Jarrat and Stone are back ... and I'm stunned

Words fail me. I mean ... words ... just ... fail. What can I say? Have a look at these, and be amazed:

Ooof. It's like looking at stills from the movie. These are two "renders" out of a set of 10, all of which are online at Jade's Adventures in 3D -- and they're also uploaded at about twice this size, so go ahead, click the pic to see the larger shot. The Jarrat renders went up first, telling a scene from his POV. The Stone renders went up yesterday, telling the same scene from his POV.

They leave my fingers itching to write NARC. And I can't, because I'm churning my way steadily through Hellgate, and 2010 is about getting that whole series finished. This is sheer, unmitigated torture! I ask myself, could I possibly squeeze in a Jarrat-and-Stone short piece, something "only" around 50,000 words or so? In fact, there *is* a story which has been slated to be the high-action prologue to the next NARC novel -- and you all know what happened last time I did this. STOPOVER was supposed to be the opening "kaboom" for APHELION, and it ended up being taken right out and published on its own, because at 45,000 words it was a) too long to be an opening act, b) would have pushed the overall length of APHELION to 230,000 words, which is monstrous; and c) was quite large enough to be published as a pocket-size thriller.

Hence, I find myself literally, and enthusiastically, adrool ... and asking the question in all seriousness: can I squeeze in a NARC short, if I work, very very hard, fueled by the rush of seeing these pictures?

Stay tuned!

And please do link over to Jade's blog, where pictures like this are commonplace, what's more, she'll tell you how to do it yourself:

Cheers,
Mel

Mel at the Movies: talking dollars and sense

What a nice outcome at the Oscars! A sorta-kinda gay movie right there in the spotlight ... the award for Best Actor bestowed upon a performer in a gay role -- and richly deserved. Is the cinema-going public changing? Is there a shift in the mindset of your average popcorn-muncher in the fourth row?

Could be. Here's an interesting quote:

Jim Carey and Ewan McGregor play love interests in the upcoming movie I Love You Philip Morris which is based upon a real life incident about a man who falls in love with his cell mate while in jail and escapes four times in order to be with his lover. Some critics worry that the film will be a problematic sell given that it is an overtly gay love story. However, they do like the film.

Several straight actors have played gay, lesbian or trans characters over the last few decades without incident, and without any problem in their careers.

For Carey, this movie makes his first foray into doing so, but McGregor is an old hand at playing gay characters. Adding into that list are Tom Hanks, Julianne Moore, Nicole Kidman, and a much longer list. The notion that audiences may not like a movie due to a gay, lesbian or trans story line may be old thinking. While Milk has not been a blockbusting success the same way, say, The Dark Knight has been, it certainly has achieved a certain amount of commercial success, and a great deal of critical acclaim.
http://lezgetreal.com/?p=922&cpage=1

From what I've learned about Philip Morris, I have a feeling the movie might be a tad bit too explicit for the average audience -- and this would explain the reticence of distributors to be involved. It costs a ton of money to strike the prints to get a movie out on the road; exhibitors have to believe they can break even or better.

Now, sometimes it's impossible to second-guess movies. Australia was initially supposed to rival Titanic, and then it was supposed to be the world's biggest ever flop, and now -- hey, it's showing critics and audiences alike that it has enough staying power to be out there earning, long after it was supposed to be getting stamped into the surfaces of a few million DVDs. However, it's not going to magically transform itself into a boxoffice success, though it might break even -- in which case, all the DVD dollars are frosting on the cake. And like The Man From Snowy River, his one will probably "go platinum" on disk.

Why? Well, because Australia cost the grand total of $130m to make, which is a fleabite these days, by comparison with the budgets of "big movies" like the Pirates of the Caribbean films. In the days of yore, it used to be that $1 in $3 of the boxoffice made its way home to the studio that put up the financing, so a movie that cost $130m to make would have to earn $390 to break even...

These days it's very, very different. To begin with, it's $1 in $5 of the boxoffice that dribbles back to the investor ... but increasingly, the studio, the distributor and even the exhibitor are all branches of the same company which, in any case, is owned by something like Gulf Western, Coca Cola, whatever.

