A quick and dirty ambient music melody generator. (Well, it’s a Flash-app tenori-on, to be specific.)

Seriously, all someone needs to do is hook up a beatbox of some type to this and it is on.

…thing that was awesome about 2008: “Propane Nightmares” by Pendulum.

The thing I like about this – well. Obviously it’s a great song, but on top of that…

See, when I originally went into film a long time ago, part of it was because I loved – and was good at – constructing trailers in my head. Part of that was giving a lot of thought to music, what a song was good for in terms of enhancing the visuals in any given trailer.

This song is fantastic for anything involving speed. (I was originally thinking “Fast and the Furious minus the emo boring parts.”) It’s got a driving pulse to it, and it’s upbeat, but there’s also a hint of desperation in it. And it’s heroic, very obviously so.

In short? If they ever make a Flash movie, this is the song to which they should cut the trailer. Just close your eyes, listen to it, and see him doing things at Ludicrous Speed, cutting back and forth between shots of him in super-slow-motion in a frozen world and shots of him in crazy-fast-motion outpacing everything. The song just works for the Flash.

The lyrics even work! “In a trail of fire I know we will be free again / In the end we will be one / In a trail of fire I’ll burn before you bury me / Set your sights for the sun.” TELL me that’s not Barry thinking about Iris.

Anyhow. Fan moment over. Discuss.

“Pork and Beans” by Weezer and “So What” by Pink. 2008 was a really great year for “fuck you” songs, as the general frustration of the world with stupid bullshit finally hit its boiling point, and these were two of the best. Weezer’s song was “Fuck you, I’m a nerd” and Pink’s was “Fuck you, my marriage didn’t work out and who are you to comment.” They both had fantastic hooks (Pink’s “na-na-na-na” in particular will burn itself into your brain) and great musicality, and while Weezer’s video might have been a love letter to internet geeks, Pink’s video had Pink dancing naked and chainsawing down a tree, so at best the “best video” contest between these two is a wash.

The Incredible Hercules. Let’s face facts: 2008 was a remarkably shitty year for Big Two superhero comics. Other than the tail end of All-Star Superman‘s glorious twelve-issue run, what was there? “Event” comics repeatedly failed to impress (something which, at this point, should surprise absolutely nobody) and most superhero comics held up as this year’s exemplars of the form (Jason Aaron’s Ghost Rider, say, or Geoff Johns’ work on Green Lantern, or Abnett and Lanning’s writing on Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy) are barely more than what should be expected out of the form – competent, entertaining storytelling that isn’t particularly revolutionary. The one bright light in all of this was Incredible Hercules, a comic which takes the mythological scope of Walt Simonson’s Thor and marries it to a humourous style not unlike that of Giffen and DeMatteis’ Justice League International (with the same core of pathos that that latter title had). Constantly wonderful and only getting better with time.

WALL-E. The single best film Pixar Studios have ever made – and considering this is the studio with Toy Story 2, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc. and The Incredibles under its belt, that says something. Confident enough to wed most of its storytelling to physical comedy – and physical comedy created by a junky little robot no less – the scope and ambition of WALL-E is only more breathtaking. Yes, Andrew Stanton and company walked it back in public, claiming that it wasn’t “about” consumerism and the ecological destruction of the planet. The rest of us knew ass-covering bullshit when we heard it.

Nation by Terry Pratchett. Nobody knows how many swings at the plate Pratchett has left in him at this point, so that makes this home run of a book all the more glorious; a book which manages to be horrifying without being gory, romantic without being crass, sad without being melodramatic, spiritual without being moralistic, and praiseworthy of science without being annoyingly self-satisfied. As it is a Pratchett book, it is of course also very, very funny and clever throughout, and its message – of the possible comingling and even necessary interdependence of science and religion – is timely and welcome.

Leverage. God, how did John Rogers pitch this and ever have any trouble? “It’s Ocean’s Eleven versus evil corporations who screw over the little guy.” Why did it take so long for someone in Hollywood to throw money at him to get it made? But finally it happened, and this show is a glorious triumph – funny, exciting and most of all you never, ever have to watch it in Idiot Mode because the characters are doing stupid things for stupid reasons. Leverage is a show where the characters, at their worst, do smart things for stupid reasons. Or stupid things for smart reasons. And that makes all the difference.

