Okay so you are going to a nerd place where the nerds are and you are thinking “right I need a costume.” Everybody understands this. If you are going to be in a giant roomful of nerds then clearly the thing to do is stand out, and you can’t do that by wearing a black T-shirt with an ironic saying on it.

So what con costume will you choose? There are so many options. And with options, come mistakes. Avoid any of the following:

Just about anything from Lord of the Rings. If you and three friends decide that you will altogether march around in costume as the Witch-King riding his giant evil lizard dragon thingy, that is about the only thing that is not played out from this franchise.¹ Do not go as Legolas or Aragorn or Third Hobbit On The Left or one of the zombie kings or an orc or an Fightin’ Uruk-Hai or any of the wizards. All the con people will be all “oh, Lord of the Rings, that is SOOOOOO 2006″ and then you will not get nerd-laid, which is mostly the point of going in costume to begin with, right? See also: Jack Sparrow, Ben Affleck Daredevil, Xena, anybody from that show with Hercules where they were in space. I think it was called Hercules In Space.

A really, really obscure superhero. When you are leafing through your comics encylopedias and mint copies of The Complete Handbook To The Marvel Universe and wondering if you will ever find love, ask yourself a simple question: will somebody only kinda interested in comics recognize your costume? There’s a reason you see so many people dressed up as mid-90s X-Men at cons. The yellow-and-green Rogue costume hasn’t been in use for years now but you always see thirty or forty yellow-and-green Rogues at a con cause that is when that girl thought Jim Lee was really cool. If you have to explain that you are Lamprey from the Squadron Supreme to everybody, you are already That Guy. Do not be That Guy.

You can make an exception for guys who are obscure but really funny looking. Like Hypno Hustler, for example. People might think you are one of the Fat Albert kids instead of Hypno Hustler, but you will have a giant Afro either way and they will think that it is awesome.

Razor Fist. Or anybody else who does not have hands, or has replaced their hands with thingies. You know what sucks? Not having hands. Me, I like not having to ask people to help me pee. Maybe you can deal with that. If so, then Razor Fist away! But make sure your razor fists aren’t too sharp or you will probably hurt people other than yourself. Actually you’ll probably poke somebody’s eye out no matter how blunt you make the razor fists. Actually I take it back, you should probably just avoid Razor Fist altogether.

Anybody with an eyepatch. Yeah I get that Nick Fury is awesome and everything, but depth perspective is surprisingly important when you are navigating crowds. You are bobbing and weaving along and then a Wolverine is in front of you but you don’t know how far away his crappy looking fake claws are, and how come every Wolverine costume has the claws popped anyhow? I mean, aren’t the weird muttonchops and maybe a cigar enough to say “I AM WOLVERINE”? If I were Wolverine I’d be totally depressed because everybody thinks it’s all about the claws. I bet he has dreams of things other than clawing. Maybe he wants to open up a traveling sushi restaurant. You don’t know him!

Anybody with a moustache. I’ll just break it to you right now: you can’t pull it off. Goatees are okay. But your traditional pencil-thin moustache, or your handlebar moustache, or your Tom Selleck moustache…? These are a recipe for disaster. The bad kind of disaster. I want you to do me a favour, you go look at your high school yearbooks right now. Find the picture of you when you were sixteen and tried to grow a moustache. It will never get any better than that. At least then you didn’t know better!

The Joker from The Dark Knight. Because you will look like a douchebag.

So, with these guidelines in mind, what is the bestest costume ever?

Obvious!

1. Okay, maybe you could go as the giant flaming eyeball on top of the tower, but that’s one very blocky costume. [↩]

A few whiles back I did a list of “reasons I will love comics forever,” which were mostly awesome panels. I haven’t had a lot of those lately; there just aren’t as many moments in comics these days that make me sit up and go “yeeeEEAAAAAAH!” I don’t know if it’s because they’ve changed or because I have. Possibly it’s both. Aging, whether it be you or an artform, can suck in this regard.

