IT'S MONDAY, YOU MORONS!!

Some of you right now are probably sitting at work in front of your computer terminal hating yourself, with a StarSchmuck's triple dose latte in one hand and a .38 in the other comtemplating some little nefarious privatized take over of some poor grandmother's welfare check- it's just that you don't really want to do that today.


But I'm here to put a stop to your diabolical schemes of mass plundering. You'll never get that handshake of approval from your neo-con compatriots while I'm around.

No siree- you pencil necked gutless fuck. I'll pound your shit into churned butter now that I'm back in true fine form....

Well, almost. I'm beginning to sign off on the last hurrah of my current dilemma and then after I promise all you good little sluts and studs that I will be back for the full duration of fighting the good fight for your right to worship me...but for now, I'm going to ask my good friend "Grizzly" Alan Sinder to help pitch hit for me and make some cyber home improvements to get this thing looking more professional than usual.

Because I care.

Not about you, of course- but all things that have to do with the Cary Coatney self pontificating universe.

How can I get more Cary Coatney into your life? Is there enough Cary Coatney in your life, ... or is there not enough? Can I get Cary Coatney to become a household word in the year 2005? Or is Cary Coatney simply resigned to become nothing more than a mere flickering beacon on the statistic radar screen? These are the destituting questions that have been plaguing my consciousness ever since last New Year's Eve.

But that was just another night at Jumbo's.

Since my company imposed exile last Halloween (i.e; endless barrage of mandatory OT) , I swear, the only contact I've had with the outside world on this internet is through Heidi MacDonald's express drive thru comic book fan blog, the Beat http://www.comicon.com/thebeat. Heidi's little cyber emporium was the only way I could type a short quip or two without detection from any of my supervisors or bosses leaning over my shoulder and try to put a cap in my already cottage cheese deflating ass (You sit for twelve hours a day, 6-7 days a week and see how buff your henie looks since last Halloween) So I'm extremely thankful to Heidi for maintaining such a easy accessible blog- because it cut down a lot of time of wandering around to other sites to get my cultural gas blast.

Some instances, I would try to sneak Heidi some stories of gossip or stuff that's newsworthy (or noseworthy if that's how you look at it) around the studio. Some made the cut, other didn't- so I'm going to try, with Alan Sinder's help to make this blog look pretty, just. like. Heidi's. In a week or so, Alan will be posting the first few pages of my forthcoming final chapter to the Deposit Man & the Last Great Gate of Mortality saga just as soon as Oliver is ready to release them to me- to whet the APE apettite in April. So, in the meantime, I'm going to go through some recent events that have come down the Coatney pike which should have made it to Heidi's blog- but maybe Heidi probably overlooked the significance of the items, or didn't have have the time to drek through the e-mails I've been sending her. I'll just post the left overs here.


1. the passing of John Vernon - the voice behind all those early Marvel Superheroes cartoons first syndicated back in 1966. Vernon lent his distinctive voice to both the Iron Man and the Sub-Mariner skeins as well as Major Glenn Talbot in the Hulk portion. Besides achieving world wide acclaim for his performances in Killer Klowns from Outer Space and Animal House, Vernon returned to voice work on Batman: The Animated Series as Rupert Thorne and Major Thunderbolt Ross on the 1996 Incredible Hulk series and was the voice of Dr.Strange on Fox's Spider-Man animated series. Although those moving mouth series were laughable looking now that I'm watching them all on bootleg dvds as a adult, it did leave an undeniable impression that these were the images cemented in my mind as a child to recruit me as a Mighty Marvel March Society member and Vernon's voice as Iron Man- well, you know, it's nothing you can shake away from a precious three year old memory. I was told that I supposedly lived just down the street from Vernon while I was living it up in Sherman Oaks. I never got to meet him, although I probably wouldn't have recognized him anyway even if he had walked up the sidewalk near my house unless I heard the sound of his voice. I used to live near a lot of Hollywood semi-celebrities such as Ann Jillian, Everlast, Michael Chiklis, and that irish guy on NYPD:Blue who plays Greg Medavoy (his name escapes me at the moment, but I did catch his dog taking a dump on my lawn).

Marvel Superheroes cartoons were such a trip back in the day. I recently viewed a old Captain America episode that I hadn't seen since I was three years old. The memories came flooding back when I watched the episode that adapted a old Avengers comic with Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, and Quicksilver fighting the Enchantess and the old Power Man villain. It scared me to death that Captain America toppled over a bridge and supposedly drowned before cutting it to a commerical on good ol' WOR in New York back when they used to air cartoons in the late sixties, I recalled being sick at the time when I watched it with my mom and my stepfather in their bedroom and I distinctly remember throwing a shit fit when my stepfather CHANGED THE GODDAMN CHANNEL!! When he finally did turn back the channel there was Hawkeye's mouth being stifled by a goddamn giant plant and Captain America then came bursting in to save the day and the beat the fuck out of Powerman. That stilted animation and all that blurring omomatopoeia really worked it's Mojo on me to indice spending my hard earned sheckels on a majority of Marvel in my later early teen years.

