Procrastinations 04 (september 2007).pdf

Procrastinations four

Square-Eyed

Procrastinations is written (or, in some cases, merely edited) by John Coxon.

Credit is given to material that is ripped off gratefully accepted from others.

Issue 4 published Thursday 6th September 2007.

Future issues may be published. You have been warned.

14 Chapel Lane, Peterborough, PE4 6RS // zines@chickensinenvelopes.net

eFanzines.com/Procrastinations

This is the first issue of Procrastinations that has been published in the

proper order, in that it actually comes after all the issues that preceded it.

I’ve got some really good people writing articles for me this issue and

I’m ecstatic that they were all foolish enough to say yes.

Just one thing that it is very important I mention at this point: Vote

Chris Garcia for TAFF. Chris is a real asset to fandom, both in the US

and to anyone who’s ever had anything to do with fanzines. He’s one of

the most active members of fanzine fandom I know, whilst being very

nice, to boot. The man’s a legend and I’d love to have the opportunity

to meet him at Orbital so please vote for him to come over next year.

Articles This Issue.

Giant Transforming Robots! ........................................................ 2

No, We Don’t Have a TV............................................................. 5

Through The Small Screen To The Future.................................... 6

Heroes : A Comic On TV ............................................................. 11

Island Ahead!............................................................................... 14

Battlestar Galactica : Old & New ................................................. 19

Imagining The Future .................................................................. 22

Letters of Comment .................................................................... 24

Closing Remarks ......................................................................... 36

Giant Transforming Robots!

By John Coxon

Editor

So, the new version of Transformers , then. I actually took some time

out of a convention to go and see the film at 10:30 on a Saturday

morning. I am thoroughly glad I did, because this film is brilliant.

However, I must warn my readers that spoilers are to be seen in this here

article.

The first thing about the movie I liked was the beginning. It focuses on

a group of US Air Force personnel, who are about to return home after a

tour of duty. The base at which they’re stationed suddenly detects a

bogie, who, as the audience realises near instantly (or at least, they do if

they’re me), is a Transformer, in fact a Decepticon by the name of

Blackout. Eventually, Blackout lands in the middle of the air base. And

then, well, he transforms.

It was at this point that I knew we were in for one hell of a movie. The

transformation sequence for this Transformer was legendary. First, the

rotor blades stopped, and we’re not talking the motor turning off and the

blades coming to a standstill – we’re talking the rotors suddenly just

stopping, sliding back, and then the transformation beginning until

suddenly, Blackout is standing there and all hell breaks loose. This is

one bloody good action scene – we get a good look at the Transformer

and he begins to fight the people at the base, five minutes of mayhem

and human slaughter, with the group of men we met right at the

beginning being (you guessed it!) the only survivors.

After the end of that sequence, it abruptly cuts to a school, where the

main character, Sam, is giving a presentation on his great grandfather,

and eventually this is over, and he scores the grade he needs for his

father to buy him a new car. This is our first encounter with

Bumblebee, the main Transformer in the movie. In a nice homage to the

original, in the first scene in which Sam sees him he is parked next to a

yellow Volkswagen Beetle, the car that Bumblebee originally

transformed into.

I could go on all day about how funny the one-liners were, about how

cool the action sequences were, and about how awesome the CGI was,

but ultimately, I just want to say this.

I go to the cinema to be entertained. I’ve seen films that made me sit up

and think before, and whilst they’re good, they usually feel like one

point in an argument that the director wanted to make over two hours,

when he could have just, you know, said what he wanted to say. As

Douglas Adams once said, and I paraphrase from memory, “If I’d

wanted to write a message, I wouldn’t have written a story.” The main

film that I can think of that fits this bill is The Interpreter , starring

Nicole Kidman, which was very good but also not something I wanted

to spend two hours of my life on.

Transformers was the most entertaining film I’ve seen all year, with the

possible exception of Hot Fuzz , which is similarly brilliant. I happen to

really, really like films that aren’t comedies but which happen to be

funny in places, which this film managed with flying colours. For

another instance of what I mean, try watching the TV show NCIS , which

I’ve always thoroughly enjoyed, because it’s not focused on comedy or

being funny but still manages to make me laugh every episode.

Having said that, I want to spend a little time talking about the actors.