Furr by Blitzen Trapper. I like music with energetic beats and operatic ambition, so the fact that I’m putting simple, folky, gentle Blitzen Trapper on my “best” list should serve as notice to how brilliant this record was. The title track is a love song about a werewolf, for crissake – just saying that should prepare you for some of the shittiest filk imaginable, but instead Blitzen Trapper makes it work, avoiding cute jokes and writing pure, eloquent poetry, and sounding all the while like a young version of Bob Dylan backed up by The Band. Just fantastic.

Berlin: City of Smoke. Jason Lutes’ epic continues to be absolutely fucking staggering. You should read this comic. Enough said.

In Bruges. Tanked at the box office, as people expected from the shitty advertising campaign that it would be another Lock, Stock-lite English gangster caper film, but instead this was by turns a funny and solemn story about two gangsters (in Bruges) taking cover after a crime gone horribly wrong, a crime that left scars. The comedy comes from razor-sharp dialogue; the pathos from absolutely brilliant work by Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes, and a story that inverts the usual heh-heh-we’re-gangsters tropes and unabashedly, without moralizing, points out that the criminal life really, really sucks at your soul. The best directorial debut of the year, by a country mile.

Northlanders. Brutal, vicious, and utterly fantastic Viking stories that only served to once again remind comics fans of why Vertigo still matters if you’re not interested in medium-dark fantasy (along with the equally fantastic Scalped). Totally hard-ass and uncompromising about both the virtues and flaws of the Viking world, and the lack of an overarching supernarrative means that Brian Wood can do what he does best – stories more connected by theme than by plot. (With Vikings in them.)

Fallout 3. Everybody else has already said everything that could be said about this game, so I’ll just throw in a backhanded compliment: the game is so crazily chock-full of content that I maxed out at level 20 when I was less than a third of the way through the main plot. Dear Bethesda: please to patch game to give more levels please.

Bob on Survivor. You have to love it when a 57-year-old physics teacher (and clearly still a very fit one) dominates the competition challenges over people half his age and invents multiple realistic-looking fake immunity idols to keep himself in play. Bob was the runaway fan-favorite of Survivor: Gabon and easily one of the most dominant players in years, his only failing being an early willingness to trust the wrong people (which merely made him all the more sympathetic).

The Boys. The next time somebody tells me that Garth Ennis just likes to take the piss out of superhero comics and that’s the only reason he’s writing The Boys, I will make them read #15, wherein Annie, undergoing a severe crisis of faith, demands that God give her a sign He exists, and leaves the church disappointed and on the brink of collapse when nothing happens – and then promptly runs into Hughie, who of course is exactly the sign she asked for. Then I will beat them to death with a lead pipe because I am sick to fucking death of people whining about shit that isn’t true. Be forewarned.

The Battlestar Galactica board game. An ingeniously designed board game, featuring the standard cooperative-survival mechanics one would expect given the setting, but with a brilliant twist: some of the players are actually Cylons and they are secretly trying to destroy humanity. The game’s system is designed to make hiding and striking against humanity a thing of subtlety and play-skill; if you’re really good you can even set up other players to take the fall for you, framing them as Cylons using nothing more than your own ability to lie. Similarly, it takes true observational skill to ferret out a really good Cylon player, as well as time your incarceration of them properly. Yes, it’s kind of a shame that Boomer sucks compared to most of the other characters, but other than that this game is seriously just about perfect in its execution.

Chuck. With a promising mini-season start last year, Chuck was already a solidly entertaining little show, but now? Far and away the most improved show on television; the plots are more clever, the dialogue snappier, the action higher quality and the unrealized romance between Chuck and Sarah satisfyingly boiling away behind a thousand actually-good reasons for them to not be together. Also good: the elevation of the Buy-More supporting cast to credits-level importance. Last season I was worried Chuck might waste them in favour of the annoying guy who plays Morgan. This season – well, less Morgan! That’s a start.