But that having been said, I absolutely adore this bit from Prince of Power #4, a scene that is so totally comics that it really couldn’t have originated anywhere else:

1.) FanExpo is growing so fast it’s honestly hard to believe. Five years ago this was just another shitty corp-con where James Marsters was the headliner. This year? Stan Lee. Nimoy and Shatner. Full editorial presence from DC and Marvel (and promises from both that next year FanExpo will have full portfolio review as per San Diego and New York). A horde of others besides. Don’t get me wrong: in many ways FanExpo is still a shitty corp-con. (And certainly not on par for awesomeoness value with the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, of course.) But it’s one that’s exploding. If it keeps growing at this rate, in two years or so it’ll be the second biggest con on the continent after San Diego; it’s already certainly bigger than anything else other than possibly New York.

2.) Of course, it would be really nice if the con organizers would act like they know they have a rapidly exploding convention on their hands, as opposed to, and I am just saying, a bunch of irresponsible idiots. Last year’s FanExpo had major crowding issues in the larger, southern half of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, so bad that they had to stop selling tickets. This year FanExpo couldn’t get the southern building for the con and, instead of purchasing the reservation from the organization which bought it (something other major cons have done in the past), settled for the smaller northern building. The main hall of the northern building is about half the size of the southern building. When they reached building capacity on Saturday (which happened at around noon), they didn’t tell anybody but let people exit (because there isn’t anywhere worthwhile inside the con to get good) and then didn’t let them back in. If the FanExpo organizers don’t get their heads out of their asses and make sure to get both buildings next year, they’ll have overcrowding issues that’ll probably make this year look wonderful in comparison.

3.) That having been said, the gaming area – off to one side, treated like the idiot stepchild of the nerd community – was full but pleasantly so. Justin Mohareb worked his ass off to provide a solid little gaming convention tacked onto the enormous behemoth groaning beneath its own weight that is FanExpo. It was a lovely experience, especially since I was volunteering and therefore did not have to pay for stuff. Well, if I had wanted to eat breakfast with James Marsters, that would have been extra. But I do not think eggs and bacon become better when you eat them with Spike.

4.) Because I was mostly not doing stuff other than helping people play board games, I didn’t do much con stuff. I generally never do. I made an exception this time and went to the DC Comics “how to get into comics” seminar, which was originally supposed to be Joey DeCavileri’s gig but ended up being Dan Didio’s instead. I want to make something clear before I go any further: whatever my beliefs about Didio’s creative tendencies as an editor, I’m a professional and I know a professional when I see one, and Didio was the consumnate professional. He was polite, honest, friendly, and tried to be as supportive of the attendees as possible without failing to be realistic.

5.) Which is important to note because I didn’t really go to the panel to learn how to get into comics, because frankly I did the research on that years ago and know the score. I went because I wanted to see the competition – this is perhaps not the nicest of reasons, but it’s the truth. The good news, from my perspective, is that a lot of people in that room aren’t interested in writing except on their terms, which is stupid: you have to start compromising to write professionally practically from the first word. You have to cut back against your own indulgences. Somebody commented a while back that one page in Al’Rashad contained the first sentence they considered “Birdian,” and that was entirely on purpose from my perspective; I know my tics better than anybody and I know when not to use them.

6.) A pause from this discussion about writing to say that I saw more people dressed up as the Doctor at this con than I have ever seen anywhere, which is good because the Doctor is a good costume: you get to wear nice clothes and most of them are relatively easy to put together. Only the Third Doctor (lace shirt and archaic jacket), Fifth (cricketer’s dress) and especially Sixth (ugly what-the-hell coat plus whiteboy afro) are a bit hard to manage. Heck, you can convert your Harry Potter costume into a Fourth Doctor easily enough: just don’t put on the glasses and fake scar, and cram jellybabies in your pocket.

7.) Also a good costume: Deadpool. This is because no matter how terrible your Deadpool costume is, people love Deadpool and will say “hey! Deadpool!” at you. If you are very fat and dress up as Deadpool, people might even not call you “Fatpool.”

8.) But I digress back to my original point. Of course, there were the usual band of “my question is HOW DARE YOU SIR” types, but Didio shut them down quite excellently by being both respectful and saying over and over again that their issues weren’t the point of the seminar. The point of the seminar was how to get work for DC in any of the major disciplines. He stressed the often low-paying nature of the gig frequently because he wanted to be honest; he explained to people, patiently, what editors looked for in art submissions multiple times. He said, straight-up, that writers looking to get work at the big two have to basically steal somebody else’s job, which means the bar is higher. Much higher. And of course people got offended by this, because people are stupid.

