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April 24, 2006  There's a fairly amazing trademark battle going on between songwriter/producer Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf about whether Meat Loaf has the right to call his next album Bat Out of Hell III. The story goes something like this: A few years ago they were going to do the album together, Steinman gave Meat Loaf a few songs, then Steinman decided he didn't want to produce it and/or finish writing it. So last year Meat went ahead and started recording the songs anyway in L.A. with producer Desmond Child. Steinman got mad and decided he didn't want to be involved at all, even though there are theoretically some new Steinman tracks on the record, which is now nearly finished and due for release later this year. Steinman registered the trademark to Bat Out of Hell in 1996, and seems to have the stronger legal arguments here ... If you wade through Meat Loaf's summary judgment motion, he makes a few questionable arguments about his contributions to the Bat Out of Hell franchise, including a claim that he came up with repeating the end section of "Bat Out of Hell" and provided the storyline for "Paradise by the Dashboard Light," neither of which would probably even rise to the level of a songwriting credit. Meat's only good argument is that Steinman always intended and acted like they co-owned the trademark, not requiring Meat to get permission for various things even after the trademark was registered. But his biggest problem is that he didn't pursue his opposition of the trademark in 1996, when he apparently wrote a letter against it but then didn't oppose the final registration. In the legal world this would prove that he knew about it and should have pursued his arguments then, which make his proceedings now unlikely to succeed because of a legal doctrine called laches, which is similar to a statute of limitations. This is all detailed in Steinman's response and motion for summary judgment. All of this leaves Bat Out of Hell III somewhat in limbo. Numerous unconfirmed reports say that there are 8 Steinman songs on it and 3 or 4 non-Steinman tracks. And although there is rampant speculation among fans about what the 8 "new" Steinman tracks are, my guess is that Steinman and Meat Loaf came to some agreement about these original songs for Bat III a while ago--including "Only When I Feel," which Meat sang on his last tour--and Steinman can't prevent Meat from using them. My other guess is that the trademark action is a sideshow, that Meat will release the album as Bat III anyway, Steinman will sue, and the whole thing will be stuck in courts for a long time. One can only hope there's something worthwhile on the album. In other news, there was a wonderful article in the Times over the weekend about the rise and fall of New Orleans hip-hop. When I did Teach for America in 1998, I was lucky enough to witness the peak of this interesting musical episode ... What I loved about it was the way the best bits of New Orleans rap cobbled together urban dance beats, so-called "bounce" rap music, and more serious gangsta rap music into something more palatable than all three individually. Tracks like Juvenile's "Back That Azz Up" and Master P's "Make 'Em Say Uhhh!"--along with more obscure artists like DJ Jubilee--captured some sort of collective moment with their unmistakably southern rhymes and attitude. (I even got into the action a little bit myself.) April 22, 2006  Please check out my latest creation, a trailer for the hypothetical 9/11 action movie "United 57," inspired by the actual trailers for "United 93" and "Passenger 57." Here it is on YouTube; you can download a higher-res WMV version here. April 19, 2006
I recently re-discovered a science-fiction book I wrote and illustrated when I was 9; I'm presenting Our Alien, HE as an eBook download to the Patrickrunkle.com eCommunity. Although the pacing is a little choppy and the story owes a debt to E.T., I believe my original vision was fairly uncompromising. Reading it almost 20 years later I realized that there is some good bookending going on in the novel, in addition to the (fairly standard) kids sci-fi symbolism of the alien representing youthful wonder. However, I'm doubting that the judges of the "National Written & Illustrated By..." contest were too thrilled about the downer ending and bizarre obsessions with fishing and 80s electronics. (This contest still exists.)
April 13, 2006
In the (somewhat) earlier days of the web circa 1997, I had a very awkwardly coded page in which I presented my favorite sound bites from the Death Wish movies, which I had digitized myself. In the spirit of that, here is a video compilation someone has artfully prepared of Bronson's Death Wish body count from all five movies. It's interesting to see the movies turn from an arguably serious look at urban violence (Death Wish) into Bronson and pals running around the ghetto with Gatling guns offing random hooligans (Death Wish 3) and then into geriatric Bronson killing guys with poisoned cannolis and exploding soccer balls (Death Wish V: The Face of Death). Death Wish V is terrible and still strikes me as a tragically blown opportunity; instead of taking the series back to its gritty beginnings, or doing something ironic, director Allan Goldstein made a direct-to-video quality stinker shot on the streets of Toronto. And speaking of Death Wish, the colorful UK director of the first three films, Michael Winner, has just published his autobiography, Winner Takes All.
April 09, 2006  Robert Ginty is one of the more unlikely action heroes of the 80s; he's the Edward Norton-ish, everyman 70s TV actor from Baa Baa Black Sheep and The Paper Chase who landed the leading role in the indie 1980 vigilante thriller The Exterminator. That film told the story of John Eastland, a mild-mannered Vietnam vet trying to fit into civilian life in New York whose best friend is killed by street thugs. Eastland vows and extracts revenge, most memorably via meat grinder. The movie was a surprise hit, thanks to its anticipation of several 80s trends, like ultraviolence, vigilantism, and Vietnam flashback prologue sequences. (The films of James Glickenhaus--director of The Exterminator, The Soldier, The Protector, McBain, and others--are also required viewing.) Ginty, a New York native, parlayed his Exterminator success into a number of different arenas, including fine arts and theater. Most relevant for fans of obscure movies, however, is the string of cheapo actioners he made all around the world in the wake of The Exterminator. These films include the bizarre Turkish-French co-production White Fire (pictured above), the unwatchable Thai actioner Gold Raiders, the Italian post-apocalypse classic Warrior of the Lost World, the Spanish thriller Scarab, and others, including a few like the Rambo rip-offs Code Name Vengeance and Mission: Kill that look like they were shot in my backyard. Ginty seems laughably out of place in most of these movies, although he carries himself with a trademark nonchalance that becomes charming after you've watched a couple of them in fast-forward. White Fire is probably the funniest of the lot, and is also available on Netflix via a really cheap DVD released by an incompetent DVD company. (The DVD does pass the minimum threshold of looking better than the 1984 videotape of the film, however, if only barely.) White Fire features a theme song, which is played about a hundred times during the film, and several different ingenious plot machinations that I will not reveal. It may take place in the world of the near future, although for budgetary reasons this idea seems to have been abandoned halfway through production. The film has some nasty violence, mostly involving hardware equipment like chainsaws and table saws. (On the heels of Ginty's meat grinder escapade in The Exterminator and Ginty's stunt double's flamethrower heroics in Cannon's Exterminator 2, other Ginty movies were evidently under considerable pressure to use creativity in their weaponry.) Also, one of the plot points involves Ginty being intensely attracted to a woman because she looks exactly like his sister. I do have to give some points to the Turkish film industry, however, for investing in original material this time, instead of creating bizarre copies of popular American movies like they apparently usually do. In the end, Ginty seemed to emerge unscathed from a decade of hilarious action movies, in 1990 directing and starring in Vietnam, Texas, which is actually a good movie, and going on to various other artistic pursuits not involving flamethrowers or chainsaws. April 05, 2006  Thanks to my friend John Gorenfeld for this essential link ... a William Shatner Commodore commercial from the early 80s. |