That damn kid never goes to bed, but he does get a movie deal done. Yes, the children’s book that isn’t really a children’s book Go the F**K To Sleep has been optioned to be a movie because Lord knows why. Fox 2000 will be the geniuses bringing us this feature adaptation of Adam Mansbach’s book (illustrations by Ricardo Cortes). Ken Marin and Erica Oyama Marino will be doing the script, under producer Karen Rosenfelt, of Twilight fame.
If you recall, the book was #1 a month before it released because everyone was emailed copies to each other. I’m sure Fox 2000 will be thrilled if history repeats itself with copies of the finished film!
Here is the Samuel L. Jackson read version that everyone knows about:
It’s time once again to be made happy by The Asylum, as they give us yet another crazetacular monster feature. Age of Dinosaurs is like Jurassic Park 2, except without all that disappointment because we’re expecting the camp!
Using breakthrough flesh-regeneration technology, a biotech firm creates a set of living dinosaurs. But when the creatures escape their museum exhibit and terrorize Los Angeles, a former firefighter must rescue his teenage daughter from the chaos brought on by the Age of Dinosaurs.
Joseph Lawson directs a Hank Woon Jr. script. Treat Williams and Ronny Cox star, along with Jillian Rose Reed and Roger Lim. Official site link. Age of Dinosaurs will drop May 7th! Until then, you have plenty of time to guess the age of these dinosaurs. Remember: some of these dinosaurs dye their hair, so lack of grey doesn’t automatically mean they are young!
Sirius is an upcoming documentary about that six inch alien corspe they found in Chile a few months ago. You remember that, right? It was in all the papers, all the blogs, all the internets. It shocked the world because it proved we are not alone. That there was life on other planets and that life was very small and came to Earth to hang out in the desert of Chile. Or perhaps there was no news on this, because it is a complete hoax. No, it must be a conspiracy. A conspiracy of people owned by the six inch aliens who are attempting to cover up any evidence of their existance and their fondness for hanging out in the desert.
When you think about it, it all makes sense. What is in the desert? Area 51! What is 5+1? 6! 6 inch alien! What else is in the desert? Burning Man! Now, I’m not saying that Burning Man is a conspiracy cooked up to smuggle aliens into Earth’s cities, but there isn’t any evidence to the contrary, so draw your own conclusions, and think twice before taking those “drugs” your partying friend offers you, because they are just alien mind control jizz pills.
The film, called “Sirius,” will also depict how readily available forms of alternative energy technology are what extraterrestrials may be using to travel here from the cosmically improbable distances between their home world and ours.
I’ll have to break my unofficial ban on giving Uwe Boll attention to talk about his new movie. Because even though the recent financial apocalypse has a large deal to do with the banks doing whatever they can to make buckets of money while the world burns around them, there has been very little repercussions against said bankers (or banksters!) Not only that, but the media rarely even gives lip service to what a lot of the incredibly rich did, partially because the incredibly rich hold a lot of sway in said media companies. So when the whole Occupy movement first sprung up it was an amazing thing, an actual grassroots movement not astroturfed by millionaires on FoxNews. Of course, it was disorganized and quickly fizzled out due to the lack of organization and focus (part of the problem was they did want there to be any leaders of the movement, which meant everyone tried to pull Occupy to whatever cause they cared about most!)
Even the recent election had a whole rich vs. poor mentality, particularly when Mitt Romney was recorded saying that 47% of the country just lived off the government and thought they were entitled to things like food. The best result ever was when Mitt Romney finished with 47% of the popular vote. But that rich vs. poor divide has not gone away, and the gap between the wealthy 1% and the rest of America continues to grow. Billionaires are now funding SuperPACs and blasting the airwaves with ads for politicians they are literally buying, and the next election will only get worse. There is room for another round of protests and movements, and one will probably happen some day.
But until then, we go as we always do, to the world of cinema, where directors are waiting in the wings to exploit the latest news and trends for their own films. And German filmmaker Uwe Boll is not one to shy away from making a film about controversial subjects. Thus we get Assault on Wall Street, a film featuring a guy in a knockoff Anonymous mask gunning down offices full of bankers and sniping the rich.
