Category Archives: Film

Spoiler Alert: WATCHMEN is fucking awesome.

Note: I have kept spoilers out of this post. Please keep the comments spoiler-free as well.

I got to see a special advance screening of Watchmen yesterday, at a taping of MTV Spoilers. They showed us the whole movie, and then ran some clips from the new Harry Potter, the Land of the Lost, and the new Star Trek movie, followed by a Q&A with Zack Snyder.

I know a lot of people want to know about Watchmen, so I'll just cut to the chase right away: It's the best movie inspired by a graphic novel that I've ever seen. It could have gone wrong in a thousand different places, and it didn't. I've wanted to see this movie for twenty years, and it was entirely worth the wait. Hear me now, my fellow geeks: you have nothing to worry about. Watchmen is fucking awesome.

Now, the entire story…

I was supposed to be there by 2:45, but lost track of time while writing, and left my house over 30 minutes late. I'd allowed a traffic cushion in my original plan, and it was gone. Everything would have to go perfectly if I was going to get there on time. Driving up the street toward the freeway, my fuel light came on. Then I hit every single red light between me and the nearest gas station. By the time I was on the freeway, I was 45 minutes behind.

Rather than totally lose my shit and drive like a psycho, I just accepted that I'd get there when I got there and not a moment sooner. I listened to the first episode of the new D&D Podcast while I made my way out the 134 and over Laurel Canyon. I laughed the whole way, remembering how much fun we all had when we played up in Seattle. It ended about ten minutes before I got to the screening, so I just let my iPod shuffle to some music. Out of 9000 songs, it chose Depeche Mode's Behind The Wheel. It was a little eerie, because I can clearly recall driving in my Prelude with my friend Darin in 1989, talking about who would be in the Watchmen movie if they made one, while we listened to Music for the Masses. I'd been excited to see the movie, but until that happened, I hadn't fully appreciated the real significance of seeing it.

"I have waited twenty years to see this film," I thought, "and in about twenty minutes, it's finally going to happen."

As I pulled up to the parking garage, I got the nervous feeling in my stomach that's usually reserved for auditions or the first few days of a book launch. I know that it's just a movie, but it's something I've thought about and cared about for two thirds of my life. I guess it was so important to me, I hadn't let myself fully appreciate just how important it was until that moment.

A few minutes later I met my friend Chris (who was my date for the movie), and we made our way to the theater, stopping on the way to talk to the MTV people about my appearance on the show later, after they ran the Star Trek stuff. It was a weird disconnect for me; while I was talking to the MTV producers, I stopped being a geek who couldn't believe he was about to finally see Watchmen, and I was a professional actor, going over the technical specifics of how the show would be put together. My stomach butterflies and that mix of apprehension and excitement vanished for a few minutes, until we walked away, I became a geek again, and it returned with a vengeance.

The lights went down, the film began, and after just a few minutes, my apprehension was gone. I knew after the Comedian hit the street that this was going to be everything I'd hoped for. For the next two hours and forty-five minutes, I gasped, I cheered, I applauded, I was stunned and I was blown away. Most importantly, though, I was transported to the world I first visited, one issue at a time, when I was a teenager. When it was over, I wanted to go right back to the beginning and start over again, just like I did when I finished the graphic novel back in the 80s.

<Non-Spoiler Review Begins>

I'm not going to discuss specifics, because that would suck for a lot of people, but: PAY ATTENTION, MY FELLOW GEEKS: YOU HAVE NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT.

(Did I just all-cap and bold that? I guess I did. What is this, MacWrite in 1986? Whatever. I'm leaving it, because it's that important to me that my fellow geeks read it.)

Now, listen, I know that we live in a world where we've endured Ang Lee's The Hulk, Spiderman 3, both Fantastic Four movies, and Indiana Jones Gets Raped Repeatedly While We Are Forced To Watch In Horror, so I think it would be really strange if we weren't worried and apprehensive about something that already means so much to us, but I hope this will calm your nerves until the movie is released: Watchmen is faithful to the book. It respects the book. I swear by the beard of Zeus, it feels like the book. Yes, there are some cuts, but they serve the release and don't disrupt or betray the narrative at all. Yes, they made a change to something that's a pretty big deal in the book, but it doesn't matter; what they did instead accomplishes exactly the same thing, and it does it perfectly. There is some of the Zack Snyder signature slow motion, and though it's a little heavy in the very first scene (which worried me) it isn't overdone throughout the movie at all, and I found it to be pretty cool and entertaining.