Shia LaBeouf was cast in the leading role, and ever since seeing Holes

(another film that starred both Jon Voight and LaBeouf in leading roles),

I’ve been watching for him to do a film as a lead actor. He was good in

both Constantine and I, Robot but he played a very similar role in both

of them, so Transformers was, for me, a chance to see some more of his

acting, and he didn’t disappoint. He’s also one hot guy, which never,

ever hurts a film.

With the addition of Josh Duhamel (the captain of the Air Force crew

we meet at the beginning), Megan Fox (Mikaela, Sam’s love interest)

and Rachael Taylor (the Australian hacker working the case of the

Secretary of Defence), the eye candy in this film is absolutely superb.

Duhamel and Fox also, as it happens, gave excellent performances –

Taylor did not really have enough material to shine in any way, and

since I’d never seen another film that she played a role in, I was unable

to gauge how good she was as an actress, but she was definitely not bad.

And then, you have the actors that make the film funny. Anthony

Anderson (the hacker to whom Maggie turns when she needs help with

the signal) and John Turturro (the man from Sector 7 who arrests Sam’s

family alongside Mikaela) were hilarious (although, as with Taylor,

Anderson did not have nearly enough screen time), as were Kevin Dunn

and Julie White, who played the Sam’s parents (the scene in his

bedroom was brilliant and made me laugh really very hard).

There are a couple of things that annoy me about the reset we see,

though. The first thing is the wave of toys that have accompanied the

movie. Not all of them transform. If you are going to put a

Transformers logo on a toy, it should transform into something, in my

humble opinion. I refuse to buy any toy called a Transformer that

doesn’t transform (and have only found, so far, two that actually do).

The second thing is the prequel comic, which could have tied into the

movie in a better way – certain parts of the story just jarred, although it

does paint a very nifty picture of Starscream and his attitude towards

Megatron as opposed to the other Decepticons.

But these are minor points. The film has encouraged a new wave of

comics from IDW publishing (we’ll leave the prequel comic out of this

and focus on the new comics) who have also republished the

Generations comics from the previous publisher. The new comics are

very good, I think, although if you’re expecting anything similar to the

movie, don’t – the new comics had begun to be published before the

movie was completed, unless I’m very much mistaken.

It’s a good film, and it’s prompted a revival of the franchise, and for

both of these things, it deserves praise and applause. By chance, both

my half-brother and I acclaimed it as the best film of the year before we

realised the other had done so, which must say something (perhaps that

the Coxon family are too easily led by shiny things blowing up). At any

rate, it is the film that now holds the record for the highest amount of

money taken at the US box office in the opening weekend by a non-

sequel film, and there are two more coming out after it, so I’ll be going

to see them, and reporting back to my readers about the experience.

No, We Don ’ t Have A TV.

By Flick

I have a routine, when people say, “Oh, did you see that programme

about X on TV the other day?” I shake my head, slightly, and say, “No,

I didn’t. Sounds interesting...” I used to say, “No, we don’t have a TV,”

but that leads to bemused looks, which leads me to say, “Well, we do

have a TV, but it’s not set up to receive TV...” but then I realised that

that just lead to even more bewilderment [I may follow this routine when

the same sort of thing is true of me during my stay at the University of

Leicester – Ed] .

We used to have a TV-as-a-TV, before we moved house. Mostly, we

used to turn it on every few days and see whether there were any good

episodes of Futurama on the Tivo. The Sky subscription ran out, about

two months before we moved, and I didn't notice for several weeks.

Then we did move, and we thought about getting a TV-as-a-TV again.

We live near to Canary Wharf, which royally buggers up the TV

reception, but we're not allowed a dish, where we live, and there's no

cable, so it would have had to have been Freeview, and that would have

required going out and buying a Freeview box, and, well, we're a bit

disorganised and crap, really. Every few weeks, then months, one of us

would mutter about getting one, but we never seemed to get around to it.

And, anyway, all the good stuff comes out on DVD, and you can watch

it when you like and don't have to wait a week for the resolution of the

dramatic cliff-hanger, or make sure you remember that it's on, or stop

playing Zelda while you watch it, and so on.

Then New Who started, and, well, we wanted to watch that. As it

happened, we saw the first episode at a con, and it was pretty good, so

Mike went out and, experimentally, bought a Tesco Value TV aerial. It

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