Over at The Torch Online Heather Hogan has put together a nice preview of upcoming fantasy films in 2010.  Quite a few films coming out this year, including some big ones.  Ms. Hogan has previewed 15 films, the most notable, in my opinion, being Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Iron Man 2, Robin Hood, and last but not least, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1.

Check out all the previews, since there’s also quite a few others of interest to people who regularly read this blog.  Oh yeah, there’s also some movie with sparkly vampires coming out this year too.

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The last time I asked for donations, it was because the site’s bills were due, and it wasn’t looking good for me to be able to keep things going here. In other words, last time, it was really needed. That bill only comes due every other year.

Presently, however, there are a few things I want to get done with this site – improving its functionality, giving the insides (especially the forum) a paint job, etc. These aren’t necessary for the site to continue functioning, but I do think it’ll make the place a nicer one to visit and work better as a place to continue discussing great literature and culture.

We’ve got a brilliant artist on the Blogengamot – Aaron J. Smith. The thing is, this is what he does for a living, and he’s been exceedingly generous to me with his work. So I’m hosting a February giveaway contest to compensate Aaron for his tremendous work, and the stuff he intends to do for this site over the next month or two.

To that end, any donation of $10 or more automatically enters you into a drawing to win one of three autographed copies of Harry Potter & Imagination: The Way Between Two Worlds. Any donation of $50 or more in the month of February guarantees you a FREE copy of my newest book, I Want to Be Harry Potter, due out this summer. Not only this, but the $50 donation also gets your name put in the book’s acknowledgements!

Donate button is below, and it will remain in the sidebar to the right. Click away! And thank you for your ongoing support and patronage of The Hog’s Head.

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Pub Patron “Mr. Pond” has a great blog, if you didn’t already know: The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond. Last week, we had a great phone conversation which he’s written up into three parts. I hope you enjoy it, and do subscribe to Mr. Pond’s blog if you haven’t already!

• talking Potter, part 1
• talking Potter, part 2
• talking Potter, part 3

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Okay, so “gamerize” is a term I just made up. But, as a full-time grad student, now, I have some license to do such things. In fact, it’s sort of expected of us so long as we take at least ten double-spaced pages to define the term. But I’ll spare me the pain of writing it, and you the torture of reading it…

As the title of the post suggests, there is, in fact, a video game adaptation of The Inferno due to be released on February 9th, called Dante’s Inferno. It’s published by Electronic Arts, and is developed by one of EA’s in-house teams, Visceral (more on EA later***). As you can tell by the screenshot above, the game takes significant liberties with Dante’s medieval classic.

Below is a story trailer for the game from IGN’s website. There is an age gate, but the trailer is safe for work, so to speak.

The early reviews I’ve seen have painted the game as a hack-&-slash bit of mayhem. These games tend to emphasize twitchy controls, quick reflexes, and button combinations that need precision timing to be executed well. Hence, Dante’s emotional journey from the original poem will, uh, take a back seat so that players can slay the undead and pull some killer stunts.

That said, it does appear that some shell of Dante Alighieri’s original story is intact, just slanted through the prism of mainstream gaming culture. I’m actually somewhat surprised this hasn’t happened earlier. Game developers have pilfered ancient Greek and Roman mythology for decades, and medieval Europe has certainly been the inspiration for a whole swath of game culture, digital and otherwise. From what I can tell, Dante’s Inferno looks much more like a mash-up of the original poem with other heroic and anti-heroic inspirations. The game is clearly ripping some of its elements from the current pinnacle of the hack-&-slash genre, God of War (a game revolving entirely around Greek mythology). For some reason, I can’t help but think of both Gilgamesh and Beowulf when I see the trailer. And, much as Dante himself was aware, a hero traveling through an underworld — literal or otherwise — is a motif with which all of us here at the pub are very familiar. Travis’s 2007 Prophecy presentation provides a superb explanation of the Hero’s Journey and the role that death plays in its fulfillment. (And for those of you either haven’t seen it or could use a refresher, it’s a pretty nifty examination of some key characters and their roles in HP, as well!)

As a number of game and media scholars have pointed out in recent years, games are fertile proving grounds for players to pursue hero quests. The framework lends itself quite well to game development, providing a near perfect template for pacing a player’s progress through levels while narrating a character’s development into a persona players connect with. Whether you’re playing games like this, which generally means you’re playing alone, or if you’re playing online in a massively multiplayer game, the steps to the Hero’s Journey appears all over the place. If you’re not familiar with massively multiplayer games — usually called MMOs — are often built around a system that demands the player run through a series of trials before heading off to a main mission. Sometimes, these can be small tasks, such as gathering resources like gold or weapons. In other instances, players might have to defeat one major enemy character before moving on to bigger, badder challenges. Though there are clear differences between the Hero’s Journey as we have come to understand it and what often happens in games, there is also significant overlap making the influence pretty clear.

