This week I’m headed to Tokyo, and boy are my arms tired.

I’d probably be more excited about leaving if I weren’t already spent. When I was stuck at the airport back in Orlando, I bought a guide book for Tokyo and read it on the plane. Once I learned that there’s a single district in the city that has both a tanuki museum and a taiko museum, I metaphorically blew my wad, excitement-wise. I’m just not as young as I used to be, and I can’t keep the giddy anticipation going for that long.

Speaking of not being as young as I used to be: I want to know what the hell happened over the past four years. I had to dig up my passport, which I’d gotten right before my first trip to Japan in 2002, and I did a double-take once I saw the picture. Sometime over the past four years, I went from Blackbeard to Skunkface. Can just telling people over and over again, “Hey, did I tell you about that time I went to Japan?” for four years really turn you that gray that quickly?

Also speaking of getting old and ornery: tonight I had to go shopping for clothes. One of my overriding memories of being in Tokyo was that I felt conspicuously under-dressed the whole time. No matter what station, what part of town, what time of day, everyone around me was dressed right out of a Banana Republic.co.jp ad, while I was dressed like an ad for Gamasutra.com. When the people weren’t sneering at my antiquated digital camera, they were mocking my jeans and clever videogame- and comic book-related T-shirts. Even knowing that my apartment was much bigger than theirs couldn’t salve the knowledge that I had shamed my country.

So I resolved to go to the mall and left feeling like I’d been assaulted. Somehow I got the gene that makes you self-conscious about your clothes but didn’t get the gene that makes you enjoy buying clothes. I hung out at the Borders and Apple Store for as long as I could, but I knew I was only delaying the inevitable.

Now that I’m straddling demographics, it’s even more difficult — the department stores have “young men’s” and “men’s” sections, but no “graying man-children” section. At least I no longer have to buy pants sized “husky,” but I still can’t get my head wrapped around the idea of paying fifty bucks for a shirt. Especially one that looks like something a 28-year-old dot-commer would wear to an Italian wedding reception to try and get laid with the bridesmaids.

I tried venturing out into the rest of the mall, a mistake I won’t make again. There you’ve got to pay eighty bucks for a poorly-made shirt, the mannequins are dressed like the WB network threw up on them before it died, and if you go into the Gap (shudder) you get 10-foot-tall close-up pictures of douchebag Jeremy Piven staring at you from around every corner.

After about two hours, I finally managed to escape with a pair of pants and a shirt that were probably in style a couple of years ago. The entire time, I kept thinking “I wish they’d turn that damn music down” and “is this wrinkle-free?” I should’ve picked up some of those black socks with the little garters, but I had to get home to watch my stories.

As our lives get increasingly hectic and confusing, it becomes dangerously more and more likely that one of us is bound to look up from what he’s been doing and suddenly realize, “Oh, shit. I just made Event Horizon.”

Paul W.S. Anderson has lived through this experience, and he’ll tell you the only way that he can manage to get through it is that he can also say, “Holy shit. I just had sex with Milla Jovovich.”

But don’t get too paranoid and frozen into inaction. It’s easy not to make Event Horizon. Thousands of filmmakers do it every day. You just have to remember a few simple rules:

1. Don’t make Event Horizon.
Seems obvious, I know, but sometimes the most obvious things can be ignored. Travel back to 1997. DOOM the videogame has already been out for four years, Solaris has been out for twenty-five, and Alien for eighteen. Someone comes to you with a movie pitch about a sci-fi/horror hybrid about a derelict spaceship bringing back something horrible from a Hell dimension and the rag-tag band of space military sent to investigate. While it’s obvious to us that there’s absolutely nothing novel about the concept and making such an inessential film would be a colossal waste of time, we still somehow ended up with Event Horizon.

2. Know your art direction.
If you can, ask your concept artist if you can meet him and take a look around his office. Note your surroundings. Are there more than two H.R. Geiger books on his bookshelf? If so, first ask whether he or she received them as a gift. Then ask whether you want to be showing your audience something that they’d already seen eighteen years ago.

3. Take a look at the concept art before you give the approval to begin building it.
Once you’ve received the concept art, take a few minutes to examine it. It sounds obsessive-compulsive, sure, but believe me: a few minutes spent here will save you hours later trying to explain yourself to the critics. Ask yourself a few key questions:

1. Wasn’t this better when it was called Alien? Or Aliens? Or Outland? Or Contact? Or 2001: A Space Odyssey? Or Hellraiser?
2. Why would a spaceship’s engine core have intricate goth metal shapes all along the walls, when the rest of the ship is late-70s what-a-deep-space-spaceship-would-look-like?
3. Or giant goth metal spikes coming out of the walls?
4. Can we not work a surfeit of chains and a giant razor-sharp pendulum into the picture?
5. Considering this is a horror movie, and the script doesn’t call for anyone to be impaled on said goth metal spikes, even though one character falls from a great height into the engine core and somehow manages to completely avoid the dozens of spikes on the walls, could they be hurting the design more than helping it?

