| 16 January 2004 at 21.04.59 ZuluTime
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Posted by Gremlin [24.8.14.102 - c-24-8-14-102.client.comcast.net] on 16 January 2004 at 21.04.59 ZuluTime:
There's a subject title I haven't used in a while....
Something else I haven't used in a while is my own laptop. It's still off the grid somewhere. I should start calling people today and see if i can find out what's happening with it. Because I really kinda need it now.
If there's a bright side to the loss of the laptop, it's a strange ability to think more about what I'd do if I happened to have it available. Last night, Hunter and I sat at Bennigan's for about five hours, plotting out neat little 'scenes' which could happen in the event of this disease happening in the world today. And that led to some interesting observations.
So far this century, there have only been a couple of zombiefilms anyone can think of. Resident Evil, which has no particular reference to the twenty-first century other than that it had begun, and 28 Days Later, which, set in London, defied centuries altogether. I haven't actually seen Remake of the Dead yet [although I've managed to read enough to get the basic idea--including that stillborn thing I was wondering about], but it doesn't yet appear to address modern times in any meaningful way.
Essentially, zombies are too wild a concept to allow to coincide with a world in which Junior and Ashcroft also stumble brainlessly about. It just never seems to happen. There's probably some strange rule against it.
So: fuck the rules. So far, the majority of Pandemic is set to occur within a few years. I'm generally thinking of it taking place from 2007 to 2010, and allowing that, as of 2004, the world is already a pretty weird place.
Granted, the introduction of zombies into the real world, as it is today, might be less frightening than refreshing. But, the more I think about it, the more I realise that, but for the idiocy common in the modern world, this sort of disease would actually be cured in a matter of minutes. But that could have happened with AIDS twenty years ago, too. People don't take diseases the right way. They panic when they should be thinking; by the time the future shock wears off and they accept that the disease exists, it's already gone pandemic and can't really be squashed anymore.
So that allows for some really cool circumstances in this little story. Also, it opens up a few arguments about reality in general. I just about killed Hunter at the restaurant for assuring me that the FBI would disallow American citisens and media from leaving the scene of an attack with a MiniDV cassette they weren't even aware of. Ultimately, the issue was dropped out of relevence, since I happen to know from experience a good way to get things past cops and other officious morons; I've done it before, personally. It'll be in the novel, of course.
Meanwhile, I think I might go ahead and write out the FBI segment in advance, since it doesn't particularly rely on anything I haven't fully worked out yet. I don't know exactly how long that'll end up being, or whether it'll contain anything like spoilers, per se; but, once it's written, I might go ahead and upload it as a sort of teaser. A short [ish] story extracted from the whole. Something better to read here at gremlin.net, perhaps, than 'still working on the book; stay tuned'.
Of course, one thing I haven't worked out yet, which is bugging me immensely, involves the prologue. For better or worse, the book is actually going to start in the Pliensbachian Age. Which is damned near a matter of necessity, for me, since I'm more of a palaeontologist than a microbiologist, personally.
Unfortunately, the Pliensbachian isn't actually done yet, IRL. We know, to date, that Cryolophosaurus elliotti were hunting down plateosaurs five hundred miles from today's McMurdo Station in Antarctica; what I haven't managed to find out from anyone is what in hell these plateosaurids were. According to one report, they were 'padasaurus', which, naturally, exist only in that one report: So we found that and then we found parts of another dinosaur, a plant-eating dinosaur, called a Prosauropod, which is a Padasaurus, Brontosaurus, those are the big Sauropods. I don't get how this sentence works, but I suspect that 'a Padasaurus' is a mistranscription of Apatosaurus by someone who wasn't really understanding the words in general. Not that Apatosaurus exculsus [or the fabled Brontosaurus ajax] were prosauropods. So I'm a bit confused about all this.
Presuming that there were no Plateosaurus engelhardti in Antarctica, this animal [along with the various scavenger deinosaurs hinted after in the same time and place] remains undesignated. Which is fine for discussing bones; describing living animals...it doesn't really work to write about a C.elliotti chasing after a six-metre, half-tonne plateosaurid thingy. I mean...I could do it, since the plateosaurid is effectively food, in this context; I tend not to worry about the species of strawberry an H.sapiens would feed to an I.i.iguana, but I might mention the R.norvegicus the same guy feeds to a V.niloticus. It's just something about things being part of the animalia, I guess.
