The Thundercat's Whiskers

The cardinal sin of many a recent comics or cartoon adaptation is the pomposity with which the filmmakers approach the source material. It’s not really their fault – they are only in it for the money (show me a director burning with the creative desire to make a Denver, The Last Dinosaur flick, and I’ll show you a weirdo) , and they realise how much the core group of fans have invested in the trials and tribulations of, say, a garbage truck that can metamorphose into a triceratops. Early bad buzz from otherwise rather laggard interweb folk can turn a blockbuster into a dud before it even has a chance to screen for the press (case in point: The Spirit – though Frank Miller and his EGO seem to be responsible for the brunt of that backlash). So Hollywood has been taking the sequacious nerds, and their beloved robots, knights, whatever, as seriously as they do themselves. I have written about this before, but just to recap, it’s a relatively recent trend. It started with (a kiss? No) Bryan Singer’s X-Men, and like an avalanche in tights, it picked up speed and debris along the way, culminating in the bloated juggernaut that is The Dark Knight (Aside: I recently read a comment somewhere that compared Nolan’s film to Bergman – I weep tears of blood for the youth of today). Albeit devoid of éclat, élan, and joie de vivre, three qualities that define superhero comics of yesteryear, the film massacred at the box office, and third-rate knock-off copies are already in the pipeline. Fingers crossed for a Power Pack film with the team made up, solely, of victims of child abuse!

Anyway, Devin Faraci at Chud, whose Top 15 films of 2008 piece is – as always – a brilliant read, has posted a hilarious fanmade live-action trailer for Thundercats. I, too, thought it was an excellent piece of satire, demolishing a wide variety of recent Hollywood mainstays, such as the fustian blockbuster, in one fell swoop, but reading some of the comments by the video’s creator WormyT, I have the vexatious feeling that it might have been a more serious attempt than I originally assumed.

Who cares? Trust the art, not the artist. This is priceless!

Ratatouille: Not Good for Cats

I gave Ratatouille a miss when it was on at the cinemas since all showings in Istanbul were dubbed in Turkish (as opposed to Sanskrit). Also, I don't particularly enjoy being at a movie theatre full of kids: they get into hysterics, I tell them to shut up, and then the children of the corn end up kicking my arse while their parents point and laugh.

Anyway, I finally saw the film on DVD a while back, and loved it. I have written about my extensive appreciation of the movie already, but I was going through some old photographs when I came across the one below. You see, my cat, Shmi, was watching it with me, and, for some reason, she started to get agitated at first, then terrified, and finally went completely postal. She got on top of the sofa, and began whining in that terrified cat-voice at the screen. I had to turn the film off, and watch the rest of it after she went to sleep. But before that, I simply had to take a picture of her. She's with my folks most of the year, which accounts for her Jabba-like derriere. She'll be 12 this year, even though she still thinks she's a baby. Freak.

"A physics joke. Don't hear enough of those."