"The Deadly Hands of Shang-Chi"

Just downloaded a gigabytes worth of Marvel Comic's "The Deadly Hands of Shang-Chi: Master of Kung-Fu."

For all you hipsters keeping score, "Golden Girls" actor Quentin Tarantino says this was his favorite comic as a kid.

Shang-Chi was Marvel's attempt to remain relevant to pimply-faced adolescents of the 1970's during the days of martial arts mania. Stan Lee saw the writing on the wall when they started trading back issues of Spiderman for Nunchucks and Bruce Lee iron-ons. Times being what they were - in those pre-p.c. days - Marvel decided to use the politically incorrect tales of Fu Manchu as a starting point. Fu Manchu was a "yellow peril" pulp stalwart from the good old days of WWII and the originator of the facial hair bearing his name that became de rigeur for heavy metal bass players around the world. They gave Fu Manchu a son and called him Shang-Chi.

The first run of M.O.K.F. featured art by Jim Starlin. The colorists on the books tended to shade our friends from the Far East in a horrible orange cast that was somewhere between full-blown hepatitis and Ernie from Sesame Street. I recall some heated exchanges on the letters page about this. Marvel editors blamed the orange peril on the limited palette available in the old days of coarse process colors on ratty newsprint. They eventually toned things down a bit but I have very distinct memories of a Shang-Chi cover occupying a prominent place in an exhibit on racial stereotypes that took place in the Statue of Liberty. Excelsior!

Paul Gulacy took over the art on issue 18. Things really got rolling when Gulacy and writer Doug Moench started collaborating a few issues later. Maybe they were trying to steer clear of the old school racist tinge of Fu Manchu, perhaps the martial arts thing was waning - but Gulacy and Moench abruptly placed Shang-Chi in a world that was more James Bond than Bruce Lee. International espionage, gadgets galore and bikini-clad vixens were stuffed into every panel.

Nick Fury would feel right at home with Gulacy's fancy layouts and stylized graphic elements. Gulacy's style owes an obvious debt to guys like Steranko and Wally Wood. And sometimes M.O.K.F reminds me of a slick version of Spain Rodriguez's crazy, violent noir. But what Gulacy and Moench did so uniquely was to just beat you over the head with random craziness until all you could do was scream mercy from psychedelic overload. It's very much a kitchen-sink approach that - in lesser hands - would look amateurish and contrived but somehow they delivered. A great run of storytelling that outshines almost anything Marvel did in that era.

The torrent is floating around there if you are interested.

"Summer Project 2008"

Whenever Woody Allen makes a movie the title is usually kept under wraps. If there is an actual title, no one working on the film seems to know what it is. Call sheets, scripts - and the check I picked up at his dark and scary office in 1992 for my two days work as a production assistant on "Husbands and Wives - all say "Fall Project" (or "Summer Project", "Spring Project" etc.)

I doubt it's really a matter of secrecy, no one is really that curious about the specifics of what the Wood-man has up his sleeve. I don't mean that as an insult, its just that you have a pretty good range of ideas what to expect when you plunk your shekels for a Woody Allen flick.

My own "Summer Project" has been the subject of much speculation and rumor-mongering by all you haters on the digital inter-webs. The blogospehere and the shadowy clans of Penguin.com have all been conspiring to leak details of my forthcoming opus.

So I am officially lifting the veil of secrecy right now.

"The Adventures of Sam Rocket" will be shooting sometime in June. You can read a PDF script here if you are so inclined.

"Sam Rocket" is a teenage girl who delivers pizza on a jet board, it's sort-of like a snowboard with a jet engine on the back. It takes place somewhere between "Children of Men" and "Bladerunner" on the speculation timeline. It's a bit more dystopian than "I-Robot" but less than "1984." It's an adventure/action piece with tons of effects, animation and cute girls and rock and roll.


My aim is for something like an updated Republic Serial or Fleisher Bros. Superman shorts. With a dollop of anime and just plain eye-candy. I'm the guy who actually liked "Speed Racer." I had giant reservations about the story and dialogue but I dug the look and the technique.

'Sam' will be serialized on the web and we'll see what happens after that. I'm not against film festivals per se but I'm more interested in reaching an audience of people who arent making movies, at least at first. Is anyone out there NOT making a movie or writing a script?