9.) Writing isn’t a zero-sum game, of course. But publishing, to an extent, is. That’s how things go: there isn’t enough paying work for everybody who wants to get paid to get paid, and if you don’t know that, grow up. Didio was patient with the people who didn’t understand that, as he was patient with the dreamers who want to change the business or grow the field. Dreams like that are great, but they don’t get you hired.

10.) And he was patient with the people who obviously didn’t understand the point of a pitch. Multiple people tried to debate Didio when he brought up “the gun pitch.” I’d heard about the gun pitch before (from Paul Levitz, actually, years ago). The gun pitch is “I want to tell the story of the gun that killed Batman’s parents.” And Didio explained that the problem with the pitch is that it’s not a Batman story, which is of course obviously true: if you’re telling the story of the gun that killed Batman’s parents, it ends when the Waynes get shot, which means it could be a story about any old gun.

11.) The debaters didn’t get it, of course. “Well, I’d like to read a story about the gun that killed Batman’s parents.” But the point of getting hired in any freelance industry is not “I can do this well,” because lots of people can do that. It’s “I can make your life easier if you give me work.” Pitching the gun story doesn’t make anybody’s life easier, because you’re not gonna give that story to somebody you don’t already know and trust.

12.) Another aside: the shopping at this con was miserably bad. When people are essentially paying a premium to get in the door to buy stuff, there should be, and I am just suggesting this, something resembling a sale price. If I can get it significantly cheaper at Amazon, your sale price is probably not very good. This goes for guy selling the Justin Bieber standups too. Especially the guy selling the Justin Bieber standups.

13.) One more thing: if you want to argue with Dan Didio about the gun pitch, it’s really easy. The trick is to make it a Batman story. You can do it in one sentence.

14. “Somebody is killing people with the gun that killed Batman’s parents.” That one’s for free.

Your guest hosts are Luther (again – is he permanent now? I hope not) and Mia Michaels. Enough with the Americans already! Bring back Karen Kain!

Bree and Edgar: dancehall. Second week Bree and Edgar have gotten an urban style, second week it’s been very good, second week Bree has gotten a lot of praise for being merely solid. (Then again, “solid” on this version of SYTYCD is generally better than any other iteration’s “good,” so.) I didn’t quite like this Jaeblaze dancehall as much as the one she choreo’d last year, but this was very enjoyable and a good opener to the show.

Amanda and Denys: contemporary. Perfectly decent routine which was elevated by the dancers’ performances; Denys and Amanda have really good chemistry, and Denys’ stoneface evaporates when he dances in a way that’s really interesting to see. Even though Denys has contemporary training, his extensions are a bit… odd? Not in a bad way, but you can definitely see the ballroominess of his movements, I think. But whatever, this was really impressive.

Kirsten and Jera: paso doble. Oh, dear, Jera’s scowlyface. Francis and Natalli had some really spectacular paso choreography – I mean, seriously great stuff – and the dancing, while not world-class, was certainly very decent, especially considering the difficulty level involved. (That final lift into a backbreaker – what the hell.) But Jera’s scowlyface was so ridiculous-looking as to be parodic, and that’s distracting.

Natalie and Mackenzie: hip-hop. This actually felt like a bit of a house-style crossover, which given that it’s Sho-Tyme choreo isn’t surprising. This was really difficult choreo – and obviously difficult choreo – and Natalie and Mackenzie didn’t quite make it look effortless but they looked good doing the steps and more importantly looked like hip-hop dancers rather than contemporary dancers. Mackenzie was perhaps a bit more comfortable with the footwork than Natalie was, but both were strong.

Claudia and Yonni: foxtrot. This was a daring experiment that went horribly wrong: a slow, dreamy foxtrot set to “Telephone” by Lady Gaga, which is an upbeat song and thus made the entire dance look five times slower than it in fact was (and it was already a slow foxtrot). Naturally, Mia blames the dancers, including Yonni, who has never danced foxtrot in his entire life but hey salsa and foxtrot are both “ballroom” (even though Latin dance and competitive ballroom have very little in common) so he should know how to do that, right? Shut up, Mia. Yonni and Claudia were both perfectly okay dancing this bad idea.

