THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN

Now complete with more brooding and teen angst. Exactly what I was worried about.

Also, another origin story just in case you didn't get it the first time.

(It takes a while to load, because God forbid Sony put it up on a site that can handle all the traffic. They don't want just anyone to be able to see the trailer for a movie they've spent tons of money on and is their flagship cash cow.)

*EDIT* There we go. Good old Yahoo!.

ANOTHER LIFE

Half cold, truck stop coffee. Parking lot calisthenics. 5 am sunrise over desolate cornfields. 9 hour night drives to avoid over-heating the A/C. Midnight pool parties. Every mall in every city. Stealing from Whole Foods. Sneaking in to movie theaters to kill time. Getting lost in Compton. Ditching the band for baseball games with a girl you only knew from the Internet. Feeding ducks. Hitting the beach no matter how cold. Wandering strange streets looking for coffee shops.

Those were the days.

ATLANTIS

I've always been fascinated by space travel. It probably dates back to when I was younger and STAR WARS dominated every aspect of my imagination. As I got older, I was still interested in it, but kind of stopped following what was going on in the world of space exploration. I'd still read up on every NASA mission a little bit, but it didn't dominate my thoughts the way it did when I was 8 and running around my basement with a CHALLENGER toy.

Then, in February of 2009, when I read this article by Chris Jones, I started becoming a little bit obsessed with shuttles, rocket ships and space exploration all over again.

Since then, I've been toying with all sorts of stories and ideas revolving around the subject and when Atlantis launched the other day, I started thinking about it even more and started looking around the Internet and finding all kinds of stuff about it. It's been a little bit depressing to read about, since this generation doesn't really care about it the way I did when I was little.

I wonder if public schools took a break in whatever they were teaching that day to turn on the launch. I never missed one when I was in school. But that was a different time.

This is from an astrophysicist in New York as he vented about the end of NASA's shuttle program.

I know there's only so many times we can send people up to space only to come back either empty handed or with barely a sliver of new information, but it's still a little sad. It's hard to put something like this in perspective because space shuttles and NASA launches have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.

Of course there's been rough times, specifically in 1986 when the original CHALLENGER exploded a little over a minute after it launched and in 2003 when COLUMBIA disintegrated upon re-entry. I remember sitting on the floor of my Grandma's living room watching the news report, even though at 6 years old, I was still too young to completely understand what happened. It was probably worse for my parents who were in Florida at Disney World and saw the debris falling from the sky as they got off the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

But still, even with those accidents, and the inherent danger that came with launching a crewed flight to space, the space program has been huge part of this generation. Unfortunately, now that's over.

One of my favorite writers, Warren Ellis, a man who probably spends way more time than he should reading about space, technology and the future chimed in about it on his blog the other day.

And unfortunately, he's 100% right about everything he said.

Still, sad to see it go.

BAT FOR LASHES

Way, way late to the party on this one, but I quit watching music videos years ago. So, I have to thank my man J. Colby Smith for showing this to me. Really dig it.

THE HANGOVER: PART II

THE HANGOVER is on HBO and is playing quietly in the background while I'm writing this. When I saw it for the first time, I had no idea what to expect. The trailer made it seem pretty funny and worthy of my eight bucks. I got exactly what I wanted out of it and now it's one of those movies that I'll click on for background noise while I'm on the computer. It's not a great movie, but it does what it was intended to do. You just can't think about it too much.

That said, I wasn't excited to see the sequel at all. What worked best about the original is that it came out of nowhere—no hype and no expectations to live up to. That wouldn't be the case this time around.

After it was released and critics were bashing it left and right, I was kind of set to defend it a little bit. The director, Todd Phillips, only knows how to make one movie. If you look at his oeuvre—actually, I take that back. Let's say 'body of work' instead. Oeuvre should be saved for people with talent.

If you look at his body of work, every film he's directed has basically had the same premise, the same set of characters and the same beats. ROAD TRIP, STARSKY AND HUTCH, OLD SCHOOL, SCHOOL FOR SCOUNDRELS, DUE DATE are essentially the same. They've got funny moments, but those funny moments are largely due to the talent he's able to assemble. So I was all set to go with that and use that as a basis for an argument about how people were being a little too hard on the sequel.

Then I actually saw THE HANGOVER: PART II.

Now I take it all back.

It is honestly one of the laziest, most uninspired movies I've ever seen. And I've seen some shit.

Phillips and his writers didn't even try. I know that's the biggest complaint, but really, they didn't. At all. If you played part one and part two at the same time on two different screens, I can almost guarantee it would look 90% the same the entire time, beat for beat. They told the same type of joke but just a little worse, they did the same pseudo-action bits but just a little lazier.

