Mr. K's Geek Cornucopia

"This is how the world ends, not with a bang, but a tweet..."

2013-05-02T22:20:00.001-07:00

Your Friends Close (2012) Directed by Jocelyn Kelvin Written by Brock Wilbur Starring Jocelyn Kelvin, Brock Wilbur, Kovar McClure, Heather Wood, Laura Nicole Harrison, Blake Silver, Rob Ondarza, Ricky House, Michael Eliopolous, Lisa Renee Foiles, Ramsay Robinson and Yahtzee Croshaw [as well as many others] [Disclaimer: I know Brock, Jocelyn and some of the other cast members from college. I also

Tramping the dirt down?

2013-04-10T12:08:00.003-07:00

I'm not exactly a huge Russell Brand fan, so that's why I was so surprised to read his cogent recollections of growing up in Thatcher's England that doesn't devolve into sheer vitriol. And he latches onto something that the people who hero worship Thatcher seem to forget. Thatcher might have dismantled what she saw as a socialist government, but she also dismantled any relationship between the

In which JCVD kickboxes a giant penguin to death...

2013-03-07T11:55:00.000-08:00

This weekend, I was watching Sudden Death, a really cheesy mid-90s action movie, where Jean Claude Van Damme is a firefighter who must rescue the Vice President from a scenery-chewing Powers Boothe during the 7th Game of the Stanley Cup. It's a master-class in cheap dramatic irony (Sudden Death refers to both the end of the game AND the situation Van Damme is in!), mainly notable for a sequence

2013-01-06T14:25:00.001-08:00

Helen Rittelmeyer has written a post about blogging etiquette. As she is one of the most talented Catholic female Ivy league alum bloggers, it is great to see her blogging about this topic, even though she has never once condemned the Armenian Genocide, to my knowledge. I am skeptical her advice will work, as people disregard common sense all the time. Truly, this lack of following advice is one

Self-Promotion: WOMEN AND MEN AND WOMEN

2012-11-28T10:24:00.002-08:00

So, some of you devoted readers (all...2 of you) might remember me nattering on about a short film I wrote and co-produced a while back called WOMEN AND MEN AND WOMEN. Well, now that the festival submissions are all over, it's finally available on the internet for everyone to see! It's a satire on male privilege, self-obsessed male writers, and the "bro-mance". Check it out here on Vimeo!

Everyday I write the book...

2012-11-06T15:02:00.000-08:00

I know that my posting on here has been a bit erratic, but I'm assuming some people must still enjoy my blathering. If you do enjoy my ramblings, then you might enjoy this: Midnight Symphony , an honest-to-good eBook that I've got a story in. In case the title and the Amazon page don't clue you in, it's a collection of horror stories. There are also some pretty awesome stories by some

"Last of the materialists. That's like last of the dinosaurs": GHOSTWATCH

2012-10-31T12:22:00.000-07:00

GHOSTWATCH (1992) Directed by Lesley Manning Starring Michael Parkinson, Michael Smith, Sarah Greene, and Craig Charles Among a niche audience of horror buffs, Ghostwatch stands as the British answer to Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" broadcast. This is actually a little too simplistic, because whereas Welles' broadcast was never intended to be taken for a real news broadcast (it had been

Primer on BUILDING STORIES & Chris Ware

2012-10-11T14:15:00.001-07:00

Chris Ware's BUILDING STORIES is out, which means its time for media coverage to begin. Since a lot of media outlets generally don't have the time or knowledge to do in-depth research into "comic books", "graphic novels" or "those things kids like". So, for everyone out there just getting into Chris Ware, he's a simple guide to Chris Ware and his work. Q: Who is Chris Ware? A: Most people

Wow... the West Coast Promise/ Fading Dreams

2012-09-27T20:51:00.000-07:00

The Shadow of the Gunman and the Swordsman: Golgo 13 and Conan the Barbarian

2012-09-07T22:53:00.000-07:00

Pop culture says a lot about a country, and the pop culture that best gives someone an idea about the country's mindset is rarely the culture that people praise. It's usually not the Pulitzer Prize winners or the Oscar winners that we look back on as time capsules of what America was like. It's the Valley of the Dolls and Dirty Harry. Whenever people (usually conservatives) attack academia, it's

On Selling My Comic Book Collection, Part 2

2012-06-17T21:40:00.000-07:00

In my last post, which was way, way too long ago, I wrote some about the road that brought me to the selling of my comic book collection. Now I'll pick up with part 2... When I first started entering my comics on Lonestar Comic's website, it was in part just curiousity. Were my comics actually worth anything? Or were they just random packages of paper, taking up space.... The answer is that

On selling off my comic book collection...

2012-04-16T11:49:00.000-07:00

So, about a year, year and a half ago, I decided to start selling off my comic book collection. I've been collecting comic books since I was probably about 5, starting with G.I. Joe, moving on to Spider-Man and Wolverine, then finally onto the Silver Age stuff and collecting specific artists and writers (Morrison, Steranko, Kirby, Moore, Ellis, etc.). I kept buying regularly through college and,

Why I hate MEN WHO HATE WOMEN

2012-03-29T13:57:00.000-07:00

I've been blogging a lot more at the Tumblr. I just posted a pretty in-depth thing about David Fincher's THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. I should say, I think David Fincher is a talented director. But not only does this movie have an awful attitude about sex and feminism (while pretending to be progressive), it's a long and rather boring movie.