It's both encouraging and defeating to know that the barriers to entry are non-existent anymore. Just because you CAN make a movie doesnt mean you SHOULD. It's arrogant of me to lament that and then decide to push ahead with my own vanity project.

But what the heck.

So download the script and let me know what you think. Please feel free to tell me it sucks, but more urgently, tell me WHY it sucks.

That is exactly what everyone doing this kind of thing needs...and seldom receives. Your friends will tell you it's great but what they are really telling you is: "I think it's great that you wrote a script - between shifts at Burger King." Encouragement and support from your homeboys is important and nice. But you really need someone to tell you that your protagonist would never stay in the haunted house after the first ghost ate his girlfriend.

"Indiana Jones and the Aches and Pains of Middle-age"

One thing that sort of bugs me about "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" is a certain bit of laziness as far as production values. The previous entries in the Indy cannon were full of cool, exotic location shoots. To my eyes, 'Crystal Skull' sure seems like everything was done within a twenty-mile radius of Hollywood. The well documented stuff that they shot at (I think) Harvard being the only apparent exception.

When we first see Indy and the Commies outside the Area 51 warehouse, it doesnt even look like a real exterior.

I'm all for green screen worlds like "Sin City" and "Speed Racer" but when it's done out of convenience, it tends to look a bit cheap. More like a big-budget cable movie.

The original Indy flicks featured a lot of full-on artifice - think of the scene in 'Raiders' where the jeep full of Nazis plunges off a very obvious matte-painting cliff. Or the mine chase miniatures in "Temple of Doom" featuring GI Joe dolls speeding down a Lionel trains set.

But there was a lot of charm in doing things old-school. And it was appropriate in the way that the effects were in Republic's "The Adventures of Captain Marvel."

The earlier 'Raiders' entries were shot all over the world. In deserts and canyons and grimy villages. With real sunlight and jungles that didnt look like the lagoon from "Gilligan's Island."

And unlike a lot of other folks, I thought most of the CGI work in 'Crystal Skull' looked pretty cool. Even to the untrained eye, it can be pretty obvious when something is CGI. CGI opens up so many otherwise unobtainable vistas that you just know innately that a giant UFO in the sky isn't a big model on wires.

But when every single shot has that fancy, golden light that nature provides a location only sporadically, you start to get a bit of eye fatigue. "Speed Racer" was two hours of eye-fatigue by comparison but it fit the mold, it had an internal consistency. Cold, hard worlds filled with machines and spaceships - like "Star Wars" - are more credibly created in a digital realm.

I didn't have gigantic expectations for "Crystal Skull," so I can't really say it was that much of a letdown. It sure zipped by pretty fast. Shia LeBeouf was nowhere near as annoying as I had hoped. The Marlon Brando drag was a bit embarrassing at first. I'm speaking of the first glimpse of him on a Harley, looking like a long-lost member of the Village People. At least he didnt wear the goofy hat after that. I liked the greaser/hot rod/switchblade stuff too. Maybe it was corny and obvious and owing more to previous depictions of the era than anything that really existed in that time frame but it was fun and goofy.

DNA of rock and roll

Originality is highly overrated. But lately I have been developing a unified-theory of rock and roll that boils down to this: Every single (rock) musical act in the last 50 or so years derives its sound from only 7 or 8 original sources. Every branch in the rock and roll tree - every leaf, nut and acorn - can be directly attributed to one or more of the following:

• Elvis Presley
• The Beatles
• Little Richard
• Hank Williams
• Bob Dylan
• Yardbirds
• The Stooges
• The Who

I tend to peg the Stooges as a low-rent version of the Doors, and for some reason I don't think of the the Doors as all that influential, so I'm a bit conflicted. But I have to trace the punk bands of the 1970's back to someone.

I'm sort of on the fence about the Who but I'll put them up there for now. Let me think about it.

My take on the Yardbirds will probably bug a lot of people but I think that a lot of the garage bands of the mid-sixties that are always cited as punk influences tended to skew more towards Yardbirds style stuff than Beatles. And on the flip side, I always thought they were pretty much responsible for metal. The Yardbirds were the first band that was pretty much for guys only. Chicks thought they were noisy and ugly but the dudes dug it. Total early onset sausage party.

As far as the Rolling Stones being excluded, I think I have a pretty good case. Not even remotely original and intentionally so. Lots of swagger and attitude but musically? At least originally they were going for a real retro thing.

Just a theory, mind you.

But I'm right.