4. Don’t be afraid to re-write your script.
I know, I know. More work! But it’s an initial investment that will be paid back ten-fold when you see the delight on your audience’s faces when they realize they don’t have to sit through another movie with a wisecracking black guy who survives against all odds. Take a shot at differentiating the two completely indistinguishable gruff, hard-as-nails white guy crew members. Since your plot involves the forces of hell working on your characters’ worst fears, why not give each one more back-story? Or, some?

5. Have an ending in mind when you begin filming.
Movies take a long time to film, so it can seem like you’ve got all the time in the world to come up with a way to wrap everything up. But more often than not, you’re going to be wicked busy during filming, and won’t have time to tie up all the loose ends. After a few days of shooting for 20 hours straight, you might even answer the question, “Didn’t the main villain just get very visibly and dramatically sucked out the front window of the spaceship?” with something as crazy as “The ship teleports him back.”

6. Hire an editor.
After all that shooting, you’re going to end up with a lot of film. What’s needed now is someone who’ll put those pieces of film together in an intelligible manner. It’s what separates the tight, suspenseful pacing of classic horror from a bunch of completely random scenes thrown on-screen with no discernible sequence or connection.

Now, Anderson claimed that the studio mandated all kinds of cuts to the movie to make it less gory and more palatable to the action-movie crowd, and he threatens promises to release a director’s cut someday. So I’ll concede that one, to a point. The trailer included on the DVD shows a bunch of clips that didn’t appear in the movie, with more background on Sam Neill’s character, more suspenseful build-up to finding records of the Event Horizon in the first place, better explanations of what’s going on in the ship instead of lines of dialogue inserted randomly, etc. Those would’ve helped a lot.

However, no amount of added footage or context could make sense out of that ending. Unless the studio mandate wasn’t just to cut stuff, but to replace the cut scenes with pure suck, there’s no denying that Anderson actually filmed Laurence Fishburne and the already-dead Sam Neill duking it out in the goth metal engine room.

7. Ask yourself if life is imitating art.
One of the recurring motifs of the movie is that people keep telling Sam Neill’s character he was wrong to make the Event Horizon. Coincidence?

8. If all else fails, take it home.
If you’ve for whatever reason ignored all these rules and still somehow made Event Horizon, just run with it. Don’t just do the Carrie thing with Pinhead Sam Neill showing up and “it was just a horrifying dream!” Take the guy who survived getting thrown naked out of an airlock even though his eyes were bleeding, and have him break out of his holding tank and start ripping out intestines. Have a demon send the ship back towards Earth and then laugh as the camera zooms into his mouth, then have the screen say “The End?!?” Show KISS jumping through the hellgate, or even the Harlem Globetrotters. Just do something, anything to make this movie have one original moment.

9. Trust no one.
After you’ve made Event Horizon, you may be tempted to watch it. You may ask friends what they thought of it. This is a bad idea, because people lie. They will describe it as “a flawed gem.” They will, with a straight face, describe it as “one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen,” even though there’s absolutely nothing in the movie that’s remotely frightening (and this is coming from someone who wets himself at grocery store Halloween displays).

The remake of Solaris is not a horror movie, but a sedate, pensive philosophical drama that asks what it means to exist as an individual, how we know ourselves, and how we know others. And it’s a hundred billion times scarier and more unsettling than Event Horizon.

They will even say that it’s a good campy horror movie until its horrible ending, which is the worst kind of lie, because it’s half-true. Your Event Horizon truly does have a horrible, stupid ending. And you’ll remember Resident Evil fondly as being good, campy fun horror with some memorable moments. So you’ll be tempted to watch. And the only thing you’ll take away from the movie is one line of dialogue: “Hell is just a word. The reality is much worse.”

It came to my attention last night that there are still people on the internets who haven’t seen the “Little Superstar” video.

There’s more details about it online, including the name of the movie and actors, and even the complete movie (which isn’t nearly as good as that one awesome scene). Do a Google search for “Little Superstar,” since every time I try it my browser crashes.