Ultra-purists who are just determined to pick it apart will be able to find some things to be upset about, but I don't know why they're even bothering to see it, to be honest. Speaking only for myself, as someone who has read the book over and over again, there were maybe … three … things that made me go "eh," but I had to work really hard to get even that perturbed, because ultimately none of them mattered. In fact, when the movie was over, and I thought about the stuff they cut or moved around, I just couldn't get upset about it, because nothing happened that fucked with the story or the characters, at all. Zack Snyder's Watchmen is as close to a perfect film adaptation of Alan Moore's Watchmen as we were ever going to see, and when his super-ultimate-here's-everything cut comes out in the fall, I think it will be perfect. But what I saw yesterday is truly remarkable: a big studio movie adaptation of one of the most — if not the most — important graphic novels of my lifetime that not only didn't fuck it up, but brought it to life brilliantly.

I can't think of a better, more faithful, graphic novel adaptation, ever. Nothing else even comes close.

<Non-Spoiler Review Ends>

When the movie was over, we got down to the business of making the TV show. This can be really tedious, and people who go watch a taping of a show hardly ever go back again, because it just isn't that fun. It could have been a disaster, with a theater that was mostly geeks, but MTV did a fairly good job moving things along, even though the producer who was sort of managing all of us geeks between shots was clearly out of his element, Donny.

Case in point: there were two dudes in the front of the theater dressed up as the Comedian and Rorschach. The producer had them stand up, and the geeks in the audience went nuts, because how cool was that, right?

The producer said something about how the Rorschach guy's costume was so great, they couldn't even tell if it was a fan or … he stammered for a second … or … "you know, the guy who, um, plays Rorschach. The actor. I don't know his name."

The geeks just savaged the guy with boos. It was mostly good natured, but when the producer said, "Hey, hey, hey! I don't get to watch these movies, because I'm really busy making TV shows. You know, like My Sweet Sixteen," they totally turned on him with a taunting so vicious, I expected someone to put a cow into a catapult. It was hilarious. I mean, talk about not knowing who your audience is!

He would repeatedly try to get the audience back on his side for the rest of the evening, but it was like DC 25, and he got -5 for each failed attempt. I think he was up to DC 70 by the time we all left, but it was all in good fun.

They brought many of the cast members up, two at a time, and asked them some questions about the movie. They didn't spend nearly enough time with them, and I thought the questions could have been a hell of a lot better, because the ones they asked were mostly silly things about sex scenes and Doctor Manhattan's Junk (which is a good name for a band), but I guess that's what the audience at home cares about, and they have to keep them happy.

I forget the order in which the following events happened, but this is how I remember them.

After the first two groups of actors did their Q&As, they showed a clip from Land of the Lost. All I can say is: for fuck's sake. Are you serious with this bullshit? If the trailer during the Superbowl was punching my beloved childhood memories in the face, this clip they showed us was pissing on its corpse. I'm not entirely sure, but I think the whole thing is a New Coke way to trick people into thinking the television remake they did in the 90s sucked less than it did.

They showed us something from the new Harry Potter movie, which I can't comment on because I don't know enough about Harry Potter, but it made the Harry Potter fans in the audience really happy. After that, they brought up a couple more actors from the movie (Billy Crudup was hilarious and, yes, ladies, he is that good looking in real life) and then a couple more who talked about the sense of responsibility they felt while making the movie (it showed on screen, guys, you were all fantastic).

After all that, they showed the Star Trek thing. It was mostly stuff we've already seen, but the geeks (including me) were excited about it. Their host asked me some questions about the movie, and I thought I got in one comment about myself that was stupid, one about the movie that was insightful, and another that was humorous. You can watch MTV Spoilers on Saturday if you want to see what I said. BUT BE WARNED: THERE WILL BE MASSIVE WATCHMEN SPOILERS IN THIS SHOW.

