David Alan Dedin
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Jesus Christ on an ET's Bicicyle 

5/16/2014

4 Comments

 
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How can you not believe in alien life?  
(And Nancy Pelosi doesn't count.)

I mean, seriously...there are fuckin' billions of stars out there!

I genuinely believe that within my lifetime - hopefully within the next five years - our government will finally acknowledge publicly the existence of life on other worlds.  I also believe they'll  reveal that countries everywhere have been in contact with ETs for years - both peaceful & hostiles, explorers & experimenters - and have, obviously, chosen to withhold the information to avoid mass panic and the worldwide collapse of belief systems.  I don't think that governments want to fess up to alien life...rather, I think they have no choice.  Our planet's technology has compounded like national debt, and with this has come unstoppable information.  And let's face it:  If Dr. Zoiberg crashes in Roswell again, the Tweets will hit the Internet lonnnnnng before anyone has time to grab a weather balloon.  "Siri...post the crash on YouTube.  Oh, and call Greta VanSustern.  As a Scientologist, she's totally been expecting this."
PictureUFOs over Washington, 1954
Seriously, though...in this modern day & age, how can anyone not believe in extra terrestrial life ?  Science has proven that our sun is just one of billions of stars, and even if just a fraction of those star systems hosts life, there'd be hundreds of thousands of other worlds out there - all with their own civilizations.  Some would be primitive, some would be advanced, and most would be as alien to us as the Rationals, Emotional's and Parental's in Asimov's The Gods Themselves.  Sure, there are likely a few human-like races out there, but those big haired ladies that Shatner plowed in his trailer will not be the norm.  I suspect many aliens would scare the shit out of us if we saw them in true form, but that doesn't mean they aren't out there now...waiting, watching, oozing.  And with each passing day, the unstoppable flow of information makes it that much harder to deny their existence...especially as our new quantum computers look surprisingly like crop circles.

PictureWow...where does one begin?
Once again, I'm not going to waste your time be repeating all the pro-UFO arguments that are all just click away.  Rather, I'd like to share what shattered my own Earth-centric shell...and that was, surprisingly, Catholicism.  

Catholics believe in the Rapture, the moment when all true believers disappear from the Earth in the blink of an eye.  The Bible doesn't give us a specific "date," but the a Rapture could literally happen before I finish this blog (or 500 years from today, when we've colonized other worlds).   As the Rapture is strictly an Earthbound thing, my immediate question has always been, "What happens to the Catholics who are elsewhere in the galaxy?  Do they get raptured too?   If Earth is raptured, but they're standing on Saturn, what then?  Will their spaceships go careening off the galactic highway because their bumper stickers say,
WARNING: In case of Rapture, this saucer will be unmanned! ?"

Every major world religion seems to have it's own concept of heaven.  Catholics envision pearly gates.  Buddhists strive for enlightenment.  Islamists want to be one with Allah, though they'll settle for 70 virgins if Mohammad tells them otherwise.  But unless you follow Joseph Smith (or John Travolta), almost all religions stop at the stratosphere - with God looking down from just beyond the clouds. But we all can see the stars beyond those clouds, and with stars come worlds, and with worlds come other races - some races that have likely been visiting us for thousands of years...so, doesn't that mean that rather than finding "God," we're all trying to find a "higher consciousness?"  (Or more specifically, a better understanding of our place in the universe?)  Once you wrap your head around that concept, doesn't all religion make a little more sense?  Like Star Trek's V'Ger, we just want to meet our creator.

PictureThe Baptism of Christ
On a similar topic, I believe that the church is the key to understanding just how long ET's have been visiting the Earth.  And it's for a pretty simple reason: the Roman Catholic Church is one of the the oldest governing bodies in the world - which means it has some of the oldest historical records.  There are documents within the Vatican's archives that coincide with the beginnings of recorded history, from the time of ancient astronaut theories.  Depictions of extra terrestrials can be found in Mayan sculpture to European paintings done hundreds of years later.  If "The Baptism of Christ" (a 1710 picture by Aert De Gelder) clearly shows a flying saucer above Jesus Christ, then you know damn well that the church has official records that cover alien visitation without neoclassical interpretation. I want to see those records.  I want Dan Brown to write a book about them.  And I want American Dad to send Roger to Vatican City (disguised as a nun) to retrieve those records for a Fox sweeps special.

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Every time I look at the stars, I imagine how many races must be out there.  Full disclosure: I have loved science fiction from the time I could poop.  I grew up in the late 70s/early 80s, in the heyday of Star Wars & OMNI magazine.  I watched Star Wars in a drive in.  I read Timothy Good's Above Top Secret.  I'm primed to believe in extra terrestrials. Like Mulder, I want to believe in life outside of Earth.  But I'm also respectful of traditional thought, and I know that once ETs are revealed, every country in the world will experience a philosophical earthquake.

