Free for All Friday (Lucky Number) 13
Hey! Free for all Friday is all over the place today.
- A new Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince trailer. Just when you think you couldn’t get any less Snape in a trailer, Warner Brothers goes that extra mile and gives you exactly three picaseconds, mostly of his gloriously greasy hair whipping around. Neat shots of Narcissa, Bellatrix, and Fenrir Greyback, though. And lots of cool stuff with Harry and Dumbledore in the cave.
- Mermaid! This is so cool.
- The Milky Way Transit Authority
- Joss Whedon isn’t a total spaz all the time.
Asked by Maxim why DC Comics was having a hard time turning its superheroes into movies, he said: “Because, with that one big exception (Batman), DC’s heroes are from a different era. They’re from the era when they were creating gods.
“And the thing that made [rival publisher] Marvel Comics extraordinary was that they created people. Their characters didn’t living in mythical cities, they lived in New York. They absolutely were a part of the world. Peter Parker’s character (Spider-Man) was a tortured adolescent.
It devolves from there, but isn’t it refreshing to read a statement from him and not immediately want to slap yourself?
- Greg Ruttner’s Definitive List of The 99 Things You Should Have Seen on the Internet Unless You’re a Loser or Old or Something
There were several I’d never seen, or even heard of, starting with number 14, “Bubb Rubb.” So I guess I’m a loser or old or something. But I knew that.
It’s also awesome for helping you remember some really excellent times on the internet. Like number 18, “GI Joe Pork Chop Sandwiches.” That was all kinds of funny.
- My Father Asks for Nothing. A very short, beautiful story about a son helping his father take a last look at World War II.
- Put Serenity in Space, for real! I always loved how there have been USS Enterprises going back to Revolutionary War sloops, all the way to the Space Shuttle. I would really love for this to be just the first of many Serenitys in space. Vote early and often!
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Two-thirds of people lie about having read classic literature. Apparently, it’s so we’ll be considered smart, which is sexy. In other news: chocolate and puppies good, cancer bad.
It lists the top 10 books people claim to have read, but haven’t actually:
- 1984, by George Orwell
- War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
- Ulysses, by James Joyce
- The Bible
- Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
- A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking
- Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
- In Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust
- Dreams from My Father, by Barack Obama
- The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins
Have you read them? I’ve read 1984 and great big whacks of The Bible, and the first 10 pages of Ulysses. And that’s it! Now I’m Old or a Loser or Something and Not Very Well Read and Therefore Not Smart Sexy.
And that’s what I got for us today. Which seems to end on a down note. But, yeah, all things considered, I’m humming along just fine. You?
I’ve read the same (minus the 10 pages of Joyce’s Ulysses). I don’t think we are unread, we just don’t feel like we have to lie about what we’ve read to be sexy smart.
Comment by marciepooh on March 6, 2009 at 10:11 am
I’ve read 1984 and The Selfish Gene from that list.
As a former Russian linguist in the Navy, I’m especially ashamed to admit I’ve never read any of the great Russian novels. I’ve read some of their short stories and poems, but I never had the desire to read Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, etc. The only sort-of exception is Nabokov’s Lolita–which has language so unbelievably gorgeous that I’d recommend it to logophiles anywhere.
I keep telling myself I’ll rectify the situation one day. But really, I won’t.
Comment by Philosaur on March 6, 2009 at 11:19 am
“with that one big exception (Batman)”
Oh, and someone called fucking Superman. Jesus tits… did Whedon just toally blow off the king of all the superheroes? Sure, as of late the Spider-Man movies have done well, but let’s be honest. Peter Parker has been Clark’s bitch for so long that you can’t even call it a rivalry. Unless it’s in the sense that a hammer and a nail have a rivalry.
And I say that as someone who really does prefer Spider-Man to Super-Man in comics. But looking back on the bigger picture Batman and Superman are 1 and 2 where those movies are concerned. And it’s not like Marvel is can’t miss.
Sure, Spidey, X-Men, and Iron Man were great. But come on, are you longing for another Daredevil, Elektra, or Ghost Rider movie? Maybe they should take a third shot at a Hulk movie just to finally get the message that people don’t give a shit about Hulk. And, seriously, how many times are they going to dip the bucket in the Punisher well and have it come up dry?
It’s also worth noting that he says the problem is that the DC characters are from the era where they were creating gods. Oops, coming soon from Marvel… Thor.
