Haunted Fire Studio :: Benjamin Hall :: Illustrator and Comic Book Artist

I posted a new image in my Gallery, It was heavily influenced by David Hartman's "Camping Dead" and my love of the Friday the 13th movies.

Take a look HERE!

Poor, poor Ultraviolet.

My wife and I went to see this movie regardless of everyone telling me it looked like a waste of time. "Lots of action and no plot" was their shared opinion after seeing the trailer. But watching Milla Jovovich kick vampire butt seemed like a win/win situation to me. I'm a pretty easy guy to please, If a movie doesn't have the best plot, I'll try to connect the dots on my own... if the acting isn't the best, I'll try to make the best of the movie... if the visuals aren't ground-breaking, I'll try to imagine what they were trying to do.


I'll do my best to meet the movie half way.. I just want to enjoy someone else's artistic vision. But sometimes, just sometimes.. a movie doesn't put out enough effort to even meet me in the middle. That movie is Ultraviolet.

Ultraviolet starts out with an amazing credit sequence of comic book covers featuring really great art, I was super impressed. Especially since this movie isn't based on a comic. It was almost as if they were trying to make the greatest comic book movie ever, but they made up their own characters as not to offend the easily offended hardcore comic fans who complain over the slightest change to the movie version on their favorite character.

A bold concept, from a bold writer/director whose previous work I really enjoyed.

I was really, really jazzed about seeing the ultimate action-oriented, no hold barred, comic book movie.

And that's why I think Ultraviolet stung me so bad.

This movie embraced everything that I don't like about comics, everything that excited me as a child, but bores me as an adult. The plot only showed up in between fight scenes and was usually used to explain the next fight scene, the backgrounds and effects were super simplistic and strange, they were blurred and hard to look at and were of the quality of a 1980's music video. I can only the assume they were done this way on purpose, to look more "comicbooky", But they were so unrealistic they took me out of the universe.

I felt as if the ultimate comic movie took my money then told me "comics suck so we really didn't try that hard." or "This is what you wanted, right fanboy? You like comics, so we figured quality really was not that important to you."

I felt as if this movie was giving me, a comic creator, the finger.

In the first half of the movie, Violet only reacts to things with gruff one-liners. She has one speed "ass-kicking", and then she hooks up with some emotionally distant kid who doesn't speak or react to anything, like a standing coma patient. I kid you not, THESE are our leads! So we are stuck with two main characters who are completely unemotional and unrelatable, rendering all the fight scenes really boring, no matter how cool they are.

Picture a cardboard shipping box fighting off a group of generic black ops guys.

Did you give the box cartoony arms and eyes in your head? Don't, that would be giving it character.

Just a box that can't take any damage. Now make the black ops guys fall down around it. You're not really sure how the cardboard box beat the bad guys, but the movie tells you it did.

Sucks don't it?

I didn't care either.

This "lack of character" has ruined more action movies for me than I care to mention. If you are a writer and you are reading this, make this your new mantra: "The audience will not care, if the characters are unrelatable". THAT is the secret to writing, THAT is why the Coen brothers could write an entertaining movie about people watching grass grow. They don't even have to be likeable characters, you just have to know where they are coming from, believe in them, know they could really exist.

C-H-A-R-A-C-T-E-R-S.

If I do not FEEL for the guy fighting off the gang of ninjas, I do not CARE if he defeats them or not. It's that simple.

Now to be fair, our theatre going experience was not the best due to a bad sound system and a rude parent holding their sick, coughing, crying baby behind me. Marlena and I actually walked out in the middle of the movie and asked for our money back, which I have never done before, so we never got to see the end. It could have turned to Shakespeare as soon as we left, and I wouldn't know. So I still plan to give this movie a second chance on DVD in the comfort of my own home, with my expectations sufficiently lowered.

Also I hear the director had 40+ minutes of plot deleted from the movie by the studio, so maybe all my complaints are not the fault of the hard working men and women who created this movie, but another sad story of a studio taking an artist's true vision and sticking it in their collective armpits trying to increase sales and then blame the stinky movie on the creators.

Hopefully, they'll release an uncut DVD that will let this movie realize it's true potential.

Most likely next week.

Possibly the coolest news program ever!

Put together by the fine folks at Google, Google Current is short video streams about what people are searching for and blogging about.

They are EXTREMELY well put together and are apparently updated every 30 mins.

From what I can tell, either the most popular one or the most current one begins playing when you first open the site, but there are many videos to view and I have not found one that was not entertaining yet.

Brilliant.

Click HERE!

We just got back from Staple (the small press expo in Austin), and I must say I was quite impressed. It was a very fun, organized (as organized as these things can get) comic convention and I met a lot of cool artists and fans.

I've been to A LOT of comic conventions, big and small, and they always leave me used up, disappointed and wanting. But I really had a good time at Staple.

I think the main difference was the lack of movie stars and retailers. Not that is a bad thing... just different. It made for a real laid back atmosphere where the creators actually took the spotlight. The location this year, although a little hard to find, was also really nice. Traffic was a little slow at first, but it really picked up. I was really impressed.

Kudos to the guys that put it together.