Insane Asylum’s Horror Emporium Halloween Festival
116 N. Green St., Ottumwa, IA 52501 · Get Directions

http://www.insanesasylumshop.com

October 28th, 29th 2011

Minneapolis Underground Film Festival
3508 Clinton Ave
Minneapolis, MN 55408
December 2, 3, 4 2011

The above is a ten minute short comedy film about rednecks dealing with zombies as rednecks do–by fighting.

I have mentioned The Black Earth a few times on dynamicsubspace, and I hope that you enjoy watching this solid effort from my friend James Warbington.

If you REALLY like it, consider contributing to his funding raising drive to turn The Black Earth into a feature length film.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

CONTACT:

Director & Writer: James T. Warbington

Production Company: Black Scorpion Films, LLC

Executive Producer: Kevin Wayne Film Studios

Producer: Family Curse Productions

warbrookfilms@gmail.com

www.theblackearthmovie.com

Short “Zomedy” Zombie Comedy to be filmed in Black Earth, Wisconsin

Madison, Wisconsin March 25th 2011. James T. Warbington in association with Kevin Wayne Film Studios, Black Scorpion Films, LLC and Family Curse Productions has announced the short film tentatively titled “The Black Earth” to be filmed in it’s name sake, Black Earth, Wisconsin in June 2011.

“The Black Earth” is the story of two country boys and their family. The two cousins are considered the Black Sheep and outcast of the town. As they spend their free time imitating stunts they have seen on television and known for having a beer or two they become the unlikely heroes that save the day. As the tourist run in fear, they laugh in the face of the undead, turn up a beer and the radio and get to protecting Black Earth from the undead invasion. The short film to be used as a stepping stone to secure the additional funding to film the feature length.

The title and location was inspired by a visit to Black Earth on ancestor search. After visiting the town and realizing it’s charm, not only did the tentative title spawn from it, it was decided it was an excellent place to film as well. Director and Writer James T. Warbington explained while scouting locations “It (Black Earth) is a wonderful town and everyone has been extremely accepting to what we want to accomplish there.”

Kevin Wayne Studios is the executive headquarters for Black Scorpion Films, LLC, based out of Birmingham, Alabama has filmed 4 feature length films as well as many short films and been a solid member of Sidewalk independent Film Festival in Alabama. Kevin Wayne Film Studios is currently in post production of the film “Company M: a mob of soldiers” as well as pre-production of the feature length “Bloodtype”. Family Curse Productions has been executive producers of 2 short films and is currently in pre-production of the feature length “The Beast” in Huntington, Pennsylvania. James T. Warbington, with over a decade of experience in professional sports, live theater as well as directed and been cinematographer on many Black Scorpion Films, LLC and Family Curse projects will be heading up “The Black Earth” short film in Wisconsin.

We hope to prove once again to all film makers that Wisconsin is a great place for the film industry.

For more information about the film, please visit www.theblackearthmovie.com.

Also you can contact for any information: warbrookfilms@gmail.com.

Avatar includes themes of cultural imperialism, white man’s burden, and economic exploitation. It brings in ideas from other science fiction including waldo bodies, or remotely controlled organic bodies. He attempts to rationalize the Gaia hypothesis. The alien protagonists have accents, they seem stereotypically Native American-like (they wear feathers with an unknown origin–there was one point in the film I believe I saw a flock of birds escaping from a tree, but I do not know if they had what appear to be feathers), and they have a world consciousness/awareness. And yes, they are blue, as are many other fictional depictions of extraterrestrial life.