It was really kind of depressing.

I wouldn't have minded watching a movie where I got to hang out with Stu, Alan and Phil for another couple of hours but this wasn't it.

And unfortunately, since THE HANGOVER: PART II has already pulled in almost a quarter of a billion dollars, a part III is all but assured.

That also means that the people who loved both installments will surely love the third and we'll have to listen to these idiots talk about how THE HANGOVER TRILOGY ranks up there with the best of them.

Those people are why America is doomed.

WUGAZI

A lot of times I don't really care about mashups. There are a lot of them out there and a lot of them are absolutely terrible. Every once in a while you'll find a good one (like the Katy Perry/Disembodied one that I'm still ashamed to admit I like).

The Jay-Z/Beatles Gray Album is probably the most popular and the one that shot amateur mashups to another level. Now they're everywhere. About once a week there will be a link to a new one and most of the time I could care less, but I saw the title of this one and couldn't pass it up.

Wugazi.

Yes, that's Wu-Tang Clan and Fugazi thrown together. The Rza, the Gza and the Old Dirty Bastard would probably be all about it if they were to ever come across it. Ian MacKaye, on the other hand, I'm not so sure about.

Either way, it's out there. The first 'single' is "Sleep Rules Everything Around Me" and a full album, 13 Chambers, is set to hit the Internet next week (7/13/11). They have a Tumblr (who doesn't?) so keep an eye on that for more.

Not going to lie. I'm pretty excited about this. And that doesn't happen very often with these things.

 Sleep Rules Everything Around Me by WUGAZI

THE ROCKETEER

I've written about how much I like The Rocketeer before, and it'll only get more apparent in the future. That's why I loved this video so much. A team of French animators put it together to celebrate the memory of creator Dave Stevens and the 20th Anniversary of the Disney movie of the same name.

I hope Disney takes a cue and John Lasseter tells Pixar to get to work. But since that will probably never happen, this will have to do.


The Rocketeer 20th anniversary from John Banana on Vimeo.

THE TRUEST SENSE OF THE WORD

Fuck Ryan Dunn.

Let's just get that out of the way right off the bat.

Ever since the JACKASS star died in a car wreck Sunday night, the Internet has gone into a "Oh, what happened to Ryan Dunn was such a shame. He was SUCH a good guy" frenzy.

And you know what? He probably was a good guy. I'm not going to lie, I've been a fan of his since the CKY skate video days. My friends and I would watch it almost nightly, wherever we were. My friend Clark was in the hospital with a broken back about 10 years ago (from his own CKY stunt of trying to slide down the bubble over the U of U practice field) and while we were waiting for him to get out of surgery, we popped that video in the waiting room VCR and forced everyone to watch it.

I saw all three JACKASS movies in the theater and made sure to catch each episode of the show when it aired on MTV. I loved those dudes. They seemed like cool guys, guys that we'd want to hang out with. And that was their appeal. You wanted to hang out with these dudes, wanted to be friends with them, wanted to be in on their crazy stunts. And they made a fortune from that. They made more money than I'll ever see and probably had more fun than I'll ever have. I can't knock them for that.

But I can knock Dunn for getting drunk (.196 Blood Alcohol Level which is well above the legal limit of .08) leaving the bar and deciding it was a great idea to drive his Porsche 130 MPH with someone in the passenger seat. Because that's just a shitty thing to do.

Maybe I have a biased opinion, though.

A friend of mine was killed when a drunk driver entered the exit ramp of the freeway and hit her head on, killing her instantly. All my high school friends spiraled straight down to shit with alcohol, heroin, cocaine and whatever else they could get their hands on. Not even one of my closest friends dying of a drug overdose stopped them. They all ditched the funeral as soon as possible to try and get higher than they already were.

Those are the things that made me who I am today and why I'm still straight edge.

To be honest, I don't care if you drink, smoke weed, drop ecstasy or shoot heroin. It's your life. Do what you want.

But I'm also not going to feel bad for you when it bites you in the ass. It's all in the game and those are the risks you take.

And that's especially true when it comes to driving drunk. I have absolutely no tolerance for it and you deserve every bad thing that happens to you if you do it. You won't get any sympathy from me.

Which brings us back to Ryan Dunn. I know people are sad because it feels like a guy we all knew just died and that hurts.

But the bottom line is that he did it to himself. He did it selfishly and recklessly and behaved like a Jackass in the truest sense of the word.

END OF DAYS

This blog is about to get a lot nerdier.

