The Game of Thrones "Hardhome" massacre and Mad Max prove that near-silence is golden, so why hasn't anyone stepped up to make the first great modern-day silent action movie?

Paul Nice, the beathead behind one of my favorite mixtapes, 2005's Do You Pick Your Feet in Poughkeepsie?, dropped an enjoyable (but not exactly danceable) Shaw Brothers tribute mix full of Shaw Brothers movie soundbites and Shaw library music cues last week. His tribute to everyone's favorite movie studio with a logo that clearly was filmed against someone's office door window has got me thinking that unless Marvel Studios tops the Raid-inspired fight choreography on Daredevil with even more impressive choreography on its planned Iron Fist martial arts project for Netflix or in the Daughters of the Dragon adaptation I've been wishing for, I doubt anyone's going to assemble a similar tribute mix about Marvel Cinematic Universe filmmaking 40 years from now, in the same way that the Poughkeepsie DJ sampled The Daredevils and Masked Avengers about 40 years after their release.

Throwback Thursday guest blogger Hardeep Aujla and Marvel Studios' harshest critics might be onto something about the MCU movies not holding up as action filmmaking 15 years from now. But if they ever YouTube how Universal Television shot Captain America in the '70s, they'd probably be like, "Wow, that was wack. It makes the studio that brought you Sharknado look like Spielberg. Okay, Joe Johnston and the Russo brothers for the win."

In the '80s, Marvel Comics published a Larry Hama G.I. Joe story about Snake Eyes and Scarlett that contained no dialogue and is still remembered as a groundbreaking piece of comic book storytelling. If Marvel Studios wants to be remembered for more than just snappy banter or one-liners and the transformation of Andy Dwyer into an action star and be thought of as an innovative action movie studio like Shaw Brothers, they're going to have to do something ballsier than even single-take fight scenes in a hallway or in front of a blind Chinese guy singing in Mandarin. I think they should make a silent action movie like that classic G.I. Joe issue and goddamn commit to it like Hama did.

(Photo source: Mars Will Send No More)

Mad Max: Fury Road is nearly a silent action movie. The guy from Skins is chattier than either Tom Hardy or Charlize Theron. The enthralling 15-minute White Walker/wight attack on the Free Folk and the Night's Watch two Sundays ago on Game of Thrones--in which David Benioff and D.B. Weiss basically knocked on The Walking Dead's door that night and said to Scott M. Gimple, "Try and top this"--isn't exactly chatty either. I'm surprised no one outside of the TV industry has attempted to do a silent action flick like Buster Keaton's The General, which George Miller cited as an influence on his latest Mad Max installment. Think of all the Akiva "My Best Work Was on the Underrated Fringe" Goldsman-penned blockbusters that would have been improved--or all the post-1996  two of the  one of the  all the three-fourths of one of the post-1996 Michael Bay blockbusters that would have been improved--if they'd been completely scrubbed of dialogue.

Oh yeah, there's director J.C. Chandor, whose 2013 film All Is Lost, with Robert Redford alone on a boat, almost contains no dialogue--Chandor said he wanted to see what Redford would be like as an actor if his voice was taken away--but All Is Lost is a survival drama, not an action flick. Whether part of the action genre or not, a huge part of what makes Fury Road, the "Hardhome" massacre sequence and All Is Lost riveting is their minimal dialogue and the performers' reliance on their physicality to carry the story. Before Fury Road, Game of Thrones and All Is Lost, a few writers and directors--all working for TV--were aware of how riveting depriving their actors of their voices could look, especially in a dialogue-heavy medium like TV, so they experimented with near-silence.

Some of Breaking Bad's most memorable cold opens were done as mini-silent action movies. Genndy Tartakovsky, who drew storyboards for Iron Man 2, did a silent action movie a few times on Samurai Jack and Star Wars: Clone Wars (the minimized dialogue is why I always preferred Tartakovsky's cel-animated Star Wars prequel tie-in over George Lucas' actual prequels, which, at their worst, turned into C-SPAN in space). The director of Avengers: Age of Ultron himself did it once for almost an entire hour on Buffy, and it remains one of the show's most popular episodes. I'd make a silent action movie if I had the money and the connections. So what's stopping the studios from experimenting with wordless action sequences for two hours?