Tonight I watched hours and hours of two series that have a lot in common: 1) they’re both shown on the SciFi channel, 2) they’re both revamps of notoriously nerd-ridden franchises, and 3) they’re both awesome.

Battlestar Galactica
Nothing cheers up a Friday like suicide bombings, descriptions of eyes getting plucked out, nighttime death squad abductions, stolen ovaries, abandoned and unwanted babies, and mass execution by firing squad! TGIF!

If there’s any doubt left that this is a well-made show, I’ll tell you it has to be. Because I wouldn’t put up with something this grim and depressing if it weren’t. At one point, Adama says, “things are going to be okay,” which really puts his intelligence into question. Dude, look around you. In the past three years, when has anything been “okay?” The only bright spot I have to hold onto is that as miserable as they all are, they’re still anal-retentive enough to cut the corners off all their paper, and even the windows of their computer displays. Well, that and the promise of seeing Fat Apollo get chewed out.

But then they have scenes like the first ones with Starbuck and her new roommate, which are cool enough to make the whole thing worthwhile. I’m kind of skeptical that a magic squad of paratroopers descends on the firing squad and whisks everyone away to freedom, so things aren’t looking too good for Apollo v1.0.

After watching tonight’s episode, I remembered a “Battlestar Galactica” comic book I had when I was younger and a huge fan of the original series. The cover had a drawing of people running away from Cylon Raiders as buildings fell and laser bolts hit all over the place. The title of it was “ANNIHILATION!” I remember thinking at the time how incredibly cool it was, and having to look up the word “annihilation” because I didn’t know what it meant.

Even armed with the definition, it never registered with me how the show I was watching was a goofy, happy-go-lucky take on the near-total obliteration of the human race. Or that Starbuck’s girlfriend Cassiopeia was a prostitute. So apparently, the story’s in the telling. There are a lot of really interesting aspects to the universe and the premise of the show that were there all along, just hidden under layers of cheesy 80s television.

Doctor Who
Much like “Doctor Who.” I’ve only seen a smattering of episodes from the original series — I’ve never seen an episode with the Daleks, even — and I was never a fan. I tried, I really did, because it just seemed like something I should like. A time-traveling alien, a robot dog, monsters, pretty-but-British-so-they’re-not-so-pretty-as-to-be-inaccessible women, and the second best theme song in TV history*. How could it go wrong?

A lot of ways, it turns out. Obviously, after Star Wars and “Battlestar Galactica” the special effects were going to be a disappointment. But there was still something about it that never grabbed me as a kid; it seemed too talky and distant, like it was aimed at very dour British children.

So the new revamp of the series has gotten a lot of hype, and it turns out it’s all deserved. I watched the first DVD of the first season, not the new ones that started airing tonight on SciFi.

It’s just great. The interviews with the exec producer and writers reveal that it was made by people who grew up with the show and dreamed of writing for it ever since they were little. But you don’t really need the interviews to see that; it comes through in everything. They captured everything that makes the premise so appealing, but with well-written stories from a post-Douglas Adams England.

It’s not just the special effects that have caught up with the concept, it’s the tone and quality of writing. The British have always cornered the market on clever, and here’s a great example of it all working. It’s funny without being campy or too ironic, clever without being condescending, fun without being inconsequential, serious without being too dark and heavy.

And the last bit is what baffles me. When I was younger, I never understood that in the UK, “Doctor Who” was targeted towards kids. It definitely wasn’t like children’s programming in the US; it seemed closer to “Star Trek” than anything I was supposed to be watching. With the new series, they’re clearly targeting a wider audience; in the DVD special features, the lead actor describes it as aimed at the whole family, which is the kind of thing you’re supposed to say on a press tour interview.

But just in the first three episodes, we’ve seen the destruction of the Earth, speeches about how time is fleeting and everything around us is going to die, two characters sacrificing themselves for the good of others, at least four violent deaths of speaking characters, and scores of reanimated Victorian-era zombies. I realize I had a very sheltered childhood, where I always got the Disney version of every story and still wasn’t even allowed to see Old Yeller, but it still seems a lot darker than what most American kids are used to seeing.

I’m not saying they shouldn’t, of course — the show is a hell of a lot of fun, and probably American kids need to get toughened up anyway. I’m just interested in how there can be that wide a cultural divide. We get Disney and Dr. Seuss, they get Roald Dahl.

Also, did I mention the scores of reanimated Victorian-era zombies? The show rocks so hard.

* Of course, “Space: 1999″ had the best.

