Grant Morrison's Mahabharata

I absolutely love mad labors of love like this: Grant Morrison's CGI retelling of the Hindu epic The Mahabharata looks fascinating, bizarre, and potentially very, very beautiful. Morrison has long been one of my favorite comics writers--though his work can sometimes come across as incomprehensible, it is always interesting.




(luscious concept art from 18 Days)









The Mahabharata is a wonderful story to begin with, and I loved Peter Brook's (more faithful) adaptation when I saw it on PBS years ago. Here's a bit of that:

The Naked Ape

I'm a big fan of the TED talks. Here's a particularly interesting one that just went up today: scientist Elaine Morgan makes an argument that humans evolved from aquatic apes. Her most persuasive points address the layer of fat under our skin, the evolution of other hairless mammals, and bipedalism. It's pretty fascinating, really.

Random Thoughts

This summer, you can plunk down your seven, eight, nine bucks and go see (the ridiculous) blockbuster sequel Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen or the wannabe franchise starter G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. If you're a masochist, anyway.

Even though I didn't much care for T:ROFL and I don't hold out very high hopes for GIJ:TROC, both of these new movies got me thinking about the fine art of film titles. Are these colon-ized(-oscopied?) titles really the only way to simultaneously identify the franchise and differentiate the product being sold? Sometimes, the post-colon subtitle makes sense--for instance, when it is also the title of the book on which the film is based (i.e., The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring) or when the subtitle has enough oomph to stand on its own (Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back). The newer franchise titles sound as generic as the films actually are, and while I'm usually a fan of truth in advertising I doubt that is what they were hoping people would see in these titles.

Speaking of George Lucas, while I do cut him some slack for the brilliance of Empire, I still sort of blame him for this trend (note the similarities between the title of the new Transformers movie and the original working title of Episode 6: Star Wars: Revenge of the Jedi).

I hope the studios check themselves on this before it gets out of control. Bring back the old 1,2,3 (Transformers: 3-D, anyone? Anyone?). Bring back "and." Bring back "vs." Or, hey, maybe try respecting your audience enough to assume they know that the movie with the giant robots and Mutt Williams is a sequel to the movie they saw two years ago with the giant robots and Mutt Williams.

I know I promised I'd try to have interesting things to say...Sorry about this. I'll try to do better next time.

Related:
The Art of the Title Sequence
Steven Hill's Movie Title Screens Page
We Love You So on the art of the title...

and let's not forget, The Transforminators:

Serious

Whoa.

Filming the Unfilmable?

io9 just put up a very thoughtful post about the idea of "unfilmable books." Especially intriguing is the argument about how the idea that some books shouldn't be filmed is actually harder to defend than the idea that certain books can't be filmed. It's definitely worth reading.

New Blog!

Hi everybody! This is my new blog. I'll try to keep posting to the old one too. I'll be writing about all kinds of stuff here and I'll try to be interesting.

So, away we go!