A security guard for an armored truck, Jim (Dominic Purcell) is a blue-collar New Yorker who works hard to earn a living. His wages support himself and his wife Rosie (Erin Karpluk), who is on the upswing recovering from a near-fatal illness. Yet things start to fall apart after Rosie’s health insurance stops covering her treatment and Jim’s life savings are lost via a disastrous investment his stockbroker had advised him to make. As a row of professional and personal dominoes falls, Jim is confronted by the realization that, after being abused and exploited by financial institutions for far too long, he has only one choice: to strike back. From the mind of notorious German writer/director Uwe Boll (House of the Dead), Assault on Wall Street is excoriating look at the American financial system that is sure to stir up plenty of Occupy-esque sentiment.
Let’s put aside all the cool boner jokes you can make with the title of a film called Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, and instead focus on an issue that has less to do with the film and more to do with the book series and author Cassandra Clare. Be warned that I will be referencing some stuff that happened in the Harry Potter FanFic community, something that if you are not familiar with will sound very craZy with a random capital letter in the middle of the word.
Before we start, let me say I love this fanfic drama stuff. The fanfic itself..not so much. I simply don’t have time to read thousands of stories online in addition to all the other reading I do and the watching movies and writing about movies and having a wife and a job. But when things go controversial or weird, that’s when I pay attention, as I’m attracted to drama. It’s my honeypot!
Cassandra Clare got her online fame start as Cassandra Claire (neither are her real name, btw), writer of famed FanFic The Very Secret Diaries (a spoof of The Lord of the Rings) and The Draco Trilogy, an influential Harry Potter FanFic. The Draco Trilogy is where we are going to focus.
The Draco Trilogy features Draco Malfoy being redeemed and joining with Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Ginny on a series of adventures. It begins with Draco Dormiens, where polyjuice potion causes Harry and Draco to be permanently switched, and hijinks ensue. Needless to say, Draco becomes good, Sirius Black declares he will marry Draco’s mom (thus making Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy brothers!), and Harry confesses his love to Hermione (who rejects him!) In Draco Sinister, Harry, Ron, Hermione, Draco, and Ginny battle Salazar Slytherin, who has returned to be evil and kidnap Hermione, because that’s what evil people do. The final chapter is Draco Veritas, which clocks in at over 500,000 words!! Needless to say, a bajillion things happen, including love dodecahedrons, people getting drunk all the time, fake coming out of the closet, and wizard strip clubs.
The Draco Trilogy was influential, producing numerous pieces of fan art and becoming the definitive story for the Draco/Ginny shippers. But it wasn’t without controversy, as it was discovered that portions of the stories were taken wholesale from sources without attribution. Buffy the Vampire Slayer quotes were the most easily spotted, as well as Babylon 5 lines. But there were a lot of passages from fantasy authors that were reworded slightly and inserted. If these sources had been identified in the beginning, no one would have cared, but it was the fact they were used freely and without disclosure that caused everyone to freak out. Her stories were removed from FanFiction.Net, though the ensuing controversy led to the creation of FictionAlley, where The Draco Trilogy reappeared (until it was deleted again right when Cassandra Clare got a book contract!)
Readers of Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments series got their own eerie sense of deja vu when they realized that some of the characters were basically Claire’s versions of the Harry Potter characters from The Draco Trilogy. Most specifically, series bad boy Jace is her version of Draco Malfoy, right down to directly quoting some of the same lines her Malfoy said in The Draco Trilogy. Heroine Clary is her Ginny. Alec=Harry, Isabelle=Blaise, Valentine=Lucius. This is problematic because even though they are her interpretations of characters, the characters are essentially the JK Rowling characters. It’s the same deal with the whole 50 Shades of Grey thing, where the characters are Edward and Bella because it was a fanfic first.
I love remixes, I love when cultural properties are used by others outside of their original scope. I love that it happens even when I don’t love the end results. But it’s nice to have acknowledgement that it is what is happening. Instead, we get silence and denials and outright drama. And Cassandra Clare is no stranger to random online drama. I get annoyed when people don’t acknowledge the obvious inspirations and sources of their materials. Cassandra Clare has a history of borrowing from others without consent, and while other fanfic writers who have gone off to be published (called profic) can come up with original ideas and settings and characters, the excessive reuse is troubling.
Also the film looks ridonkulous. Seriously ridonkulous. It will be a glorious train wreck. And maybe Godfrey Gao will become the new Asian heartthrob!
(Image from so many tumblrs I don’t even know any more!)