After I finished my bit, I got to sit back down and enjoy the rest of the taping, which included the promise of something from the new Transformers movie that they didn't actually show (I guess it was a rights thing, and they can't show it until Saturday night) and then the only thing that could have made the evening even more awesome than it already was: a Q&A with Watchmen's director Zack Snyder.

They told us that he'd probably talk for about 30 minutes or so, but he ended up staying for close to 45. I was just blown away by his candor and his enthusiasm not only for Watchmen, but for comics and filmmaking in general. I know that he's been talking about this stuff and answering these exact questions for months, but if he was feeling any fatigue over it, he didn't let it show. He could have sat there and spoken in the language of Hollywood douchebags, but he spoke in the purest form of Geek that I've ever witnessed from a filmmaker. He didn't talk at us, he talked with us, and it was great.

I can't possibly remember everything he said, but there were a couple things that totally stood out, that I think geeks would want to know:

He said that when he was in film school, he wanted to make movies out of everything, whether it was a pair of shoes, or a cup of coffee. When he read comics back then, he thought that it would be great to make some of them into movies. He singled out Dark Knight Returns and Sin City, but when he got to Watchmen, he said there was no way he would even attempt it.

Then the studio came to him after 300 and asked him to make the movie. He didn't want to do it at first, partially because he was so afraid he'd screw it up, but also because the script was just horrible. It was set in the current day, it was about Doctor Manhattan going to Iraq, something about "The War on Terror" and was a PG-13 monstrosity that would be left open to a sequel. It was, in other words, exactly the kind of thing we're so afraid the studios will do to things we love when they adapt them for film.

He said that the more he thought about it, though, the more he felt a responsibility to make it. He said something like, "If I made it, I had a chance to not screw it up. If I did screw it up, at least it was me who screwed it up. But if I let them take the script they showed me to someone else to screw up, it would have been my fault. So I had to make it."

He also talked about how the studio kept trying to turn it into what he called a "PG-13 Superhero movie" and how he just refused to let that happen. He said that it was going to be rated R, there wouldn't be this ending that they wanted which would make you go for fuck's sake. are you serious with that bullshit? It would be set in 1985, and it would be faithful to the book.

I've read interviews with him, and I've heard from some second-hand sources that he cared deeply about the material, but until I saw him speak last night, I didn't fully appreciate just how passionate he was. While I listened to him speak, it hit me: Zack Snyder cares about Watchmen as much as we do, and it shows.

Before I realized it, I was on my feet, getting in line, not to ask a question, but to make a comment.

When I approached the mic, I felt my hands get cold and I couldn't feel my feet. This is typically what happens to me when I'm really nervous.

I cleared my throat and said, "Hi, my name is Wil, and I'm from Pasadena."

He said, "Hey, I'm from Pasadena, too!"

"AWESOME!" I said, and felt stupid.

I steadied myself, as the entire theater faded away and all I could hear was the sound of my own voice, coming out of someone else, very far away. "I just wanted to tell you that I've wanted to see this movie for twenty years."

I took a breath, and was horrified to feel some very real emotion rising up in my chest.

"Oh fuck. Just say it and run away!"

"I just wanted to say thank you for making it worth the wait."

He said something, but I don't know what it was. I was too busy running away.

As I left the theater, and feeling returned to my hands and feet, I thought, "Shit. I forgot to tell him, "If they ask you to make Sandman, please say yes.'"

I doubt he'll ever read this, but just in case he does … Zack Snyder, this is Wil from Pasadena. If they ever ask you to make Sandman, please say yes.

i’m not going to lie to you: there’s a lot of awesome packed into this post

Hi there, I’m Wil, and I’m the luckiest guy in the world. Why is that? Well, allow me to present the following items to support this outrageous claim:

Quite some time ago, I engaged in correspondence with one of the guys who makes woot go. One thing lead to another, and I ended up designing a T-shirt for shirt.woot.com.