So that's something I'm still trying to find out about: the Pliensbachian antarctic in general.
Which doesn't work very well, so I go off and watch films for a while.
I forgot this one the other day. Stargate. Which is obviously forgettable enough. In fact, I fell asleep in the middle of it. Again. Something about Ra dressing up as Anubis does that to me, I guess.
Before the film, though, I looked through the Special Features of the Ultimate Edition. All I really found was a sort of documentary of that 'tard who pulled Chariots of the Gods out of his ass a few years ago. Of course, he brought along some anonymous twerp to back him up in this silly little report.
Ultimately, the twit cites a bunch of 'evidence' that aliens keep visiting Earth, beginning with the mathematical probability that extraterrestrial life exists on other planets, while ignoring the same math's improbability that this potential life would ever discover Earth, and leading to a bunch of pyramids set up to look exactly like the Solar System...except in relative size, shape, and numbers. We keep finding new Solar 'planets', along with data suggesting that Pluto [necessarily a planet if it's 'evidence' of aliens telling homosapiens where to build pyramids] isn't actually a planet at all. For that matter, if memory serves, these cultures believed in the planet of Nibiru, which has been disproved. Did the aliens tell them about that one, too? It's all very silly.
Anyway: as a matter of course, I wound up watching all six hours of The Stand, too. I found out something upsetting while looking for stuff on Remake of the Dead. Not only was Romero the first choice to direct Resident Evil [which I caught in Fangoria or something a few years ago], but he was also supposed to direct the cinematic version of The Stand. I'm not sure what went wrong there. Except for the obvious: someone else directed a six-hour version of GRated bullshit which, despite its length, somehow left out most of the important aspects of the novel. Primarily the novel's intelligence.
Based on the 'film', the virus was made by the Government [capitalised to indicate how You the People of the People for the People are apparently some nefarious and unobserved terrorist organisation] for some reason, and it for some reason got loose within the Government, who for some reason thought they could contain it within a hurricane fence. Viruii are what we scientists wold call very, very small; they can get through a fence with holes just the right size to trap a tennisball; I checked. Yet, the Government apparently figured that, but for a guard sitting next to the fence going to the other side of the fence, this airbourne bug would have stayed put.
Incidentally, in the novel, the virus and the guard were deep inside the building when the sirens went off. But, watching a guard panic and flee a Governmental lockdown would be far too interesting for television, so something changed.
The rest of the story, of course, follows through the extinction of mankind over the course of two weeks, before a handful of survivors [reportedly one in three hundred people or so were actually immune to the superflu] collected into two primitive camps to fight each other for the control of the planet and its ethics. Or something. It kinda works while you're watching it [unlike the mountains behind the oil tanks in rural Indiana], but...afterward, you kinda have to wonder why in hell it particularly mattered whether Good or Evil won, in the end.
It was, of course, a pretty good match. The badguys had better clothes. But the goodguys had this neat little omnipotent deity who showed up at the very end to trigger a nuclear warhead; we think the deity's name was Dean Koontz.
Let's move on.
In 1987, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors was released. I think that was February or so. And that all made some sort of sense, at the time. The first film had been interesting and creepy, in a sort of two-million-dollar-film manner. Actually, I think it was $1.8million; for $2million, they coulda had lighting, too.
Freddy's Revenge, of course, sucked. A lot. I probably don't have to explain that much.
But Dream Warriors wasn't bad, really. It was dumbed down a lot; it hinted at the emerging studies on oneironautics, but not in any useful ways. It also--finally--hinted that dreams might not have any need to adhere to physics. Which is something suspected for some time now by people who happen to sleep every once in a while. Which is important, of course. You'll get why in a minute.
In the spring of 1987, before anyone had ever heard of Pinhead, before Child's Play had been regrettably greenlit, before anyone had acquired the guts to bring Michael Myers back into Halloween [Season of the Witch kinda wrecked things for years], Fred Krueger was emerging as an antihero of horrorfilms. His only real competition was the arguable zombie, Jason Voorhees. And the hypotheses began to arise.
Who would win in a fight between Fred Krueger and Jason Voorhees. That was the idiotic question everyone kept asking. And the answer was disparagingly simple. There couldn't be a fight; they have no particular way of encountering each other. It's very simple.
