Salt City Sinner

posted on 9/9/2013 by the Salt City Sinner Salt Lake City's first Comic Con, held from September 5 - 7,  was a record-crushing success. SLCCC sold 50,000 tickets, had around 80,000 visitors, had to turn thousands away at the doors (including some wristband-holders, due to excessive amounts of people and pesky fire codes). Celebrity meatvatars included Adam West, William Shatner and Stan Lee. You could play “blast a storm trooper” or get your picture taken with probably no fewer than three hundred Batmen roaming the floor, ranging from the pudgy and depressing to the marvelous and movie-quality. Like all cons, this one was an orgy of both creativity and consumerism – a colorful peacock parade of costumes jammed shoulder-to-shoulder between long rows of booths selling art prints, posters, clothing, video games, action figures, and, of course, comic books. SLCCC will be back, I have absolutely no doubt, and that is a boon for Salt Lake's geek / weirdo economy (arg...

posted on 6/21/2012 by the Salt City Sinner In the near-perfect final scenes of Kill Bill: Vol. 2 , Bill (played by none other than stone-faced, living Easter Island statue David Carradine) holds court in his hacienda, and introduces his final monologue by saying, quite simply, "As you know, I am a great fan of comic books." I, too, am a great fan of comic books . But I am also a great fan of horror movies, especially the kind that have been inspired by the Netflix Insurgency. You see, time was, a horror movie that went straight to DVD was guaranteed to be of the babe-slashing, misogynistic, predictable "BOO!" variety. The major franchises were similarly hideous - let us not forget Jason X (AKA "Jason In Space"), which was odious but also so self-conscious of its odiousness that it attempted a brazen sort of postmodern tongue in cheek that fell flat as a rug. YEAH DUDE Thanks to Netflix's predator-drone marketing, a crop of what I've ...

posted 5/23/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Gods darn it, I tried to ignore this story. I tried to ignore it on April 18 when Grant Morrison popped off about Batman in an in-depth feature on superheroes for Playboy . Quoth Grant: [Batman]s very plutonian in the sense that he's wealthy and in the sense that he's sexually deviant. Gayness is built into Batman. I'm not using gay in the pejorative sense, but Batman is very, very gay. There's just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he's intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay...All these women fancy him and they wear fetish clothes and jump around rooftops to get to him. He doesn't care - he's more interested in hanging out with the old guy and the kid. First of all, consider the source of this statement from two angles. Angle one: Morrison is the most talented comic book writer of the last thirty years, and I'm including Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman (wr...

posted 5/14/2012 by the Salt City Sinner As I so often say to myself these days, "I can't say it better than Grant:" Image by the preternaturally talented Alex Ross Grant Morrison's Supergods , which anybody who has ever read a comic book even once should read and slowly savor, gets *really* interesting in chapter 21. In the chapter, titled Hollywood Sniffs Blood . Morrison marks the ascendance of comic book culture in Hollywood with 2000's "X-Men." He acknowledges early efforts in the field like Tim Burton's Batman movies, but I agree with Morrison that the turn of the century marked a turn of fortune for comic book culture in Hollywood. Morrison makes the case that M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable was the true turning point in super hero cinema. I won't argue with the master -- Samuel L. Jackson (an outspoken comics fan among celebrities) would later build upon his performance as Mr. Glass by becoming the embodiment of Sp...

posted 5/3/2012 by the Salt City Sinner From Grant Morrison's masterful Supergods : At the heart of [Chris Nolan's] The Dark Knight was a reputation-assuring performance that seemed to burn and fizz off the screen; it was hard to recognize the face of handsome young Heath Ledger under the scars and smeared makeup of the Joker, but he owned the screen from the moment he first appeared and slammed a pencil through a man's head until his final dangling turn as the hanged man of the tarot, condemning Batman to an upside-down world of darkness and madness. [emphasis mine] When I first read this, the only reaction I can describe is a trite one: my mind was blown. Judge for yourself: Hung, you may note, by his ankle ...also hung by his ankle. And the standard Tarot reading of "reversal" is right there in the movie. These things are hidden in plain sight. Or, possibly, I'm insane.

Once upon a time, I took a course at the University of Utah called "Neighborhood Democracy" - for all I know, now Professor-City-Councilman Luke Garrott, who used to be plain old Professor Luke Garrott, is still teaching it. As far as political science courses are concerned, it still stands as one of the best I've ever taken - Dr. Garrott was and is a fantastic professor, and it wasn't until relatively recently that I fully realized why I got so much out of his classes. I should have caught on sooner. When, for example, we were assigned Jane Mansbridge's Beyond Adversary Democracy , a book that is about the art and practice of that most Utopian of meeting structures - the non-adversarial small-d democratic model (also known, for those who are into the whole brevity thing, as "unitary democracy"). Mansbridge is excerpted in an informative and succinct fashion here . The trick to which I should have wised up sooner was Dr. Garrott's expert use of...

With my obligatory "health care, meh" post out of the way, time to geek out a bit. There's been a lot of scuttlebutt in the dorkus malorkus community about which actor will play Captain America in the upcoming movie adaptation. I, myself, think that DC has a better track record than Marvel when it comes to films (then again, I'm a DC partisan in general), but Marvel has improved their record lately with the impressively non-awful Iron Man and Spider Man franchises. Well, scratch that last, actually, as they canned Sam Raimi recently , along with the entire Spider Man cast, in the interests of a truly poorly though-out 3-D reboot. Now I get this news : Chris Evans will play Steve Rogers, also known as Captain America. Sources tell us the actor has not only accepted Marvel's offer, first detailed on Friday, but that the dealmaking moved so fast it's now all about dotting the i's and crossing the t's. Evans, if you recall, played Johnny Flame in the shitf...

NERD ALERT: Okay, the Halloween and Friday the 13th reboots have been interesting because, as horror films, their antitagonists were of a particularly dumb slasher variety. Rob Zombie's take on Meyers has been interesting and worthwhile in my humble opinion, but I've always had a poorly defended soft spot for Zombie's movies (I think, at root, I just basically like what he likes as much as he likes it). "Nightmare on Elm Street" was always going to be an insanely difficult reboot, because A.) Freddy had more personality than any of the slasher greats, and B.) Robert Englund was so closely tied to the character (all the way up to appearing as himself in Craven's weird meta self-parody, New Nightmare ). That said: Englund has so thoroughly sullied his career * post-Freddie that he is out of the game for good in my opinion. Jackie Earl Haley is a brilliant choice for his replacement. In short, I'm keeping an open mind for this reboot - cross your fingers,...