According to the woot newsletter, it’ll be available tomorrow (THURSDAY):

Ever Bought A T-Shirt Designed By Somebody On Star Trek? You Wil. Speaking of Shirt.Woot, noted actor, author, gambler, blogger, and android Wil Wheaton adds ”t-shirt designer” to his CV this Thursday, and it’s all going down at Shirt.Woot <http://shirt.woot.com> . This is like a true-cross thing for hardcore geeks (like us), except that Wil himself will never have laid eyes on your actual shirt, much less hands. But still. As for the design, we don’t want to give too much away, so we’ll just thank Wil for rolling the DICE with us to release this to-DIE-for tee.

Speaking of DICE, The first episode of the Penny Arcade/PvP/WWdN/D&D4E Podcast (MP3 link) has been released! Even if you subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, you owe it to yourself to go check out the D&D Podcast page, because Mike and Scott did incredibly awesome art to go with each episode.

Returning to Woot for a moment: there’s a woot-off happening right now, and you can follow wootoff on Twitter to get almost as many updates in an hour as I occasionally send.

Speaking of Twitter, as of right now, there are 105,547 accounts following me. Um. What? How the hell did that happen? I thought I was freaked out when it was at 51,000, but I didn’t know what freaked out truly was until I tried to compose a tweet, and ended up staring at it for five minutes before I sent it because the thought of sending it to that many accounts paralyzed me.

What was that tweet, you ask? Allow me to show you: When I got this invite today, I thought it was too good to be true, but it’s real: I get to see WATCHMEN *tomorrow* for this MTV thing!

Yeah, for at least four hours today, it won’t be so bad that MTV doesn’t play music videos like they did when I was a kid. They do a movie show called SPOILERS, and one of their producers invited me to come see the move. Because just seeing the movie wasn’t cool enough, the entire cast will be there. Because that wasn’t cool enough, Zack Snyder will be there, doing a Q&A after the movie. Because that wasn’t cool enough, they’re also going to show some preview clips of the new Star Trek movie. Because that isn’t cool enough, they want me to go on TV and talk about all this stuff as some kind of expert.

Don’t tell them I’m just a geek, okay? Or at least wait until after we’re done. I don’t want to mess this up.

The show will air on Saturday, but I think they’re putting some live updates on their website somewhere today. I’ll try to take my phone with me so I can Twitter about what’s going on, (without spoilers, of course) but I suspect this will be one of those “don’t bring your shitty little cell phone into the theater because the studio thinks you’re going to pirate the movie with your tiny 3MP camera that can’t even focus on the screen” kind of things.

I’ve gotten to do some really awesome things lately, and for the last week or so, I feel like I’m dreaming — in fact, last night, I dreamt that I was at PAX, and woke up all excited to go there — and I’m afraid that I’m going to wake up, and find out that none of this incredibly cool stuff has actually happened, so I’m working extra hard to appreciate every moment and not take a single thing for granted.

my other mother loves me

Yesterday, Anne convinced me to take a break from work so we could go see a matinee of Coraline, which was playing in 3D at a local theater. I love the book, and I love Nightmare Before Christmas, so it seemed like a no-brainer.

But 3D? I wasn’t so sure. I’m not a huge fan of 3D. It always feels gimmicky and intrusive, and I’m always wondering when Doctor Tongue is going to thrust a cat toward the audience.

However, my love of the source material, an excuse to play hooky with my wife, and how excited I’ve been to see the movie since I first heard they were making it was enough to get me into the theater without any real argument.

I am so glad that I went, because I loved the movie. I heard that Henry Selick wanted to use the 3D technology to give the movie depth, rather than shove things into the audience’s faces, and I thought he did exactly that. I told my friends that they don’t have to see it in 3D, but they kind of have to see it in 3D.

Speaking as a fan of the book, I was mostly happy with the adaptation. They added an entirely new character, which I wasn’t thrilled about, but he didn’t feel like Scrappy Doo to me, and if I wasn’t already a fan of the book, he wouldn’t have felt out of place to me, at all. Everything I wanted to see was there, and they managed to create the world that I’d created in my head when I read it with eerie perfection.

