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NEWS AND VIEWS - APRIL 2024
WRITING NEWS Still working on City of Strange Gods (the tenth Signalverse novel). Current word count is just a little over 74,000. It's starting to look like the book might run just a little bit shorter than I was initially expecting, so it's possible I'll have this one done, or close to done, by the end of May, or maybe a week or two into June. It's coming along okay, but it's a complicated novel -- I've had to pay very special attention to the chronology, because I've got four protagonists here, interacting with each other over the course of just a couple of days. So it's been kind of a pain to write, actually. Still haven't decided what I'm going to do with the book once it's finished -- I could release it to straight to Amazon and hope for the best, like I usually do, or I could try turning it into a Kickstarter or Indiegogo project or something. I'm not very good at crowdfunding projects, but I would like to do something special with this book, because as I've noted here before, it's the tenth book in the series, it features the return of Jack and Miracle Girl, and it's set to be the longest Signalverse novel I've written so far. If you've got an idea on what I ought to do with it, let me know. * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M READING, WATCHING, PLAYING I finished reading Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (by Richard Baukham) this month. The book makes the case that the Gospel of John, which was written later than the Synoptic Gospels and has a much more sophisticated christology (and so was traditionally believed to have been the work of a later "Johannine community" which had developed its own ideas about the nature of Jesus), is actually the only Gospel which was written by an eyewitness to Jesus: the Beloved Disciple, whom Bauckham believes to be John the Elder, a rather mysterious figure (sometimes conflated with John the son of Zebedee) who is mentioned by Papias and Irenaeus. Although not one of the Twelve Apostles, he was a disciple of Jesus and lived to be very old, which makes it conceivable that he wrote the Gospel of John at the later date that is usually suggested. Bauckham's ideas are plausible and I thought he made a pretty convincing case; however, half the book is dry academic stuff about the nature of "testimony", the distinctions between oral and written histories, and so on. All this stuff was necessary to make his case, I suppose, but personally I didn't find these sections to be all that interesting. But then, I'm not an academic, nor am I particularly interested in historiography; I've just got a nerdy fascination for early Christianity. Games-wise, I've been working on The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles and Tales of Arise, two games which have been in my backlog for a very long time. I'm something like thirty-six or thirty-seven hours into Tales of Arise, and I'm liking it, but not extremely. The graphics are very good, the battles are usually pretty fun (although the boss battles have a tendency to go on too long), and the mechanics are okay, but the game feels much more linear than previous Tales games, and the story, in addition to being rather grim for a Tales title, is very straightforward, with Alphen and his buddies just going from one realm to the next to overthrow the lords. As for the characters (the most important part of any Tales game)...well, they're a little cardboard, frankly. Alphen is a generic hero, without too much personality, while Shionne is a prickly kind of tsundere. 
And as for what I'm watching...well, I'm still getting through Moving and Link, Eat, Love, Kill (both Korean shows), but I also started watching Shogun this month. I tend not to watch very many American shows, but Shogun is practically a Japanese co-production and I enjoyed the first couple of episodes. * * * * * * * * SATURDAY MORNING LETDOWNS A lot of hit movies in the 80's and 90's were adapted into Saturday morning (and sometimes syndicated) cartoon shows. Some of these were surprising: RoboCop was an incredibly gory, R-rated movie, but it somehow received an animated adaptation aimed at kids. Rambo was turned into a cartoon as well -- the haunted Vietnam vet becomes a generic "action man" in this sixty-five-episode cartoon; the best thing about it is arguably voice actor Neil Ross's amusingly bad Stallone impersonation. Probably the best of these animated adaptations was The Real Ghostbusters, which ran for seven seasons. The show was fun, intelligently written, generally respectful of the source material (except for the fact that none of the Ghostbusters looked like their counterparts in the movie), and -- perhaps most importantly -- launched a hugely successful toyline. I never had much interest in the series myself, but I used to watch it, occasionally, if I saw it on TV. Most of these kinds of shows were pretty bad, though. As a kid, I remember being especially disappointed with three of these series in particular: Back to the Future: The Animated Series. Like most people, I loved the Back to the Future movies and I had high hopes for this show. More adventures with Doc and Marty! Live-action appearances by Christopher Lloyd! Unfortunately the show turned out to be a typical harebrained Saturday morning cartoon, focusing on Jules and Verne, with Marty mostly taking a back seat, and with Einstein the dog piloting the time-traveling train. No stakes, no cliffhangers, no paradoxes, no character development -- just dopey slapstick that was impossible to take seriously. This show should have been a huge hit -- the Back to the Future franchise was extremely popular at the time -- but the ratings were bad and it was cancelled after just two short seasons. Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice was one of my favorite movies and again, I had high hopes for this series. But this one took even more liberties than the Back to the Future cartoon: Beetlejuice and Lydia have somehow become best friends (!), and the Maitlands don't appear at all. And like Back to the Future, it was a jokey, Looney Tunes-kind of show that I simply couldn't take seriously. In retrospect, I suppose the producers of this show (which apparently included Tim Burton himself) did the best they could with this adaptation; Beetlejuice isn't exactly a kid-friendly kind of character, so they had to make him less scary, and focusing on Lydia rather than the grown-up Maitlands was probably the least bad option. And the show does, admitedly, have some weird and interesting visuals. But I was still disappointed. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures. And this was the worst one. I was a huge Bill & Ted fan back in the day, and when I heard there was going to be an animated series, I was very, very excited. The fact that Alex Winter, Keanu Reeves, and George Carlin were actually going to be reprising their roles from the movie was the icing on the cake. Alas. Unlike the Beetlejuice cartoon, the producers at least stuck to the premise -- Bill and Ted are lovable goofs who use a time-traveling phone booth to have all kinds of adventures -- but that's about the only good thing I can say about the show. The animation was ugly and unappealing (Hanna-Barbera, ugh), the stories were the usual cartoon crap, and worst of all, the "jokes" were simply not funny. Now, granted, I was ten years old when this show aired, so maybe a little older than the audience they were aiming for, but I was a hardcore Bill & Ted fan and I still found this show almost impossible to watch. Oh, and the lame theme song ("It's outraaageous! So bodaaaacious!") made me want to cry. * * * * * * * * MOVIE REVIEW: BIKINI SQUAD Here's a short review I wrote many years ago. Bikini Squad (1993) is a crappy movie about an up-and-coming director named Cathy who has recently been hired to finish the season of a Baywatch-like TV show called Bikini Squad. Trouble is, the producer is a slimeball, the casting director expects (and gets) sex from prospective actresses, the stars are all total idiots, and there's virtually no money left to shoot anything. It turns out the slimeball producer is deliberately sabotaging the show because he's losing money or something, and it's up to Cathy and her new assistant/boyfriend to put things right. Bikini Squad is not one of those Bikini Carwash-type movies, where some dude or dudette inherits a failing business and realizes that bikini-clad women will draw in new customers (a genre with which, I assure you, I am not at all familiar). The film is certainly not a sex romp -- there's only a couple of very softcore sex scenes in the movie, and they're basically played for laughs. It mostly just tries (and fails) to parody Baywatch. 
If you can stomach the bad jokes, stupid ideas, and dull romance, however, and are capable of putting up with long periods of depressing, unfunny inanity, you will eventually come upon a few mildly funny scenes and characters. The conceited, self-absorbed Biff (J.C. Palermo) is a hilarious idiot who offers exotic cheeses to Cathy before accidentally hitting himself in the groin with his own Thighmaster. Later, his bimbo co-star Summer invites him into her tent -- she's into him because she thinks he's some kind of genius (big-brained guys really rev her engines). "Say something smart!" she orders. "Huh?" Biff stupidly replies. Then he makes up a bunch of ridiculous "facts" in order to...ahem...further arouse her interest. "You know that stuff in your belly button?" he says. "Well that's called kunur, and if you saved it all up for a year, you'd have enough to knit a sweater!" "More!" she cries, now in the throes of ecstasy. "You can tell how old a horse is by looking into his mouth and counting his teeth," Biff continues frantically, "unless he's had 'em fixed, and then you'll have to look up his nose, and count...the...hairs!" It's pretty stupid, but Palermo pulls it off, mostly because of his completely over-the-top approach to the material. He's really trying here. Sadly, no one else is. Cathy (Becca Rocheford) is totally uninteresting, and so is just about everyone else. Palmero is the only one to get any mileage out of this mess; when Summer compliments him by saying that she loves his chest hair, and he smarmily replies that he loves hers too...well, let's just say his delivery will leave you laughing. But basically, you're probably gonna be disappointed with this movie no matter what you come looking for. Titallation? There's a lot of bikini-clad girls, but very little actual nudity. Laughs? Well, occasionally, but only if you're in the right frame of mind (maybe high or half-drunk). I suspect most viewers will come looking for the topless girls and be disappointed when they realize the focus is on the stupid comedy. If nothing else, though, keep an eye out for Ted Raimi in the movie's opening scene (where Biff fights a rubber shark). What the hell is Ted Raimi doing in this stinker? Don't ask me. |