Frankbeaton.com

Nothing warms me up like a little good-natured self-deprecation.

Good on ya, K-Fed.

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by how low Reality TV as a whole continues to sink. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse than THE SWAN, a Dutch TV network is now developing a dating show for the “visibly disfigured.”

Via Reuters:

The broadcaster SBS 6 is seeking candidates for its “Love at Second Sight” show due to be launched on February 20.

“Do you have a visible serious handicap and are you looking for a partner?” says an appeal on its Web site.

“The program is a platform for people with such problems to share experiences and feelings in a positive way with the rest of the Netherlands and to show that they are absolutely not pitiful,” the broadcaster said.

My favorite part? The original title of the show was “Monster Love”.

Oh, you humans.

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So, yeah. Mperia is dead, as is its parent company Bitpass.

A lot of things could have (and frankly should have) been done to make Mperia a success. But that’s all spilled milk under the bridge, now, isn’t it? The truth is, BP never really knew what to do with us — and who can blame them? I mean, really. Semantics aside, Bitpass was a bank. You can’t expect a bank to run your quirky little independent record store and do a good job of it.

Remember the frog and the scorpion? The frog has no right to bitch.

Still. Me and Josh and Kurt spent three years of our lives trying to create something with (we hoped) cultural significance and just the right amount of awesome, and it’s sad to see it just fold up like that. Not with a bang, etc., etc.

To all of you out there who used, visited, or otherwise supported Mperia, I sincerely thank you. I’d especially like to thank Warren Ellis, without whom we wouldn’t have lasted as long as we did.

Sigh. It really was a cool idea, wasn’t it?

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Superman: Ultimate Collector’s Edition DVD Box Set

Um. Please?

I’ll be your best friend…

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Going to see Stephen King lecture at PSU tonight. Tickets were more expensive than I would have liked ($30 for the cheap seats), but since he’s my favorite living author and he doesn’t tour often, I’m seeing this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. If any Portlanders want to come check it out, it’s at Arlene Schnitzer Hall, Portland State University, tonight at 7:30PM.

I have absolutely no idea what King will be lecturing on — presumably writing — but at this point I don’t care. It could be a discussion of new advances in fly-fishing technology and I’d still be there with bells on.

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Elsewhere in Portland, my friends Jamie S. Rich and Joelle Jones are having a book launch party for their new romance comic 12 REASONS WHY I LOVE HER. If you haven’t picked up the book yet, this would be a fine opportunity to do so. Jamie and Joelle will be signing copies and selling original art at Floating World Comics (20 NW 5th Ave., Downtown) from 7:00-10:00PM this evening.

I understand there will be beer and wine, as well — which, of course, is wholly appropriate. If history has taught us anything, it’s that romance almost always goes over better when there’s booze.

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Also, my very good friend Warren Wucinich is showing his Urban Landscape series of paintings at Saffron & Turmeric Gallery (203 SW Pine St., Portland) this month. Tonight’s the opening, but his show will be running through the end of November. Stop by and, if you’re so inclined, buy a painting or two. Do it while his work is still affordable.

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Not doing NaNoWriMo this year. Too much going on right now. I might try to kick out a short story or two, just to quell the mild guilt I’m feeling for not participating in the event, but there’s no way I can clear my schedule enough to attempt a full-length novel. No way.

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Go see THE PRESTIGE, all of you. Best movie I’ve seen in a very long time.

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Thinking a lot about writing lately. The theory of it. Now that my writing partner Matt has moved to Portland, I’ve been talking about it, as well. May as well start writing about it. So bear with me while I try to figure out what the hell I’m doing.

Saw a short documentary about J-Horror on IFC tonight. Brief history of Japanese horror, discussion of some of the big tentpole films in the genre, interviews with important directors and film historians — pretty standard stuff. The most interesting part was a discussion about the fundamental differences between Japanese and American horror, and how those differences reflect the religious beliefs of each culture.

In Western (read: Judeo-Christian) horror, things are extremely straightforward. Light is good, dark is bad. The Devil has a face, and it’s more or less like ours. Plus, in Western horror, there’s the promise that if you say the right words or perform the right action, you can banish the Devil — or at least trick him.