So, this is yet another case where he leaves me slapping the forehead. To end FFAF on a positive note though, everybody should go dig on this 22-20s video.
Comment by doc on March 6, 2009 at 11:36 am
I understand where you’re coming from. Reading War and Peace is something I’d like to have done, but not enough to actually do it.
A million billion frillion seconds on the beauty of Lolita. When I think that English was Nabakov’s third language, I get chills.
Comment by Sarah, etc. on March 6, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Truth tellers are sexy also!
Comment by Sarah, etc. on March 6, 2009 at 12:31 pm
Wow at the Free for All goodness!
Really? Snape is in the preview? I couldn’t find him. I tried. I don’t understand how they justify that for Harry Potter and theFREAKING HALF BLOOD PRINCE! Grrrrrrr!
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that Whedon totally did just deliberately blow off the King of all superheroes. Wow. Supes sure ain’t god. He’s a person, and the very way he integrates with the real world is a huge part of the story.
I have read all of 1984 and Madame Bovary. I read the latter in AP English, and I really was too young, naive, and self-righteous to really appreciate it. I wanted Flaubert to die in a fire even if he was already dead. I’m going to try it again soon. On my partial list, is huge chunks of the Bible, a couple of pages of Ulysses. Many of the others are on my lifelong “to read” list. I actually enjoy Russian authors, but still haven’t gotten around to War and Peace.
Also the mermaid is cool, I’ve already voted for Serenity, and I haven’t time to check out the rest today. Eeep! :)
Comment by Ladyglutter on March 6, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Is the economoy so bad that Sol is no longer considered a station on the Milky Way Transit Authority?
Comment by irish_cavalry on March 6, 2009 at 1:05 pm
Also, am I the only one that sees Richard Dawkins on there and thinks, WTF? That seems so out of place on that list. But at least there is no Moby Dick. We’re winning that war!
Comment by doc on March 6, 2009 at 1:06 pm
That and Obama. Johnnies come lately.
Comment by Sarah, etc. on March 6, 2009 at 1:17 pm
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” - Douglas Adams
Comment by Sarah, etc. on March 6, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Maybe we can use some bailout money to build a station.
Comment by irish_cavalry on March 6, 2009 at 4:44 pm
I completely disagree. Consistently speaking, Batman movies are the only superhero movies in the DC franchise that make untold amounts of cash. Superman Returns didn’t do half as well as The Dark Knight, and if the old Superman films had been released in conjunction with the older Batman films, it would almost definitely have played out the same way.
People don’t identify with Superman. Superman is the best of the best, and he makes us all feel inferior. We can’t hope to be Superman in our wildest dreams - no one is that good all the time. He’s the world’s biggest boyscout. Batman, however, is someone we could all be - we see ourselves in his problems, his dual identity. There are more Batman comics and spin-off comics than there ever could hope to be for Superman.
Maybe if they play the reboot of Superman that they’re planning to do correctly, he’ll take off. But they’ll have to add some angst in there somewhere.
Spider-Man was a bad choice for the comment, I think. But then, I hate Spider-Man.
Comment by Poptart on March 6, 2009 at 10:47 pm
Okay, this will teach me to press send before I’m actually done. Lol.
As to Thor, and Hulk, and all the other Marvel flops - they are flat out trying to make money. Marvel is good at that. They may have awesome characters (and I’m not saying all of them ARE awesome, just a chunk of them), but they suck at storylines. DC has less awesome characters, but better story. It’s why I switched to DC.
And to be fair, depending on which Thor we’re talking about, he’s not actually Thor. He just gets Thor’s powers from the hammer. (Although I do believe they’re doing the Son of Asgaard storyline with the movie, which means he is actually Thor…)
And another important point is that the major DC characters were created in the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s. The Marvel characters came about in the 50’s and 60’s. The idea of superheroes was different for both companies. The DC heroes appealed to the depression era, struggling, just-come-back-from-war generation (perhaps more “escapist” as Kira comments), while the Marvel heroes appealed to the post-vietnam, hippie-dippie, individualist generation. DC wanted heroes we could look up to rather than emulate; Marvel didn’t want heroes who were better than us, they wanted heroes everyone could be.
Comment by Poptart on March 6, 2009 at 10:52 pm
I read 1984, the Bible (in chunks, but I have read all of it), and A Brief History of Time. I also read Crime and Punishment, but not War and Peace.
Comment by Poptart on March 6, 2009 at 10:53 pm
Thank you for posting “My Father Ask for Nothing”.
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