***EA is a controversial company in the gaming world for a number of reasons. Gamers most often complain of the quality of games, which can often be shoddy and half-hearted at best. On the business side, EA’s reputation might best be described as “the Microsoft of the gaming world.” They are, in fact, the largest third party game developer in the world, which makes them (at least at one point) the second largest software company in the world — right behind Microsft. EA has thrown that muscle around quite a bit over the last few years. Combined with their size and financial clout, EA has been able to sew up the rights to the National Football League in an exclusive deal that forbids any other company from making an NFL game. They can make football games, but not using the NFL license. Many gamers felt like this was a huge problem because, at the time, EA’s Madden NFL franchise had been suffering a steady decline in quality. Many consumers interpreted the move as a way for EA to squelch competition to Madden rather than rising to the challenge of improved game design driven by a competitive market.

The company also courted some controversy last year when the game’s development was first unveiled at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (aka E3), which is the single largest annual video game event in the United States. A small band of protesters showed up to voice their displeasure over the game’s content, claiming it was sacrilegious and anti-Christian. Very quickly, though, some in the game community sniffed a hoax, which EA confirmed a few days later. They hired a group of folks to pose as concerned Christians unhappy with the game’s violence and use of religious iconography.

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Any fans of LOST out there? Tonight, we get three full hours to start off the final season! (The first hour is recap.)

This has been a fascinating series of television, full of references to many of our favorite authors and philosophers (Charlotte Staples Lewis (?!), Edmund Burke, John Locke, among many others). The tension between the supernatural and science, faith and fact has been interesting to follow, and I’m eager to see where they go with it in 6th and final season.

If you’ve got theories and predictions, please visit the thread that’s been started at the Forum and join the discussion! I’ll be watching tonight’s show with my wife, but I might also try to live-tweet it a bit from my Twitter account. You should also follow EW’s Jeff Jensen (HT to Arabella Figg).

Now: time to spend the remainder of the day refreshing my knowledge of Seasons 1-5 and reading some theories.

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With the inspiration of revgeorge, and the urging of Red Rocker, I shall open up this little post for us all to provide and discuss some of our favorite movie quotes. Whether you remember Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, George Clooney in Oh Brother, Where Art Though?, or Michael Gamb… Well, I guess I shouldn’t get carried away…

A number of quotes stick out to me, some of which I’m not willing to post here word-for-word. The Big Lebowski sticks out to me as one of my favorite movies of all time, and it is so very quotable. But not always in a family setting! So, some others:

• Ghostbusters: “I’m fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing.”
• The Big Lebowski (I had to stick in one): “But I’ll tell you what – after seeing Los Angeles, and this here story I’m about to unfold, well, I guess I seen somethin’ every bit as stupefyin’ as you’d seen in any of them other places. And in English, too. So I can die with a smile on my face, without feelin’ like the good Lord gypped me.”
• Jaws: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “That rabbit’s dynamite!”

Fire away!

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John Carpenter (did he get that name from The Day the Earth Stood Still?)has made some great movies. They’ll always be associated with my teen years (not all of them, of course) and some of the music scores he’s written are still in my head.
Please let us know what you like and why you voted the way you did.
The poll is on the lower right.

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A great Dilbert comic strip for the Harry Potter fan.

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Interview with John Granger about his book, Spotlight: A Close-Up Look at the Artistry and Meaning of Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight Saga.

The Hog’s Head PubCast is on Farpoint Media! Visit the site, check out their other podcasts, and please, write me a review!

On Tap:

• Buy Spotlight!
• Forks High School Professor
• Spotlight on Twilight

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Just a quick shout out on one of my favorite poems.  The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe was first published with his name attributed to it on this day in 1845.  Very haunting and very Gothic.  Anyway, if you’d like to read it, go here.  If reading isn’t your thing, you can find a recording on Librivox here.  If you want to see a video of Vincent Price reading The Raven, go down to the bottom of the wikipedia page on the poem and you’ll find it under external links/video.  He does a dramatic reading of the poem, not literal, but hey it’s Vincent Price!  And if you want to see the best adaptation of The Raven ever, go here for The Simpson’s Halloween special version.  So, if you like really depressing, gothic poems, enjoy!!

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