Speaking as a fan of movies and stop-motion animation, I was delighted. All the actors are fantastic, and the set design and animation was breathtaking. You don’t need to see it in 3D, but I thought they used the 3D experience perfectly, and if you have a choice, I’d take the 3D option (which is something I never thought I’d say.)

Coraline gets 4.5 out of 5 Beldams, on the Wheaton Scale of Randomly Rating Movies In A Way Which Is Amusing To Wil.

Seriously, people, go see it. I think you’ll love it.

the one about that time i worked in a movie with ron jeremy. yes, that ron jeremy.

I can't recall exactly how it came up, but I recently mentioned that I'd once worked in a movie with Ron Jeremy. This revelation was met with some interest and a look that sort of goes like this: O_o so I thought it would make an entertaining (to me, at least) post.

The movie was called Mr. Stitch. It was a weird science fiction retelling of the Prometheus myth. I play the title character, a creature who was sewn together from the parts of 44 men and 44 women. It was written and directed by Roger Avary.

Roger did Mr. Stitch right after the massive success of his film Killing Zoe, and on the heels of his Academy Award for Pulp Fiction. Everyone in the world wanted to work with him then, and he assembled a mostly incredible cast[1]. He got Ron Perlman and Nia Peeples for major roles, Taylor Negron for a small but important role, and a guy you may have heard of called Ron Jeremy for a cameo.

While Ron is very well known for his … other work … he had also worked on a few indie movies at the time, including Killing Zoe, where he played the bank manager, who was shot in the face before he could deliver a single line. Roger liked him, so he hired Ron for a scene in Mr. Stitch that I don't think made the final cut, as a military medic in a flashback.

Ron came— you know, I'm going to go ahead and rephrase that. Ron arrived in Nice about a week before his scenes were to be shot, and he hung around on the set the whole time. He was incredibly funny, very friendly, constantly falling asleep, and when asked about pretty much any porn starlet from the time would reply, "Oh yes, I've had sex with her many times." I don't know if that was actually true or not, but it always made me laugh when he said it.

Ron told me that I could visit the set of one of his … other films … when we got back to Los Angeles, and though a certain part of me thought that would be hurr hurr hurr awesome, a more rational part of me thought it would just be weird and uncomfortable, so I never availed myself of the opportunity.

I grew so much as an artist and person during the end of 1994 when I lived in Nice and worked on that film, even though many aspects of the production were miserable, it remains one of the most fondly-remembered times in my life.

[1] I say "mostly" because the other lead actor, Rutger Hauer, was an absolute nightmare to work with and almost single-handedly ruined the film.

yet another awesome video for watchmen

They've done another video to promote Watchmen, this time made to look like a 16mm film made in 1977:

If you're not familiar with Watchmen, I may need to explain — well, before I finish that, I will encourage you to buy Watchmen right now and go read it. I'm serious. Don't even eat or pee or anything until you're done. It's that good. There's a reason nearly every comic geek in the world swears it's one of the all-time greatest books, you know.

Okay, now that you've finished reading it, go ahead and eat and pee.

Okay, now it's totally normal for you to want to pick the book right back up again and start over, making sure you digest every single available detail in each panel. You won't catch everything, but that's okay; re-reading Watchmen is something certain geeks do, and every time we go behind the mask we find something we've never seen before.

Okay, now that you've eaten and peed, and read the book again, I don't need to tell you what I was going to tell you, because now you see it in the video.

…I know, right?!

boating our software

Yesterday, I started writing a monthly column for Amazon’s End User Blog. For my first column, I looked at a really cool device that’s battling something I call Feature Creep:

…it’s increasingly difficult to find things that do just one thing, and do it very well. I blame this on something I call “Feature Creep” which I suspect comes from too many meetings, too much input from marketing, and not enough product managers and engineers who are willing to stand up and say, “You know what? I don’t think this coffee maker really needs an MP3 player in it. It’s fine just making coffee.”

