Well I got a very fun/disturbing post for you all this beautiful saturday morning.

Let me start off by saying that I LOVE Star Wars. I might be the biggest fan of the series ever. Empire Strikes Back is the best film ever made…in my opinion. So I was excited and horrified when I found a musical version of a New Hope. It is awful. I mean it’s really really bad. So bad that its good!

It is in every way everything that you never want to see fully produced on stage because it would ruin every single thing that we all love and hold dear to our hearts. Check out the video below.

I know…it’s bad. I told you it was. If you’re like me than you didn’t finish watching it because you would rather stick chop-sticks into your cerebellum.

Check out the official website here!

If their ever was going to be a Star Wars Musical, don’t you guys think John Williams would write the music?

Well, more to come next week. Love to know what you all think about this, chat it up folks.

“Now don’t get cocky!”

–Admiral Eo

Hey, kids! It’s Akatzen with another Book Report. I hope you didn’t miss me too much last week. With The Undergrounds rolling out the introductions, it would have been downright petty of me to insist on keeping my day reserved for Reports. Besides, I’m looking forward to more of The Undergrounds as much as you are. You are, right?

Anyway, in honor of the newest addition to Semantink, I thought I’d review one of my favorite modern horror fantasy novels. While it may not be all that scary, it sure is a lot of fun! The book I’d like to discuss is Nightwatch by Sergei Lukyanenko.

No, it’s not based on the Rembrandt painting. A movie version of the book came out in 2004, directed by Timur Bekmambetov (director of Wanted and producer of 9). I do have to say, however, that you should read the book before you see the movie, because the two are barely similar and the book is better (And if you accidentally see Nightwatch starring Ewan McGregor, you’ll be even more confused, since that has nothing to do with the novel and is actually a remake of the Danish film Nattevagten). Published in Russia in 1998, the novel took the country by storm, elevating Lukyanenko to the same level of popularity as many other high fantasy authors (in fact, when the movie came out in Russia, it ended up grossing more than The Lord of the Rings).

The novel centers around two groups of supernatural humans (known as Others), who live among normal humans. The two groups are the Light Others and the Dark Others, and a long time ago they fought each other in a vicious war. The Light Others get their power from the positive emotions of people around them, while the Dark Others feed off of negative emotions. During the war, they realized that neither side could get the upper hand and the endgame would be annihilation of both the Light and the Dark, so the leaders of both sides established a Great Treaty, and also an Inquisition composed of Light and Dark Others to arbitrate. They also formed two Watches, the Night Watch and the Day Watch. The Night Watch is a group of Light Others who are in charge of policing Dark Others and making sure they abide by the Treaty, while the Day Watch is Dark Others policing the Light.
All types of magic and myth show up in these books: Magicians, Wizards and Witches, Vampires, Werewolves, etc. are all explained as Others who follow the Light or the Dark.

The reason Others can do extraordinary things is because of The Twilight (some translations call it The Gloom, which might be better, since it helps people avoid comparisons to certain crappy novels written for tweenage girls — and also adults with tweenage mentalities). The Twilight The Gloom is a world existing just underneath the regular world, colors and sound become less vivid, but emotions are heightened. A human becomes an Other when they enter The Gloom for the first time, and all Others can enter The Gloom at will, though at a price. While The Gloom allows Others to perform deeds which seem, to regular humans, miraculous, the price is that Others must give The Gloom their energy to perform these deeds. An Other who loses his energy inside The Gloom becomes absorbed into it, and lost forever.

The book’s protagonist is a Night Watch operative named Anton, a low-level Magician who finds himself caught up in high-level scheming. In addition to the urban horror-fantasy setting of the novel, what makes the book so interesting is the battle between Light and Dark and good and evil. Light Others tend towards the altruistic, acting for the good of the many, while Dark Others tend to act selfishly, acting for the good of themselves. What this book does amazingly well is show how blurry the lines between Light and Dark and good and evil really are.