Simply put, Cameron knows how to dip into what Damien Broderick calls the mega-text of science fiction. The mega-text, an idea Broderick himself borrows from Christine Brooke-Rose, is a corpus of ideas, terms, and usages that authors within a particular genre evoke, use, repurpose, and disseminate through their works. The cool thing about the mega-text is that for those people who read widely within a given genre, they will eventually learn the mega-text and better understand its employment in a given text without the necessity of too much further explanation. Samuel R. Delany has also written on this subject. For example, my earlier use of the word waldo would, for many, tell them that this is some kind of remotely controlled technology that mirrors the body or its functions in some way. The word, originally used in this context by Heinlein, was appropriated by others to convey the same idea, because readers of science fiction already knew what the word meant from Heinlein’s usage. Furthermore, the popularity of Heinlein’s work and the linguistic concision of the word probably also played a part in its adoption into the shared science fiction mega-text.

Cameron’s Avatar shared in and gives back to this mega-text. Harlan Ellison aside, many authors and readers accept this circulation of ideas within science fiction. The mega-text could be said to be an ancillary or reductive idea from the bigger idea of intertextuality. This is the connections between works and history that has a long history, but has reached a high level of discussion in discussions of postmodernism.

As Linda Hutcheon points out in her book The Poetics of Postmodernism, intertextuality is something that has always been with us. I believe it is something tied to language and writing alike, because communication necessitates a common understanding, and one aspect of that understanding is the conveyance, repetition, and memory of stories and concepts that go beyond the singular signified/signifier relationship. Language is intertextual, and our stories carry forth this intertextuality, too. But what makes postmodern intertextuality different from earlier forms of intertextuality? Postmodern intertextuality is the ironic twist, the challenging of the earlier citation, the questioning of the carried-over idea.

Avatar is, I believe, a postmodern science fiction film in that it appropriates ideas and stories from other texts and situates them with an ironic turn. First, there is the irony of the needed element for space travel–Unobtainium. Interestingly, this is something that falls on deaf ears for many non-science fiction reading or watching friends of mine. However, I believe it is the subtle way in which Cameron introduces this to the audience that it works for the audience as a believable macguffin despite the name. So, the Unobtainium creates the framing irony for the entire film–the thing humanity wants, but ultimately cannot have.

A second irony is Jake’s Na’vi avatar body. As a paraplegic, he cannot use his legs, and the only way he can once again enjoy the sensation of walking is by the amazing technological intervention of the avatar technology. Despite the high cost of getting his legs working again in what he describes as a dire economy, he is lucky in a sense to get to take his twin brother’s place on the avatar project.

And a third irony, which I will conclude this post with, considers Poul Anderson’s formulation of avatar technology in “Call Me Joe.” The first hit in Google for “Avatar steals plot” is a reference to this story, which is about a crabby disabled man who explores the surface of Jupiter with an organically created and remotely controlled body. Over time, the human man’s brain atrophies while his ‘mind’ transfers into his body that is capable of living in the unfriendly for human environment of Jove. This does bear striking similarities with Jake Sully in Avatar, but there are ironic twists to this ‘going native’ story. The first is motivation. Anderson’s waldo driving character is fed-up with humanity and his disability. Jake Sully in Avatar has no ties to others, but he isn’t escapist like Anderson’s character. Instead, he, from the very beginning on Pandora, demonstrates an awareness and wonder at the things he sees and the sensations that he feels both in his human body and while inhabiting his Na’vi body. Jake seeks personal and spiritual fulfillment, something that Pandora and the Na’vi offer him and he fights to retain from his human masters. Jake doesn’t wish to escape his bounds, instead he seeks a meaning to his life through responsibility to a people undeserving of humanity’s exploitation of their planet. The irony for the audience is that Jake, of Clan Jarhead, is more than the stereotypical grunt (something explored in Cameron’s Aliens). Jake’s enjoyment of the process of becoming one of the people and his attraction to Neytiri causes him to loose sight of his original mission and the impending danger to the Na’vi and his life among them. He becomes part not only of an alien being in an alien environment (as Anderson’s character does), but also of a social network, a family, a people, an interconnected system of life that spans Pandora. This is the challenge that Cameron brings to what may be an inspirational story by Anderson–the difference between the lone warrior from the pulps into a contemporary growing awareness (or re-awareness) of the interconnectedness of all life and our social structures.

