageous hair styles. He immediately falls in love with her and as a metaphor for dealing with a lover’s baggage must fight every person she’s ever made out with to the death in lavishly choreographed fight sequences cut by an epileptic.

Like most of Wright’s work Scott Pilgrim is a juxtaposition of genres. He’s done zombie/romantic comedy and British pastoral/Michael Bay mash-ups before. As crazy as they might have seemed going into them the case has been made again and again that the man knows what he’s doing. Here’s one that no one asked for. “Overly precious twee mumblecore independents” meet “Kung Fu Mega Man: A Mark Neveldine Joint.”

Long shots, clever pastiches, and quirky editing choices spend the first act lulling you into a whimsical world of recognizable caricatures only to be interrupted mid-indie-rock song, as it were, by a racially insensitive boss battle full of hovering demon hipster chicks and a Bollywood dance sequence. It’s then back to long walks and the pronounced ellipsification of hipster language. Both of these tracks get crazier and crazier until the film concludes at just shy of two hours.

And then it's all like this.

When the film was over and the lights were raised I found myself smiling buffoonishly. This is strange because, as many  of you know, I am dead inside and broadly incapable of feeling joy. I walked to my car alone and reeking of a chocolate stout I had spilled on myself during one of the many “fuck yeah” moments, and as I drove home I started trying to piece together the conspiracy. It all seemed too perfect. Beyond the appearance of the director, a devious ploy to be certain, there were many aspects of the film that seemed to have been placed specifically to win MY favor. The sound design was littered with video game sound effects, musical interludes, and a Universal logo tuned through what sounded like a five channel Ricoh RP2A03 sound chip. Some elements of the books had been stripped away for length considerations, but the ones they kept seemed even more nostalgic and powerful as sound and movement filled out the rest of my patining memories.

The girls were the sort of girls that I could see myself befriending or lusting after. The guys were the sort of guys I could see myself befriending or lusting after. (Understand that in both of these circumstances I am being played by the slightly cooler version of myself who doesn’t have as many x’s on his t-shirt tag and plays an instrument. It would seem that he is also a bisexual. News to me.)

Better than our own world, we are presented with a land where our private history is wide spread enough that every single band in existence is named after obscure video games. It is an idyllic life where no one really has to have a job any more strenuous than a coffee shop, there will always be some girl that will go out with you no matter how much of a dick you are, and when the time comes to face your enemies your battle will include lightning bolts and flaming swords you pull out of your chest.

This is a film that has been made to stimulate that dream that lives within all of us, the once children of the video game age, who still fight against the horrible conformity of the culture at large in our own way.  We haven’t sold our consoles and we know that slothfulness, thumb dexterity, and Japanese snack foods are the only true weapons in the fight to not become our parents. This is for us what Twilight is for 40 year old secretaries who never invested in marital aids.

The “problem” with Scott Pilgrim is that few properties have sought to please their defined audience as exclusively. Just as Watchmen was a 162 minute love letter written in a dialect that only readers of the original series could understand, Scott Pilgrim is a film predicated on the viewer sharing a lifetime of experiences. More than simply adding in-jokes for those of us who know about “Crash n the Boys” or the back catalogue of Vic Tokai, a lack of knowledge on an element like role playing attributes can literally confound a person completely out of the film when they pop out of nowhere. And I’m ok with that.

While it might hurt the film’s bottom line to alienate so many thick necked troglodytes I find a sense of purity in offering so few helping hands to keep them on board.  Scott Pilgrim vs the World is like one of those speeding train levels in a brawler game where you have to move across the tops of sleeper cars fighting wave after wave of enemies. If a well timed jump kick knocks you off the train you are toast as the level continues to move and enemies continue to spawn without you. Luckily, the target market for this film, those among us who played with power, are more than capable of getting to the end and can feel a level of due superiority in the blank stares of the fallen. Considering how stupid I am made to feel whenever I don’t know who is winning in the basketball sports I will take my moments of pride wherever I can find it.

Hell, I just used “troglodytes” in a review.

