James

I watched the pilot and really liked it. The tone is far more The Incredibles than Heroes. Haven't seen past the first episode but Chiklis and Benz are likeable and the effects are great.

Oh, by the way the new Wikia style is a piece of shit, so log in and change the preferences to Monaco.

It's still not quite a deus ex machina, but I'd say it comes closer than anything else prior to the most recent season finale.

Not disagreeing, but enquiring: what was deus ex machinistic about the season five ending?

I've definitely reconsidered my stance on RTD after the fact and realised I was being a bit hyperbolic with my dislike of him at the time. I do think the first couple of seasons were properly shoddy work, though. Four and (especially) three were genuinely good but it wasn't until the Moffat/Smith era that I felt comfortable recommending the series without couching it in 'ifs' and 'buts'. Well, save for telling people not to watch the lizard episodes beyond the bit where Rory karks it.

That may be, but that's how it is with the studios. I'm not saying they're in the right.

How well known was Cilian Murphy to the general public? Or Liam Neeson (yeah, Star Wars - but how many non-nerds can place his name?)? Or Aaron Eckheart? And yeah, Ledger was well-known but only really for Brokeback Mountain, which came out three years before - I'll bet that a good percentage of the film's initial success came from his posthumous news coverage.

I dunno, man...I just tend to spend a lot of time riding my bike.

 

I'll have a look through this evening, and let you know what sort of content I'll be willing/able to fill in.

Well at least it's healthy.

Obviously there's no obligation to do anything, and I know this looks a bit full on. But any and all contributions are appreciated.

Oh, and if you need them, here are the templates:

Issues, for individual issues of a series.

Comics, for hub pages dealing with comic series rather than individual issues.

Books, for all OGNS, trades and novels.

Characters, for people good, bad and inbetween.

Locations, for all places real and unreal.

Objects and concepts, for all manner of odd things that Constantine happens across, whether physical or theoretical.

And I should probably do one for writers and artists but I haven't got around to it yet.

Imagine you were unemployed. Imagine you had no money to go out at the weekend. Imagine you'd already watched all the TV shows you were interested in and played all the games you have. Imagine you had hours and hours ahead of you, stretching away into nothing.

What would you do? Probably something more productive than this.

The Hellblazer Wikia (located at http://hellblazer.wikia.com ) has now been kitted out with templates and categories, and now contains pages for every issue of Hellblazer and most HB-related spin-offs, one-shots and miniseries.

What it doesn't have is much in the way of actual content. And since I've done all the boring shit of putting together the framework and stretching the canvas, all you have to do is get out your paintbrushes and have some fun.

The main page is a bit shit at the minute - to keep out the riff-raff while the interior gets done up a little - so here's a quick jump to the things you can find:

People!

Places!

Objects!

Stories!

So many lists!

Come one, come all, and justify my obsession. Anyone want to have dibs on writing up a particular issue or issues? Or any particular characters? Or just anything at all? Go hog wild!

Did Rhys Ifans get a new agent or something? It's like the Notting Hill years all over again.

... Nobody think a Spider-man Noir might Work?

No? Maybe as a straight-to-DVD animation or something, but people want to see the Peter Parker they vaguely know and are capable of loving, not some weird What If...? film set in an alternate universe.

I'm totally with Mark on this one. It felt like a mandatory run around the houses to catch up with everyone before they could get on with something more ambitious.

Yeah, that's my hope, too, although I don't think "shitting out the only draft over a weekend" is either fair or accurate, not least because some of the scripts which we know for a fact Davies produced on very short notice and under intense deadline pressure ('Tooth & Claw', 'Midnight', most of 'The Unquiet Dead', 'Children of Earth') are among his best.

Not sure I'd say 'Tooth & Claw' was one of his best, and the Children of Earth miniseries was workshopped in the writer's room, but point taken.

While the pressures of running the show seem to have sometimes impacted badly on the quality of both men's script-writing, at their respective bests, I substantially prefer Davies to Moffat as a writer of Doctor Who, and I'm looking forward to seeing what he can do with the utterly-splendid new (best ever?) Doctor.

Agree, disagree, agree and agree wholeheartedly, in that order. I really do appreciate what Davies has done for the series and I was being too hard on him in that last post (the bad certainly outweighs the good). I'm very interested in seeing how he tackles it.

I really hope Moffat succeeds in his stated goal of persuading RTD to do a guest-writer script for the parent show at some point too, but I'm not really expecting it to happen, not least because I can't imagine him having much left to say with the concept/character which he didn't already manage to write during his five years running the show.