Since the summer of 2004 I've been freelancing for City Weekly. I've done a few things for them like album reviews, band profiles, comedy writing and event previews but what I mostly did was write about comic books. For a long time it was a steady rotation of once a month, just like clockwork. At first it was strictly reviews and usually went like this - one 450 word piece and two 100 word capsules. Mostly I tried to review comics that I really liked and thought more people should be reading. I never liked reviewing shitty comics because to me, the point was to get as many people reading comics as I could. So that meant highlighting all the good stuff that was out there and I thought I did a pretty good job of that.

One of my favorite stories about this was, one week after I had written a review of the awesome NORTHLANDERS by Brian Wood (which just got cancelled and inspired another post to come) my friend Josh was at the comic shop talking to the owner. The door opened and this guy that looked like he didn't read comics came walking in holding something in his hand. He held it up and it was a copy of my review, ripped out of the City Weekly and just said "I want this book."

Hearing things like that made me happy. There's been a few other times I've gone in to the comic shop and the owner would tell me that something I wrote was selling a lot of books and it would make me feel good.

Once the rotation of my column started getting more and more irregular, I started branching out a bit more and writing pieces that were more essays than reviews. I'd pick something that was going on in the industry and write about it for a bit. It was fun, but since I never had a clear idea of when I was going to get to write, I decided to steer clear of posting comic related stuff on trevorhale.com just in case.

But last week I got an e-mail from the A&E editor, the guy who's essentially been my boss for the past 7 years telling me they'd signed a deal with Big Shiny Robot to take over the Geek Culture aspect of the paper which included comics.

I was a little bit bummed, but not shocked. Bryan Young, one of the founding editors of the site has been working hard for a long time building that site in to what it is today and he's done an awesome job of it. I can't say I'm the biggest fan of some of the writing on the site, but I do respect the guys, what they do and how hard they've worked at it.

I'll still be freelancing from time to time for City Weekly, but that also means that this site is going to have a lot more comic related stuff on it now.

Just a fair warning.

BREAKING BAD

Been home all day burning through Season 3 of BREAKING BAD. If you like awesome television with fantastic storytelling and actors that kill every moment they're on screen, you need to be watching this show.

And when you're all caught up, if you're a story nerd like I am, read this interview with the show's creator Vince Gilligan. Lots of showrunners come off as pretentious dicks, but this guy is so humble that it makes the show that much better.

But don't read it if you're not all caught up, because they talk about some pretty major aspects of Season 3.

Now I've just got to bide my time until Season 4 starts next month.

RELAXING

The airport runway on the island of St. Maartens is remarkably short, ending just feet away from Maho Beach. Since the runway is just barely long enough for jets to land, pilots have to fly extremely low, nearly clipping the fence as they descend. Tourists ‘relaxing’ on the beach often have planes pass a mere 30 feet over their heads.

FINALLY

The NBA Finals start tonight. This is the first year that I've managed to watch most of the games in the playoffs (which have, for the most part, been fantastic) since I got back into basketball in a big way four or five years ago. And it kind of pains me to say it, because this is the first year the Jazz haven't been in the playoffs in a while, too.

But even without a clear team to root for this year, I've loved all the games. I skipped out on a wedding party to watch Memphis and San Antonio's overtime game, woke up from a nap just in time to see Brandon Roy come back from the dead and kill the Mavericks in the fourth quarter, watched as Scott Brooks let his young team pretty much do whatever they wanted only to watch them get repeatedly knocked down by a veteran group that knows better.

I changed my tune on the Celtics while watching the Basketball Jesus drain momentum-killing threes coming off a high screen, then watched as their season ended when KG suddenly showed his age and the miles he's put on his body since coming in to the NBA at age 18 caught up with him. I watched as Amare struggled with watching Carmelo become the new top dog in NYC, and watched the Magic fall apart in the first round. I reveled in watching the Lakers get swept by a team that everyone predicted would be gone in the first round. I watched Derrick Rose play magnificently at first only to get shut down when it mattered most.

It's been an awesome eight weeks of basketball and I'm sad to see it go—especially since it looks like the NBA is on the same path as the NFL and there won't be anymore basketball for a long, long time.

But the Finals start tonight with the Dallas Mavericks facing the Miami Heat.

And no matter who wins this series, we all lose.

We all lose for one, big, six foot eight, 250 pound reason—LeBron James.

We all remember what he did last summer when he took his talents to South Beach, putting a target on his back and essentially making him the new villain of the NBA. I wrote a little bit about it then, but haven't much cared to since. Because everywhere else you go, that's what was dominating the news, whether it was Yahoo!, ESPN, Fox Sports or one of the millions of basketball blogs.