Charmaine and Jeff: contemporary. Your standard Stacey Tookey moment of brilliance with Jeff and Charlene in their element. That is all.

Julia and Jesse: samba. I think I know why TonyNMelanie keeping getting to do choreo for this show despite usually being boring as all hell: they’re very good at isolating the various elements of a Latin dance, which makes it easier to judge a dancer on their merits at performing those various elements. Julia: of course very strong. Jesse: good hip action, but still stiff in the upper body and his work in the paired samba roll was dreadful. Overall routine: boring, as expected.

Danielle and Sebastian: theatre. The judges loved this and I… did not. I thought Sean Cheeseman’s choreography was great (which makes me sound like a judge! “It wasn’t the choreographer’s fault!”), but Sebastian and Danielle both looked clumsy to me: he was falling out of his pirouettes ahead of beat, she stumbled more than a couple of times, and the unison sections were frequently, well, non-united. I thought Danielle’s performance quality in terms of embodying the character was strong, Sebastian less so. Jean-Marc busts out “VID” again because it is the Worst Catchphrase In The World.

Janick and Shevar: krump. L’il C calls himself a “warriographer” about a dozen times (claiming that he just came up with it, uh huh sure whatever L’il C). Janick was very bad in this, I mean holy crap levels of bad. After seeing all the other contemporary dancers tonight nail their hip-hop numbers, Janick was just not up to snuff by any reasonable standard; the force behind her moves was not there and there was no swag in her step at all. Shevar was good. Not great, but certainly capable, and he had the attitude at least.

Kloe and Jonathan: jazz. In the video package Kloe reveals that her nickname is “Orangina” because she routinely wears too much bronzer, and it’s like piercing the veil because, as a guy, now that she has pointed it out I cannot stop noticing it and the entire routine was “god, she’s so orange.” I was lukewarm on Blake’s choreo here; it just felt very standard, somehow. But Kloe and Jonathan danced it well enough and should be safe.

Probable bottom three: Claudia and Yonni, Julia and Jesse, Kirsten and Jera.
Should go home: Kirsten and Jesse.
Will go home: Claudia and Yonni.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

I was watching some clips of ‘The Daily Show’ today, about Glenn Beck and his plan to hold a rally on the anniversary of, and at the site of, Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. For those of you not paying attention to American politics, this is causing a tiny bit of controversy, on account of how Beck is an unapologetic racist who is espousing philosophies that would make the non-violent King want to punch him in the crotch until his balls implode.

But here’s the thing: Beck and his supporters insist that he’s not racist at all, apologetically or otherwise. They might even pop up in this very comments section to do so. They insist that they’re all good, kind-hearted people who are just espousing principles of common decency and humanity, and the Evil Lib’ruls are trying to shut them up by making baseless, unfounded claims of racism that just happen to be supported by easily misunderstood video evidence.

They’re lying, of course. We know they’re lying, because we have the aforementioned video evidence. They know they’re lying, because there’s not a single person in the world who could be so utterly lacking in self-awareness and basic intelligence as to hold a giant rally for white conservatives on the anniversary of a famous civil rights speech, in the exact same place that speech was held, and not notice that there might be some sort of problem. Beck is being totally disingenuous and everybody knows it including himself, but Beck, like Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, Malkin, and Ann Coulter, simply refuse to admit that they’re being disingenuous. They have decided that as long as they’re consistent in their denials, the truth of what they’re denying simply doesn’t matter.

And that sounded familiar to me, as I was thinking about how to describe the phenomenon for this column, and I finally remembered this post from the excellent blog, Kung Fu Monkey. (Please read it, I spent a long time looking through the archives for it. Then I got smart and just googled the keywords. But I digress…) What he describes there is the problem of shamelessness, and he describes it perfectly. Glenn Beck has no sense of shame. He doesn’t see any problem with lying, and confronting him on his lies is no use, because he will simply continue to lie. You cannot shame the man into admitting that he’s a terrible person, because he’s such a terrible person that he doesn’t care that he’s lying about being terrible. And he’s got a national TV show.