Cameron didn’t rip off Anderson or anyone else in developing his script for Avatar. There were important transformations to his mega-text derived ideas, and he challenged some of their earlier uses. He took good ideas that have been in circulation for awhile and turned them in significant ways and he did it in such a way that a lot of people were able to connect to his story in ways that people didn’t connect or even know about Anderson’s mid-century story.

So please, let’s move along to more important matters such as the cultural implications of Avatar. What does Avatar add to the mega-text, and what are its cultural implications? What are people walking away from the theaters with? Is it changing their attitudes to imperialism and exploitation, or is it instilling in them a desire to leave Earth for Pandora via Poul Anderson’s escapism?

Read more about Avatar on the official website here, wikipedia article on the film here, and the post-zero about Anderson’s possible influence on the film here.

Having just completed Professor Babacar M’Baye’s African-American Literature course, I was able to engage Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man” with the history and stories of the African-American experience that were fresh on my mind.  I have known for a long time that Asimov’s robots are an allegory for African-Americans, but it was on re-reading “The Bicentennial Man” that I realized how much Asimov’s earlier robot writing culminated in this later robot story, first published in 1976–two and three decades after his much loved early robot stories such as “Runaround” and the R. Daneel Olivaw/ Elijah Bailey detective stories.  In fact, I found that “The Bicentennial Man” mirrors the basic structure of American slave narratives, which I go into more detail on in my entry for the collection on film adaptations.

With this rich source material, I was at first resistant to spoiling it by watching the abysmal film adaptation Bicentennial Man by Chris Columbus and starring Robin Williams.  However, I discovered that for as bad as the film is, there are subtle gestures toward the spirit of the source material.  Unfortunately, the film overall pulls the rug out from under the main character’s efforts and successes by erasing the anxiety and hardship Andrew encountered in Asimov’s original story.  I don’t believe the audience understands Andrew’s predicament in the film in the same way that Asimov demonstrates Andrew’s precarious situation in the novelette.  Nevertheless, the film does have some redemptive elements, which are more fully explored in my entry for the collection.  

When I have more information about the publication of the critical companion, I will post it to dynamicsubspace.net.

Yufang and I just got back home from seeing J.J. Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek reboot, and I had to put down my initial thoughts about the film.  If you haven’t seen it yet, go forth, watch it, and come back and let me know what you thought.  For those of you who have seen it, read on and comment below.

Visually, Star Trek (2009) has much more visual energy than any other Star Trek film or television series (and I’ve seen them all in toto).  Part of this energy comes from its borrowing a thing or two cinematically from the recently finished re-imagined SF series, Ronald D. Moore’s Battlestar Galactica.  The cinematography sweeps, lunges, plays loose, and zooms and tracks.  Furthermore, the editing and pacing of the film overcomes one of the major detractions from the other Star Trek movies.  The new Star Trek artfully bridges the immediacy of television with the longer play format of film.

However, a significant difference between the two filming styles is the visual brilliance of the new Enterprise compared to the grit and dirt of the BSG.  The BSG definitely connects to earlier SF space craft such as the Nostromo from Alien, while the new Enterprise looks like something Jonathan Ive would cook up.  Additionally, recent space craft design and cinematographic aesthetics bleed between these firmly entrenched franchises–the new USS Enterprise and Cylon Basestars, and Nero’s Romulan mining vessel and the BSG.  It would be interesting to explore the implications and meaning behind spacecraft design in contemporary SF film and television–I will begin developing this into something longer.

Considering the cast–Chris Pine as Kirk, Zachary Quinto as Spock, Karl Urban as Bones, Zoe Saldana as Uhura, Simon Pegg as Scotty, John Cho as Sulu, and Anton Yelchin as Chekov–I believe that these actors have assumed these established roles with care and expertise.  I don’t get the sense that any of them are over playing or parodying what has come before.  Each brings something more to the table than merely mimicking the work of William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, Nichelle Nichols, James Doohan, George Takei, and Walter Koenig.  The new Star Trek, working with a mythos and formula that goes back to the late 1960s, returns to the beginning instead of trying to reformulate that origin as we saw in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica.  It is this point that, as much as my inner fan delights in it, is one problematic issue for bringing Star Trek into the 21st century.