Sure, The Artist was one of the lowest-grossing Best Picture Oscar winners, but a modern-day silent movie isn't exactly box-office poison. People (who are open-minded enough to put aside the notion that a silent movie is too old-timey) will go see such a movie if they're fans of whoever's going to be doing all the non-talking. Mel Brooks' star-studded Silent Movie was a hit in 1976, and I bet that if IMAX theaters show for just one week the "Hardhome" massacre sequence--and only that sequence--droves of Game of Thrones fans will roll into those theaters that week like that creepy "Hardhome" zombie avalanche.

With their one-act or one-episode experiments, Vince Gilligan (and his Breaking Bad army of imaginative directors like Michelle MacLaren), Tartakovsky and Joss Whedon proved once again that far braver creative souls have been emerging from TV. So maybe a silent movie would be too bizarre for the playing-it-safe (and now Joss-less) film division of Marvel Studios. Someone said Jackie Chan, who worships Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin, should be the one to tackle a silent movie, but I doubt Chan would get that experimental these days: he's in the "Steve Martin shifting back and forth between Father of the Bride and more serious movie roles" phase of his career, not the "Steve Martin doing weird shit like recording banjo albums" phase. But you know who I think would be up for a silent actioner because he has proven that just because you're a 70-year-old filmmaker, that doesn't mean you have to phone it in? George Miller.

The Aussie director considered making Fury Road silent. A silent version of Fury Road is even being planned as an extra for its Blu-ray release. Also, it looks like Mad Max is getting less chatty with each installment. I wouldn't be surprised if by the time Hardy does his last movie as Max--and Hardy's inevitably going to make more of them--he'll say only one line in the whole movie: "Oy."

The General: Fury Road from Walter Rafelsberger on Vimeo.

I contributed a script of a Palace arc to the ImaginAsian exhibit

Purdue University grad school instructor and Colonial Viper pilot Kate Agathon recently invited me to contribute artwork to an Asian American art exhibit she organized, and the collection is worth checking out if you're in the Hoosier State. Her ImaginAsian exhibit began its run at the Tippecanoe Arts Federation in Lafayette, Indiana yesterday and will last there until May 9:

In celebration of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month 2010, ImaginAsian is a collection of cultural artifacts intended to raise awareness and understanding of the contemporary Asian Pacific American community as articulated through a variety of art including photography, visual and literary.

Sponsored by the Asian American Network of Indiana, the exhibit is comprised of sixty-six pieces of work donated by sixty contributors from 13 states including writer Lac Su, artist and author Kip Fulbeck, civil rights activist Yuri Kochiyama, director Michael Kang, Senator Daniel Inouye, G.I. Joe creator Larry Hama, and other stakeholders in the Asian American community.

Instead of new artwork, my donation to ImaginAsian was a script of a future arc of my webcomic The Palace that I haven't drawn and posted on this blog yet (though the dialogue is finished), so ImaginAsian gets a taste of this arc before everyone else. (I wish I didn't have to draw this arc. I'd rather have somebody draw it for me, but as I've said before, I don't know any cartoonists around my hood, and I've got no money to pay a penciller/inker, so I've had to do everything myself.)

I hope I can finish drawing this Palace arc in time for the week before The Last Airbender's July release date because it revolves around the making of a Last Airbender-esque cinematic turd. The title of the arc is The Palace: Like Stuff It, White People.

The Hunter gets captured by the geeks: The books I picked up at Comic-Con, part 2

Previously: The Middleman: The Doomsday Armageddon Apocalypse, Adrenaline and Bumperboy and the Loud, Loud Mountain.

My rundown of the graphic novels and TPBs I bought at Comic-Con concludes with two recent projects from IDW, which quickly became the comics publisher whose releases I've been looking forward to the most because of its ambitious reprints and high-quality revivals of properties like Star Trek and Doctor Who.

I picked up Classic G.I. Joe Volume 1 at the IDW booth because I was looking for a comic that veteran Marvel and DC letterer (and friend and mentor to several of us Secret Identities creators) Janice Chiang worked on and could sign for me at Comic-Con, and the TPB happened to contain an issue lettered by Janice. She then brought me over to another former Marvel letterer, Rick Parker, to have him sign the TPB because his work appeared in the collection too.