Metropolis by Janelle Monáe.

I trust that was self-explanatory, but if it wasn’t – that blend of nu-funk, futuristic soul and utter batshit craziness (it’s a concept album! Set in 2719!) is like what I think Legion of Super-Heroes should be if it were transposed into musical form. And she’s an obvious music nerd. Any other P.Diddy “discovery” diva-lite would want to be all pretty and sexified in their debut video. She wants to be Robot James Brown. How awesome is that?

2008 was a year that produced many singular and outstanding creative works. These were not those.

Waltz with Bashir. One of the most overrated films of the year, the recipient of far too many movie-critic blowjobs to count. Admittedly, the idea of a documentary presented entirely in rotoscopic animation is novel, but one novel idea doesn’t necessarily make a film good, and once you get past the gee-whiz factor of the cartoony Waking Life visual treatment of the film’s material, what do you really have? You’ve got a documentary that’s somewhere in between indulgent and boring, relying on the “oh this is serious stuff” aura that journalists will cheerfully hype about absolutely any inferior creative work related to the ongoing Israeli-Arab conflict. Pretty cartoons do not redeem it.

“Lollipop” by L’il Wayne. L’il Wayne has so much awesome work under his belt that it seems a cruel trick that this, one of the most annoying songs he’s ever written, should be his biggest mainstream hit ever. It’s not catchy, it’s just repetitive.

Countdown. It seems almost besides the point to mention how fucking terrible Countdown was, because everybody remembers how fucking terrible it was. But people deserve to be reminded of how shitty, how absolutely crap every fucking week of this fucking shitty comic was, in case they are considering buying a DC “event” comic. So: Jason Todd spent a long time becoming Red Robin. Then he quit being Red Robin. Mary Marvel became a magic-eating psycho whore. Then she stopped doing that. Then she started doing it again. Kamandi finally got the origin story nobody ever demanded. God only knows how many pages were spent detailing the slow death-by-superdisease suffered by Karate Kid, which would have been compelling if the payoff hadn’t been “they fail and he dies anyway.” (Memo to Keith Giffen: I know you’re proud that you’ve managed to kill off Karate Kid twice, but at least the first time it only took you one issue.) We met the Earth-3 “good guy” version of the Joker. Then they killed him off. Jimmy Olsen fucked a bug. Then the bug dumped him. Then Jimmy Olsen fought Darkseid. Again: Jimmy Olsen fought Darkseid, and they were serious about this, which gives one new respect for George Lucas because as bad as the prequel trilogy was, at least he never had C-3P0 fight the Emperor. And finally, a series ostensibly intended to “count down” to Final Crisis in the end turned out to have absolutely jack shit to do with Final Crisis, which begs the question what the point of this shitty, shitty comic was in the first place.

Four Christmases. I sat through this when a friend of mine’s son and I couldn’t get into The Transporter 3 and we needed to see something. Sitting outside in the cold for two hours would have been preferable to sitting through this lifeless, unfunny waste of time, a movie which just screams out “we only did it for the paycheque” en masse. If I ever see Vince Vaughn in real life, I will punch him in the cock.

Heroes. Okay, yeah, Heroes always sucked, but I am gratified that this was finally the year where everybody else figured out that it sucked too. Masi Oka, one of the few actors on this show capable of more than two facial expressions, got saddled with plotlines and dialogue apparently designed to make everybody hate his character. (It worked!) The writers continue to come up with new ways to not deal with the fact that right out of the gate they created three characters (Sylar, Hiro and Peter) who are massively overpowered compared to everybody else on the show and who need permanent power-downs or else the show’s idiocy level will rapidly become terminal. Of course, before they do that they need to figure out how to write a basic plot worth a damn. Also, if I ever see the guy who plays Mohinder in real life, I will punch him in the cock too.

The AI in Call of Duty: World at War. When I play the solo mode I want to really feel like I’m in the middle of the biggest war of all time. This is tricky when you have American GIs and Japanese banzai solders shooting at their respective opponents while standing literally shoulder-to-shoulder because the GIs are stuck in “shoot pointlessly at enemy” and the Japanese are stuck in “shoot pointlessly at you.” Do not even get me started on the Russians and their propensity to throw grenades at the same time they’re calling for you to charge something.

Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. Introduced “nuked the fridge” into common parlance to complement “jumped the shark,” wherein the former means “movie franchise jumping from beloved icon to joke nigh-instantaneously,” but the phrase could have just as easily been “swing with the monkeys” or “watch the alien spaceship.” This movie is stupid, where previous Indy movies were so pointedly not, and that is the greatest disappointment imaginable. Shia Labeefs’ status as “Next Big Thing In Hollywood, No Really, We Mean It” aside, he sucked in this. Of course, everybody else sucked in it too – even Harrison Ford for god’s sake – so he’ll probably be fine.

DCU: Decisions. What was the point of this comic, anyway? Never mind that simply getting Judd “I’m A Liberal!” Winick and Bill “I’m a Conservative!” Willingham to tag-team-write a comic doesn’t actually ensure any sense of political balance so much as it boils down political positions to ludicrous cariacature (Lois Lane and Power Girl are Republicans because they’re for “strong national defense,” and Green Arrow is a Democrat because he’s a big enviro-hippie!). Forget that the plot made no sense. But seriously, who was going to care about this comic when real life was more important and interesting than figuring out who Batman would vote for? (And before anybody says “well, they scheduled it months before anybody knew Obama was going to be a candidate” – whatever, any real American election would be more interesting than this comic.)

The third season of Dexter. Oh man I have never seen a show go this badly off the rails before. What was previously sharp and savage got dull and indulgent real goddamned fast. And Jimmy Smits? Jimmy Smits is never bad in anything. What the hell happened? Did they put something in his water? Who is poisoning the waters of Jimmy Smits? I will discover who is doing this thing, and I will harm them!

“I Kissed A Girl” by Katy Perry. Any music critic talking about this piece of shit being “catchy” is trying to earn populist cred. Sometimes shitty popular songs are just that and nothing else. The only thing more annoying than the chorus and the lyrics was the ginned-up “controversy” about Katy Perry (WHO IS TOTALLY STRAIGHT EVERYBODY AND IT IS JUST A SONG) endorsing bisexuality. Christ, like James Dobson needed something else to get him hard?

Comics fanboys pre-emptively whining about The Dark Knight getting ignored by the Oscars. Heads up, guys: Heath Ledger is already practically a lock to win Best Supporting and that’s great. But you know what else? The movie is half an hour too long at least, the sonar thing was distracting and hard to watch, and that middle bit where Jim Gordon is dead and Bruce decides to quit being Batman then Harvey says he’s Batman then it turns out it was all a trick to catch the Joker except why did Bruce tell Alfred he was quitting being Batman – that bit made no fucking sense and Christopher Nolan, that clever little bastard, was just figuring we’d all cream our pants over everything else so much we wouldn’t notice and he was mostly right about that. The Dark Knight is a good movie, close to being a great one, but it wasn’t even the best superhero movie this year (that would be Iron Man). So please shut the fuck up.

Because everybody knows the King of Spain vacuums the turf at Skydome.

(ASIDE: Note that a much younger Jian Gomeshi performs in this video. Of course, Gomeshi is now better known as the host of Q a fine show upon which I shall be appearing today around 12:30-1 p.m. on CBC Radio 1, available on Sirius Satellite Radio (channel 137) or via the internet at the CBC website. How coincidental that this should be the case!)

(yes, I have a Zune now. I got sick of spending money on fixing goddamn iPods.)

No actual music video, so I opted for Audiosurf, because Audiosurf is awesome, even if I kind of suck at it.

However, since I only heard “Handlebars” by Flobots like, last week, it has become obvious to me that I am not listening to enough new music lately. Hence this is my call for a Thread Where People Suggest Music To Everybody. Youtube links in comments, please!

