A homemade knitted Dalek in one hand and a Sonic Screwdriver in the other, with a mix of Blue Curacao and vodka they’re calling The TARDIS in the cup holder – I’m thinking, This better be good. I curled my hair for this.
I went to The Angelika in Dallas for the series 9 premiere of Doctor Who. Of course it was good. With Peter Capaldi as The Doctor they’ll never do wrong. It was a free showing thanks to bigfanboy.com and the fact they were streaming directly from BBC America. I’ve never watched Doctor Who on BBC America before, so I wasn’t expecting commercials. I’m fundamentally against inserting commercials into BBC shows that weren’t meant to be split up, and in a full, dark theater packed with viewers transfixed on the narrative’s every move, it was abundantly clear why. Doctor Who, when it’s good, has a flow that’s a crime to break (although I’ve started to feel like most Steven Moffat scripts could cut the first twenty minutes and immediately improve by at least 15 percent). We all sat together, snapped out of our collective trance, and began analyzing the structure of each ad’s marketing strategy instead. The interruption of the storyline for commercials was a jarring reminder of the intrusion of commercial interests into the pure enjoyment of the show. It made me wonder about the impact on both the viewers’ experience and the network’s paycheck.
We cheered at the good parts. The Twelfth Doctor is a rockstar, and he got the applause he deserves. There’s always something transcendent about watching something important for the first time with a huge group of people. It just about made up for splitting up the time with suspension-breaking commercials.
I’ve just found a vlog, and I think it’s going to be my new thing. Or maybe it won’t – maybe I won’t have time for it because all my online video watching is dedicated to staying caught up on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. This could be the start of something new, or it could totally pass me by, and I just won’t know until that happens. (But really, I think this is going to be good. I’m kind of picky about the vlogs I watch, so just hitting the subscribe button is a pretty good indicator it’s going to be something I like. And as the internet knows, it’s hard to be this refreshing in a medium that’s been around since 2005. That’s forever in internet years.)
It’s easy to look back on that time when you were just getting into something and remember how fun it was. Sometimes it seems really momentous, like, “That was the summer I started listening to The Nerdist Podcast,” or just, “Remember when The Avengers came out?”. And then sometimes, later, that thing isn’t quite as “good” as it used to be. It’s changed, or you’ve changed, or it’s immediate purpose in your life has – somehow – changed.
But the thing is, there are always other great things out there to find, and those old things aren’t going away. A couple of summers ago, I was listening to The Nerdist Podcast everyday. Now I’m just listening every so often, and my daily podcast is Ear Biscuits. I still love The Nerdist, but this summer is not that same summer of 2011. And I don’t want the same old summer, I want one I can look back on and remember the start of something new.
San Diego Comic Con is an event that everyone wants to go to, but a relatively tiny amount of people actually do. If anyone really puts their mind to it, it’s probably actually very possible, but sometimes the difficulty seems more than it’s worth. It used to be fairly simple to feel the SDCC experience from home, just by leaving the TV on G4 all weekend and watching coverage, pretending you’re there. In a cruel twist of life, G4 is no longer a television station, and getting that displaced SDCC feeling is a little bit harder. But it’s not impossible.
COVERAGE
There are a few places online to find video coverage of the convention, including what’s trying to fill G4’s empty spot, Nerdist.com. The video clips posted throughout the day are fairly short and sparse, but honestly, G4 didn’t have all that much coverage either. It was mostly reruns of the same thirty minute spot. The Nerdist videos are set up to look like they’re live, and the format looks a little less sincere than fake live coverage did on TV. But it still works, and since it’s coming from people who are loving being there, it’s much better than nothing.
Other websites have some live coverage scheduled, especially IGN.com, which used to only have live text chats but has stepped up its game to video. But it may just be easiest to fill up your twitter and instagram feeds with SDCC attendees, as the photos, videos, and updates will come completely in real time and are come from within the convention halls and on the floor.
OFFSITE
More and more of the San Diego nerd festivities are happening outside of the convention halls. Zachary Levi’s Nerd HQ is back thanks to an Indiegogo campaign, and while it’s not technically a part of SDCC, it takes advantage of the number of nerd celebrities already gathered in one place. Full videos of the event go up on YouTube afterwards.
Geek & Sundry has an offsite event lounge full of gaming (both video and tabletop), panels, and those nerd parties that comic conventions are secretly so famous for. Nerdist has an offsite laser tag game and an after-convention hours podcast. Even Thrilling Adventure Hour and Welcome to Night Vale are in San Diego with a crossover live show. It will be a while, but you can relive the convention through podcasts as soon as they finally go up.
The SDCC Nerdist Podcast is where crazy stuff goes down.
THE MERCH
To really emulate that comic con feeling at home, you’re going to have to buy some stuff. That’s the number one thing that happens at conventions, and to really feel authentic, you need to spend more money than you were intending to. You could do this anywhere – your own town’s comic book store, the mall, a fast food drive thru – it’s all the same effect. But it is possible to get your merch from the con itself. I have some SDCC exclusive Funko Pops making their way to me through the mail right now, thanks to the internet. It’s almost like I’m there – I ended up with three new Funko Pops, when the number I actually need is zero.