But here we are on May 31, with game one tonight in Miami and there are two ways this plays out. The first is that the Heat lose. If this happens, Dirk and Kidd get their rings and Nowitzki comes off "the list" he's on with Barkley, Malone and Marino as the greatest players to never win a championship. But that all goes away after about three days and we spend the entire summer listening to the talking heads on TV and radio and reading the sure to be dozens of columns all saying the same thing—even with Dwayne Wade, LeBron still couldn't get it done. How he'll never live up to his title of 'King James.' They'll tear him apart all summer long and well in to next season, too. It'll be the top story for months.

The second, is that the Heat win. If this happens, those same people will spend the next six months tearing LeBron James apart, saying that he couldn't do it alone and how he'll never rightfully earn the nickname 'King James.'

Either way, get ready for another summer of LeBron.

And I know last year, when I sort of predicted a Laker-Heat final, I said I'd root for Los Angeles, just to watch the Heat lose, but I changed my mind. There's one person in the NBA I've hated for well over a decade, and I'll be pulling for Miami for one small reason.

It'll be way more fun to see Mark Cuban lose than LeBron.

THE FUZZY PACK

This movie will be fantastic.

ISOLATION

I posted these a few months ago, but they kept getting taken down and I kind of gave up trying to keep up with all the new links and how to find them. But they started popping up again, so I'm posting them until they get taken down—which will probably be sooner than later.

"Gimme Shelter" is one of my favorite Rolling Stones songs (how could it not be, though?) and I think these isolated tracks are just truly fascinating. They're just totally stripped down and raw and you can hear every little nuance and every little mistake they make. The lead guitar track is the best example of this, but it's not up anymore. I'll post it as soon as I can find it.

Vocals Only


I'm not the biggest fan of The Beatles "Helter Skelter" when it's played by the full band, but the vocal track alone is one of my favorite things to listen to. You can just hear how much fun Paul is having singing and it definitely translates.

Vocals Only

FRIDAY THE 13TH @ CATHEDRAL TATTOO

11:30 PM and still a full house

Last week it was Friday the 13th. While the day is normally associated with bad luck and awesomely terrible horrible horror movies, a lot of tattoo artists have turned the tables.

Cathedral Tattoo (249 E. 400 S. in Salt Lake City) decided that they were going to do small, flash walk-ins all day long and spread good luck instead of bad. They had tons of custom designs for people to choose from starting as low as $13 and ranging up to $80. Seemed like a great idea and on top of that, some of the proceeds for the day would be going to Cause For Paws, an organization to help find homes for shelter animals about to be put down. They advertised it on the Internet, cleared their books and hoped for the best.

They had no idea what they were in for.

Dan C in the coveted #1 spot

When the 5 employees (4 artists and a shop manager) showed up an hour before the doors opened, there were already around 40 people waiting outside. They set up shop, devised the ticketing system, opened the doors and bedlam ensued right away. Okay, maybe not that bad. Everyone was patient and understanding while Jake, CJ, Tyler and James got to work.

I showed up around 3PM and there was still a line around the workspace that stretched out the front door. I grabbed a ticket for Jake (number 30) and decided to head home for a bit, rather than wait at the shop all day. Before I left, I asked Mike what number Jake was on, he consulted the sheet, looked at me and said, "seven."

I laughed and headed out. Ran a few errands, cleaned my apartment a bit, took a nap, showered, grabbed some dinner and went back down to the shop around 9PM. Jake was on #19. Not having much else to do, I decided to stick around and hang out.

The shop stayed full the entire night and by the time it got close to my turn, it was 1:30 in the morning. By that time, everyone was worn out, but pressing on. Knowing I had to be awake and at work in a few hours and that there were still a few people after me, I gave up my spot so they could get tattooed instead.

As much as I wanted at Friday the 13th tattoo, I decided I'd rather just get a bigger better tattoo another time—a time when I didn't have to wake up three hours later. So I made an appointment, bid everyone at the shop adieu and headed home with no new zaps anywhere.

While I don't have anything to do with Cathedral Tattoo professionally, those dudes are some of my closest friends and I was genuinely thrilled to see how many people wanted to spend their Friday waiting around to get tattooed. Everyone that I talked to that night was gracious, respectful and understanding of the wait and I never saw anyone pitch a fit and storm out. While there were a few people that never came back when their number was called, even more stuck around and gutted it out.

By the end of the day Jake, CJ, James and Tyler had tattooed for nearly 14 hours straight and collectively done close to (if not a bit more than) 150 tattoos.

Everyone had fun and good luck had been shared with tons of grateful people. Here's hoping they do it again on the next Friday the 13th.

And if they do, I'm camping out the night before.