It's going to be a mess for awhile, with civil & social unrest.  We'll experience fear, panic, and violence in certain places - and I'll finally get to cook my Patriot Pantry purchase.  But humanity will get through it because, ultimately, we already know it's true.  And once the smoke clears - and history is reevaluated - we'll accept that ET influence has been a part of our lives from the very, very beginning.  Our view will go from "global" to "galactic"... and petty terrestrial fighting will simply become impractical.  If Putin wants Crimea and China wants Taiwan, big deal.  Look up at the stars. There's plenty of real estate to go around.


Now, as for Earth's ambassador to ETs, may I make a suggestion?  
I mean, she's funny, she can handle a crowd, and she already looks like a grey...

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4 Comments

Found Footage Fiascos

5/4/2014

3 Comments

 
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The premiere of The Blair Witch Project was no less than incredible, and to this day the movie stands out as the most exciting "opening night" I've ever attended.  Blair Witch was the first of its kind, the In Cold Blood of found-footage films...and the media hype that led up to its release was as carefully crafted as the film, itself.  Nothing like it had been done before.  It's marketers had so successfully blurred the production's backstory, that many in the audience actually believed the students' footage was real.  I saw Blair Witch on opening weekend at Arizona Mills Mall in Tempe, Az - long before anyone knew how big the movie would get.  But we all caught a glimpse of what was to come, for sure.  The box office line grew so long/so fast that extra showings were added that night - and a single reel of celluloid was shared between two side-by-side theaters, so two audiences could watch the film at once.  That certainly didn't happen at the premiere of Porky's...
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By now everyone knows what happened after that.  Blair Witch was a success, it's sequel was a disaster, and everyone with $500 and a camcorder set out to make the next great found footage film.  Sure, there were a few good ones - Paranormal Activity, Rec, Quarantine, Atrocious, Cloverfield, Continuum - but most of the genre ended up looking like a first-year film student's weekend project (with far too many teenagers and far too many F-bombs).  What made found footage movies great in the first place also turned out to be their greatest weakness: If your filmmakers have no talent, they can't hide behind a special effects budget.  Sadly, both Netflix & YouTube offer many examples of this fact.

Picture"What do you fuckin' mean I need to take direction?"
Before I go any further, I must admit that I genuinely admire anyone who tackles the challenge of making their own movie.  In many ways, producing an independent picture is like self-publishing a book: the proper tools are out there, if you've the means to use them.  Filming a movie without consulting a competent editor is no different than writing a novel without pressing the spellcheck button.  It's okay to make something on the cheap,  but at least give us a product that we can all take seriously.  

I have a buddy who's lived in LA for the past eight years.  My friend is in his late 40s, an accountant by trade, and after an unusually strong midlife crisis, he packed up his life in New York and drove cross country to Hollywood - where he was only guy in film school with white hair.  My buddy has shared many stories about the experience, especially those surrounding students' attempts at screenwriting.  It's actually become a common joke among film teachers: every first year film student writes the same goddamn story.  It always starts with two kids sitting in their dorm, when something "happens" that causes them to run off with their cameras.  They leave their room, run down the hall and out onto campus - filming everything along the way.  Their intention is to pass "stream of consciousness" as plot, but like writing a thesis without an initial outline, the result is often comically amateurish.

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I'm not going to bitch about the quality of specific found footage films; I just did a Google search, and there are plenty of blogs on that subject.  I will say though that if filmmakers insist on keeping this genre alive, an effort must be taken to use creativity to counterbalance these movies' inherently cheap nature.  There are so many reeeeeeeally bad found footage films out there, and I often wonder if their participants realize that they're damaging their resumes by posting crappy movies on YouTube.  I mean, unprofessional FaceBook posts/pictures have been known to cost people their jobs, so can't the same be said for bad movies?  Especially if you got the idea after smoking a blunt in your dorm?

"Where Have All The People Gone" should be required viewing for all young horror directors today.  It isn't a found footage film; it's actually a pretty effective made-for-TV movie that was shot on a shoestring budget in 1974. (You can watch it for free on YouTube.)  This film clearly had no pot to piss in - and I suspect most of its budget went toward paying Peter Graves' salary (in the same way that Trog's budget went to cover Crawford's bar tab) - yet the director found a way to make a few sprinkles of talcum powder seem scary as hell.  There is no shaky camera work in the movie, but it does have the same "general wandering" that frequently makes found footage films seem lazy.   When you've got the same special effects budget as an episode of Love American Style, you need a script with tighter direction than "Run through the woods and do something cool for Netflix."

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Ok...this blog is bordering on a movie rant, and as I am not the Simpson's "comic book guy," I'm going to bring it in for a landing.   I'll close by saying that if by some act of God "I" were ever to direct a found footage movie, I'd totally do something that blows people's minds.  For starters, I'd cast adults - rather than teenagers - and I'd steer far away from anything paranormal, extra-terrestrial, demonic, monster-related, or worst of all, Bell-Witchy.  And as those topics pretty much sum up the entire genre, the shock at the end of the movie would be that there was no movie to begin with. 

I might miss out on a Blair Witch-sized opening night, but at least I won't have anything embarrassing popping up on your Netflix cue.

3 Comments

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