A selection from "Steve's Really Cool Movie Blog" by RJ Sevin

Steve’s Really Cool Movie Blog

by RJ Sevin

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ovember 16, 12:53 a.m.

Hey, gang. Sorry I didn’t get the Bluray releases updated as promised—it’s been an INSANE week. It’s late, I’m a little tired and I’m a lot drunk. I just got back from a party at Troublemaker Studios. Saw stuff I can’t tell you about yet. (Oh. My. GOD.)

Gotta get some sleep. Will have something posted tomorrow, before I fly to SF for my first trip to the Ranch.

Yes. THE Ranch.

Tomorrow is going to be the coolest day ever.

November 17, 5:48 p.m.

Yesterday I told myself that I wouldn’t bother updating this site again—I mean, who cares anymore? It’s over, right? But so many of you wrote and said that you wanted to know what I had to say about this, so here it is. I’m crying and I’m hating myself for what I’m about to write, but it’s who I am and I’d be lying to you and to myself if I didn’t tell you what I’m feeling.

The Empire State Building. Woody Allen. Martin Scorcese. Times Square, where I saw Fulci’s ZOMBI and BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR back to back, maybe the strangest double feature ever. (Did the projectionist think he was running BEYOND THE DOOR?) Stan “The Man” Lee and Marvel friggin Comics.

All gone. I’m sitting in front of my computer, crying and shaking and New York City is a smoldering crater. Millions are dead, thousands more are dying, and I’m thinking about Spider-Man and King Kong and the fact that I’ll never attend another New York movie premiere or read another issue of THE UNCANNY X-MEN.

I’m sorry. I’m gone. This is it. It’s been fun. Turn off your computer and go hold someone you love.

November 18, 11:26 a.m.

I’m back.

I’m numb. I do not believe what I am seeing, but there it is. You’ve seen it, too. The answer to our greatest and most urgent question (Who the hell did this to us?) is also the answer to our most ancient question: are we alone?

No, we’re not.

Back when I was a teenager and going through all the crap teens go through, I went on a bit of a Bible kick. I—damn, I have NO idea where I was going. Just sort of started staring into space and, well

Nope. I’ve lost my point.

A few days ago, I was gearing up for every nerd’s dream trip to San Francisco. The next day, the Big—

Oh, the point I was gonna make, I just remembered it. Funny how that happens. The Bible. When I was a teenager, I went on a bit of a Bible kick, reading Revelation and Daniel and listening to prophecy teachers interpret the meaning of the wounded beast’s head or the feet of clay in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream or whatever. I came to believe that prophecy—the ability to see the future—was not a gift from God but a talent inherent in all truly creative people. Artists and writers throughout history would get these flashes, they’d peer into the future, through the A to Z linear fog of human existence and into the simultaneously existing seconds of eternity. And so we’d get St. John writing of falling torches scorching the earth (nuclear warheads), Nostrodamus warning of Hister (Hitler), and, yes, the visionary predictions of writers like Ray Bradbury and Jules Verne. You can’t read THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU without seeing in the words of H.G. Wells a chilling pre-echo the horrors of genetic engineering gone mad, and anyone whose read his THINGS TO COME would

Wow. That’s how I sound all the time? It’s pretty pathetic. Even now, I’m an effing nerd, crying about Marvel Comics and going on about prophetic sci-fi writers. (And trying, even now, not to go off on a spiel about the glorious disaster that was the ‘90s film version of DR. MOREAU. Brando and the ice bucket, man.) So, yeah, my point, dammit, is that I’m drunk and New York City has been leveled by aliens and H.G. Wells was right. The invaders may not be from Mars but they’re from SOMEwhere and they’re here and things were bad enough, what with the disintegrating economy and the threat of terrorists and gas prices soaring and George Lucas once again adding shit to STAR WARS. Dammit.

We knew it was coming. After 9/11, I thought maybe that our obsessions with seeing New York obliterated on screen—either through alien attack or in a buckshot hail of meteors or a rampaging giant lizard—came from the collective pre-cognitive awareness of that day rushing to meet us. Then I sobered up and realized that maybe the brainwashed zealots simply knew what we all knew: that a catastrophic blow to New York would be a catastrophic blow to the world.

Now I know better. Blithering no-talent hacks like Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich weren’t channeling 9/11. No. On some level, everyone who ever wrote a story or made a movie about aliens blowing the piss out of the earth knew THIS was coming.

Look to the skies, bitches.

November 19, 12:48 pm

I keep staring out the window. It’s a cool day. Not a cloud in the sky. A few folks milling around. Church is packed, according to the local news. Lots of talk about angels and judgment day. I’m getting scared. They haven’t attacked us again, yeah, but it’s like a powder keg, isn’t it? You know what I mean. Folks don’t need aliens raining fire from the skies to go crazy and get violent.

3:20 p.m.

I’m looking at the photos. On some level, you’d think an alien would be hard to look at, like maybe you couldn’t wrap your mind around what you were seeing, so you’d see an indecipherable blur or you’d go insane or die or something, like someone in a Lovecraft story looking upon the horrifying form of some Elder God, or maybe someone from the Old Testament gazing upon the face of Jehovah, their face going all RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and shit.

None of that. Looking at these things isn’t really all that different from seeing some really exotic deep-sea creature on the Discovery Channel. It’s jarring and shocking and also very, very cool, but it’s just another animal, just another living thing. None of them seem all that different from life on Earth—not the multi-limbed slave-laborers or the little bug things scurrying all over the landing site or the humanoid ones that seem to be running the show.

Humanoid, can you believe it? God’s fingerprint, or proof that there are monkeys everywhere, and we are all Devo?

November 23, 1:18 p.m.

Papa Steve and Ling Ling are okay, by the way. Dad is nervous but kind of satisfied, in an I-told-you-something-like-this-was-coming kind of way, and my wife is scared. She wants to head for the hills in the van.

I really don’t want to leave all my stuff.

We’re going to the store. I expect it to be a madhouse.

6:05 p.m.

I just watched someone die.