Maria Alexander News and Updates from TheHandlessPoet.com

You probably don't know who Christine Valada is, but she was the returning champion and winner of tonight's Jeopardy show. She's won over $36,000 so far and comes back tomorrow night as returning champion for the 2nd time.

I've only met her twice, and I can attest that she's every bit as sweet and smart as she appears on the television screen.

But that's not the story.

Her husband, Len Wein, is a famous comics writer and editor, the co-creator of some of your favorite characters including Swamp Thing and Wolverine. I met him back in 2003 at LosCon when we were both guests.

But that's not the story, either.

The story behind the story is this:

Almost 7 months ago, Christine and Len lost their home and one of their beloved dogs to a fire that also savaged many of their priceless belongings, including irreplaceable comics and comic art worth untold hundreds of thousands. It was a catastrophic loss. My heart and I'm sure the hearts of many, many other people went out to them.

Christine's wins are an awesome righting of the universe's normal injustices, even if her winnings so far don't come close to what they lost. I'm just happy to see goodness happen to two wonderful people. I hope the goodness continues to run riot.

As soon as I recovered from some exhaustion last week, I decided to dance with the Aztecs at Hollywood Forever for the extravagant Dia de Los Muertos celebration.

Not sure what I was thinking, but it was ridiculously fun for the five minutes it took to wear me the heck out. Here's proof:



Photo courtesy of the fabulous Lisa Morton.

And there's more photographic proof of the fun that was had on my Flickr account.

We arrived sometime around 4:30 but didn't actually step inside the cemetery for another hour and a half because parking was incredibly bad. But we knew that would happen. As we suspected, if you didn't get there before 6:00pm, you were doomed to sit outside stuck in line for strange aeons.

I had never been to the festival before, so it was an extraordinary treat to see the altars erected to flappers, Dr. Seuss, the Saint of Homeless Pets, Frida and others, with the random Darth Vader helmet inserted as needed. I marveled at the similarities between the afterlife beliefs of Mexican and Asian cultures, the feeding of the dead being very important.

When we got home, exhausted and fed, I read the delicious short story, "The Night Face Up," by Julio Cortázar to Lord Arux before we went to sleep. I just had to have one last bite of Aztec goodness.

Then yesterday we watched Donnie Darko for the first time ever. It was the Director's Cut, so we have no idea what the original was like. I can totally see why it has such rabid fans from an artistic level alone, but I'm not one of them, alas. It almost worked. We talked about it quite a bit afterward and decided that the movie only made sense if Frank had not called Donnie out of his bed. If Donnie had been left alone and was sleep walking as usual, meeting Frank outside for the first time as a result of that wandering, it would make perfect sense that Frank would later have to convince him to go back to bed to undo everything. But the way the film and voice over were cut in this version, it seems like it's Frank who drags Donnie out of bed that night, which makes no damned sense on Frank's behalf whatsoever.

Last night was fired because of insomnia. I hope tonight to sleep like los muertos.

Courtesy of Uncle Walt, Lord Arux and I had the distinct pleasure last night of hearing "The Disney Symphonic Legacy" featuring John Mauceri and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra at the Disney Concert Hall.

100% awesome.

Starting with The Nightmare Before Christmas, which was fun but could have been crisper, they played some of my favorite Disney movie symphonic music. Even better, conductor Mauceri had created a 15-minute suite of music from the Pirates of the Caribbean films with permission from Hans Zimmer. The result was this dramatic yo ho-ing score that had everyone alternately bobbing their heads and sitting mesmerized by Zimmer's seaworthy themes. The Cal State Fullerton choir supplied the expansive, timber-shivering backup vocals.

Hans Zimmer, for those in the know, wrote Paperhouse, one of my all-time favorite movie soundtracks.

But the real treat was the "symphonic retelling" of the movie Snow White, which was unbelievably great. It starred Ashley Brown, who is the new Mary Poppins in the Broadway show that's coming to Los Angeles. Ashley sat on one side of the stage with Blake Griffin, who played the Prince, and the stunning Ruth Williamson, who stole the the whole freaking show as the Wicked Queen. The "Dwarves" sat on the other side of the stage, all brilliantly funny as they assumed their character roles sitting and sometimes standing. The director did some creative editing of the tale to whittle it down to 55 minutes, but the score still shined. The choir backed up the main characters, with two women whistling the bird parts. Frankly, I had no idea that human lips could do the things they did. Now I know!

Strangely enough, the Snow White music had never, ever been played live. The conductor Mauceri and his crew had to dig up the yellowing music pages out of Uncle Walt's vaults to recreate the score for stage performance. It's a beautiful and lush score for such a simple tale. I can hardly believe it had never been performed live.

They ended with an encore where they sang "True Love's Kiss" from Enchanted. That is a very funny song. I couldn't help but laugh out loud at lines like, "And that's the reason we need lips so much/ For lips are the only things that touch." Hee-larious. Lord Arux and I agreed that it really wasn't the right song. "That's How You Know" would have been a bigger roof raiser, but admitted that it might not have worked as well in that venue.