Here’s a post from the blog of C Martin Croker (TV’s Zorak from “Space Ghost” and “The Brak Show”) from a little over a month ago, about the changes recently made to Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

I haven’t seen Disneyland’s new version yet, but I have ridden Walt Disney World’s, and I agree with him on just about every single point he makes. It’s kind of frustrating, because to me it seems like the whole thing is the best of a bad situation.

Technically, they did a great job. The new animatronics are very well done, the best I’ve ever seen of trying to emulate a real person. They’re integrated well into the scenes without overpowering them. (In the Florida version, the end scene is completely replaced, but that was always an anti-climactic and weak scene).

And I’d even say that as a concept, it made sense — the movies have been huge successes, and the first was genuinely an “instant classic.” (I didn’t like the second one as much, but it could still work if the third one delivers the pay-off).

But it just doesn’t fit all that well. As the blog says, you’re left wondering “who’s that guy wandering around the Pirates ride?” But if they’d tried to do a Marc Davis-style characterization of Capt. Jack Sparrow, I can guarantee you it would’ve just come across as a failed animatronic of Johnny Depp. So you’re stuck with never touching the ride except for refurbishments, or trying something new and getting criticized for not being “true to the original vision” or only being out for cheap marketing tie-ins. It’s not a position I’d want to be in.

Like I said, I haven’t been on Disneyland’s version yet. According to Croker’s blog, the bits voiced by Paul Frees got the boot, which worries me. That was my favorite aspect of the ride.

P.S. I just saw in that Wikipedia entry that Paul Frees was the voice of K.A.R.R. in Knight Rider. Which is so unbelievably awesome.

If there’s one thing I learned from that lame “Lost Experience” game that ran over the summer, it was this: don’t let marketing guys create content.

Actually, it was this: however “Lost” does end, it’s going to be a disappointment.

My first reaction after seeing the final wrap-up of the game (youtube is down at the moment, so I can’t link to it) was that it was just unforgivably bad. But after thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that the concept itself wasn’t too terrible, it was just presented in about the worst way possible. If it hadn’t had such terrible, clumsy acting; if the series writers had been in charge of the pacing; and if it weren’t wrapped up in crass marketing disguised as a ridiculously complicated “alternate reality game,” it could actually be a decent resolution to a lot of the mysteries in the show.

After three-plus years of build-up, however they decide to wrap up the big questions of the series is going to feel small and anti-climactic. But once you realize that it’s not the resolutions that are key, it’s how the stories are told, you can really appreciate what a great job they’re doing with the series.

Just in the two weeks leading up to the season premiere, I heard or read about a dozen people in magazines, online, in person, and in the blog comments talking about how season 2 was a huge disappointment. It was meandering and pointless and dropped storylines and never had a pay-off.

Well, I loved season 2 as it was airing, and I re-watched much of it after I got the DVDs, and I think it was outstanding. The season opener was every bit as amazing and intriguing as the series pilot was. The story went off in a whole new direction while still staying true to the central premise — getting into the minds of these characters and finding out what events made them the way they were at the time of the crash.

Over the course of the season, they really, genuinely answered a ton of questions. What’s in the hatch? What happened to the tail-enders? What did Kate do to get arrested? What does the smoke monster do? What happens if you try to leave the island? Is Michael an evil douchebag, or just an annoying one? Who were the people on the boat that took Walt? What caused the plane crash? How did that prop plane crash on the island? Is the island a real place? What happens to the people who get kidnapped by the Others? Is Locke the only one who got “healed” by the island? Are major characters really going to be killed off? What happens if you don’t enter the numbers? They don’t needlessly stretch out the reveals, like “The X-Files” did, but instead give real answers that lead to a bunch more questions.

The season 3 premiere was tonight and, well, I think it was a huge disappointment. It was meandering and pointless and dropped storylines and never had a pay-off.

Well, maybe not, but it did feel to me like they’d built up a ton of momentum with the season 2 finale and failed to carry it through. The opening didn’t really do anything to surprise me (after two of the best season-openers in the history of television), and the rest of the episode didn’t say anything that we couldn’t have already inferred from the reveals of last year.

I’m sure it’ll pick up, but it’s kind of a let-down to spend months wondering about all the questions raised in the last season finale, only to get an episode where all we learn is that Jack is stubborn and had issues with his father. Where’s Penny and the arctic monitoring station? Or Michael and strange-powered Walt? Or the aftermath of the explosion? Or Sayid’s part-pregnant assault team on the boat? I already know we’re not going to get answers, and I’m fine with that. I just wish they would’ve started out not by telling us stuff we already knew.

Several years ago, someone recommended I watch Sherman’s March: a Meditation to the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation. I’m glad I waited so long to finally see it.