Yeah, I'd like to see him coming back as well, once he's got a bit less on his plate (I imagine Torchwood USA is going to be taking up a lot of his time for the forseeable future). Whether that means a cracking romp like 'Smith and Jones' or another moody 'Midnight', I'll be very happy so long as the quality keeps up.

I worry that The Doctor, Sarah Jane, Jo Grant, the kids AND shit-looking vulture aliens will be too much to fit comfortably into one story. Still, this should be 'trying really hard because he's in new territory' RTD and not 'shitting out the only draft over a weekend' RTD, so fingers crossed.

The only thing that bothers me is the direction - I found Tennant's SJA episodes hard to watch because his presence made the disparity in production values between the two glaringly obvious. If I felt like that with an excellent-looking villain like The Trickster, I'm not sure how I'll get through two episodes of this:

Do we need one of The Dukes films remade from the point of view of/narrative voice-over telling you what to think about everything by, a 14 year old girl?.

It's not a remake, it's a second adaptation of the original book, which is written from the POV of the 14-year-old girl.

They did do some interesting things with the character in the first two episodes but I'm afraid they're starting to drift back to the Dexter's life status quo.

Well to be fair the status quo has - as far as the series has been concerned - always been Dexter and Rita. So there's a fundamental change there. I do think they need to take more risks now, though. Thankfully, Dexter's fast-growing emotional ability, his loss of interest in killing, the fact that he's brutally murdered someone just because they were rude and he was angry, and Quinn's realisation that Dexter is Kyle Butler - all in the first two episodes - suggest that we'll be getting them soon, rather than having to wait until the last four episodes of the season.

I've read Fragile Things and I enjoyed it for the most part. Certainly worth picking up - especially for the Cthulu vs Sherlock Holmes story.

I'll leave Ade to do it. I haven't spoken to Mike for years, and that was just a brief hello as he left a pub. I'd feel a bit odd about badgering him now.

I actually quite like King's digressions as well, but I don't think they'd fit comfortably into the Castor stories' pacey, pulp-detective mould.

OCD MODE ACTIVATED!

1- The Devil You Know

2- Vicious Circle

3- Dead Men's Boots

4- Thicker Than Water

5- The Naming of the Beasts

They are very good, though I rather wish we'd see more of Castor's world. It's the same problem I have with True Blood - I'm more interested in seeing how society and politics adapt to the undead than I am with some of the actual stories.

That's the nature of the medium, though, I suppose - in a comic you've got the room to do a one-off story about, say, a court case overturned because the murder victim's accused someone else, or a scientist slowly going nuts as he tries to come up with a rational way to explain the irrational. In a book you've got to stay on-point lest you turn into Stephen King. A book of short stories set in Castor's world would be fun but I don't know whether the market would support it (and whether Mike would particularly want to write it).

At times it's OK to be reminded of how many cool, sensible and tolerant people who actually live in the USA:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DDfAz0huTE

Sadly I can't watch US news without thinking of this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO9jGsgPTsk

Apparently Columbia picked up the rights in 2008, which suggests they lost and then re-purchased them. View Askew owned the rights for a time. And were Columbia behind the HBO series that was planned? The report there would suggest not.

Ennis should be making good money off these non-starters, though - he'll be getting a payoff every time the rights are bought up by another production company.

Bear in mind I've been reading Pratchett since I was 12 or 13, so all this knowledge is pretty much hardwired into my DNA by now.

While we're on the subject - and I'll try to make this my last post about Pratchett - he seems to have given permission for a couple of his short Discworld stories to go up on the web. They're not as satisfying as the novels, obviously, but they might be of interest: 'Theatre of Cruelty' and 'Death and What Comes Next'.

I would've been excited eight or nine years ago, but I think the time for a Preacher movie is long gone.

James' advice on Pratchett is pretty bang on-the-money, although outside of the series-within-the-series books (besides the Night Watch books which James mentioned would be the Rincewind stories, the Lancre Witches books, and the Death stories, among others - wikipedia will help with sorting them out), there are a handful of standalone novels which are among Pratchett's best.

Fuck it, I've got a spare 15 minutes. These are the various sets of novels within the Discworld series, though protagonists from one set may appear as supporting cast in the others. I'd probably recommend just going through the entire series in chronological order once you've done with the Night Watch books (with the proviso that the first three are very shaky indeed). However, if you want to do it by character you'd be advised to read each 'collection' of books in the following order:

Rincewind the incompetent 'wizzard'

Rincewind was the first of Pratchett's characters and you'll find that most of his stories are pastiches of classic fantasy fiction, particularly the Conan books. The exceptions are Interesting Times and The Last Continent, which look at the Disc's equivalents of feudal Japan and modern-day Australia, respectively.

