April 2007 Archives

Today I watched ten minutes of Return of the Living Dead Part II. Why only ten minutes? Because of fear. Not fear of zombies. No, it was fear of the title.

Return of the Living Dead Part II

Doesn't the "Return" already imply that this is a "Part II"? Shouldn't it be called "The Living Dead Part II: The Return" or something like that? Return of the Living Dead Part II is like making the movie Ocean's Twelve Part II. Or Spider Man 3 Part II. It doesn't make any sense. Unless... unless what's happening is a diverging tree of movies and sequels.

Let's simplify this by calling our original movie "Z" and imagine an infinite array of movies, each expanding upon a subset of the movie space.

Z
Z II -> ZII II -> ZII III -> ...
Z III -> ZIII II -> ZIII III -> ...
Z IIII -> ZIIII II -> ZIIII III -> ...
...

Since I can't portray three- (or more-) dimensional space here, you'll have to imagine the ZII II II and the ZII III II and the Z IIII II III II and so on in their appropriate places. But the idea is that the movie Z II II (for example) takes off where Z II ended, which is also where Z III takes off, but in a different direction, allowing reinterpretations of the Z space. For that matter, why limit it? There could be an infinite number of Z II's, each taking off where Z ended but in a different way, and then an infinite number of movies taking off where each of those infinite number of Z II's ended. God, we need a new nomenclature (ZII-III III-II) just to capture this complexity.

This is not how movies are made!

But perhaps they should be...?

Has this ever been done before? I am reminded of the increasing number of Highlander sequels, each claiming to ignore all but the original.

In any case, the "Return" in Return of the Living Dead Part II could, I suppose, represent not that this is a sequel to a movie called Living Dead (or Night of the Living Dead or any other of the million variants on Living Dead) but, simply, that the movie involves Living Dead who Return. And, in fact, this appears to be the case.

Though this raises a different issue. I think the "Returning" part implies the "Living" part, and vice versa. Normally, the Dead neither Live nor Return, and if they are doing one they are probably doing the other.

But, I suppose, not necessarily, as these other possible movie titles demonstrate:

Return of the Unliving Dead, aka Someone Dug Up Unanimated Corpses
or
The Living Dead Decide To Go Somewhere They've Never Been Before

And that's why I had to stop watching the movie.

I realize I've been slacking in my blog duties. Recently my "creative" talents have been focused on my MFA thesis, which is due May 2nd. I've finally created the Peeps web comic, which I know some of you have been excited to see. (Or at least impatient to see.) It is, unfortunately, not very funny, more of a whimsical flashback to childhood. But at least it has some Peeps. Scanning actual Peeps required me to detach my all-in-one printer/scanner/copier and give it a thorough cleaning, even after which the next couple of scans had kind of a blurry yellow tint.

Anyway, after May 2nd I will be a little more consistent in my efforts. And if you are upset that today's comic did not feature giant, mutated Peeps... well, remember, now that I've scanned them in once I will always have those images available for a future effort.

This comic has been much delayed (so much for an Easter deadline) and it doesn't quite make full use of the scanned images of Peeps. But give me a break, I have a thesis due!

I'll miss him.

NYT obit

You may remember the long, near-tragic saga of my attempt to see all three parts of The Coast of Utopia at Lincoln Center. By now I've seen the whole thing. Instead of forcing you to read my rambling, incoherent review on this blog, I'll instead point you to EconoCulture, an internet magazine of reviews, interviews, and general cultural content, where you can read my rambling, incoherent review there!

To summarize for those of you too lazy to read the first paragraph:
Support EconoCulture for supporting me, and check out my review of Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia.

After much deliberation I have decided that April Fools jokes are dumb and that MixedMetaphors.net will not actually be going anywhere. This site is near and dear to my heart for the following important reasons:

1) It takes up too much of my time. Time that I could spend doing more productive things.
2) There is nothing of value produced on this site. It's all nonsense and poppycock.
3) I hate blogs.

That's right.

Thank you to all of the loyal readers who have been with me the whole way. You are all good people. Except for one of you. You know who you are.

Sincerely,
MixedMetaphors.net

After much deliberation I have decided to shut down my website. It was not easy to come to this decision, but I make it now for the following reasons:

1) It takes up too much of my time. Time that I could spend doing more productive things.
2) There is nothing of value produced on this site. It's all nonsense and poppycock.
3) I hate blogs.

Thank you to all of the loyal readers who have been with me the whole way. You are all good people. Except for one of you. You know who you are.

Sincerely,
MixedMetaphors.net