The premise of the movie is that filmmaker Ross McElwee received a grant to film a documentary about Gen. Sherman’s march through the south, but just before he was to leave to begin filming, his girlfriend left him for her ex. No longer interested in a Civil War documentary, McElwee meandered through Georgia and South Carolina, roughly following Sherman’s route of destruction, spending the entire time trying to hook up with various eccentric southern women.

The movie’s more engaging than it has a right to be, considering it’s three hours of a neurotic guy lamenting his desperation and ogling women’s chests and thighs. Taken at face value, it’s an extremely personal and self-effacing document of people’s attempts to find meaning in their lives and someone to share their lives with — that story, it tells well.

But after over 20 years of enforced cynicism and the unwelcome onset of video blogs, it’s difficult not to see the layer of artifice there. McElwee says in voice-over that he’s lost himself along the way, to the point that he’s filming his life just to have a life to film. But there’s still the nagging sense that he’s created a caricature to star in the movie, cribbing character traits from Woody Allen and Albert Brooks’ fictional selves and passing them off as himself.

He dresses as a Civil War soldier for a costume party, then delivers a drunken late-night monologue to the camera about how Sherman was a tragic figure and how he can relate. He starts to deliver a documentary-style speech about Sherman at a war memorial site before stumbling out of frame by a river bank. It just comes across as fake and threatens to ruin the believability of the rest of the movie.

It’s a pretty minor complaint over all, since the movie does what it’s presented to do, it has some genuine insight, and it actually manages to convey as much real information about Gen. Sherman as you’d retain from a “real” documentary. But it teeters uncomfortably on the edge of open, honest, personal filmmaking as it is, and I have to wonder if a few more years will make it seem insufferably self-indulgent.

Speaking of being insufferably self-indulgent: what I liked best about it was seeing the south of my middle-school years, the real south as I remember it before the strip malls and subdivisions and Republicanism sucked the soul out of it.

He goes to Stone Mountain and rides the skylift and the train around the park. We see shots of Atlanta’s old skyline, when you could still see the blue hamburger. He shows bits of Savannah and the coastal islands. He shows how even the cities in Georgia had an empty, hot, rural feel to them. He shows conspiracy freaks, vacuous discussions about religion, and morbidly obese mechanics wearing white T-shirts stretched to their limit. It’d come across as more stereotyping if I hadn’t been there and seen plenty of people exactly like that.

There’s a scene where first meets one of his targets as she’s singing with a band outside a Sears in South Carolina — that kind of image perfectly sums up southern suburbs in the early 80s to me: hot, strangely desolate, and just weird.

After being hit with that kind of nostalgia, then seeing these people all desperate for something to give their lives meaning — a job, a bomb shelter, or a girlfriend — it was hard not to feel as morose and insomniac as McElwee. Has it really been that long since I was there? What have I been doing since then that’s of any importance? I’m now as old as he was when he made the movie; why do they keep referring to each other as “middle-aged?” How come I can’t stand to be back there for too long now, but still feel strangely out of place out here?

The movie’s got enough deadpan humor and clever editing that it never feels too depressing or self-indulgent. But this feeling of desperation and tragedy and yearning for some bit of satisfaction you can’t find at home, that lingers after the movie ends. So I guess that makes it art.

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud has gotten a lot of praise over the years, and it’s justified. It’s well presented, and it has some genuine insight into how art works (not just comics) and how people communicate. And even when you don’t agree with the points he makes, the book itself is an excellent example of how to make a presentation and of what comics can do.

Making Comics is even better. This is just a great, great book.

Everything about it — from the art to the tone to the organization — is cleaner, more sophisticated, more direct and uncluttered. It’s like attending one of the best, most insightful presentations you’ve ever been to, with a speaker who can make his head pop off his body and change shape.

He covers the insights into art and communication that have been his trademark since Understanding Comics, but never condescends, never seems removed or too “old-school” to be irrelevant, and grounds everything in the practical. McCloud covers all the topics from staging and framing to facial anatomy to perspective to buying art supplies, always showing you what others are doing while reminding you there’s no one right way to do any of it. You’re not just encouraged to make your own comics, you’re inspired to.

Because it’s such a practical book, it might not find as wide an audience as Understanding Comics did. That’d be a shame, because it’s a great read even if you don’t plan on making comics yourself. (And I think after reading it, it’d be hard not to want to make them yourself). It doesn’t come across as a lecture or a textbook or even a book, for that matter, but as a conversation with someone who just loves comics and wants to share them with everyone.