2. Another lost memory rewound in my head this past weekend dredged up more foul deeds of my cretinous step-father. As I may have said previously on this blog back in it's infamy, my step-father, THE EVIL ROGER had very unique and fanciful ways of torturing our impressionable young hero back in the days from my tyke days of LOST IN SPACE up throughout the period of Harlan Ellison's STARLOST. His slow simmering masterful techniques would even woo over Alberto Gonzalez if he were slumming around as a houseguest 30 years ago. What happened was this: If I had brought home a bad report card or let my hamster run up my drapes and I had to pull the drapes out of its' rungs to bring him back down, or even slipping out the words YOU FUCKING BASTARDS at the dinner table, My stepfather would demerit me by ripping a MARVEL COMIC book right in half in front of me and then maybe follow it up by a black eye or two. However, at one time, he took a comic book that I had lying around the house and tore it up for no good damn reason just to serve his kind of social or political agenda. My stepfather had a really, really, major meltdown issues concerning Black Americans. He didn't want me to associate or speak with any black kids in general (considering that I went to school with nobody but Italian or Irish or jewish kids, there weren't that many around in Parsippany, New Jersey where I was growing up) and so when he saw a copy of Luke Cage: Hero For Hire Number one just casually lying around the coffee table - he had a instant China Syndrome. These social quirks would also escalate much later in my teen years when I got my first subscription copy to Rolling Stone while in high school which depicted a nude John Lennon and Yoko Ono shortly after Lennon was assassinated. Something about my sister coming home from school and being able to see it really fanned his flames. I also got chewed out when I bought a paperback editions of Marathon Man and Jaws at the bookstore when I was still in the fifth grade, but it wasn't as centralized as bringing anything to do with the black culture into the house. Asking permission to see Blacula or Shaft was definitely out

I swore that was going to be the last comic book he'll rip up over my fucking dead 60 or 70 pound little body. So each subsequent issue after my lost number one issue had to have employ more stealth sneaking in than a issue of Playboy or Penthouse. I don't know what bug crawled up his ass about black people- maybe he couldn't get permission to whack off to risque photos of Pam Grier in front of my mom. So, it's now my uniformed duty to celebrate with you all of the fact that I've finally reconciled with my haunted past now that Marvel has finally decided to release the Luke Cage Essential tradepaperback.

Sweet Fuckin' Christmas. This is what should have been under my tree two months ago. I figure if I had to have the Iron Fist one- you just can't have one without the other- that's just simple applied Coatney logic. No two ways about it.

It's all here. Luke Cage Hero For Here #1-16 and Luke Cage: Powerman #17-27 including my long lost (and unread too, I might add- it was torn up before I could even open the cover to read the damn thing) first issue. Villains such as Diamondback, Mace, Ester Rolle as Black Mariah (heh heh - she looks like all my supervisors rolled in one) Chemistro, and I'll never forget that rip roaring battle of Luke Cage vs Doctor Doom that started in New York and winds up in Latavria all over because Doc Doom skipped town without paying his $250 tab for hiring Luke's bodyguard services.

The writers and artist are all here too. Archie Goodwin, Len Wein, Tony Isabella, and Steve Englehart supplying the breath taking words and George Tuska, Billy Graham and Ron Wilson keeping it real with the pretty pictures.

It's a long lost crown jewel for me. I can't wait to tackle this big puppy.

3. Brando Old Time Classic Radio http://www.brandoclassicotr.com is representing Superman & Batman on Radio with the classic serial installment of the Voice of Doom. Escaped convict, Butcher Stark is rendering people unconscious just with the sound of his voice- and Superman's old nemesis, Scarlet Widow wants in on the action too. The 1946 fifteen minute serial is streamlined Monday through Friday @ 3 AM, 11 AM, & 7 PM Central Time.


~

Coat

CONSTANTINE - a half-assed hurried movie review due to monstrous OT that doesn't leave me much time to even review a movie by Cary Coatney.

I can't believe it's not satanic butter. The day has finally arrived after long gruelling days and hours of production hell (no pun intended) The Constantine movie based on material from one of my most beloved comic books, Hellblazer is finally getting released in theaters all over the world.

