Tine for a quick catch-up.  A lot has happened since my last post, and I do mean A LOT.

In no particular order:

-My son just turned 3.

-My daughter is now 3 months old.

-My wife and I celebrated our 8th anniversary.

-Melancholy Greetings is now a national brand, available coast to coast in 20 B&N stores.  (My #1 new store?  It's in Newington, NH.  Go figure!)

-I am now on Facebook, operating under the moniker MELANCHOLY MAX.  (This may soon be changing to DESPONDENT DAVE.  I know, it just oozes originality.)  Add me as a friend so I can bore you with the tedium of my mundane existence.

-I am also now on Twitter: @melancholymania.  Follow me so I can really bore you to tears with pointless 140-character missives.

-At the Lancourts' urging, I created a new web comic for Walrus Comix: Melancholy Squared--check it out here.  (Confession: I haven't created any new ones in a while....)

-And in entertainment news, I saw the new Star Trek.  Loved it, flaws and all.  (That said, I am getting tired of these Hollywood reboots....)

Welp, that's about it for now.  Will try to write some more this weekend.  This website needs some serious TLC!

So, for all my complaining about The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull BEFORE it even hit theatres, I figured it only fair that I WATCH the damn thing to see if my griping was all for naught.

It wasn't.

Unlike this year's The Dark Knight, this was one movie that could not live up to its own hype. Indy 4 was rather more like Episode I, in that surpassing fan expectations was nigh impossible. The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, however well-intentioned it might have been, got very little right, in my opinion.

So what did the movie get right? Aside from a few striking visuals (like Indy observing a mushroom cloud), not much. Everything about this film was phoned in, from Spielberg's lazy direction to Harrison Ford's barely-there performance to the script's criminal lack of character development.  I remember a time when the Indiana Jones movie set the standard for action movies in the way that classic Bond films once did. The Indy films actually spawned their own genre of (copycat) adventure films (like The Mummy series) and videogames (like Tomb Raider, which itself begat a few movies). And now, with this latest entry, Crystal Skull does very little to set itself apart from its sea of imitators.

So, what does Crystal Skull get wrong? Here's a list:

-Too many new characters, none of whom have any backstory to speak of. Mutt? Oxley, Mac--who cares? Why couldn't it have been Abner Ravenwood in this movie, instead of Oxley?  Oxley meant nothing to the returning audience.  One of Indy's charms in films past was his ability to figure out cryptic clues, figuratively and literally. Oxley basically stole Indy's thunder in that regard--and his intellect, too.  And with Mutt was on hand to play the de facto action star of the piece, what was left for Indy to do but serve more as a supporting character?

-Riding out an atomic blast in a lead-lined refrigerator? SERIOUSLY?  At this point the whole enterprise began to feel like a cut-rate parody of an Indiana Jones movie. It was also at this point that I considered abandoning the movie entirely.

-If you're going to do something gutsy like bring back Marion Ravenwood, make sure she packs an even bigger punch (literally) than she did in Raiders. This woman used to be a first-rate badass. Just like Morpheus in the third Matrix film, though, Marion is an all but useless character in her latest screen incarnation.

-Give us a villain with some depth. We knew nothing about Cate Blanchet's baddie. A slavic accent does not a character make. Look at Belloq in Raiders. He was interesting because he was multi-faceted. In the end, he wanted what Indiana wanted--they just had different ideologies.  Blanchet's villainess (I can't remember her name and don't care to even bother looking it up online) is a forgettable one-note baddie.

-An over-reliance on CGI. Seriously, what happened to the practical effects Spielberg talked about during the making of the film? Why should I care about characters that never, ever seem like they are in any real peril? Indy navaigating his way beneath the Nazi truck in Raiders is a movie stunt for the ages. Not so much his CG-rendered scion's straddlling of CG-rendered Jeeps in a CG-rendered jungle.

And then they took the movie to even lower lows with those CG monkeys. As current CG goes, the monkeys weren't even all that convincing.  (The CG gophers from the beginning of the film likewise looked very fake, even on the small screen.)  I feel this bit with the monkeys in particular was Spielberg at his laziest. Is it too much to ask for even a LITTLE bit of verisimilitude at this point? I mean, just throw in a few extra shots of Mutt shooing away monkeys as he clings desperately to his vine. Better yet, as he swings through the jungle, SHOW us how Mutt might contend with dense foliage and wayward insects smacking him in the face. Make us FEEL like we're there with Mutt. Make us feel SOMETHING. Put us in the heroes' shoes, man. We want to be these people, right? We want their triumphs to be our triumphs--and we want to anguish over their failures, right? Isn't that just good storytelling?

-Lastly--ALIENS. But not aliens from outerspace--but aliens from the space between spaces, as one character describes them. What???  So then why do these aliens even need a flying saucer?

Anyway, I could go on, but hopefully you see my point.  The bottom line is this: never at any point was I ever emotionally invested in this film.  How could I be, when its execution was so caculated and bloodless? 

The day after I watched Crystal Skull I watched Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind.  Be Kind, for all its deliberate quirkiness and inventive deconstruction of movies, was clearly meant as a love letter to cinephiles.  The movie does this by respecting its characters and the audience.  And it does it all with heart and style (and yes, with just a dash of CG as well).

