“There’s no King of Pop, like Michael Jackson, in the punk world.”
– Julien Temple
What would early punk be without its incestuous bickering? It was the initial refusal of Joe Strummer to allow a young Julien Temple into his inner circle in the mid-70s that first pushed the budding filmmaker towards the other great punk originators of the day, The Sex Pistols. That led to the creation of Temple’s two seminal Pistols documentaries, The Great Rock and Roll Swindle (which John Lydon loudly denounced for getting everything wrong) and The Filth and the Fury (made with his involvement and blessing).
When a movie was to be made in the mid-80s about the doomed affair of Sid and Nancy, director Alex Cox chose Strummer to write the film’s theme, much to the shock and chagrin of Lydon. Temple would then go on to record a commentary track for that film, in which he points out everything Cox gets wrong about the Pistols.
“There’ll always be something new. It’s like whack-a-mole.”
– Leigh Whannell
I first met Leigh Whannell as the writer and costar of Saw. I thought it was a really cool indie movie that came out of nowhere. It had a mind-blowing surprise at the end and a theme that really spoke to me. When Whannell wrote two sequels in two years, I really got into depth with him on Jigsaw’s morality. Seven Saws later, and Whannell has written another script for his directing buddy James Wan .
Insidious again deals with themes that are bigger than the immediate story. In the film, parents Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Renai (Rose Byrne) find their homes (that’s plural) haunted by spirits. So it’s a ghost story.
“People thought we had some political agenda…”
-Elaine Lee
Fans have been yearning for years for a hardcover volume of Starstruck. However their long wait is over, since an IDW published collection will hit stores in April. Writer Elaine Lee has lived with these characters for longer than anyone though, and she isn’t finished with them. Starstruck debuted as a play, and was then published as a comic in the early 1980s. The science fiction story is told in a nonlinear fashion with a vast cast of characters, including multiple female heroines. Starstruck was ahead of its time when it first came out, so reading the book today, it feels very contemporary.
Details are starting to emerge on the follow up to 2009’s J.J. Abrams-directed Star Trek reboot. Screenwriter Robert Orci recently took some time at WonderCon to talk about what direction the franchise will likely boldly go, while promoting his upcoming movie Cowboys vs. Aliens.
Imani Coppola is less concerned with writing a hit single and more concerned with, as she puts it, creating music that feels like having a line of coke blown up your ass. This ballsy, Brooklyn-based beauty coolly disregards designer-imposter pop stars who claim to push boundaries, when in truth, the only boundary they’re testing is our ability to stomach any more empty calorie pop songs.
However, Coppola is no stranger to the major label machine. The 29-year-old singer and multi-instrumentalist signed with Columbia Records during her freshman year in college, churned out a hit MTV single “Legend of a Cowgirl” off her 1997 album Chupacabra, and was then dropped – sadly, an all too familiar story for new talent these days. But that was then, and this is now.
Last week in my post about Wall Street Kid, I mentioned that Sturgeon’s Law might be especially true for video games. Coined by the sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon in 1951, Sturgeon’s Law posits that “90% of everything is crap.” Those being the odds and this being only my second Random Game of the Week, I was relieved to find that I enjoyed this week’s game: Mr. Heli no Daisuke, or Mr. Heli’s Great Adventure for the NEC PC Engine, also known as the Turbografx-16 in North America.
