Doyce Testerman

Disney’s Gearing up to make a Pirates sequel.
Eh. Sequel. Eh. Still…

“I’ve got two more stories to tell about (pirate captain) Jack Sparrow,” says the writer.

There are certainly worse things.

This is so cute, and also kinda sad: Gellar talks about Scooby Doo like it’s a real movie.
A choice quote:

“I think the first story sort of revolved around Daphne finding her place…”

Yeah, the movie’s plot revolved around Daphne. This statement is amusing both for the obvious reason (Gellar’s overwhelming ego) and for the assumption that there was a plot.
The sequel (god yes, there’s a sequel) “takes on a mystery in their hometown of Coolsville, which will feature the return of several well-known monsters from the classic Scooby-Doo animated TV series. Mystery, Inc.’s adversaries this time around will include the Black Knight Ghost, the Pterodactyl Ghost, the Tar Monster, the 10,000-Volt Ghost”.
I’m all ready to be snide and dismissive, because I hated the show when I was a kid — hated, the only good thing about the first movie was that it didn’t follow the standard storyline — but then some bastard had to go and cast Seth Green in the damn thing, and now I’ll want to see it :( I can’t have any fun.
Oh, by the way, Pirates of the Carribean rocks. Raaawwwwwks. Go see it. Go see it twice.

Richard Matheson’s short fiction is very, very good stuff. I’ve particularly enjoyed “Buried Talents” and “Near Departed”.
I can definitely see where he could have turned that knack into a lot of fine work on the Twilight Zone.
Good stuff.

December 9th sees the release of Buffy, Season 5 and Firefly.

Amber Benson, that is, who’s made a true Indie movie called “Chance“, about which she talks here.
I think it’d probably be fun to see. I definitely think it’s great that she’s got this entirely un-Buffy thing going on. Kudos.

Read the first hundred pages or so of Richard Matheson’s I am Legend last night, so I guess I’m not that tired.
I’m glad I picked this up — Matheson thanks Henry Kuttner on the opening page, who you might know was a huge influence on Zelazny so, you know… connections.
It’s a good story, though the wording is sort of clumsy. I have a notion that he was going for the sort of sparse feel of The Thin Man and ended up with stoic instead. Stoic is fine for a character… it’s not so good for a book.
Still, a good read, and as the story progresses he gets more comfortable, forgets what he’s trying to sound like and things start coming across in a much more authentic voice — the bit about the dog kept me up and reading another 45 minutes longer than I’d intended to, which is all anyone really wants a reader to do.
It’s a new printing of the book, which actually includes a bunch of shorter things after I am Legend (the book’s 300 pages, and I am Legend is only 171 of it). I’m not as enthused about those as I might be — I haven’t decided if Matheson will write better stuff in a shorter format, or if he’ll treat each short story as an ‘exercise’: “With this story, I will not use any words with the letter ‘m’ in them.”
We’ll see.
(Oh, the premise of the book is that the protagonist is the last uninfected human in a world full of vampires. Touted as one of the 10 great ‘vampire’ books of all time. I can only name about… three or four ‘vampire’ books/series, so I’m not sure what kind of praise that is, but there it is nonetheless.)
Addendum: In that era, everyone smoked a hundred jillion cigarettes per hour… if they were cutting back. Just FYI.

Tori Amos
7 August
Red Rocks – Denver, CO
On Sale 6/21

That is all. Hmm.

The full Joss Whedon interview that I mentioned last week is now up.