I never was an avid reader of Marvel's G.I. Joe comics, although I bought some issues of the mothership and a couple of its spinoffs when I was a kid. I was more familiar with the Sunbow animated series, which hasn't exactly aged well. Even when I watched G.I. Joe and Transformers back-to-back after school, I thought the animation on both those Sunbow shows sucked. The constantly choppy character movements made the crappy made-for-TV Popeye shorts from the '60s look like Richard Williams cartoons. Because the Sunbow series was essentially a 29-minute toy commercial (subtract one minute for the "Knowing is half the battle" PSA, which was devoted to giving safety tips or warnings about creepy guys in white vans instead of selling toys), most of G.I. Joe's episodes were forgettable and silly, except for one: the Steve Gerber-penned "There's No Place Like Springfield," an eerie two-part ep about Jack Nicholson's Shipwreck's awakening from a seven-year coma that was inspired by The Prisoner (Shipwreck's home address at "Number Six Village Drive" was a shout-out to that famously surreal show). The downbeat tone of the ep and the images of Shipwreck's wife, daughter and friends melting into grey goo blew my mind when I was a kid and scarred other kid viewers for life.

The Marvel comics were intended to sell toys too, but the writing in those comics tended to be much better than the writing on the cartoon, thanks to regular scripter and G.I. Joe action figure dossier writer Larry Hama, a real American hero, especially to Secret Identities contributors who dug that an Asian American was at the helm of Marvel's finest-written toy-based title (also the first comic ever advertised on TV). The Vietnam vet-turned-comics scripter's military expertise added authenticity and grit to the comics and kept them more grounded than the cartoon, where nobody died, Star Wars-style lasers replaced bullets and Cobra was about as dangerous and menacing as Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz. That's why the late Gerber's despair-filled "Springfield" was such a stunner back in 1985--the cartoon ditched its usually campy tone for once, added some much-needed menace to Cobra and incorporated a storyline from the comics, the Joes' discovery of a Cobra base disguised as an idyllic, all-American suburb called Springfield.

The standout 1983 G.I. Joe issue that introduced Hama's Springfield--a town that's as rotten-at-the-core as Matt Groening's Springfield--is included in Classic G.I. Joe Volume 1, which collects the first 10 issues of the original 1982-1994 Marvel comic, most of them drawn by '70s Incredible Hulk artist Herb Trimpe in the classic '60s/'70s Marvel style. My tastes in espionage comics lean towards the more adult Queen & Country and Sleeper, so I found the dialogue in these early '80s G.I. Joe issues to be on the hokey side. Despite the hokey one-liners, as the Topless Robot blog noted last year, the original comic still kicks its cartoon counterpart's ass. Scarlett--the lone female Joe in these earlier issues, before Hasbro added Cover Girl and Lady Jaye to the cast--gets a bunch of thrilling take-charge moments in the 1983 issue that Janice lettered, a Mike Vosburg-drawn story in which Scarlett is assigned to protect a diplomat who's being targeted by Cobra (another highlight of the TPB, as well as one of the few issues in the collection that didn't involve either Hama or Trimpe).

"The Best of Jimmy J. Aquino on Twitter," Part 3

My archive of earlier tweets from my Twitter page continues.

Previously on A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog: Parts 1 and 2.

In a set of tweets from April, I liveblogged 1991's The Rocketeer.