I almost didn’t, but then I did.
It wouldn’t feel like summer without trying to vicariously attend San Diego Comic Con. Maybe it’s possible to experience it even better from home, since home doesn’t have the 4:00 am wakeup times and 10 minute lines to the bathroom? Yeah, of course that’s not true, but thinking that way makes the weekend way less bitter and way more fun.
Adequate female representation in media is hard to find. Major film studios stay clear of women main characters, girls are reduced to sidekicks, even within the hundreds of Funko Pop vinyl figures there aren’t many female toys. But while browsing through a Half-Price Bookstore, I stumbled upon a genre I’d long forgotten, and one full of well-written female characters – early young adult fiction.
I glanced over shelves in the young adult fiction section of the store, situated so close to the children’s section that some early-reading chapter books were spilling over. Since it was summer, a lot of the books on display featured summer camp, summer vacation, and even summer mysteries.
Young adult mysteries? I instantly recalled spending fourth grade with the Sammy Keyes novels. A (sometimes) fearless young girl solved neighborhood crimes with the help of her two female best friends, getting into trouble both at school and with the police, with a (now) surprising lack of supervision. But being unquestionably allowed to adventure was what reading as a kid was all about.
Now searching strictly for nostalgia, I found the Sammy Keyes series in that young-adult section, on the bottom self, basically sitting on the floor. Flipping through the pages reminded me of a completely different series I started reading in fourth grade, and finished two years later – Abby Hayes. While the names were similar, the books were almost total opposites, with thoroughly different characters – not a surprise, since women (even young ones) are each their own unique person. Abby Hayes led a more normal life, her books taking the form of a journal with notes on her fifth-grade class, her friends, and her enemies. She was also allowed out on her own, but her town seemed much less crime-ridden.
It really made me wonder why after growing up, practical female-centered stories are so hard to find. And why are some people so hesitant to create them? Obviously this is slowly changing, with comic books like Lumberjanes and audiences’ undying love for shows like Community. But the extreme support behind these realistic shows is a reaction to previously being denied them. It’s still a problem that female representation stops at the pre-teen level. But I was in the apparent answer to everything – a bookstore. Without anything to go on, I looked for the perfect combination of elements: a summer mystery with a female lead. This is what I found.
Stumbling upon Three Times Lucky by Sheila Turnage was the luckiest find I could have made. I might say I’m sorry I didn’t read it back when it came out in 2012, but the beginning of Summer 2014 couldn’t have been more perfect. I loved the feeling of being in the South and the dialogue that came along with it. Mostly I loved seeing characters – girls with more than one personality trait and one emotion – and the families, friends, and neighbors who support them. Even better– there’s a sequel.
Sifting through blogs on the internet is pretty hit or miss. Sometimes you find a goldmine of information – sometimes you find incoherency among photos of someone’s breakfast or dogs. Because of zines, this was a problem even before the internet. But that’s a pretty unfair way to describe them. Zines have made a huge impact on the rise of independent publishing. It’s a medium that may now seem a staple of the past, but is still extremely relevant, and may even be making a comeback.
http://www.brokelyn.com/
Basically a zine is a self-published magazine. It’s made without the help of a publisher or distributer, and usually has a staff of one. Each zine focuses on a specific subject. Those subjects are often obscure and niche, and also tend to have content that is fairly personal to the maker. Authors assemble, then copy their work, and either give it away, trade it for other zines, or attempt to sell them and possibly make a profit.
Technically, the concept of a zine has been around since writing has. Following the zine-guidelines above, any collection of ideas, written down and distributed, counts as a zine. The form was more clearly defined in the 1930s, when science fiction fans started writing, and publishing, and trading their own stories. They called them fanzines. Slowly, other subcultures started picking the idea up and using it for their own. The most advantageous for the medium was the rise of punk zines in the 1970s. These came at the same time photocopiers emerged, so zines were much easier to share, causing a huge boost in their prevalence and popularity.
[Check out an overview of the history of zines here.]
The most important thing the rise of the zine did was enable creators to speak their minds. Like blogs, they help similar people find each other and build a community of independent writers.
www.pikaland.com
Zines made the statement that anyone with an idea could get it out there. People were creating and trading their own stuff, and others were reading and buying. One of the points that attracted so many people to the concept was that there was no one higher up to tell them what they could or couldn’t write. This caused zine subject matter to be often controversial, things that people were discouraged from talking about.
There was a freedom, a sense of secrecy, operating in the underground: even a sense of doing what’s right. Now, with the internet, the ideas that used to fill up zines are filling up blogs instead. Sometimes this feeling translates, but the internet gives the chance to be open to any number of eyes, from anywhere, at any time. While the content is still there, part of the fun is in the way you obtain it, and there’s nothing much special about just logging on. The concepts are similar, where anyone can put their writing out there for free. But it loses that subculture of people, laboriously creating and physically putting their work into the world.