(Post by Will Entrekin)

Earlier this week, blogger Kevin somebody-or-other was arrested for posting and streaming 9 songs, all of which appeared to be near-studio perfect recordings of GN’R’s long-awaited 6th CD, Chinese Democracy, on his blog. He appeared in court on Wednesday morning, when his bail was set at $10,000. In June, after he streamed the songs on his website, he apparently told Rolling Stone:

I’m not so worried about that. It’s a legal grey area since it wasn’t for download, it wasn’t a finished product. We aren’t sure who owns the recordings. I feel like I might survive this.

And I’m sure he probably will, but one might wonder precisely how.

Apparently, the songs were only on his website for a little while before two things happened: first, it sounds like the host’s server crashed (which makes sense, because ZOMG NOO GNR!!!111!!!), and second, someone associated with GN’R asked the guy to take the songs down and erase the digital files, which he did (which was why he couldn’t supply the FBI with the original files when they later asked). So, really, no telling how many people managed to catch the audio stream at exactly the right time. In the meantime, after the songs were taken down at GN’R’s request, copies managed to make their way around the tubes. It was one of those copies a friend of mine convinced me to listen to.

I had mixed feelings about doing so. I’ve heard a few people call Axl names for suing the guy who posted them, but I just can’t help seeing the situation from Axl’s perspective: here’s a guy whose name is on two of the greatest rock albums of all time (Appetite for Destruction and Use Your Illusion). I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to have to try to make a follow up to Illusion; both CDs are, first minute to last, terrific. I still listen to them all the time. And Appetite? It’s turbo-charged summer on vinyl, barbecues and beers and bonfires, the groin-tightening excitement of making out for the first time, knowing you want to use your body but having not a clue what you want to use it for. So he’s got both those albums under his belt, and now everyone’s been waiting for the follow-up for, what, like, 13 years or something?

Not to mention all the press he’s gotten in the meantime. People who have probably never actually seen him in real life, even on a stage, writing about his “neuroses” and “depression” and “erratic behavior,” and etc. And I’m not saying his behavior hasn’t been erratic at times, but I am saying I can totally understand why he’d want to become total recluse. With pretty much everyone scrutinizing your every move, would you want to leave your house?

I wouldn’t. I’d sit down in the studio and I’d spend a decade trying to write something better than what I had done before, and it would probably take that long, too, because let’s face it; what he’d done before was awesome. So Axl spends more than a decade trying to get it right, trying to get it better, and then some random dude posts the unfinished work on his random website.

Heck, I’d be pissed, too.

But, then, as a fan, man, do I want to hear what he’s working on. Which was why I had mixed feelings about listening to the songs; on one hand, I’m just dying to. On the other, I know that if they’re not out yet, there’s a reason they’re not out yet, and Axl probably doesn’t think they’re finished yet. And I’ll admit I ain’t musical enough to detect an extra note here or a more produced layer there, most of the time, but then again, I’m not cinematic enough to really know anything about lighting or whathaveyou, and I wouldn’t presume to try to view, say, Quantum of Solace before I sit down to watch it in a theater.

In the end, the GN’R fan in me won out, and yes, I listened to those 9 songs. I thought it’d be neat to do a review of them, but then I thought: as a writer, would I want someone to review an unpublished novel I didn’t feel I had finished revising yet?

Of course I wouldn’t.

Hell, I’m not even sure I should tell you that I thought they were awesome. The kind of awesome, in fact, that’s worth waiting nearly a decade and a half for.

So I won’t. I’m not going to tell you that I think it’s the best thing the man behind Appetite for Destruction and Use Your Illusion (I & II) has ever done.

Not right now.

Maybe when it comes out.

In the meantime, I think we should all wish Mr. Rose luck in finishing what he’s started.

Soon.

(cross-posted to )

(post by not-MGK author Dan Solomon)

Because we all love Lost, but can struggle to find the 22 hours required to re-watch an entire season after we know where all of the plot twists are going to come in, it’s clear we’ve all been seeking the ideal medium for enjoying an entire season’s events in roughly an hour. But which medium is appropriate? Which medium?