So while various divisions of the company might be showing a loss, the parent "machine" that drives this multi-national juggernaut is sitting pretty ... and it gets better.

The DVD revenues associated with movies can, and do, outstrip their boxoffice potential. You have global boxoffice to think about; plus the network TV premier; cable TV; pay per view; the DVD release; the BlueRay release; the TV rerun(s); the Netflix subscription service; and whatever merchandizing you've been able to scare up along the way.

Any way you slice it, movies are huge business, even though box office figures the world over are far from attractive. There's a site which makes fascinating browsing: BoxOfficeMojo.com ... enter in, and prepared to be astounded.

Russel Crowe in A Good Year ... directed by Ridley Scott, himself a legend. Total boxoffice gross: just under $7.5m ... you're not reading that wrongly. Nor did I mistype it! $7,459,300.

Kathleen Turner in her absolute hay day in V.I. Warshawski -- if she can't put bums on seats, who can? $11,128,308.

Johnny Deep and Charlieze Thieron (and I wouldn't be in the slightest surprised if I don't know how to spell that!) ... same bums-on-seats remark. The Astronaut's Wife. $10, 672,566.

Let's face it: if only the top 2% of movies ever broke even, Hollywood would have collapsed by now! The truth? Boxoffice is only part of the picture, and not even a large part.

Australia is at just under $50m, and still earning at the boxoffice before they get stuck into all the rest. Hey guys ... it's not that bad, really.

Little is happening in this neck of the woods. The big news (and terms are relative!) is that I did two posts to Legends today, and here they are:

http://mel-keegan-legends.blogspot.com/2009/02/chapter-nine-conclusion.html
and
http://mel-keegan-legends.blogspot.com/2009/02/oracle-knows.html

I haven't been able to look at Digital Kosmos for a week, and in this week I'll have to make a decision: gee, do I get five titles up on Amazon Kindle, or do I post to the photo blog. Duh. I'll get back to DK when time permits. Till them -- bear with me, guys!

Ciao for now,
MK

They love you, Philip Morris ... they just won't distribute you!

Some things never change, do they? Like the apparent belief that the US public isn't ready for a gay movie in the mainstream, even if it does star names like Ewan McGregor and Jim Carrey.

A news story landed on my desk yesterday -- mind you, it dates from the end of January, so it's a couple of weeks old already and one sincerely hopes that it's OBSOLETE by now!

The gist of the story was that I Love You Philip Morris hasn't secured a distributor for the continental US after Sundance. Which is just about enough to make you haul off and scream. Nostrakeeganus, he predicting that Philip Morris will do very nicely in Europe, including the UK, and maybe in Japan; but in the States, Canada, Australia...? Forget it. It'll be lucky to play the art houses here -- though it will probably do phenomenal business on DVD.



Well ... shoot. Makes you wonder if we're making any progress at all, what with this happening to Philip Morris, and the brewhaha over Internet filtering in this country, and the Prop 8 fiasco. *sigh* I have to admit, I was hoping (and actually believing) that Ewan McGregor and Jim Carrey could beat the system.

Back home in the Mel-o-Sphere, things are happening, albeit slowly. We're working up to the Kindle issues, and I'd like to do a press release: Keegan on your Phone. Look out for this in the next couple of weeks. Also, Legends is steaming along -- Chapter Seven is up today. And I'm delighted to report that the Digital Kosmos photoblog is doing fine, winning Google searches from every corner of the globe. There are times when the traffic on DK is double the number that touches down on this here blog --

Which leads me to the conclusion ... it's time to effectively shut this blog down and start another ... Google never did address the question of my page ranking. It's still utterly impossible for me to win a Google search in the USA, where 90% of anyone's visitors come from. I can win them in Nepal, and Cameroon, and Lithuania, but not in Los Angeles or New York or Chicago. I have almost 300 posts online at this time, of which about 20 are being accessed with any regularity. The rest are buried, and have been buried for about three months. Gak.

So: MK is about to concede! TKO to The Big G. Now, let's bounce back and see if we can get this show back up on its wheels and rolling, by floating a new blog, deleting this one from the Google index, and importing existing posts to the new template, where they will be spidered and indexed and ... visited. Which was the whole point of writing them.

