Sam Raimi to Direct World of Warcraft, or What’s Wrong With Video Game Movies?
Come with me, if you will, to a magical, improbable land. A land where ideas and craft outweigh brand recognition and marketing potential, where films are the visions of writers and directors rather than of moneyed committees, and where the word ‘remake’ is most commonly associated with smoothing the bedsheets after a midday nap. It’s a place perhaps more fantastic than worlds of warring orcs and elves, since at least the orcs and elves are behaving according to their nature.
Blizzard — world-straddling giant of the video game industry — just issued a press release saying that Sam Raimi of Evil Dead and Spiderman fame has signed on to direct a movie based on Blizzard’s megaton MMORPG hit World of Warcraft. This interests me on a lot of levels, though as one of the mere thirty or so people in North America that has never actually played World of Warcraft I can’t really discuss it from the angle of a fan.
In fact, I may be spectacularly ill-equipped to talk about this at all. When I heard that WoW — as World of Warcraft is affectionately known to its fans (it’s also called Warcrack, as many a neglected girlfriend can well-attest) — was potentially being made into a film, I said to myself “Oh great, another video game movie,” closely followed by “Oh great, something to blog about at BG!” I then did my best to be charitable and think of all the video game movies I liked. Drawing a blank, I ransacked the little gray cells for examples of video game movies I’d actually seen. Coming up with nothing, I then went to that resource of first-resort for the google generation, Wikipedia, for a list of films based on video games and confirmed my suspicions.
They all suck.
It’s nothing new to hear that yet another print publication has gone the way of the dinosaurs. Still, for those of us who retain affection for inked dead trees, it’s always a cheerless day to learn of yet another comet strike.
Charles Saunders has posted a terrific short story over at 
Heroic fantasy anthologies are a rare sight these dates. And those willing to to take a gamble on emerging authors – virtually non-existant.
One good thing about the recession is I have more time to catch up on my reading. And I don’t have to worry about spending money on books during tough times as I already own a ridiculous number of volumes that I never had the time to get around to. One of almost recent vintage is Shambling Towards Hiroshima by James Morrow. It’s a clever premise: a parallel effort to the Manhattan Project is to develop a race of super lizards to level Japanese cities and end World War II. The irony here is that the whole Godzilla mythos of badly made, badly acted 1950s Japanese movies was a metaphorical projection of the atomc bombings. The plot, such as it is , concerns an American horror monster actor who is recruited to provide a realistic demonstration of the lizard’s destructiveness to force the Japanese surrender without having to deploy the monsters (what many critics of the U.S. atomic bombings argue might have sufficed instead of targeting cities). Morrow is one of my favorite authors, though this is a minor work; even at novella length, the premise is stretched a bit thin, and maybe would have worked better at a shorter length in pruning some plotting that doesn’t really advance the theme. Still, worth checking out.
My first thought upon hearing that Andrzej Sapkowski had won the inaugural