The predominant religion in Japan, Shinto (which I freely admit I know little about), tends to view the spirit world as something huge and rather beyond our ability to comprehend. Shintoists also believe that ghosts and spirits are everywhere — thousands of them, millions of them — and all we mere mortals can realistically do is hope that the good spirits do whatever it is they do to keep the bad ones at bay. That feeling of helplessness and incomprehension is really the hallmark of J-Horror — the idea that ghosts, demons, etc., are going to do whatever the hell they want, and you don’t have a hope of even understanding it, much less stopping it. It’s the same idea that makes Lovecraft’s stories so unsettling.

Okay. I’m too tired to write a conclusion. Luckily this is my blog, so I don’t have to. You may now commence with calling me names for not understanding how Shinto works.

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Hey, if Gaiman can get away with random, disjointed blog entries, then so can I, damnit.

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Just bought a wireless PS2 controller, and its presence in the house has served to underline just how much of a lazy bastard I really am. See, our couch is just far enough away from the TV and the PlayStation that we need to use an extention cord for the controller. It’s a big, unweildly cable that has to be unwound every time we want to play a game, and if we don’t put it away again immediately, the cats chew on it. As a result, we don’t play games that often. Pulling out the controller and then putting it away again is just enough of a pain in the ass that we usually just watch TV instead. Yeah, I know. Pathetic, right? When you’re too lazy to play video games, maybe it’s time to consider suicide for the good of the species as a whole. Anyway, with the wireless one (which I’m already thinking of as “the PlayStation remote”) and Jill laid up with the flu, we’ve been playing all weekend.

(Currently playing: TONY HAWK 3, WE LOVE KATAMARI, and PSI-OPS — because sometimes you just have to kill people with your brain.)

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Has anyone seen this show HEX? Any good? From the ad I saw on BBC America, it looks like a sort of British BUFFY about a teenage spirit medium. And apparently her best friend is a ghost who dresses like a goth chick from the ’80s.

So far it’s pushing all the Beaton buttons, I gotta say. Anybody know if it’s worth watching?

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Since its initial release, I’ve ranted to a lot of people about how STARSHIP TROOPERS is a wildly misunderstood film; that at the movie’s center is a very clever anti-fascism statement, a sort of, “What if the Nazis had won — and now it’s three hundred years later and there’s aliens?”

I saw the movie again for the first time in years the other night, and while I still think the above is true, the movie itself really isn’t very good. Sometimes it just shakes out like that, I guess.

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I installed the Google Web Accelerator a few days ago. It says it’s saved me 7.1 minutes so far.

I think it’s lying.

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Okay. I’ve been working the last two weeks without a break, and any time I’ve been able to carve out for writing has had to go to the REAL writing (i.e., the shit I can sell) and answering emails, so I’ve been neglecting the blog and, for that, I apologize. Still, I can barely string two thoughts together right now for exhaustion, so I think this is going to be a random thoughts entry. Ready? Here goes.

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Just bought and re-watched CRIMSON TIDE. Best submarine movie ever, and I’m not just saying that because you get to hear Denzel Washington declare that the Kirby Silver Surfer is the only TRUE Silver Surfer (he is, by the way). I think I have to write a submarine story now, if only because submariners have the best military jargon: “Make your depth one-five-zero feet, zero degrees, down bubble!” “Conn/Sonar — Torpedo in the water, bearing two-four-one!” “Launch forward counter-measures!” — I’m a sucker for that shit.

I’d love to juxtapose all that incredibly precise technobabble with something supernatural or otherworldly. Come on, tell me the idea of a fast-attack nuclear submarine taking on a giant sea monster doesn’t bring a smile to your face.

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From CBR:

Batman-On-Film has new rumors about casting for Harvey Dent and the Joker, claiming that actor/director John Cusack is up for the role of the doomed district attorney, while cable channel G4 ran a crawl across the screen saying former Pee Wee Herman actor Paul Reubens would become the Clown Prince of Crime.

Obviously bullshit. What amazes me is that a site like CBR, which usually maintains a relatively high journalistic standard (at least among comics sites), would report something that was so obviously bullshit.