Anyway -- that's the plan. You know me by now: I get there in the end, but things can (and do) tend to move sloooowly, or at least less quickly than I'd have liked.

Here's a nice piece of news, though: The Lords of Harbendane is selling well enough at Amazon for its rankings to be in the hundred-thousands already, and it's only been on sale about ten days. The actual Amazon rank is 191,965 -- in ten days, before the advertising has started!

The important thing there isn't the number, it's the time frame. All books start out with a page ranking over 2,000,000, and you climb if you can, and as you can, from there. The advertising is about to begin for The Lords of Harbendane, and you bet, I shall be watching the Amazon ranking.

More good news for folks who're looking at Create Space as a possible gateway to Amazon: they've redesigned their page -- it loads a hell of a lot faster. Also, they've tightened up their javascript, and the shopping cart is FIXED. It works, and it works fast ... so we're starting the NARC books on the long, hard road to Amazon. They'll be there in April or so.

I'll leave you with a couple of links:

Chapter Seven: The Prophecy is up at Legends,
and
Home Sweet Home was my post to Digital Kosmos today.

Ciao for now,
Mel

Gay movies, the Oscars, and ... who's on top?!

Flotsam and jetsam today ... the Mel-o-Sphere is a flat calm, which means a lot of work gets done but not much interesting crosses my desk!

One interesting item I've been looking at is the question of whether Milk can hope to get anywhere near the Oscar it richly deserves. It's not for me to say, of course ... I'm not a member of the AFI, and I'm in the wrong country to boot! But this is well worth a read:

Hollywood slowly opening door to gay drama:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5h28VyE4y3OGVlxqM4SOlQ2DIrjCA

It would have been very nice indeed if Brokeback Mountain had won the Oscar ... but we all asked, at the time, if Hollywood was ready. And the fact is, it wasn't.

Not that Hollywood hasn't been pushed and shoved by the GLBTI community to get real, get a grip on the world at large and drop some of the prejudice: The Maltese Falcon dates from 1941! You might like to read this:

Hollywood's gay forays: http://theenvelope.latimes.com/entertainment/la-ca-gaybodies15-2009feb15,0,1244145.story#

There have been loads of gay movies. But how many of them have been great movies, as well as being gay? How many have been of the quality to get into the running for an Oscar?

From the perspective of a writer, I can tell you that the honor of even getting into the running is pretty darned high. Brokeback Mountain and Milk are a couple of ground breakers -- even if Milk gets beaten as Brokeback did. Hey, there's always next year ... and the inspiration for indie film makers to just keep on getting better, making better movies.

One day, one of these -- a gay indie -- will come out, uh, on top. And Keegan will be the first one to stand up and applaud!

Cheers,
MK

Not quite the perfect vacuum

Just flotsam and jetsam today: the vacuum goes on! The wait continues for any action on any front whatever, save that involving air conditioning. The split system is INSTALLED. And what's more, it WORKS. In fact, it's so bloody cold, I keep turning it off because otherwise I'll have to go put on a sweater. In summer. Woah.

Allow me to pause for one moment, pop a photo and paste it in here:

...just what you needed, right? A closeup look at the two square meters from which all of the Mel Keegan extravaganzas are launched. You were expecting a suave, sophisticated office? You were expecting, maybe, neat and tidy?! Where there's Keegan, there's usually kaos, as any reader of this blog over the last seven months or so will attest!

The ongoing vacuum makes me look beyond the norm and seek other items of interest to inject a spark into the day. This one's good -- in fact, it's utterly priceless. Apparently it's been doing the rounds in the last week or so, and I caught up with it on an Alaskan blog (I'll give you the link in a moment):

Dear World,

The United States of America, your quality supplier of ideals of liberty and democracy, would like to apologize for its 2001-2008 service outage. The technical fault that led to this eight-year service interruption has been located, and the parts responsible for it were replaced Tuesday night, November 4th.

Early tests of the newly-installed equipment indicate that it is functioning correctly, and we expect it to be fully functional by January 20th. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the outage, and we look forward to resuming full service --- and hopefully even to improving it in the years to come.