Feature Creep is everywhere, bloating our software, lengthening our startup times, cluttering up our menus, and draining our batteries, so when I come across something that has successfully resisted it and stayed focused on doing one simple thing very well, I have a little bit of a pants party.

One of the best examples I’ve come across in the last year is the Netflix player from Roku. It’s a tiny little box that streams anything from Netflix’s on-demand library straight into your television, and that’s all it does.

So I’m pretty excited to have an opportunity to do for blog what I used to do for InDigital, and I’m looking forward to examining various gadgets and technology trends in the mysterious future. My column will update on the final Thursday of every month.

(If you missed this on Twitter and don’t know what the title of this post means: I put a really stupid typo into this column that snuck past me and my editor, and I was originally lamenting how feature creep is “boating” our software. Mmmm. Boating. It’s since been corrected, but I can’t help giggling about it.)

one last fistful of Ted Kord interviews

Part deux of my interview with Trekmovie.com is online, so you don’t have to avoid spoilers any more:

TrekMovie.com: The first season can be be brutal.

Wil Wheaton: Yeah. That is why the first season is kind of fun. Some of the episodes are really really bad and a few of the episodes are extremely good, even if you are not grading on a curve. For the most part — we are awkward — we are trying to figure out what our show is about. And you can see how we had so many different writers and creative power struggles while we figured out what we were going to be. We were really lucky we got a chance to do more than one season. If it wasn’t for the incredible cast and writers like Sandy Fries and Tracy Torme, we probably would not have gone past the second season.

TrekMovie.com: I am in the camp that thinks that Michael Piller, and writers like Ron Moore, really saved the show in the third season.

Wil Wheaton: They absolutely did.

TrekMovie.com: I know some don’t like to hear that Gene [Roddenberry] didn’t save the show. I love Gene Roddenberry, but for TNG I think the Michael was the best thing for the show.

Wil Wheaton: Gene had the presence of mind to know he was getting old and he knew that someone who loved Star Trek as much as he did could step in to take the reins. He hand picked Michael. He begged Michael at the end of season three to come back. Michael didn’t want to at first, but Gene said to him “I need you to make this show great, I can’t do it without you” and Michael agreed. And Michael had the open submissions policy, which is how Ron [Moore] came on, with “The Bonding.” I don’t think it is inaccurate or unfair to give Michael a great deal of credit for making Next Generation great, but at the same time I think it is also fair and accurate to acknowledge that it was Gene Roddenberry who had the vision and presence of mind and the foresight to keep Michael Piller on and put him in a position to do what he did.

I also talked to buzz focus about playing Ted Kord, and that’s online, too:

So…. Brave and Bold Batman vs Frank Miller Batman – who would win?

W. Wheaton: (laugh) I don’t know that’s like asking which fruit will taste better an apple or an orange.

Are you also a fan of 70s/80s cartoons?

W. Wheaton: I remember getting up really early on Saturday mornings to watch the old Super Friends cartoons. It was really Challenge of the Super Friends and those old battles of the Legion of Doom that I loved. And I’m exactly the right age for GI Joe, Transformers, Thundercats and He-Man.

Thundarr the Barbarian is my favorite cartoon in history. That was before they were allowed to do marketing and merchandising in cartoons. So these guys were like, “let’s tell some cool stories.” And, they did.

You’re involved in so many things, what’s your passion these days?

W. Wheaton: Honestly, it’s spending as much time as I can with my family. My boys are getting older. My oldest son is in college, his brother is a senior in high school and is going to college next year. I am keenly aware how 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week isn’t that much time. More important than anything else is providing for them financially and emotionally.

Finally, I talked to Media Blvd., and got to deliver what ended up being my favorite one-liner of the whole series of interviews (unplanned). See if you can spot it:

Shaun> That’s cool, I grew up on Challenge of the Superfriends. Don’t start me going down that memory lane.

Wil> Are you a Wendy and Marvin kind of guy, or are you a Zan and Jana kind of guy. Wendy and Marvin were lame.

Shaun> I was glad though when Zan and Jana took off, and that damn monkey Gleek, that was always screwing things up.