Star Trek has long been lauded as the touchstone example of a progressive television show, or more exactly, a SF show that engages contemporary issues, including human equality and the Civil Rights movement, veiled in SF narrative.  Why then is the new Star Trek held up by its token antecendents?  It is impossible for Star Trek to be more progressive in the same way that the re-imagined BSG did where characters were remapped (though it is important to note that BSG transcended race, ethnicity, or gender in an overwhelmingly positive way). I acknowledge that the new Star Trek is meant to be a reboot and not a re-imagining, and as such, it facilitates this maneuver through the too-often-used technoscientific time travel narrative, which means that the characters remain essentially the same with slightly different histories and personal development. It is as if the past (TOS) is reaching forth from a syndicated grave to leave an indelible imprint on what could be a new and progressive vision of the future.  The hierarchy and friendships must remain the same between the members of the Enterprise crew.  

However, the relationship between Spock and Uhura caught me by surprise.  It is in a way more positive than Kirk finding his way into Uhura’s bunk, but despite Spock’s hybridity and green blood, he still resembles a white man.  Furthermore, he is Uhura’s instructor and superior.  The power structures are intact with Uhura on the bottom.  Even with her demand to Spock to put her on the Enterprise, how much of this is selfish acquiescence on the Vulcan’s part?  

Another problem that I encountered in the new Star Trek film has to do with the tragic hero, Nero (I assume that this was a pun by the screenplay writers).  As I have argued before regarding Joker being the true hero of The Dark Knight, I believe that Nero is the hero of the new Star Trek film.  He witnessed the annihilation of his family and the Romulan home world prior to the serendipitous time travel facilitating singularity created by the so-called “red matter.”  He reveals his pain and anger as something raw and single minded.  Nero does not accept the universe of Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations.”  Nero blames the Vulcans, the distant relatives from which the Romulans split, for the destruction of Romulus and the billions of lives lost.  Obviously, the history of politics and (possible) racism between the Romulans and the Federation (particularly the Vulcans) fed into Nero’s beliefs.  

There were attempts at unification and peace between the Romulus and Vulcan when we last left a future Enterprise crew on the NCC-1701-D and E iterations of the Federation’s flagship.  The Romulans had their “empire,” and the Federation of Planets was represented as a democratic body with representatives from the various member worlds.  However, were the Romulans really antagonistic to the Federation, or were they reacting to their being boxed in by the Federation behind the so-called Neutral Zone?  Why is the supposedly science and knowledge oriented Starfleet, the militaristic arm of the Federation, regimented, armed, and never willing to run from a good fight?  On one level, the new Star Trek film reveals that the real threat comes from an uncaring Universe, but the political sentiments, beliefs, and machinations are an equal threat to life.  

Nero takes the opportunity to save his planet by attempting to eliminate the peoples he feels are responsible for not preventing the dangerous supernova. Unlike Terminator 2, in which Sarah Connor attempts to prevent the Skynet orchestrated armageddon by killing Miles Dyson, Nero assumes a scorched Earth approach to protecting his and his people’s future.  Could he have traveled to Romulus with his technology and given it to the past?  Yes.  Could he have communicated with the Federation rather than fire the first volley at the USS Kelvin?  Yes.  But, I don’t think that any of us can really imagine what it would be like to witness that kind of loss and devastation.  The Vulcans apparently take it all in stride in the film when Vulcan is destroyed, but I do not believe that even a strictly logical Vulcans could overcome the hatred born of (real or believed) racial animosity and genocide.  Let me be clear that the Vulcans did not actually, as far as the story tells us, destroy Romulus, but how would an off-world Romulan miner see the destruction of Romulus with their history of a divided ancestral past?  And, in what way does “diaspora” (I’m thinking of the Jewish and African diasporas respectively) play in the imaginative annihilation of Romulus and Vulcan?  Are the Romulan and Vulcan representatives from another Star Trek mythos/timeline/alternate history sent forth into the void not in place, but in time?  Have we run out of place in the Trek universe, and all that is left is time?  When presented with the vastness of the physical universe, what does it mean for us, as an audience of Trek stories, to be bored with place and now only concerned with time?  