Well, obviously, it’s indie rock. Because the Flaming Lips may sing about robots and wizards and Superman, but even they aren’t quite nerdy enough to pen songs with titles like "Be My Constant" or "The Ballad of Sayid Jarrah". Brooklyn’s Previously On Lost has taken up the slack, complete with nasally vocals and a coke-fueled rhythm track. If you’re a Lost fan who’s secretly lamented the fact that you couldn’t dance to "There’s No Place Like Home, Part I", I hope that this provides you with what you never even knew you were missing.

Also, maybe y’all have seen it before, but the (severely missed) Mike Wieringo posted a series of Lost-themed sketches on his DeviantArt page in 2006 that I just found. They’re great, and now this post’s a two-fer.

One nice thing about a week with little internet and having to do a lot of work in my room meant that I finally had time to catch up on Doctor Who after losing track of it early through David Tennant’s first season. Now, Doctor Who is pretty goddamned great teevee, all things considered.

However. There do exist purists who feel that the Doctor Who theme must remain purely in its electronic, creepy form, as per the early serials, as follows.

This is a valid viewpoint to take, because come on – that is near-perfect sci-fi television music. (I actually prefer the Baker theme to the higher-pitched Peter Davidson theme, and I was introduced to Doctor Who with the Fifth Doctor, so that should stand as testament to how good the Baker theme is.) There’s a reason it’s iconic; even today it sounds futuristic and vaguely unsettling. It is great theme music, and I don’t think anybody can disagree with such an assertion. However, just because that interpretation is great doesn’t mean the more orchestral spin that was created for the 2005 revival is invalid.

This is a different interpretation on the classic, but the eerie Theremin is still there, predominant as it needs to be to maintain the integrity of the Doctor Who sensibility; the driving strings and drums beneath that eerie electronic slidewhistle serve to give the tune more intensity, which is very much in keeping with the mindset that seems to create the modern Doctor Who show – “still weird and wonderful, but now with an extra daily helping of FUCK YEAH.”

But there is such a thing as too much of that.

Electric guitars? Replacing large chunks of the theremin with a horn section? This is far and away the worst Doctor Who title sequence ever, managing to be even worse than the schmoopy, cloying, synthpoppy Sylvester McCoy sequence.

PLEASE FIX THIS IMMEDIATELY! Or I will be forced to stop illegally downloading the show!

In a more serious vein considering superhero movies (as opposed to previously), some random thoughts about where the origin story is appropriate for a superhero movie, and where it just isn’t.

GREEN LANTERN: This is probably the last of the really good “movie is the origin story” superhero movies, because Green Lantern’s origin, when told right, is really fucking awesome. To wit:

1.) Hal Jordan in exciting test pilot plane sequence
2.) Abin Sur “interrupts”, gives ring
3.) Fun stuff with Hal using ring, maybe fighting criminals who have, say, golden battle armor for some reason (so to explain ring’s weaknesses).
4.) Sinestro-as-a-Green-Lantern shows up, starts training Hal on Earth then in outer space. Tentative student/apprentice friendship emerges!

This is the obvious first act. Then you go into the balls-out SECOND act:

5.) Trip to Korugar. OH SHIT it turns out Sinestro is INSANE, because Sinestro thinks the need to keep “order” means you need a fascist interstellar government. Plus, Hal has no way of knowing that Sinestro doesn’t represent the Green Lantern ethos, so now it’s him against ALL the Green Lanterns, he figures.
6.) So Sinestro has an interstellar battle fleet and he’s going to restore order to the universe sector-by-sector, planet-by-planet. STARTING WITH EARTH because he wasn’t impressed with it and because Hal, who is Hal, resists him.
7.) Sinestro reveals that it was HE who killed Abin Sur, because Abin Sur found out what he was doing and was trying to stop him.
8.) Sinestro uses his awesome will to strip Hal of his ring and dumps him OUT OF A FUCKING AIRLOCK into SPACE.