Now obviously, this isn’t going to last forever. Most of Beck’s sponsors do have a sense of shame, or at least can put a dollar amount on exactly how much they’re willing to sacrifice in order to support a shameless man, and they’re dropping his show in droves. And the remaining ones are being indicted for fraud, because while there are no laws about shamelessly lying on a national television program, there are laws about false advertising, and coincidentally most of the people still selling ad space on Beck’s show are turning out to be fraudsters. But when Beck goes away, someone else will take his place, because these guys have figured out the loophole in the system. Just deny it all. Even if you know you’re lying, even if they know you’re lying, deny it all. You’re not breaking any laws. The only way they can punish you is with social contempt, and you’re already beneath that.

John Rogers hit it perfectly. These guys have found the exploit that allows them to game the system of civilized conduct. That’s why irony is dead: Stephen Colbert and his fellow comedians are trying to make an absurd statement in a serious way, but all they can ever hope to do is match the stuff Glenn Beck is trying to say for real. You can’t even make fun of these guys, because they’re crazier than the craziest satirist’s dreams. All you can really do is hope that people get smart enough to see through their bullshit, and that’s a pipe dream.

Someone broke human behavior. We need a patch.

Yesterday, I was busy with this.

This weekend I will be at Fan Expo here in Toronto. I’ll mostly be demonstrating board games (in the gaming area, natch) as a volunteer all weekend, because I don’t really care about panels and don’t need that much time to go shopping. If anybody wants to drop by and play some games, feel free.

BunnyM asks:

I’d love to hear your thoughts on assorted nerd musicians, who you think works, who doesn’t, and perhaps why.

This is big in my mind at the moment because I stumbled over Kirby Krackle earlier this week completely by accident, and they are consuming my headspace in way that hasn’t happened since I found They Might Be Giants in the early 90′s.

Wow, I am so not the person to ask about this. I just went through my Zune (yes I own a Zune shut up) and found songs that could be classified as official nerd subgenre (as opposed to music nerds like but isn’t definitively nerdy, like They Might Be Giants): one MC Chris, one Optimus Rhyme, one Lemon Demon, one Ookla the Mok. I have about twelve hundred songs on that thing, so that’s .3 percent of my portablized music.

This is not due to lack of exposure, either. People send me links to nerd music all the time; nerds self-promoting, nerds promoting their friends, nerds sharing whatever nerd thing they found this week they think is awesome. (I just checked my email right now and I have an email from Kirby Krackle circa March of ’09 saying they liked a post and I should check them out, et cetera.) I usually give anything that gets sent to me at least a single once-over if it doesn’t look like spam.¹ I’ve got a pretty wide range of exposure to nerd music, and my honest admission is that it surpasses Sturgeon’s Law quite handily.

Perhaps that’s unfair to an extent, but moments of musical genius are few and far between in nerd music. Clever lyrics, sure, there are plenty of clever lyrics, but only rarely do they raise above the level of simply making the reference and moving on; the more ambitious gambit tends to be “tell Character X’s story in song,” which is marginally tougher. Musical virtuosity is rarer; competency is generally the over/under, or maybe a bit lower.

The takeaway, for me anyway, is this: moments of genuine brilliance in nerd music are few and far between, and certainly they appear at a lesser rate than in non-nerd music. The number of nerd songs I’ve heard that can match up lyrically, to, say, Eminem on an average day? Fingers on one hand. And instrumentally, if a nerd band can be as consistent as Nickelback – friggin’ Nickelback – they’re already in the top quarter of musicality.² Tack on top of that a general lack of interest in listening to a song about any given superhero or video game character if it’s not really, really funny and you begin to understand my lack of disinterest in nerd music generally.

(I know in comments there will probably be a bunch of “well you haven’t heard THIS,” and hey, have at it; maybe other readers will find good suggestions in the comments. But my track record for “well you haven’t heard THIS” is “no, I haven’t… and now I see why.” Four nerd songs on my Zune, people. Four songs.)