Ps. We don’t use a rating system around here. Just watch the fucking movie.

I am way above paying 2.99+ an issue to read a manufactured, transient property like Dark X-Men, but I am so not above popping a squat in one of the comfy chairs at B&N and diving into a stack of Dark Reign trades in order to remain in the loop.

Don’t worry, corporate conglomerate, as long as I buy a few overpriced and sub-par cappuccinos now and then, you still profit significantly off of me despite my free peeks at your comics. But I’m simply not dropping another century mark on a mega-event crossover that will inevitably only feed into another mega-event crossover which will require another load of cash before its underwhelming conclusion.

Civil War saw to that.

But as I was sifting through the glut of zombie Green Lanterns and “dark” versions of Marvel superheroes that have infested the shelves so far in 2010, I was poked in the eye by a pair of antlers jutting out from the most shadowed regions of the deep woods.

Not since Isaac avoided his father’s sacrificial blade on Mount Moriah has an individual been so relieved to see a random pair of horns forcing their way through the fog.

I was immediately taken in by the soft, plaintiff eyes of the boy on the cover. Naturally, his antlers aroused my curiosity too, but more than anything I was drawn in because I wanted to find out why he looked so lost and confused.

After reading the book, the answer might be that we all are.

A New Kind of Mutie

Sweet Tooth; Out of the Deep Woods contains the first five issues of the Sweet Tooth series as written by Jeff Lemire and published by DC/Vertigo. Lemire tackles a tough question that has wracked every single brain on Earth at one point an time:

What would happen if Bambi was set on a post-apocalyptic Earth where the value of human life has been reduced to less than that of your average rutting buck* caught in Dick Cheney’s cross-hairs?

Sweet Tooth is the story of a boy named Gus, who is raised in the backwoods by his father after a virus kills off most of humanity. His father calls him “Sweet Tooth” because of his weakness for the candy bars used by hunters to lure and kill mutant hybrids.

You see, for whatever comic booky scientific reason, the only children born after the spread of the virus are human/animal mutant hybrids. As it happens, the doe eyed Sweet Tooth seems to have a rather strong strain of deer DNA contributing to his personal genetic building blocks, ergo the antlers.

Sweet Tooth spends his early years in the backwoods with his father, hiding from the world. Because hybrids are immune to the virus, scientists think that studying their DNA could provide a key to saving the last of humanity. Sweet Tooth is a valuable commodity in a dying world.

Sweet Tooth is taught from infancy that there is nobody in the world he can trust besides his father. For the boy’s own good, he is quarantined in the deep woods. He is taught to run like hell if he ever sees anybody else. The thing is, the only people he has ever even laid eyes on are himself and his father.

This works out well for a while. Sweet Tooth survives his early childhood years despite all of the dangers. His pops teaches him some basic survival skills and really pushes the “Trust No One” mantra. But when Sweet Tooth’s father dies, the most naïve sentient creature in the known galaxy is left to fend for himself in the cruelest of realities.

Could anybody survive if they were truly on their own against the world?

Immediately after his father’s death, Sweet Tooth latches on to a mercenary type named Jessup who promises to lead him to a mythical “sanctuary” for hybrids. The story is more or less Bambi meets I Am Legend with a little bit of Old Man Logan sprinkled in for good measure.

But this book is not about its plot so much as it is about the questions it raises on both the micro and macro level.

Are you really even alive if nobody else knows it? Is personal safety worth it when it comes at the expense of freedom and is dictated by fear? Are the hunters really as evil as they are portrayed? Sure, Sweet Tooth is an innocent kid who wouldn’t hurt a tick even if it was using him to spread Lyme’s Disease, but is he worth more than the entirety of humanity? Is it okay to sacrifice an innocent individual for research that could benefit all of mankind? And to take it a step further, how can we ever know whether or not the powers that be are really doing the research they claim to be? Is the world Sweet Tooth lives in even worth saving?