And finally you get the awesomer than awesome THIRD act:

9.) In the seconds before Hal dies of space death type thing, he gets picked up by a stealth shuttle piloted by Katma Tui and Tigorr. (YES FUCK YOU IT IS MY GREEN LANTERN MOVIE AND I SAY TIGORR IS IN IT.)
10.) Whoops, Sinestro finds them on Korugar and Hal Jordan uses WILLPOWER to get his ring back and they have a ring-fight which is AWESOME and Hal knocks Sinestro for a loop long enough…
11.) …for Hal to go into space and really GO TO FUCKING TOWN on the interstellar space fleet with his power ring. I am talking ten-mile-long buzzsaws, swarms of a billion boxing gloves, enormous star-devouring Bea Arthurs, you name it.
12.) But Sinestro shows up for ROUND TWO and they ring-fight EVEN MORE and at this point everybody watching the movie should have an enormous erection because it will be JUST THAT GODDAMNED COOL.
13.) And then the Guardians show up and you play the “wait, what if the Guardians are on SINESTRO’s side?” to the hilt until Tomar Re and Kilowog show up and say “fuck YOU Sinestro” and Sinestro gets exiled to the Anti-Matter Universe and Katma Tui gets the power ring and replaces him and then the movie makes eleventy billion dollars.

I’m of course being exceptionally facile here, but the point stands that the Green Lantern origin story just works in a way that a lot of superhero origin stories don’t because it – much like Iron Man – is fundamentally a movie about the superhero origin story as self-discovery, about the realization of greatness (Tony Stark and Hal Jordan share one thing in common, traditionally – they’re both, as people, way above average on the “ability” scale) and the responsibility borne with it. Origin stories work as movies when the origin makes you want to root for the hero.

FLASH: Now, this is fundamentally the opposite of a Green Lantern movie right here, because Flash’s origin story is shitburgers from a movie storytelling standpoint.

1.) Meet Barry (or Wally)! He’s a decent guy! He’s a cop!
2.) He gets zapped with chemicals and lightning!
3.) So he becomes a superhero!
4.) And fights, I dunno, Gorilla Grodd or Captain Cold or whoever.

Compelling, frankly, this is not. You can layer on stuff about “it’s tough to be a decent upstanding guy in the world” but Christ, that’s a shitty movie right there because every day your audience has their own shit to go through and you don’t want to paint Barry (or Wally) as a whiner when he can run at the speed of something really fucking fast.

Does this mean a Flash movie is unworkable? Of course not, but it means you have to take a different approach. I gave Speed Racer a well-deserved heaping of shit because it was really just a bad movie, but one thing it did right is that it didn’t bother explaining why Speed Racer lived in this crazy-ass world with these crazy-ass cars driving on crazy-ass racetracks, and also why they had a monkey. The point is that if you start your movie with the premise “this is how things are,” audiences will, more often than not, be fine with that so long as you suspend their disbelief and never question your own narrative.

Applying this to a Flash movie allows us to use the strongest element of the Flash concepts, namely the heroic legacy model. In short, a Flash movie has Barry and Wally and Jay in it – Barry as the star, Wally as the sidekick, Jay as the elder statesman. You want Professor Zoom as the main villain, although you can of course throw in any number of Rogues for color. And most importantly, you establish that Barry has been the Flash for years and everybody knows him and is used to him and Jay as the elder Flash and Wally as Kid Flash.

And the movie is about Barry’s last adventure as the Flash, ultimately joining the Speed Force and becoming the lightning bolt that gives Wally his powers. (You probably want to retcon Jay’s origin just to make it closer to Barry and Wally’s for the purposes of the flick.) Wally and Jay can help defeat the Big Bad, and somewhere in there Zoom dies, but the important thing is Barry sacrifices himself to save the world. Then, at the end of the movie, Wally puts on the Flash outfit for the first time, says “The Flash lives again!” and that’s your triumphant ending right there – a hero has died, but the legacy continues.

People will eat that shit up with a fork. It’s the superhero story as Greatest Generation-style narrative of shared sacrifice and shared victory.

(And you’ll note, incidentally, that this sets up the sequel for an almost-straight retelling of Mark Waid’s “The Return of Barry Allen” story, which continues the theme of heroic legacy while being an awesome story that translates incredibly well to a filmed narrative.)

ALSO: If and when they ever make a movie for The Flash, they must set a sequence to Madonna and Justin Timberlake’s “4 Minutes,” because that would be awesome.