I've taken the production of this movie very personally, since it's been given the green light at roughly the same time that I was hired at the studio. My department is right next to script processing - which formats movie and television scripts to fit the studio's fussy requirements that they have to be typed and distributed in a certain way to everyone involved to the production's liking. One script that had been coming back over and over had been Constantine, going way back to when Nicholas Cage was involved with the project and he left after some director, whose name escapes me at the moment, jumped ship because he was a faithful Hellblazer fan, and he'd be damned if he thought Nicolas Cage would make a great John Constantine. So after a strange series of (unfortunate)events(heh), it wound up in Keanu Reeves' hands and he went and sought out a former video movie director, Frances Lawrence to pick up the reins.

In previous blog entries, I've mentioned that I'd been scoping out some of the sets while the movie was being filmed. Some of the sets I've seen were in the midst of construction such as Papa Midnite's secret emporium (where sits an electic chair that opens a portal to a dimension to hell) and other sets such as the psych ward pool therapy room which is used at the climax of the film. The latter was one I managed to peek my head through the door of Stage 16 with or without the kind permission of security or production personal. People involved with the project were very tight-lipped about certain particulars even to their fellow badge waving co-workers, so most of the dirt that I managed to come across in the element of the storylines were from my neighbors in script-processing, who through a astonishing record of 52 drafts during the past several years, never really got bored with it. Perish the thought that they didn't have fond memories of typing it over and over again, since they claim it was a enjoyable script to work with.

I can't ever forget the props. One morning, one of my supervisors and I went to breakfast on the lot for a meeting and it was hard to navigate around the streets because they were these tow trucks bringing in these banged up junkyard cars stacked FIVE HIGH - all doused in some ugly secretion like webs and they were blocking many main access avenues. These were used in part of a scene where Constantine takes a trip to hell by planting his feet in a pan of holy water in Rachel's apartment to find out whether or not her sister really committed suicide by going to this hellish dimension which is nothing but a decimated dystopian future of Los Angeles where these cars are laid abandoned except for some headless demons trying to hotwire in the ignitions. Amazing the sequence is nothing more than lots of green screens and CGI which doesn't last longer than maybe 3 minutes.

I saw the picture last Sunday night- and I wasn't expecting it to be as quite this good. This is what should have been our new Exorcist movie instead of what was released last August. There are so many twist and turn scary moments in this film that the only frightful thing missing is a actual Boston priest convicted of molestation. I almost forgot that this was a movie based on a comic book - and I'm sure the general movie going audience will treat this as a well made horror flick. A few caveats that made me wince in the second half of the movie were a few super heroic bad boy scenes that has Reeves running around with a souped up crucifix tommy gun that supposedly squirts out holy water and some amped up fight scenes that wouldn't seem out of place on a Angel episode. It's examples like this that's going to stir up the pot on the rabid hyperbolic drooling rantings on fanboy messageboards.

Keanu wasn't bad in this role - in fact he makes John Constantine so sardonic and cynical- you'd swear the role was tailormade for him or that at least he's doing a reverse about face on Neo (look for a Matrix: Revolutions parody on that movie's ending towards the end of this picture). The actor who played Papa Midnite was dead on and one of the coolest thing about the movie was they put the DC Comics Vertigo logo in the opening credits that blows away hellish ash cinder with a mighty wind ( I would assume to counteract Marvel's boisterous ego banner in their movies of late).

You swear that you may want to quit smoking and drinking after seeing this movie. This movie should favor well with the Surgeon General that they may want to use snippets of this movie to use for their next ad campaign. There's a real clever gruesome scene between a priest run amok in a liqour store that will haunt me for the rest of my days. If you just dismiss the idyllic inaccuracies such as not Keanu's dyeing his hair blond or that Constantine's faithful cabbie pal, Chas is nothing more but than some little runt with a smart mouth, or that psych ward Ravenscar is in LA and not in England, then what you have left is a genuine good horror movie with a whacked out exorcism opening scene. The whole plot wielding the Spear of Destiny just for sport of Heaven and Hell's siblings is tightly paced.

After the screening that I attended at the Hollywood Arclight, there was a Q & A with Frances Lawrence last night and one of the things he revealed about the movie is that there is a cut of the movie that has around 45 minutes of extended scenes that we are mulling over on whether or not to put that out on DVD. These would includes scene with a character called Elle a woman/half demon that Constantine has a relationship with that was cut out of the film. The director said the cut that is being released is his favorite because it portrays Constantine as a loner. The regular DVD is nearly already completed in the can.

One of the questions that Lawrence is shocked about hearing over and over is why not the British accent? He says after doing so much research with the source material after getting the assignment, he noticed that Constantine has adventures all over the world in places such as South Africa, India, America, the middle east, blah, blah, blah. Why should it matter what accent he has? He also said that if there are further movies in the future, that they'll probably take place in a different setting.

Then we all got T-shirts and all went home. Marv Wolfman and Len Wein were sitting behind me. They always seem get into these things without having to wait in line like everyone else- but it's great to be in such prestigious company sometimes.

~

Coat