A New Twist on the Twist Ending

You would have to be a deer/human hybrid isolated in the backwoods for approximately the first 12 years of your life to not see the ending to Sweet Tooth’s first story arc coming from several miles away. But that doesn’t mean it is not a great ending.

The badass Jennings finds himself wrestling with the same questions as the reader after the final act of issue #5. And we both want answers.

I strongly suggest dipping into Sweet Tooth if you no longer care whether or not it is the Heroic Age or the Age of Apocalypse. Whereas the latest run of Captain America might answer the question of who will carry the shield, Sweet Tooth forces you to answer questions that we all  might be more comfortable avoiding.

Sweet Tooth is the best comic that I didn’t pay to read so far this year. Sadly, the overpriced cappuccino still sucked .

*I have been looking for a chance to slip “rutting buck” into my writing since reading To Kill a Mockingbird in eighth grade. Mission accomplished.

I try not to leave the space station too often unless I get really desperate for an aguas frescas from the HEB in my ‘hood. Instead, I choose to sit locked in orbit reading more and more comics so that I may gather the wisdom necessary to pass judgment on the masses  scurrying about the blue marble below. Comics have the answers to every problem facing society today. Here are a few comics/nerd goings on that threaten to shatter the very fabric of reality and how they should be handled according to Nerd Revolutionary Doctrine:

Education

The entire world is up in arms about the changes to the text books in Texas. It turns out that the candy-coated  history American public schools have been pushing down our throats for the last century or so is not false enough for contemporary tastes. To fix this problem, a group of patently under-qualified individuals gathered in Texas to literally rewrite the history books to match the image of American history that exists only in their warped minds.

The rest of the world is naturally shocked, but nerds already know what’s up. In the world we live in, continuity is meaningless. Nothing fucks up a good story like the facts.

That is why I believe it is time for America to institute an idea I have been holding in my back pocket for a few years now. The current curriculum for history in Texas and every other state should be replaced with the Official History of the Marvel Universe. Everything that has ever happened in the Marvel Universe is recorded in full, four color splendor for all to see. It is the only way we can guarantee intellectual honesty in the classroom.

Kang Sets his TiVo

Like the traditional curriculum, the Marvel Universe is  rooted somewhat in the real universe. I personally judge my presidents on their Captain America policy. Nixon was the worst. Clinton and W. were okay. Obama has been great.

You never hear Newt Gingrich talking about how close the country came to disaster when  the Serpent Society had a lizard/human hybrid Ronald Reagan running amok in  DC.

I blame the schools.

Replacing the standard “Founding Fathers” mythology with the history of the Marvel Universe would send a message straight to our children that history is not written in stone. In fact, I would recommend that once a month students go through a ‘Duck and Cover’ emergency drill in case Kang the Conquerer shows up. I hear he is pissed about the last episode of Lost, and he doesn’t care how many timelines he has to destroy to get the answers he wants.

And the best part is that there are already plenty of text books ready to go.

Nerd Culture meets Jock Culture Meets Prison Rape Scene

Power Ranger Tommy won his last fight in only 24 seconds via arm bar at UWC 8 in Fairfax, Va. It is as yet unknown if this nerd icon has what it takes to dry hump his way to the top, and unfortunately he doesn’t wear his Power Rangers gear when he fights. There are no lessons to be learned from this story other than an MMA organization desperately needs to enter into a partnership with Marvel or DC and start dressing their fighters up like heroes and villains. Rorshach vs. Batman pay per view would break all kinds of records.

‘I was here, but I disappear’

Am I the only one itching to re-watch The Harder They Come after reading about the situation in Jamaica?
Too bad it’s not just a movie this time.

Left Wing Conspiracy to Promote Nerd Core Rap

Nerdy rapper Baba Brinkman will get a big break this week when he appears as part of ‘Geek Week’ on The Rachel Maddow Show. Rachel Maddow is, without a doubt,  the reigning queen of the nerd community. She is the Barbara Streisand of nerd culture.