The book is divided into three parts: Destiny, Among His Own Kind, and All For My Own Kind. Each part is a complete story in and of itself, and while each story feels like a separate entity from the other stories, by the end of the book you can see how they are actually all connected.
Readers familiar with Star Wars (the Force) and Harry Potter (magic) will see many recognizable elements, but their portrayal is a unique and refreshing change. In particular, I appreciated how the legends concerning monsters and magicians were explained to work in this world without completely changing their mythology (the way Meyer did in her books-which-shall-not-be-named).

The film version of Night Watch actually only covers (extremely loosely) the plot of Destiny, the first story of the novel. The movie’s sequel, Day Watch, covers a highly bastardized combination of Night Watch’s other two stories, which is a real shame, since the novel’s sequel (also called Day Watch) is a series of three stories writing from a Dark Other’s perspective.

There are actually four books in the series: Night Watch, Day Watch, Dusk Watch (released in America as Twilight Watch), and Final Watch. Each book provides an examination of good and evil from different perspectives, and as a morality tale the reader discovers how much of a Grey Area between the two sides really exists.

So give ‘em a read and make sure you come back Monday for another read of The Undergrounds.
Until next time.

Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Hello again and welcome to another Geek Of The Week. This weeks post is about more Star Wars. I was cracking up earlier this week when I was reading Mr. Wolfs post about Darth Vader not living up to his badassness. (badassness? it kind of sounds right. Right? Its better than badassedness. ) If you missed it you should definitely check it out, here. There has to be some reader out their willing to combat these assumptions and engage Mr. Wolf in the comments section. Or maybe Mr. Wolf is right Darth Vader really wasn’t that good of a villain.

So not to continue this seriousness  of the previous post. I would like to appease and satiate our Star Wars fans with some fan made artwork. I just found these coincidentally this week when I was searching for answers to this Darth Vader debate. Once I found these images my feverish search for the truth was quelled. I felt that I needed to post these in order to help the rest of yous deal with what has transpired.

These images really crack me up. I don’t have any source material on how or who created these images. I stumbled across these in blog that had these all collected into a gallery without any info. I’m sure anyone of these artists would love to hear what Mr. Wolf has laid down. I like these images because they are pulling from the greats like Leonardo da Vinci. Most of the time fan artwork is a quick and dirty photoshop of the fan and his beloved character standing in some glowy meadow of weirdness. These are much better than that so enjoy and if you want to see the rest of the images, yes there are more, then check them out, HERE.

Darth Vader.  Everybody’s heard of him and were he in a room with you, you’d be quite nervous.  He’s established as one of the most classic villains of our time.  Galaxies fear him, fat-star-wars-fans want to be him, and many would say that he is one of the all time greatest terrors of sci-fi cinema.  So here’s my question:  why?  Do you realize that in his six films, Darth Vader (or Anakin Skywalker) never really won a battle?  Well, maybe one, but that’s debatable…  So why have we given this all-time famous loser been lifted above so many others as an icon of all that is awesome and terrifying?

Lightsabers are not scary if they are not on.

Episode 4: A New Hope — Darth Vader, our villain, opens this groundbreaking film by storming aboard the vessel of Princess Leia, and demanding that she return the plans for the death star!  Remember?

So anyways, throughout the film we learn that Vader has one goal: protect the Death Star from the punk-ass rebellion, led by that skeeze Princess he should’ve killed from the get go.  Alas, Vader fails.  That’s right.  Our cherished villain is unable to protect his master’s WMD from a few X-Wings.  Luke Skywalker, the protagonist, is able to “use the force” and shoot his torpedoes through a ventilation shaft into the heart of the Death Star, effectively destroying it and creating a NEW sense of HOPE throughout the galaxy!  And Vader looks like a failure the first tie we meet him.

Not a great first impression of “awesome and fiendish power.”

Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back — Okay!  Here we go!  This must be the time when the Empire strikes fear and death into the heart of the rebellion!  We’re finally gonna see some Vader kick-assery now!  Turns out that Vader didn’t die in the Tie-Fighter spin-out he caught himself in last episode — though he does seem kind of pissed.  When we see him again for the first time, he’s all anxious about catching Skywalker, while pounding into the planet Hoth.  He fails and the rebellion group escapes (for the most part).  Vader sets a trap with this treacherous mother f**ker named Lando.  It works — sort of.  he catches Han Solo, though that was never really his goal.  Solo was only bait to get Skywalker’s ass to the Cloud City.  Well, Skywalker shows up and Vader tries his darndest to get this young Jedi to join the dark side but fails, but not before taking two things: (1) Vader takes a bit of the boys pride when he admits that he is in fact Skywalkers father (Oh snap!); (2) Vader cuts off his son’s hand — Whoop-dee-doo…  Skywalker has it replaced within fifteen minutes.  Verdict?  Vader tried to convert or kill his son and failed, once more.

This is what dishonor looks like.

Episode 6: Return of the Jedi — By definition of the title things don’t seem to bode well for our not so successful villain.  Here’s the gist: Luke is a badass and ftries to bring his father back to the light side of the force.  It works, barely.  Vader fails his emperor and millions of followers for the last time and pays with his life.  Wow.  At this point, I remember thinking that, while a good story, Darth Vader was the most unsuccessfully, bad, bad guy in the history of storytelling.  He failed, once more.  You can’t help but wish he could’ve at least killed Solo?  Maybe Chewbaca?  But no.  This “badass,” jedi-turned-villain, red-light-saber weilding, “I-only-kill-ancillary-characters,” loser, wrapped in neat black packaging cements himself as the worst antagonist ever.  Darth Vader is forever a loser — though there are three sequels coming…

You’d think that after his death, pictures like this would begin circulating around the empire…

Episode 1: The Phantom Menace — Darth Vader is a kid.  It sucked.  There is an annoying alien that doesn’t di and that sucks too.  Anakin Skywalker (Darth) is able to help out the galactic empire by accidentally stealing a fighter jet and blowing up some stuff on accident.  But he doesn’t win because every character in this movie loses very, very badly.  Go ahead and disagree with me.  You’d be wrong.  Nobody in this movie wins anything.

Episode 1: The Phantom Damn You, Lucas

Episode 2: Attack of the Clones — Okay, here we go!  Anakin Skywalker is a teen filled with angst and we now he turns into “the most powerful jedi ever” (though he won’t ever win anything), so we have got to see some victory now, right?!  Surely Anakin will prove a more worthy “badass” than Vader ever does…  Nope.  Wrong again.  This time Anakin gets his ass (and hand) handed to him by Count Dooku — this old man who fought Gandalf in a tower.  Yoda breaks up the fight and whoops some ass, but this isn’t about the awesomeness of Yoda, it’s about the bitchiness of Vader…  So, Anakin loses.  Again.

Vader doesn’t seem to be out-growing his lameness…

Episode 3: Who cares about Vader at this point? — It doesn’t matter anymore.  By this point in the series my childhood was raped and I felt like a betrayed little boy all alone in an ice cream truck along the coast of a strange european country run by clowns with fangs and bulges in their pants.  Know only this: Anakin loses, get’s all jacked up and becomes Vader, his future loser self after a brief stop at Frankenstein lab…  For eternity, Vader will remain win-less.  Though he was a cool-looking loser…

Pastel FrankenVader woul’ve been better…

So back to my point.  Why was Vader tough?  He never really killed anyone important to the story (technically he didn’t even kill Obi-Wan…) — only the non-importants would ever feel his wrath.  He never did any job that he was given with even a modicum of success.  And his “force” powers were no good against his punk son.  Wow.  Cool.  At least Kahn killed Kirk’s kid.  The Machines got almost everyone in the Matrix (and weren’t even defeated in the end).  The Aliens ultimately killed Ripley.  But in the world of Sci-Fi, Vader shall remain Jedi-lord-BITCH.

Thanks for reading.  And I’ll leave you with this little gem of our dear Vader:

Until next time,

Mr. Wolff