Krueger, like Voorhees, is dead. Kinda. Krueger, unlike Voorhees, is effectively trapped in a dreamscape. Granted, Nancy Thompson ripped him out of the dreamscape in the first film; but, the way the first film was written, it was implied that she only pulled him out of the dream in a dream--the whole sequence with the boobytrapped house was ultimately virtual; in fact, the entirety of the film was arguaby just one long nightmare. Just based on the ending.
Also, Krueger escaped the dreamworld in the second film; but no one took that very seriously.
So. Notwithstanding the possibility that Krueger can, in fact, get out of the dreamscape, he can't encounter Voorhees IRL. However, if he could, bad things would happen. Voorhees would mulch him. It's just that simple. Because, outside the dream, Krueger loses the sorcery he uses to win.
Leaving the alternative. Which is impossible. because Voorhees is a damned zombie. He's not able to dream. He doesn't sleep. He dies on occasion, but that's a little different. Which is too bad. If Voorhees encountered Krueger in a dream, his life expectency would be measured in yoctoseconds.
So. It wasn't really a fair question. If Voorhees the immortal zombie could meet Krueger the nonlinear deity...the winner would be decided by the geography.
Which, I'd hoped, had settled the issue, back in 1987.
So I'm watching Freddy v Jason last night. And a couple of interesting things occurred to me. First, there's a pattern here. Freddy's Revenge, Freddy's Dead, Freddy v Jason. If the word Freddy appears in the title of the film, it's going to suck. Which may or may not hold true for 1988's Freddy's Nightmares. As a show. As a title, it still sucked.
Nearly worse than the film was Disc Two, in which we discover precisely why the film sucked so much. A couple of dickweeds wrote one of the worst possible filmscripts for this thing, and nothing else; they're reportedly working together, again, to write a film about a shark, or something. There was a reference to the earlier plotline I'd heard about, in which a devil, now in possession of both villains in hell, got them to fight each other for some reason--its own entertainment, maybe--until, in the end, Krueger and Voorhees caught on that they were being played, teamed up, and slaughtered the devil; the final scene was reportedly a slow dolly back from Krueger sitting in the devil's throne, with Voorhees crouching at his feet like a doberman.
Which was apparently too intelligent a concept; instead, this happened to us.
Instead, these two idiots worked out a shopping list of commandments for the film. Like staying true to the idiosyncracies of the main characters, and not inventing any bullshit plot devices. Like, say, Jason's hydrophobia, which prevented him from swimming to the shore of Manhattan, for example. Those sorts of bullshit plot devices.
The script behind this film actually makes me regret deciding not to be a retarded hack willing to write FanFic bullshit; otherwise, I might have bothered to come up with something better for NewLine here.
With only fifteen years for preproduction, NewLine had to settle for that illiterate imbecile responsible for Bride of Chucky to direct this insult. Which explains a hell of a lot. He, of course, had his own commandments. Like staying grounded in reality. Which is always a good idea, in a fucking dream. If one film ever actually displayed a need for the ubiquitous nonlinear effects of The Matrix, this was it. Granted, by now, the relevance of it all would be lost; but that's the fault of every idiot using these effects for the wrong reasons. If anyone is going to defy all known physics, it should be Krueger. And, perhaps, anyone else in the dream. Instead, this guy just stumbles about, being generally boring, and talking down to the fourth wall a lot. Freddy Krueger's Day Off. 'Not strong enough yet; but I will be soon enough. Until then, I'll let Jason have some fun; it's a little childish and stupid; but then, so is high school'
The disc did happen to have the original ending, which the test audience, being the target idiots, didn't go for. I suppose I get why, since it pretty well declared Krueger the winner. The official ending did the same thing, of course; but the morons get to be happy not getting that at all. So that works out for everyone, I suppose.
Of course--and this is the funniest part--the film was rated R [despite one idiot's idea of making a PG13 superhero disaster, in one of the scripts] for reasons including but not limited to Drug Use. No argument here: I saw people freebasing caffeine and stuff. Oh, and Hypnocil, which hasn't been evaluated by the FDA since we first saw it used seventeen years ago.
In any case, it was a disappointment. I'm just hoping that the various competing studios manage to prevent any future X v Y films concerning Pinhead, Myers, Chucky, et cetera...even though Alien v Predator appears to be a certainty.
More later....
--Gremlin