Dastardly: Place a hogtied woman on the train tracks, and witness her death by train. (5G)

As you can imagine, this achievement has been heavily scrutinized as an example of misogyny.  As a feminist I share in these concerns and believe it is about time that we as gamers take an honest look at how the trend of polarized moral choices and reward systems do not so much as open the possibilities of immersion as they direct them through narrow corridors of dangerous subjectivity.

With my Stetson® thrown into that heavily populated ring I shall now move on to addressing the voiceless victim of this achievement: the train.

Since their invention in 1784 no single piece of technology has endured the palpable fear/hatred of mankind more than the locomotive.  African American folk-heroes took them on for pride, environmentally conscious modes of transportation took them on for profit, and small children risked millions of lives taking them on for thin pennies.  It is easy to trivialize these brazen outbursts of violence as nothing more than symptoms for the general sense of technophobia that human beings feel when facing an iron titan they cannot begin to understand or control. Sure. Take the easy way out, but I’m going to keep on writing anyway.

It is a hatred instilled in us when we are young. Have you ever wondered why so many children’s programs have focused on the rail system? Shining Time Station, Mr. Rogers, School House Rock, and Don Cornelius’s Soul Train all prominently feature trains. Such shows are propaganda in its most egregious form and are devised to begin a three part process: first conspiring curiosity in these vehicles through autopomorphized grins, ritualistically educating audiences on techniques to down the enemy through the redundant plots of “things” being left on the tracks and the “death box” that is the switchyard, and finally using catchy music videos aimed at impressionable young people to build an association between locomotives and loathsome grammar rules. It is a 1-2-3 punch and it is working.

How else can you explain the fact that such an obsolete piece of machinery, irrelevant for nearly a century at this point, should continue to make as many appearances as it does in the clearly biased anti-train media? When did you last hear a positive news story about the Transcontinental Railroad or a feel-good-piece about the convenience of the overpriced sandwiches in the Café Car? Ask yourself that. Then consider the last-time you were passed a meme link to a YouTube video of a car being hit by a train, read coverage of the casualties that resulted from a massive derailing of a British line, or heard someone at your job use an anti-Amtraktic slur like “son of a conductor” or “rail-monkey?”

In 1863 American playwright and known hat-wearer Augustin Daly, taking a lead from Charles Bolton’s earlier work, began production of the play “Under the Gaslight.” In this heavily politicized farce of steam-powered paranoia Daly envisioned a world where man had been pushed to his limits by these (and I quote) “iron faced cog-suckers.” He then illustrated a means by which a man could theoretically sacrifice his own life, or that of another in case he was presently using his own, in hopes of derailing a locomotive with their own bodies once securely fashioned to the tracks, or as he repeatedly put it “blood stained whore stockings of Satan.” The mass hysteria of his prophecy rang true with many and inspired the short story “Captain Tom’s Fright,” a half dozen plays in London which ran concurrently, the 1914 film serial “The Perils of Pauline,” and countless other appearances across all forms of media.

Constantly berated with such acts of slander and literary terrorism it is no wonder why these gentle behemoths of the industrial revolution have gone into hiding in recent years.  Oh, you’ll still see them from time to time, I suppose. Running loudly through the spaces in the tree-line or passive aggressively making you wait for twenty-five minutes at a railroad crossing on your way to work. But can you blame them?

I imagine over the next decade we shall see them less and less until the invention of hover-freights and teleportation pods send them whistling into the distant recesses of the lost wood where so many of our once modern marvels have found themselves.  They’ll be happy there, perhaps befriending a flock of Betamax players or seeking alliance with the dial-toneless remains of a once great nation of those old-timey phones with the earpiece on the string that you had to nail to the wall.

It sooths my heart to think of such a future. And it is to that wistful future that I must look as I stand in the world that is and long for a day when no trains will die.

Also, Dirk Dastardly was in Wacky Races. SNIDELY WHIPLASH was the Dudley Do-Right character that tied girls to the railroad tracks, assholes.

Trainicide throughout history:

Now is your chance as the loyal fans of the premier nerd-centric comedy tour in Austin to hunt for yourselves in photos of the audience. Everybody wins!

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