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I've been rewatching Rocketeer as research for uh... something. Last time I saw it was when it aired on Disney Channel in the early '90s.
4:31 PM Apr 25th from web

3 Disney employees need to be pimp-slapped: Miley the racist ho, the equally racist Joe Jonas and whoever handled Rocketeer's DVD transfer.
>4:33 PM Apr 25th from web

It's nice to finally see Rocketeer in WS, but Disney's transfer is so janky I had the same expression I get when I hear Miley Cyrus sing.
4:34 PM Apr 25th from web


The Rocketeer DVD's non-anamorphic, grainy transfer doesn't do justice to Hiro Narita's cinematography and Jennifer Connelly's cleavage.
4:36 PM Apr 25th from web

Why do many of my favorite actioners (Rocketeer, the original Taking of Pelham, Johnnie To's The Mission) get the crappiest DVD transfers?
4:37 PM Apr 25th from web


Billy Campbell--TV's go-to guy for middle-aged scumbags when Eric Roberts is busy acting in rap videos--looks like he's 12 in The Rocketeer.
4:39 PM Apr 25th from web

I forgot that Locke was in The Rocketeer. Because it's a Disney film, Terry O'Quinn's Howard Hughes doesn't collect jars of his own piss.
4:42 PM Apr 25th from web

Though I think Timothy Dalton is underrated as 007, @nathanrabin is right on about him being more compelling as Neville Sinclair than as JB.
4:47 PM Apr 25th from web


One of the funniest scenes in Rocketeer is when Neville tries to spit game at Jenny, and she notices all his lines are from his movies.
4:51 PM Apr 25th from web

Jennifer Connelly's Jenny Blake: hottest-looking film geek ever.
4:52 PM Apr 25th from web

A lot of H!ITG!'s in The Rocketeer: Margo Martindale, Jan from The Office singing at a '30s club, Midnight Run "Hopalong Cassidiche" guy...
4:59 PM Apr 25th from web


Am I the only one who thinks Rocketeer--which tanked in '91--has aged better than the more popular actioners from that summer (T2, RH:POT)?
5:01 PM Apr 25th from web

In Living Color did a then-amusing Latino version of Rocketeer after the film came out. I remember his leafblower doubled as his jet pack.
5:03 PM Apr 25th from web

@pfunn If there'll ever be a Rocketeer double-dip, it needs an extra pointing out each of the film's countless references to Old Hollywood.
5:12 PM Apr 25th from web in reply to pfunn



A couple of clickworthy pieces on The Rocketeer, by @nathanrabin (http://tinyurl.com/d35dvz) and Scott Tipton (http://tinyurl.com/dah5o6).
5:14 PM Apr 25th from web

In his obit for Dave Stevens, @evanier said that after Rocketeer tanked, DS lost interest in doing more Rktr comics, which was unfortunate.
5:16 PM Apr 25th from web


The Rocketeer got me pumped over IDW's Rocketeer reprints, which I'm dying to read b/c I want to research more about Dave Stevens' creation.
5:18 PM Apr 25th from web

From April '08: A FISTFUL OF SOUNDTRACKS: THE BLOG: What if Rick Berman continued making #StarTrek movies?: http://tinyurl.com/cznosm
2:38 AM May 6th from web

I was searching my parents' garage for some old Starlog issues that contained articles about The Rocketeer and Gerald Fried and...
10:16 AM May 8th from web

...in my parents' garage, I stumbled into some '80s G.I. Joe comics by Larry Hama, whose work all of us Secret Identities creators admire.
10:17 AM May 8th from web

A fistful of classic Larry Hama G.I. Joe comics = some kickass bathroom reading. (Tweet number 300. This! Is! Cobra-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!)
10:19 AM May 8th from web

Among the G.I. Joe comics I unearthed from the garage: G.I. Joe #61 (July 1987), which has a dope Mike Zeck cover: http://tinyurl.com/p8nkqq
10:21 AM May 8th from web

G.I. Joe #61 is about the rescue of a U.S. reporter accused of espionage, an eerie precursor to the imprisonment of Laura Ling and Euna Lee.
10:22 AM May 8th from web

G.I. Joe #61 makes me wish for a special ops unit to sneak into North Korea and get Laura Ling and Euna Lee the hell out of there.
10:22 AM May 8th from web

Though I enjoyed Abrams' #StarTrek, I'm sick and tired of time travel and madmen trying to destroy Earth a la Khan, Kruge, Soran & Shinzon.
10:14 AM May 12th from web

Trek VI & Casino Royale proved you can have villains who aren't concerned w/ global domination & yet it still feels like plenty's at stake.
10:16 AM May 12th from web

An article from my past as a journo: De Niro and Brando sleepwalk through The Score: http://tinyurl.com/ocp3yv
10:24 AM May 12th from web

Favorite #StarTrek in-joke: Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" during prepube Kirk's joyride is a nod to Shatner's TAS "sabotage" pronunciation rant.
3:26 PM May 12th from web

Why so few Filipinos during JJA's #StarTrek? "Must have been a Pacquiao fight going on that day," jokes @moonielantion: http://bit.ly/xKLUv
3:28 PM May 12th from web

To be continued.