Department of new ventures....

2012-02-04T15:09:00.000-08:00

So I've started a tumblr blog as an offshoot to the Mr. K enterprise. The tumblr blog will be more of a place for flash fiction and occasionally snarky images, whereas this site will remain devoted mostly to criticism, thought pieces and reviews. Check out the tumblr now for the beginning of a continuing series called "A Tomb for Hugo Gernsback." A little hint to you blog-fans: this first

Blog Department of Burying the Lede, Tyler Cowen Edition

2012-02-02T11:05:00.000-08:00

Some of you long-time "Mr. K" fans (if such a creature exists) might remember when I blogged about Tyler Cowen's writing on arts and capitalism. It won't surprise you that I continue to follow his blog Marginal Revolution, which he co-writes with Alex Tabarrok. While I don't agree with all of his conclusions or understand some of the headier economic material, he usually has some interesting

The money will roll right in...

2012-01-30T16:29:00.000-08:00

I went to go see "Under the Big Black Sun", the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art's exhibit of modern art from 1974-1981 on Saturday. It was a free day for most of Los Angeles' museums, so I figured I would make the most of it with a journey downtown, via train, through the barren wastelands of Downtown LA on the weekend, to Little Tokyo. Now, with an exhibition named after an album by LA

Quick "I'm still here post"

2012-01-27T12:57:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to say "hi" to all you out in blogland. I haven't forgotten you, I swear! This blog isn't going to go live on a farm with Firefly and Community and mainstream horror movies that aren't found footage. So I'm just going to post some of the crazy search terms that get people to my blog: "psychedelic prison" - probably because of my post on Joseph Losey's Modesty Blaise post. Or that's

The past is a foreign country...

2012-01-18T14:07:00.000-08:00

I recently watched the two hour pilot of Showtime's The Borgias (I know, welcome to 2010, Mr. K) and the first two episodes of Roberto Rossellini's Age of The Medicis, which was produced as a three part miniseries on Italian television in the 1970s. Both shows dealing with politics in the Italian Renaissance, both helmed by talented directors (Neil Jordan serving as the show-runner for the

This is the end, beautiful friend, the end...

2012-01-04T13:24:00.000-08:00

So my talented and funny friend Brock Wilbur has just started an amazing series of reviews on movies about the apocalypse or post-apocalypse (though he missed out by not calling it the A-Brock-Alypse). You can see the first post here. But it reminded me of how many post-apocalyptic films there are, even if you exclude zombie movies totally. Off the top of my head, here are some interesting

"It was St. Sebastian I thought of, and his arrows..."

2011-12-14T11:04:00.000-08:00

So jokes Nick Cave at one point in his darkly comic song about a psychopath killing all the patrons in a small-town bar, "O'Malley's Bar", off the classic album Murder Ballads. It's an album about murder and death that deals with both man's drive towards destruction, while also examining the wreckage in the aftermath. For an album about murder, it never languishes in one mood for too long, while

I'm sick, so time for some heresy to spark discussion...

2011-11-02T19:44:00.000-07:00

People like to complain about how Spielberg and Lucas created a generation of films aimed at overgrown men-children. But I wonder how much of the youth-oriented nature of films today are the fault of John Hughes. All his generic teens and their generic issues, the films in the end coming down on the side of the conformists and middle-class whitebread midwesterners, preparing us for a crop of

HALLOWEEN COUNTDOWN: Horror on a minimum wage

2011-10-27T14:10:00.000-07:00

THE INNKEEPERS (2011) Directed by Ti West Starring Sara Paxton, Pat Healy and Kelly McGillis If you had told me that the next movie from the guy behind House of the Devil was also going to be a throwback to an earlier style of horror, I certainly wouldn't have been surprised. But if you'd told me that he was making a slow-burn ghost story with very little gore, along the lines of the original

Halloween countdown: He served a dark and a stupid god

2011-10-17T11:09:00.000-07:00

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) Directed by Tim Burton Starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen, Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall I know quite a few people I like and whose opinions I respect won't agree with what I'm about to write. Not just friends, but apparently even Mister Stephen Sondheim himself. But Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd just isn't good. In

Quick Link Love...

2011-10-14T12:35:00.000-07:00

I already have a bit of an intellectual crush on Jess Nevins for his series of pulp posts at io9, his annotations of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Top 10, and his tumblr blog. But now he has to go write an awesome and inspirational article about Asian history in the 18th and 19th century and Asian pulp literature for sci-fi publishers Tor. RTWT, but my favorite part (and best idea for a

Halloween Countdown: I love Lucky McKee...

2011-10-07T17:08:00.000-07:00

I love Lucky McKee. I've only seen two of his three and a half films (the half is his episode of Masters of Horror: Sick Girl), but I've loved both May and The Woods for the way they played around with the conventions of horror, while still finding the monster/villains sympathetic. And the way he switched from the low-key "indie" style in May to a very lush '60's feel in The Woods showed he had