• The Colour of Magic
  
• The Light Fantastic
  
• Sourcery
  
• Eric (stylised as 'Faust Eric')
  
• Interesting Times
  
• The Last Continent
  
• The Last Hero (illustrated novel - includes characters from The Night Watch)
  

The Night Watch

These books start out as fantasy detective thrillers but, as the focus shifts onto recovering alcoholic and leader of the watch Sam Vimes, they increasingly become political and social critiques. But they're still very funny.

• Guards! Guards!
  
• Men at Arms
  
• Feet of Clay
  
• Jingo
  
• The Fifth Elephant
  
• Night Watch
  
• Thud!
  

Death

Yeah. Him. Death is a recurring character in the Disc books (and he even appears in Good Omens!) and while he starts out as a bit of a prick he gets progressively more sympathetic as the series continues. His books are generally skewed takes on aspects of modern life, such as rock music, internships, Christmastime and shopping malls.

• Mort
  
• Reaper Man (this book introduces the head wizards at the Unseen Universty; they're supporting characters in many of Pratchett's books)
  
• Soul Music
  
• Hogfather
  
• Thief of Time
  

The Witches

Focuses on a coven of witches in the Disc's countryside; each book is usually a pastiche of a particular classic story or fairytale.

• Equal Rites
  
• Wyrd Sisters
  
• Witches Abroad
  
• Maskerade
  
• Carpe Jugulum
  

Tiffany Aching

This is Pratchett's Discworld range for younger readers. All that means in practicality is that there's less death in the stories (though Death himself still turns up); the ideas, jokes and characters would fit comfortably into his adult Disc books. Tiffany is a witch-in-training, so various characters from the Witches books turn up as supporting characters.

• The Wee Free Men
  
• A Hat Full of Sky
  
• Wintersmith
  
• I Shall Wear Midnight
  

Moist von Lipwig

Moist is Pratchett's most recent ongoing character: a conman forced into public service by the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork (a city that is basically London with a dash of 19th century New York and Renaissance Italy thrown in). His books involve outwitting more dangerous, vicious con artists, businessmen and hustlers while doing his (enforced) duty.

• Going Postal
  
• Making Money
  

Miscellaneous

Every so often Pratchett will write a one-off book featuring an entirely new protagonist, usually in a new city (ie. not Ankh-Morpork) or situation. You can read these out of order, pretty much, though they may cross over with other, regular Disc characters.

• Pyramids (set in the Disc's version of Egypt; the son of a pharoah and newly-trained assassin returns home to find his country in chaos)
  
• Moving Pictures (the Disc discovers film-making, but all is not well in the city of Holy Wood...)
  
• Small Gods (the Great God Om finds himself stuck in the body of a turtle and bound to an idiot-savant worshipper; a critique of religious fundamentalism, and the first Discworld book I ever read)
  
• The Truth (the Disc's first newspaper has opened up just in time to stumble across a dangerous conspiracy)
  
• The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (Another younger readers book, but darker than a lot of Pratchett's adult stuff; a talking cat and his equally intelligent rodent pals scam villages with fake rat-plagues - until they come across a town sitting on top of a terrifying evil)
  
• Monstrous Regiment (a young woman disguises herself as a man and joins the army to find her missing brother)
  
• Unseen Academicals (the Patrician tries to quell civil unrest by legalising soccer. This is bad news for the corpulent wizards of the Unseen University, as they are forced to join in)
  

I'm still enjoying Glee but it does feel like they've stepped too far into wacky town. It was always OTT, but it's hard to imagine them doing something as sweet and vulnerable as Kurt coming out to his father or Quinn being kicked out of her parents' home with the cartoon characters that populate the show now. Before, at least, the supporting adults carried the wackier stuff and the kids got to be human. Now everyone's OTT. Rachel's probably the worst example of this change (though I did cry laughing at the crackhouse bit).

And why is Quinn suddenly evil again? She spent half the first season beatifically smiling, Virgin Mary style, on everyone. I get that they needed to give her something to do, but how do they explain her suddenly wanting to split up Finn and Rachel, and backstabbing her way back into the Cheerios?

Anyway - I'm currently reading Things the Grandchildren Should Know, the autobiography of the man behind ace indie rock outfit Eels. It's brutally honest, dryly witty and has some really startling stories. In fact it's so good that I think I'd even recommend it to people who have no idea who Eels are.

And then I would tell them to buy the album Electro-shock Blues.