An old G.I. Joe comic has eerie parallels to Laura Ling's ordeal

I posted about this recently on my Twitter page. While searching my storage boxes in my parents' dusty garage for some old Starlog issues because I wanted to look at a couple of Starlog articles about Gerald Fried and the making of The Rocketeer, I stumbled into a stack of '80s Marvel G.I. Joe comics written by Asian American comics author Larry Hama, whose work is admired by all of us creators from Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology. (Quick Kick--one of the few Asian American heroes in '80s comics and voiced on the original G.I. Joe animated show by none other than Dr. Pierre Chang--was Hama's creation. A chat between Hama and Secret Asian Man creator Tak Toyoshima appears in Secret Identities as an interstitial feature drawn by Tak.)

At the top of the stack of G.I. Joe comics I unearthed from the garage was one of the first comics I bought for myself, G.I. Joe #61 from July 1987, which is notable for two things: a badass Mike Zeck cover depicting Snow Job, a wounded Quick Kick and a mad-as-hell Stalker in the middle of a shootout (one of my all-time favorite comics covers) and some early Todd McFarlane artwork that Marvel rejected because it didn't meet their standards. Marvel replaced the future Amazing Spider-Man and Spawn illustrator with Marshall Rogers, whose late '70s Batman comics I've always dug (one of Rogers' Batman stories was later adapted by Batman: The Animated Series into "The Laughing Fish").

But McFarlane's scrapped art actually isn't the most interesting thing about issue #61, which, like many of Hama's other G.I. Joe comics, is grittier than the bloodless, Star Wars-like '80s animated series and Paramount's upcoming G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. (Uh, Stephen Sommers, I think you've gotten your '80s cartoons mixed up. The shiny skintight power suits aren't G.I. Joe. That's Silverhawks, pal. And that long-winded Rise of Cobra title is terrible. It's not going to attract non-fans who think it's a documentary about health insurance for the unemployed.)

Hama's story in #61 centers on the Joe unit's attempted rescue of an American reporter who's arrested on trumped-up espionage charges in the fictional country of Borovia.

While re-reading #61, I couldn't help but think of recent headlines involving captured journalists, like the North Korean detainment of Current TV staffers Laura Ling--a correspondent for Current's Vanguard and the younger sister of reporter and ex-View co-host Lisa Ling--and Euna Lee.

Hama's comic makes me wish that a special ops unit would sneak into North Korea and bust them the hell out of there.

Those of us former or current journos who are worried about Ling and Lee's impending trial (and hope they are released like captured Iranian American journo Roxana Saberi recently was) should read the LiberateLaura Twitter page, which has been posting both updates on Ling and Lee's case and links to candlelight vigil announcements and press coverage. I first learned about the page when its tweeter replied to my tweets about the 1987 G.I. Joe issue.

A lot of bloggers are blasting the Al Gore-owned channel for not publicly acknowledging the ordeal. Current continues to air Ling's past Vanguard segments as if nothing awful has happened to her. For instance, the channel has lately put Ling's segment about Vietnamese bird flu into heavy rotation because of its relevance to the swine flu problem, but Current Tonight host Rawley Valverde didn't mention his colleague's present situation at all during a recently recorded intro that preceded the bird flu segment. The channel's silence must be due to legal reasons--as angry asian man notes, not even Ling's family members can publicly "go into detail regarding her ordeal due to the sensitive nature of the case"--and what I assume is the Current staff's discomfort with having two of its reporters become the story.

By the way, when will newspapers and blogs stop posting the same two blurry DMV driver's license photo-quality pictures of Ling and Lee? Are these papers and blogs lazy or what? Ling wasn't exactly reclusive in her line of work, so how can that be the only picture these papers and blogs have of her?