1. At some point spam artists will figure this out and penis extension pills will come disguised in links for X-Men fan fiction. [↩]
2. Which is not surprising when the general self-ranking of many nerd musicians is nerd first, musician second. [↩]

So far too many people have asked me to do a post about the “ground zero mosque” controversy, and using that phrase just makes me feel irritated because it’s not at ground zero and it’s not a mosque, but using the phrase at least means everybody knows what you’re talking about.

Here’s my problem: I don’t know what there is left to write about. The right people have already pretty much covered every inch of this issue and why it’s a non-troversy. People have talked about how the “mosque” is in fact a community centre with a prayer room, and how if you want to call it a mosque then by the same logic the Pentagon is a mosque. People have talked about how Feisal Abdul Rauf really isn’t anything but a moderate, peaceful scholar and how his “ties” to radical Islamic movements have been overdramatized or fictionalized. People have talked about how this wasn’t a big deal to anybody until the usual right-wing media suspects decided to gin it up into a big deal months after the fact. People have talked about how other people who should frankly know better (I’m looking at you, Howard Dean) are acting as apologists for bigots. And of course, people have talked about how this is a basic issue of civil rights, and how suggesting that all Muslims have to be “sensitive” post-9/11 is the worst kind of assigning of collective guilt, something that should generally be anathema to anybody living in a modern liberal democracy.

And none of it really matters, because “Muslim” is the new “nigger.” Except in a way it’s kind of worse, because the (almost entirely white) people screaming about Muslims nowadays are the ones who either still use the word or who are the ones who never really understood why it was bad in the first place. Everybody knows at least one white person who doesn’t understand why black people get to use the N-word and why white people can’t; to them, the word being bad is completely understandable. Taboo behaviour is nothing new, after all, and they can understand a new type of taboo behaviour, but what they don’t understand is that the reason for the taboo isn’t because the word itself is bad; after all, it’s just a word. “Nigger” is taboo because when someone who isn’t black uses it, it’s one-word shorthand for “you are less human than me based on the colour of your skin.” Which is why black people can use it, because when one black person says it to another, they’re both black and that shorthand doesn’t apply.

If you don’t understand that – or if you don’t care – then you’re not really going to be concerned about the fact that there are many different types of Muslims and the gigantic majority of them just want to live in peace like everybody else, because the idea of living post-racially (as best anybody can; we all have our inherent biases to overcome) is one that requires introspection and an inquisitive mind. Neither of these traits has been terribly evident in the mosque protesters.

I know this season has a buttload of contemporary dancers (nine girls and seven guys out of 22), and this is something I have complained about previously when discussing SYTCYD. On the bright side, though, Canadian dancers crosstrain more than average. So there is that, at least.

Kirsten and Jera: contemporary. This was a perfectly decent opener for the season, entirely pleasant and entirely unmemorable. Honestly, I am striving to remember anything at all about it now. I know they danced and I remember quite liking their lines. That will have to do. I’m not even sure if it was first. I think it was first.

Claudia and Yonni: salsa. TonyNMelanie make their return to SYTYCDCA with a truly blah piece of salsa choreo, all the more unforgivable because Yonni and Claudia are both Latin ballroom dancers; the tricks could have been far more fluid and I’m one hundred percent sure that Yonni and Claudia could have nailed it as easily as they nailed this piece of ugly choreo.

Amanda and Denys: tango. Amanda’s legs are insane and they go on forever. It’s almost inhuman. She wobbled a bit early on in this – clearly not that experienced at dancing in heels – but recovered nicely immediately after and was rock-solid throughout the rest of the routine. Denys was ridiculously good, as you would expect him to be with this right in his wheelhouse.

Kloe and Jonathan: hip-hop. Kloe was very, very rigid through this entire (quite decent) routine by Sho-Tyme. No flow at all. Jonathan was better; his lower body got into the groove quite well, but his upper body was a bit too loosey-goosey and he wasn’t hitting his releases on the arm movements nearly as hard as he could have done. Still, since the routine was pretty step-centric he still came off quite well.

Charmaine and Jeff: jive. And that’s what happens when you blow a big move and can’t recover from it. Charmaine made an effort, at least; Jeff just collapsed and didn’t find himself until the end of the dance. In fairness, having an uptempo jive married to a “soldier has to abandon his girlfriend to go off to war” storyline is kind of weird to begin with, but they really didn’t come up to par at all.