What can come through on blogs is the raw, personal story that’s allowed to be told. In traditional publishing there will always be someone – an editor, a publishing company – that has a claim on switching things around. Zines, and now blogs, create that element of one person broadcasting to the world.
Zines are a medium that have inspired and transformed writing and media. The physical aspect may have been lost in translation, but as “the original blogs”, a lot of writers owe more to zines and their long history than they realize.
Independent horror films are often held up to the “Paranormal Activity” standard – to be so bone-chilling for audiences in the festival circuit that a major studio immediately snatches it up. But Hell Baby is not that kind of movie. By the way, do you know where to watch scary movie 6?. Categorized as a “horror-comedy” film, there is far too much emphasis on the comedy half to be taken seriously, but still scary and gruesome enough to make it a movie you wouldn’t want to watch alone. In fact, its high level of absurdity, mixed with sufficient chills, makes Hell Baby an optimum fun viewing experience.
Ultimately, the film uses the horror-comedy genre to find its stride. Written by Tom Lennon and Robert Ben Garant of Reno 911!, the often ridiculous mocumentary and Cops spoof, Hell Baby knows how to make fun of itself. It will appeal to fans of the show which spanned most of the 2000s. The film mirrors Reno 911! in its normal, mundane setting, which then, through unexpected circumstances, edges toward surreal.
In Hell Baby, this is the life of a couple (Rob Corddry and Leslie Bibb), expecting their first child, who are moving into a new house. It’s a common enough set-up, even when the neighbors inform them that everyone who previously lived in the house has died. It even has the nickname “House of Blood”. While unusual for real life, that’s a pretty standard scary movie situation. The first tip-off that this is not a straightforward horror movie is the wife’s description of the neighborhood as “the lower lower garden district,” and the husband’s as that “white people don’t know this neighborhood exists.” It’s a signal that the writers intend to play with the traditional genre. The introduction of the next door neighbor, F’resnel (Key & Peele’s Keegan-Michael Key), heightens this. He’s obviously a sidekick comedic character, but it’s taken even further than usual. The reason he pops up at unusual times is that he sometimes lives in the couple’s crawlspace – a secret he doesn’t even attempt to keep. It’s an unrealistic situation that’s grounded in a pretty ordinary conceit.
Throughout the first scenes, the comedy can seem a little stiff and jilted until the audience gets a chance to become immersed in the film’s ironic tone. The jabs at the formulaic horror genre are far less than subtle. The joke about white people not knowing about the neighborhood is played so straight that it’s hard to tell if it’s actually meant to be a joke or not. This creates some confusion – is this a satire of horror, or is it just dryly imitating the well known horror format? It causes Hell Baby to initially creep toward parody with no substance of its own. But a third of the way in, it hits its stride.
The narrative is mainly about a possessed mother-to-be and her (appropriately terrified) husband. While fully aware of the house’s blood-filled past, the wife starts acting strangely, and vaguely demonic. She’s uncharacteristically aggressive, she growls, she communicates with the recently appeared black ghost-dog. Their trials are predictable, mainly focused on just trying to figure out what’s going on. It is when the Vatican City priests arrive (played by the film’s writers Tom Lennon and Robert Ben Garant) that the style of the film clicks into place. They are the characters who solidify Hell Baby’s mocking yet unconventional tone. Solely Lennon’s foreign accents have the ability to pick up any floundering film, and here is no exception. Obviously, with these characters, realism isn’t the goal. The Italian accents are ridiculous, over the top, but finally show the audience that, yes, this is a little bit foolish, but you’re supposed to be laughing.
The strength of the full cast is continuously a strong point. New characters are sporadically introduced (the sister, the cable guy), and each are played by prominent members of the stand-up comedy scene (Riki Lindhome, Kumail Nanjiani). Hell Baby is working with a strong basis but it is the array of supporting characters that give the film its fun, unique spirit. A large portion of one scene is dedicated just to the cable guy crashing into garbage cans. It’s irrelevant, but it’s entertaining. While the husband’s humor seems stiff on its own, his shared scenes with F’resnel is when his intended natural dry humor comes through.
Fortunately, once these side characters come into play, the rest of the story follows suit and immediately becomes engaging and entertaining. Two thirds of the way through I was audibly laughing every couple of minutes. Still, the movie never loses the ominous, demonic tone throughout. This is achieved mainly because by this point, the audience is safely invested in the actions of the characters. The transition into that investment is particularly slow and subtle. By the story’s climax, I realized I had built up an emotional attachment to these characters that I wasn’t expecting, largely stemming from their fun and effortlessly comical personalities. They had gone from stiff to accessible in under an hour, and I hadn’t even noticed the shift.
Overall, Hell Baby successfully achieves its goal of fitting into the horror-comedy genre – a group that includes Shaun of the Dead, The Lost Boys, and even Gremlins. It is obvious it was made by people excited to bring a sense of humor to the terror realm, but still write a story that can stand on its own. The opening may feel slightly choppy, but it is a slow beginning that pays off in the end. Expect to leave Hell Baby having enjoyed yourself and feeling satisfied with this new take on a classic horror story.