Wil> I was the right age for Zan and Jana, so I thought that was really funny. They always turned into something. They could have defeated their adversaries, like they were way overpowered for what they actually did with their superpowers. I was exactly the right age, I was born in ’72, so I was like 8 when I was watching that. I thought it was awesome, then I grew up a little bit and there was Wendy and Marvin and Wonderdog. I thought, “They’re dumbing this down!” I was like 11, “They’re dumbing this down for the audience, and they’re insulting my 11 year old intelligence. This is awful, worst episode ever!”

Shaun> I hated the way the Superfriends treated Batman. The only thing they’d show of Batman is the car stopping and picking up Wendy and Marvin, but the dog doesn’t make it into the Batmobile.

Wil> I know, like you’re going to make Batman the chauffeur? Are you serious? I can promise you that that does not happen in Batman: The Brave & The Bold. In Batman: The Brave & The Bold, Batman is awesome, and he is not a ridiculous chauffeur. Batman is nobody’s bitch in Batman: The Brave & The Bold.

Maybe I could have said “Batman: The Brave & The Bold” a few more times in that last answer. I think I really dropped the ball there.

So … I thought there were more, but I’ve either closed the tabs, or I was hopped up on old Foreigner albums and had double vision. I know that three isn’t really a fistful, but I have small fists. So there.

And with that, my friends, I am off to Phoenix for the Phoenix Comicon. I don’t know what kind of internets I’ll have while I’m there, my friends, but if history is any indicator, I’ll be Twittering the hell out of everything, my friends.

Geek in Review: Sci-Fi Guilty Pleasures: Schwarzenegger Edition

Oh man, I had more fun than should be legally allowed while working on this month’s Geek in Review, Sci-Fi Guilty Pleasures: Schwarzenegger Edition:

Long before he was the most dangerously incompetent governor California has ever had, Arnold Schwarzenegger was the biggest action superstar on the planet, and everything he touched turned to box office gold.

Most of my generation first saw him in the title role of 1984’s The Terminator, a movie that was perfectly suited to his, um, acting ability, and (unfortunately for science fiction fans) cemented him in the minds of studio executives as the guy for science fiction movies…and he can be found chewing up cigars and scenery in some of the biggest blockbusters of the 80s and 90s.

In true action star fashion, Schwarzenegger totally overwhelms the roles he plays to the point of self-parody in each one. In the 80s, as a science fiction fan, I hated this, but with the benefit of time and the ability to not take these movies so seriously, I can enjoy them for the guilty pleasures that they are.

For this month’s Geek in Review, I reached into the vault and pulled out a few of the future Governator’s more memorable sci-fi vehicles. To get perspective from the damn kids today, I convinced my 17 year-old son, Nolan, to watch them with me and give me a comment on each one.

Here’s a little excerpt from the Total Recall portion of the column:

Douglas Quaid is a construction worker with the hottest wife on the planet, who wants to fuck him every time he breathes. Because he is some kind of asshole, this dream life isn’t perfect enough for him, and he constantly fantasizes about living on Mars. His entire household budget goes toward keeping his wife’s hair huge, though, so they can’t afford to take an actual trip. Luckily for him, a company called Rekall can implant vacation memories that anyone can afford, so he visits Mars that way. But just visiting Mars isn’t awesome enough, so he tells Rekall to make him a secret agent, throw in some alien artifacts, and a nefarious plot to destroy the planet. He also wants to nail a girl while he’s there who isn’t nearly as sexy as his wife, and is actually kind of skanky. Seriously. Asshole!

Something goes wrong (or does it?) at Rekall, and Quaid finds out that … he’s a secret agent on a mission to Mars, where there are lots of alien artifacts and he’s nailing a girl who isn’t nearly as sexy as his wife. Before we’re done, people try to kill him, he uncovers a nefarious plot, saves the world, and gets the girl –– who isn’t as sexy as his wife. We’re not sure if he’s dreamed the whole thing, but one thing is crystal clear: this guy is an asshole.

Here’s Nolan’s comment on The Running Man: “This movie needs 33% more skin-tight jumpsuits.”