Okay, first off, I suck.  I suck in a way that has never sucked before.  I am the Dyson vacuum cleaner of suck.  Why?  First of all, for all of my talk, I never did get anything done with my Hairbat reboot.  I can't even say it was for a lack of trying. 

What trying?  I was too busy to try.  Seriously.  You'd think that by getting only four hours of sleep every night that I'd have something to show for my time other than dark bags under my eyes.  But that's not true in the grander scheme of things--just where Hairbat--and this website--are concerned.

Anyone that has read this blog will know that fatherhood agrees with me in a big, big way.  And it still does.  So that's second of all.  Being a parent has defied any and all expectations.

Third of all, my greeting card biz is doing very well.  One can now find Melancholy Greetings in six locations, five of which are in NYC.  So that's pretty major.

Hairbat, however--well, that's available in exactly zero locations (that I know of).  Unless you count eBay vendors.  Really--go check it out, I'll wait.

Okay, so a few things to cover before I sign off:

One: I recently cleaned out my stuff from a storage facility in Rockland County.  I found a lot of stuff I'd either forgotten about or feared lost in one of my many moves.  Found tons of notebooks and sketchbooks, and a lot of artwork from my RISD days.  Surprisingly, little of what I found from my youth was embarrassing to me as one who is rapidly approaching middle age. 

Of course, I still have TONS of Hairbat back issues, though not all of them have fared well during the last 15 years.  I guess you could say that this picture sums up Hairbat's current overall state quite well.  (The damage is not nearly as bad as what is pictured here.)  I literally have hundreds and hundreds of back issues--all in the boxes that shipped directly from the printers.  Still, it doesn't mean that throwing away these wasted issues wasn't sobering or depressing.

Two: and speaking of depressing, my greeting card sales have been good--definitely better than last year's numbers.  And I am hoping to best this year's numbers twelve months from now.  Anything is possible, right?

Three: I have a super-secret project in the works.  Shhh.

Four: I just started my two-week vacation, so expect some more updates to the site, including my long-overdue review of Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.  (Spoiler Alert: It sucked harder than a Dyson.)

So, yeah, finally caught the trailer for the new Indiana Jones movie.  Rather than win me over, as I secretly hoped it would, it actually left me feeling rather sad.

Let me just say this--I am not being a naysayer just for the sake of being negative.  I harbor a deep affection for the original trilogy (though, admittedly, not so much for Temple of Doom).  Those movies were created for, and existed in, a certain period of time, both in film history and in moviegoers' collective memories.  Why sully the original trilogy's legacy with a new movie that no one really needs or wants?  A reimagining-cum-reboot a la Batman Begins or Superman Returns I can understand.  (Though, for the record, I did not clamor to see either of those movies, either.  In the end, I rather enjoyed both of them, albeit with reservations.)  Instead, what loyal viewers will get for their ten bucks is something more akin to the travesty that was The Godfather 3.

If Internet rumors are to be believed, the script chosen for the new Indy film was Lucas's pick, not Spielberg's.  If that's true, then there is no hope for this fourth movie.  Spielberg has always been the better director and better storyteller, hands down.  Just look to the Grievous vs. Kenobi and Palpatine vs. Yoda sequences he directed in Star Wars: Episode 3.  They're more kinetic and creative than other, similar sequences in the movie as executed by Lucas.

I know one could argue that their partnership worked well on the original Indy films, but Lucas has, since then, proven himself to be rather limited as a filmmaker and especially as a screenwriter.  ("Hold me like you did on Naboo"?  Are you kidding, George?  And Darth Vader hates sand?  Really?  Ye gods.)

So, having said all that, I doubt I will catch The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull on the big screen.  Hopefully the movie will live up to its hype, and even recapture the magic that informed and transformed so many viewers' childhoods.   

It's been a crazy couple of weeks here at Zapanta Studios, let me tell you.  Here's a rundown of the last 21 days, in no particular order:

First, I got the greeting cards into a new location--the Court Street Barnes & Noble, in Brooklyn.  I used the occasion as an excuse to rebrand the cards as Melancholy Greetings.  That meant updating the website and redesigning the cards and existing spinner signs.

Second, I submitted a previously unpublished five-page comic to Walrus Comix, called Trevor and Me--about a loser whose life is changed (for the better??) after befriending a garrulous TV.  I'd originally drawn the pages back in '93, so it was a little painful to look upon a drawing style so far removed from what I'm capable of now.  The temptation to Photoshop the old art was quite strong, but ultimately I left everything as-is, which was the right thing to do. 

Also for Walrus Comix--the gents collectively known as Bransley asked me to provide some Aragones-like doodles for the margins of a print edition of Walrus Comix.  That was a tremendous amount of fun.  I'm still providing content for the site, albeit at a much slower pace than a few weeks ago.

Third, I landed a freelance gig, which is nice.  It's been a good challenge for me, as the subject matter is a little outside my comfort zone.  But I think I'm actually zeroing in on what the client wants.

So, creatively speaking, that's what I've been up to.  And, unfortunately, Hairbat is once again taking a back seat, despite its being at the forefront of my thoughts.

In the immediate future--more new cards, more updates to the site, more new content for Walrus Comix.  And, hopefully, a little bit of Hairbat action, too.

Please, do stay tuned...