I think I liked the old “Comics-2-Film” guy better.

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I have grown a beard. I have done this because Laurenn told me that I looked like Steve Niles; I decided right then and there that something had to be done about that. No idea if I’ll still have it in San Diego, but for now I am both rugged and manly.

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My house is currently under attack by hordes of tiny black ants, who crawl in through the spaces in the window jambs and seem to have a fondness for my desk. If anyone knows a reliable method for getting rid of the little bastards, please let me know.

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Yes, the SOPRANOS season finale was a little flat. That’s because it wasn’t a season finale. We’re not getting Season Seven in January, we’re getting the second half of Season Six. See, everyone was contracted was for six seasons. If HBO did a seventh, they’d have to renegotiate all the contracts, and apparently the cast was asking for the moon and stars to come back for another season. The producers got around that by simply making season six longer, giving them enough time to wrap up the story properly without having to give James Gandolfini a million dollars an episode. HBO did exactly the same thing with the last season of SEX AND THE CITY.

Having said that, it was still disappointing. Everyone involved in the show knew about the six-month break before the season began. They really could have punched up that ending a little bit.

However, the finale of BIG LOVE was excellent. And DEADWOOD’s back on the air now, so none of those other shows matter, anyway.

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BATTLESTAR GALACTICA = awesome.

Frank = embarrassed to have typed that.

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All right. This “quick” post has now taken me twenty minutes. More when I have time.

(I really am trying to be a diligent blogger, you know.)

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…but does anyone have a BitTorrent link to the pilot episode of the ROBOCOP TV series? It’s not available on DVD and I’d really like to see it.

Stop laughing. Let me explain.

I love the first movie. Love it a lot. No shame in that — it’s a great movie, right? Fuckin’ A, it is. Everything after the first movie, however, sucked. Sucked hard. After ROBOCOP 3 (which I couldn’t even finish), I dropped the big guy altogether. Never watched the TV show or that miniseries on the Sci-Fi Channel. Never read the comics — not even the Frank Miller ones.

I just bought the DVD of the original movie, so I’ve got RoboCop on the brain right now. Last night, I IMDB’d it to see what else, if anything, the film’s writers may have done since then. Not much, it turns out — a lot of script-doctoring and rewriting, mostly. But one item caught my eye — Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner, the writers of the original film, actually wrote the two-hour pilot for the failed ROBOCOP TV series in 1994, although that was apparently the extent of their involvement with the show. A quick Googling revealed that the pilot script, titled “The Future of Law Enforcement,” was a cleaned-up-for-TV version of the screenplay they’d originally pitched for ROBOCOP 2 in 1989. Neumeier and Miner’s script was rejected by the studio because the producers, a) wanted to go in a “different direction,” and, b) had their hearts set on getting Frank Miller to write the sequel. When I read that the pilot “takes place three years after the events of the original ROBOCOP and completely ignores everything that happened in the sequels,” I decided I needed to see this thing.

So, yeah. If anybody has a torrent link for it, shoot me an email. It will probably suck and I will probably regret having given two hours of my life to it, but it’s worth a try, right?

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Girl-Wonder.org launched today. It’s a group blog/online magazine designed to bring a feminist perspective to the discussion of mainstream superhero comics, and the misogynist undertones they often contain. What’s notable is the tone. Rather than simply attacking (and then dismissing) superhero comics as inherently sexist, the site authors are self-proclaimed fans of the genre — women who love superhero comics, but are tired of the way women are constantly sexualized and victimized in their pages.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m on the fence with this issue, but I don’t lean to the extreme on either side. I don’t think Frank Cho should be strung up by his testicles because he likes to draw women with big asses, nor do I think it’s okay to dress every female hero like a stripper on her first song. And that whole, “torture-and-kill-all-the-women-in-really-nasty-ways-so-the-male-hero-has-something- to-avenge” thing is really, really lame. It’s not only sexist, folks, it’s played out. There are other ways to motivate a character to action, ways that don’t involve alienating all your female readers.

Anyway, the site’s worth checking out, and the debate is worth having. Go. Read.

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