Life is crap. Dio is dead. And that’s not all…
One by one my music heroes kick the bucket, it seems. Lane Staley? Dead. Most of the Ramones? Dead. Cash? Dead. Joe Strummer? Dead. Metallica? Dead (at least dead to me).
Now, Ronnie James MotherFreaking Dio? Dead. He’s gone. On a “rainbow bridge to Valhalla” to quote my philosophical friend, Kahlil. I could not have said it better myself.
I can’t even fathom what a world without the magic of Dio will be like. I mean, can you? Can anybody else do what he did? Can any of the current crop of metal front-men who tend to follow a very formulaic pattern of grunting verses with melodic, sing-songy choruses wail on about rainbows while clad in outfits of leather and fur?
This is all rhetorical. They can’t. Nobody can. Dio was without equal.
I’ll say this about Black Sabbath’s two lead singers, Ozzy and Dio: Ozzy is great, but other people can and will do what he does. There is only, and will always only be one Dio. He was truly unique.
Compounding the Dio issue is some other troubling developments in the news. First, Woody Allen has come out in support of Roman Polanski. And, I want to be clear about this; Roman Polanski is a child molester. He is a gifted and talented director, but he’s also a CHILD MOLESTER. Do I love Chinatown with every fiber of my being and think it’s one of the ten best films ever made? Yes. Do I want to see Roman Polanski hit by a car? Yes. These are not mutually exclusive ideas. If a porn star has the best orgasm of his or her life while not making a porn movie, in the quiet of his or her own home without anybody to witness it, it does nothing to effect the stock market in Malaysia. Get my drift?
So, Woody Allen, who also seems to have quite a fascination with young girls, has decided it’s a good PR move to speak up for ol’ Roman. Clearly he’s completely lost his sense of irony. I’ll say this now to you, Mr. Allen: you haven’t made a good movie for about thirty years. Please go play in traffic. You have become to comedy what Jerry Bruckenhymenface is to action films: um, not good at making them… at all… but persist despite this obvious handicap, which is weird. So stop.
Next up on Dan Silver’s News Brief: Heroes is cancelled. That show has been a giant bucket of barf since season one. If you don’t agree with me, all I can say is you must be a Lost fan. Seriously, it’s a great idea and all, but nothing ever seems to happen in a Heroes episode. They saved the cheerleader and saved the world in the first season. That was the entire plot. Apparently the writers all decided to give up after that. How do I know this? Because Hiro was transported back in time to feudal Japan in the first episode of the second season. Time travel shows are what they did on Star Trek when they couldn’t think of anything else to do (also, they hadn’t invented the holodeck yet to make silly filler episodes the focus of). Off to a bad start right there. I won’t even bother slamming how lame it was that feudal Japan in season two looked exactly like Southern California. It’s incredible that their location scout didn’t pick the parking lot of an area Costco, with that level of sloppiness. I’m sure in at least one frame there’s an extra in a samurai costume eating out of a McDonald’s bag.
Last but not least is a tragedy of epic proportions, one almost as awful as Dio’s death, but far more damaging and polluting to future generations…
I’m not talking about that little oil spill in the Gulf; I’m talking about the upcoming “re-imagineering” of Star Tours, the Disneyland/Disneyworld ride.
Okay, I get it. I know that Star Tours is pretty much a dated, cheesy, and nauseating ride. But, I love it for a number of reasons. There’s the nostalgia factor, for one. I love it because I am a hard-core Original Trilogy nerd, the line is usually pretty short but still endlessly entertaining, and there’s not a single iota of computer graphics in the whole thing.
I saw a news ticker at a coffee shop last week say that European filmmakers are desperately trying to catch up to the US in computerized “special” effects. This forced me to make an audible groan, because apparently people in Europe aren’t any smarter than us dumb Americans like people in New York and San Francisco seem to think.
The rise of computer graphics sparked the literal end for creative filmmaking. Brilliant artists were once forced to write these things called “stories” for action and adventure movies. Said artists were also limited by technology and budgets as to all the crap that they could put into a single frame of a film. Since CG came along, that hasn’t been the case. And now we get movies like the last three Star Wars turds and Avatar that are more or less unwatchable due to the apparent utter inability of people to have their creative minds reigned in by reality and consequently tromp all over the ability of the viewer to suspend disbelief.
I mention all of this because Star Tours is going to be remade as a “three dimensional pod racing adventure.” So, in essence, we are taking the lamest sequence from the lamest Star Wars film and combining it with James Cameron’s latest cinematic lameness to give a whole new generation of nerds a reason to open up an artery in a bathtub or find morbid uses for lengths of phone cord.
Screw you Disney. Screw you world. How dare you take away my idols so?
PS – Buy my novel.