I can’t say that I adequately addressed all of the many ideas that the new Star Trek illuminated in my mind since I first saw it, but this post serves as a beginning for further work that I might endeavor on this new film.  As the most successful box office Star Trek film, I am confident that this film is connecting with people who would not otherwise watch a Star Trek film.  There is something new going on here that I am interested in discovering.  For my work, as in the film, time is the great arbiter.

I have heard from a number of friends that have taken issue with the film’s dedication to its source, the graphic depiction of violence, the casting, the soundtrack, etc., ad nauseum.  I had almost lost all hope until I saw that Patrick Sharp gave props to the film and Haley’s performance as Rorschach on Facebook.  And today, I ran across Patton Oswalt’s shining emblem of Nerdlore head-smackery in his discussion of Watchmen and film interpretations:

Because Zack Snyder STEPPED UP, motherfuckers. THE WATCHMEN was going to get made, one way or another. And instead of bleating on his Facebook status updates or Tweeting about how shitty the upcoming adaptation’s going to be, he TOOK THE BULLET and tried to do it right. . . . Zack delivered a 2 1/2 hour, honest attempt, and broke his ass cranking out tons of free extras. . . . Plus, he gave you a kick-ass DAWN OF THE DEAD remake, plus 300, plus whatever else he’s got coming down the pike. He’s the best friend the Nerd Mafia’s had since Joss Whedon and Brian Michael Bendis, so everyone please crack the tab on a frosty can of Go Fuck Yourself and go see the movie version of THE WATCHMEN.

You should read the rest of Oswalt’s hilarious and on-target post on his MySpace page here.

In a side note:  I’m currently having my students experience interpretative tension between Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, and Philip Kaufman’s film of the same name.  In these two works, there seems to be more a conversation taking place between them instead of a directly derivative function of the latter.  My students in both classes today came up with some great ideas for their essays on this subject, and I’m eager to hear what more they have to say about interpretations in class on Friday.

I’ve seen every film by Pixar except for the Toy Story series, and I’ve enjoyed all that I’ve seen thus far.  However, Wall-E surpasses all of their previous work through a well-thought out story, amazing cinematography, good examples of real-world physics, and the interweaving of American consumer culture with capitalistic-paternalism and eco-disaster.  The most striking element of the film goes back to Leo Marx’s work, The Machine in the Garden, but I believe Wall-E is emblematic of how Marx is wrong.  Marx’s thesis is that American literature imagines an idyllic garden which has been lost and is reattainable through the embrace of technology, but the lost Edenic pastoral is gone forever, and technological progress pushes us further away from it.  The characters of Wall-E and his girlfriend, Eve, show humanity the way toward regaining what we’ve lost through two key scenes (one in the film, and the other during the end credits).  The earlier scene has Eve take Wall-E’s plant offering into what is best described as a womb.  There, the plant is safe until returned to the corporate robot controlled Axiom starship (accepted/unquestioned truth, wow, what a perfect name!).  Wall-E and Eve keep the plant safe, and reawaken obese humanity’s connection with (mother) Earth.  Then, during the end credits, there are developing scenes in a variety of stylzied animations covering cave paintings to Egyptian heiroglyphics to Impressionism.  In these scenes, the garden is recreated by the cooperation of humanity with its autonomous robotic creations.

Wall-E is a really fun movie for all ages, and I guarantee that you’ll be as enchanted as I was by this amazing Science Fiction allegory!

Watch some clips and trailers for Wall-E here.