Danielle and Sebastian: Bollywood. This seemed like a really, really simple routine – just all sorts of basic – and everybody knows choreographers will dumb down routines when dancers can’t handle the steps involved, but how much was involved here? Sebastian calls himself “quirky” about seven thousand times and then the judges all call him “quirky” and then Leah Miller calls him “quirky” and I never want to hear the word ever again, because Sebastian seems like a decent person other than this one really annoying affectation.

Janick and Shavar: afrojazz. Very solid work here as CHEESEMAN~! brings the goods, as he is wont to do. When Janick and Shavar were dancing in unison or on their own, they were just excellent; the only stumbles came on the lifts, where Shavar looked a bit tentative bringing Janick up and the pauses were noticeable. Still, better that he execute them well and a bit offbeat than badly, I suppose.

Julia and Jesse: “new disco.” Once again Melissa Williams tries to invent a new genre and once again it’s just jazz dance with a few imported moves (in this case, disco) and once again her choreography is thoroughly disappointing; we’re now in three years of her choreographing for the show and I can’t think of one piece of hers that’s been more than tolerable. Julia owned her performance, though; she has stage presence to spare. Jesse… not so much, not yet.

Natalie and McKenzie: Viennese waltz. This was very nice. I’m not going to go further than “very nice,” but it was definitely that thing. McKenzie’s rise and fall could be a little more pronounced, and their backs could have been firmer in closed position, but on the whole this was perfectly acceptable dancing.

Bree and Edgar: hip-hop. Ah, yes, Canadian hip-hop, where we can grind it hardcore on stage. Edgar absolutely killed this, every single bit of it. Bree was fully committed, and although she doesn’t have Edgar’s hip-hop technique she definitely made up for it with sheer effort. Jean-Marc busts out the “V.I.D.” catchphrase which nobody in the entire universe likes. Stop it, Jean-Marc.

Shelaina Special Substitute Tara-Jean and Hani: jazz. Shelaina tragically broke her foot and, barring some sort of voodoo miracle, is gone tomorrow night without even getting to perform, which probably means they’ll pull a Billy Bell for her next year and let her try to make top 20 again. Tara-Jean is even better than she was last year, which is the way of things. Hani was very good and should be safe.

Probable bottom three: Charmaine and Jeff, Danielle and Sebastian, Julia and Jesse.
Should go home: Shelaina and Jeff.
Will go home: Shelaina and Jeff.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

…well, the ones that weren’t to music by Warner Music Group, anyway. which is a shame because Warner’s Youtube boycott kills most of the great ballroom and also Justin Johnson’s mindblowing tap solo. (That having been said: trust me, watch to the end. The last one in particular is mindblowingly awesome.)

JR (second) reminds me in style astoundingly of Twitch.

No, you haven’t accidentally mis-clicked on an article for Cracked.com. This is still Mightygodking.com, even if I’m not him and I’m totally stealing a gimmick from Cracked’s lists (that are more like crack than Cracked, honestly. Once you start clicking on them, it’s five hours of timesink before you know it.) Because let’s face it: Lists, especially non-comprehensive lists that you can add onto yourself in the comments section, can be fun.

This time, it’s about film adaptations. We’ve entered a true golden age of film adaptations in some ways, especially when it comes to sci-fi/fantasy films; the improvements in effects technology, combined with the general viewing audience’s increasing familiarity with sci-fi tropes, has resulted in increasingly sophisticated and effective adaptations that bring the book (or comic book) to life. But sometimes, I find myself wondering if “faithful” should really be the defining quality of an adaptation. Sometimes, what works for a book doesn’t work for a movie, and vice versa. By way of counter-example, here are five films that changed a lot, but still made excellent movies.

5. Blade Runner. This one is low on my personal list because, despite it being a beloved cult film that influenced a generation of movie-makers, I really don’t care for it. I’ve watched the theatrical cut, the director’s cut, pretty much every cut they put out, and it always feels like a slow, shapeless mess that wastes Harrison Ford’s talents as an actor (or, arguably, where Harrison Ford wastes his own talents as an actor–Ford can be brilliant, but you can tell when he’s not emotionally invested in a project, and he clearly sleepwalks through this one.) But I’m aware that it is much adored by a great many people, and I can appreciate that even if I don’t share it.