So, yeah, it’s not the most serious column in the world.

As always, the article is SFW, but the rest of the website is delightfully NOT SAFE FOR WORK. You have been warned, so don’t complain to me if you get in trouble.

“He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.”

I’m nowhere close to Hollywood’s “A” list, but when they opened it up to the rest of us, I signed this letter:

Dear SAG Board Members, officers and staff:

We feel very strongly that SAG members should not vote to authorize a strike at this time. We don’t think that an authorization can be looked at as merely a bargaining tool. It must be looked at as what it is — an agreement to strike if negotiations fail.

We support our union and we support the issues we’re fighting for, but we do not believe in all good conscience that now is the time to be putting people out of work.

None of our friends in the other unions are truly happy with the deals they made in their negotiations. Three years from now all the union contracts will be up again at roughly the same time. At that point if we plan and work together with our sister unions we will have incredible leverage.

As hard as it may be to wait those three years under an imperfect agreement, we believe this is what we must do. We think that a public statement should be made by SAG recognizing that although this is not a deal we want, it is simply not a time when our union wants to have any part in creating more economic hardship while so many people are already suffering.

Let’s take the high road. Let’s unite with our brothers and sisters in the entertainment community and prepare for the future, three years down the line. Then, together, let’s make a great deal.

Sincerely,

[About 130 actors who are on the "A" list, according to the people who decide what the "A" list is. And your pal Wil Wheaton, who is not on the A list, but still struggles to qualify for his health insurance every year.]

Allow me to give a little perspective on where I’m coming from: I’m a former member of SAG’s Hollywood board of directors. I’ve chaired committees, and I’ve sat in on negotiations. I’m about as pro-union and pro-actor as you can get, and I hate the insulting offer the AMPTP has given us. But I’m also a realist. If we go on strike in February, we won’t hurt the moguls enough to force them to negotiate with us, they’ll just fill up on “reality” programming and produce new works under the disastrous contract those idiots at AFTRA agreed to, while SAG’s health and pension plans are destroyed. We’ll definitely hurt our own members, and all of our friends from other departments who work with us on the set. Yeah, I realize that SAG’s first responsibility is to its own members, but we don’t exist in a vacuum, and we have to acknowledge that fact.

Let me be clear: The moguls can go to hell seventeen different ways for being greedy and unreasonable, and trying to bust our unions. In three years I’ll be the first in line to fight them as long as it takes … but we aren’t coming from a position of strength right now, and everyone knows it, especially the AMPTP. Producers and networks won’t feel the pain of a strike in any significant way, but a – and we all know that they’ll do whatever they can to drag it out as long as possible; look at what they did to the WGA – will likely ruin the lives of more middle and working class people than I care to think about.

For the SAG board to even consider voluntarily stopping work when we’re falling deeper and deeper into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression isn’t just stupid, it’s recklessly irresponsible. SAG needs to face the reality we’re stuck with: AFTRA sold us out. AFTRA fucked all actors everywhere by negotiating with the AMPTP on their own and agreeing to shockingly horrible terms. The AFTRA negotiators failed all actors, whether they’re currently SAG, currently AFTRA, or are still hoping to join. Those “negotiators” should be ashamed of themselves, and they shouldn’t be allowed in the same building as a contract ever again.

I believe the things SAG is asking for are entirely reasonable, I believe they reflect the reality of the entertainment industry in 2008 and beyond, and I believe that they are vital for actors to continue to make a living in the future – especially internet jurisdiction and residuals. In any other economic environment, I’d be willing to walk out in a heartbeat to get them. But we have to be realistic. People are losing their homes, can’t afford basic healthcare, and are struggling to support their families. SAG is not negotiating from a position of strength (thanks again for that, AFTRA, you’re awesome) but in three years, we can join our sister unions and we will be.

Sun Tzu teaches us that “He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.” SAG leadership needs to be responsible and realistic; this is not the time to have this fight. If you’re a SAG member, I urge you to vote no on the strike authorization vote, and be ready to fight like hell in three years.