Thank you for your patience and understanding,
*The USA*

And here's the blog where I caught up with it: Attention: Service Has Been Restored, on the Esther Republic. That is so cool.

Another item of exceeding great coolness is this interview with Ewan MacGregor and Jim Carrey at Sundance:



Some idiot, somewhere, in a ridiculous comment on one of the news stories (LA Times??) said something about "Jim Carrey looks too old." Excuse me? Where is it written that you have to look juvenile to be attractive? You track down the place where that snippet of "wisdom" is inscribed, and I shall personally go around there with a bucket of industrial grade ammonia and erase it.

Incidentally, I Love You, Phillip Morris is being downloaded by the torrent already. No, I don't have a copy, but I've no doubt some of you do! You can see the trailer on YouTube, and a clip. Looks like a great time was had by all while they were making it, and I expect to enjoy the movie muchly.

What is massively refreshing is that neither McGregor nor Carrey is carping and whining about how hard it was to smooch another guy for the movie -- unlike both numerous other actors who couldn't wait to do just that. Far from it: both Ewan and Jim have (!) only good things to say about doing the romantic scenes. Like I said, refreshing.

Digital Kosmos continues to grow, with over 50 photos online now, of which I think about 15 or so are mine. My latest contributions have been goodies like...

Colors blaze on Stampede Trail
Storm light
Noon on the dunes
Tribute to the pioneers in Fairbanks, Alaska
Still life, with wine casks
Windows onto pure color

...I have to admit, it's a lot of fun. We could have been doing this for months.

Still waiting for a response from Google; still waiting for the proof of The Lords of Harbendane ... getting very tired of waiting for both. Working on LEGENDS -- getting the new blog in place and stockpiling posts/chapters so that real life can shove its nose in, as it always does, everything can go haywire, and the book will continue to appear on time ... there's nothing worse than a serial that keeps putting itself on hiatus.

Cheers,
MK

Going gay at Sundance -- again!

If there's a story breaking in the zone of gay fiction, film, writing and whatnot right now ... this would have to be it.

The new movie, I Love You, Philip Morris, has made its premier at Sundance, and the Internet going public is split neatly down the middle, as you'd expect...

It goes like this:

"I like the actors but don't get off on gay movies." "I like gay movies but I don't like these specific actors." "Jim Carrey looks too old." "I don't like Ewan MacGregor playing an American." "Why is Hollywood going gay?" "Gay movies are being overdone now." "How can 3 gay films be overdoing it, when there are thousands of straight ones?" "Ewww, how can people watch this stuff, it's disgusting." "You're all sick puppies and God will punish you." "Gay bashers should shut up." "I'm not bashing gays, it's my right to say what I think." "Well, everybody else here thinks you're a prejudiced, bean-brained little twerp, so shut up and go away." "Momma, momma, they're picking on me!"

Good, isn't it? You notice how fast the discussion degenerates from a reasonably intelligent, critical comment on the movie itself (albeit subjective: *I* don't like gay movies, *I* don't like the actors) to an all out, knock-down, drag-out fight.

I'll look forward to seeing this, because I like both the actors AND I like "dark comedy, and it'll make one hell of a change for a really good movie to have a gay spin and be neither a tragedy nor erotica to top it off. I'll blog about it when I've seen it -- and in this neck of the woods, it might have to be on DVD before I see it. I shouldn't think it'll play the local movie houses. Not enough bucks in it. If it's not Hugh Jackman with claws sticking out of both fists, and/or the cast are not wading up to the kneecaps in blood -- forget it.


There's a rumble on the Internet in some weird places: are Ewan and Jim really gay?!! O...kay. That's a whole 'nother question. Who knows? I guess they do -- and what's more, it's their business!

I have one more picture for you today, and then I am going to go and get WET and cool off after a long day working in idiotic temperatures:


Hey, kilts are cool. Kilts are sexy. Kilts are well, they're kilts.

Well, check this out: http://viv.id.au/blog/?p=1445 ... Gratuitous Official International Kilt Day. Barrowman, Tennant, Connery, Neeson, Tom Baker, and a whooooole lot more. Kilts. Right. Great.

Ciao for now,
MK