And to the extent that it is good, it’s good specifically because it abandons Dick’s original novel; “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” never really looks at the moral ambiguity present in the Replicants, instead taking the claim that they lack empathy at face value. “Blade Runner” admits the flaw in this entire concept, questioning the morality of gunning down people who look human, act human, and may in fact be more human than human. In fact, I’d say that the less faithful an adaptation of this novel is, the better it could be. (Witness “The Wedding Banquet”, which abandons every single aspect of the novel and is absolutely charming. )

4. The Collector. This is an interesting one, because in terms of plot, it’s totally faithful to the original novel…but the original novel was absolutely unadaptable in its existing form. For those of you who haven’t read it, it’s a story about a kidnapping told first from the perspective of the kidnapper, then from the perspective of the victim, then returning to the kidnapper’s point of view for the finale. The narration manages the almost impossible trick of making you understand the motives of the kidnapper and even sympathize with him at times (the victim’s POV scenes make her out to be every bit as snooty as the kidnapper’s persecution complex imagines her to be)…right before hitting you in the gut with the final sequences.

The film adaptation doesn’t have the ability to do any of that. But with nothing more than a tiny bit of voice-over narration, it still conveys that same sensibility, solely through the acting talents of Terrance Stamp. His body language and facial expressions convey everything that the film can’t show in other ways, and Samantha Eggar strikes just the right note of ambiguity as the victim (it helps that Eggar shot Stamp down for a date when they were at college. Nothing says awkward like actual awkwardness.)

3. Memento. I’m going to try not to gush here, but…the original short story was a very clever idea, expertly presented in an artfully precise short story. Christopher Nolan then took that idea and used it as the seed for a chillingly brilliant film that explores the nature of revenge in a way that almost no Hollywood movie ever does. Seeing that final/first scene, and realizing where Leonard’s quest for revenge has taken him, is a moment far more powerful than any of the various “Death Wish” clones out there ever deliver. Lots of films talk about how revenge is ultimately hollow, but they usually do that as an obligatory wrist-slap after the hero gets heaping helpings of juicy, delicious revenge that we can vicariously enjoy. “Memento” radically departs from that model (which is equally present in the original short story) and is all the better for it.

2. The Princess Bride. I actually read the book before I saw the movie, and I remember watching the whole thing in a state of constant, low-grade dread because I knew how the book ended. I know there will always be purists who feel that the original, unhappy ending is somehow “truer” (I hear the same thing a lot about “The Little Mermaid”, too) but I think that sometimes we need a little bit of fairy-tale in our life. We need happy endings in stories precisely because we don’t get them very often anywhere else, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting them. And “The Princess Bride” is just an unabashedly beautiful film with plenty of heartfelt moments (I defy anyone in the world not to shed a tear the first time they hear Inigo say, “I want my father back, you son of a bitch.” It’s not exactly a “Memento”-level commentary on the hollowness of revenge, but it gets the point across.) Most interestingly, this is a rare case where the writer and the adapter are one and the same person; William Goldman was undoubtedly proud of his novel, but he wasn’t afraid to kill his children if it resulted in a good movie, and “The Princess Bride” is one of the best.

1. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? If you’ve never read “Who Censored Roger Rabbit?”, the novel that formed the basis for the film, let me save you some time: Don’t. It’s downright inept, a muddled murder mystery full of red herrings and an ending that comes so far out of left field that you might legitimately suspect it to be from another ballpark. But somehow, Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman managed to throw away the gallons of bathwater and still keep the baby. Almost nothing remains of the original save the barest bones of the central concept–”Toons”, a private detective, and a murder–but those elements make the story what it is. Every change improves the story, and they’re all done with a keen, aggressive eye towards making it all click with audiences. If you ever want to run a clinic on how to rewrite a book into a movie, this would form a core part of the curriculum.

So that’s my five…or at least, five of my many. As always, feel free to add yours in the comments section!