So, he sang it just to me and I got to enjoy it all to myself. Yo ho!

As an obvious connoisseur of Wild Things, I've been asked by various people if I liked the the way Spike Jonze adapted my incredibly beloved children's book by Maurice Sendak to film. Having carried Trog as a purse for about 8 years now with plans to continue indefinitely, I suppose I am especially invested in the outcome. Actually, I was quite looking forward to it. Not because I was so hot to see an adaptation, but because clever, witty, up-on-the-know people have been saying to me for years, "Hey, uh, did you know they're making a movie?" To which I would pertly reply something like, "Yeah, Tom Hanks is involved. Should be interesting." (The real answer being, "No, I live in the scum of my boot toe. What movie?") It's the one thing about carrying Trog that's driven me batshit insane, truth be told. There wasn't anyone outside of Warner Bros. other than myself quite so happy to see the infernal thing finally crawl from its loathesome production cave and emerge squinty-eyed in the projector lights.

I saw the film at a press screening with The Hedgebeast last Tuesday night, October 13th. And it is very much as Jonze describes it: it's not a "children's movie" as much as it is a movie about childhood. And that is precisely what I love about the book. At its core, it's about what it's like to be a child and how you discipline your inner wildness. The movie captures the feeling of the book and sustains it throughout. It's a more indepth, complex look at what the children's book does so beautifully.

You may or may not like how Jonze took the Wild Things and made them a dysfunctional New York Jewish family. I really dug it. It's how Max sees grownups: whiny, distracted, careless, nonsensical. It's also how he sees himself: sad, lonely, misunderstood, unfairly treated. Both projections create the chicken wire mesh over which Max molds his paper mâché impressions of people. He then works out his emotional issues though these dual-purpose beings until he has that moment when he finally groks what a big pain in the ass he's been to his mother and sister. It's a wonderful because you think, for a moment, that he's finally grown up.

The film is peppered with the silly moments and epiphanies you would expect in a child's mind. At times it veered into dark terrain as the Wild Things became petulant and depressed, threatening violence. The acting is terrific throughout. Unsoiled by The Sopranos, I loved James Gandolfini's voice and easily gave it to Carol, the Wild Thing that matches my beloved Trog. I held Trog in my lap and scrunched him like a stuffed toy, watching with wonder at the marvelous effects, worried that the Wild Things would accidentally trounce Max at any turn. I bawled and almost started to howl when Max left the island. But it was a healthy parting. I knew it was time for him to go. And so did they.

The most important thing I have to say is about the ending. But if you don't want to know it ends, then stop reading here.

No, really. Stop. Reading. Now.

Okay...so...

...at the end of the film, I was left a bit cold. The Movie Max is much older and far more ill-behaved than the Book Max. I mean, Jonze's kid is seriously out of control. So when the film ended with the cinematic equivalent of "...and it was still hot," it was more like "...and I still wanted to paddle Max's butt."

Despite the previously mentioned epiphany, Max doesn't seem terribly sorry for the serious trauma or difficulty he's caused his mother. That's where Jonze leaned too heavily on the subtly of the book. He should have realized that the older and wilder Max needed a more explicit interaction with his wounded parent. 6-year-old Max who is sent to his room to pout might eventually get some hot soup when he comes around. 9-year-old Max who has run off into the dark snowy night after savagely biting his mother, leaving her to grieve and worry horribly, shouldn't get shit except a smack, a severe grounding and maybe even a visit to the shrink. NOT chocolate cake, for chrissakes. If he's truly grown up a bit -- and at 9, he should be -- then he needs to take responsibility and show it in a more demonstrable way.

So, bring a paddle. Maybe a pervy friend will let you work out your frustrations on him or her afterward. But the rest is great.

Much to our joy, Lord Arux and I saw the Eddie Izzard documentary, BELIEVE, last Friday night. His story is interesting, yet another "overnight success" that took decades of dogged pursuit despite one discouraging event after another. Using lots of family home movies and other footage, the documentary was written and directed by his ex-girlfriend, Sarah Townsend. The surprise cameos were the best part of the documentary, especially the chat with George Clooney, who explained the correct pronunciation is Iz-zard, accent on the second syllable. (Really!)

The Q&A afterward with Eddie was funnier and generally more wonderful than the show Amelia G and I saw together last year. It started with a crazy guy telling Eddie about some dream he had where Eddie was a dog or something. Eddie parlayed that into hilarity and rolled on from there. Someone asked him why he wasn't performing in drag these days. He explained that it was because he happened to be in "boy mode" right now. He'll probably go back to "girl mode" at some point. And, besides, it wasn't like he couldn't go home and put on a dress if he felt like it. He's really focussing on drama at the moment, as he believes it's harder for an actor to move successfully from bonkers to serious rather than the other way around, so he's focussing on serious. He reported that The Riches has definitely been canceled and, if he spoke to next steps in his acting, I don't remember much about it.

He declined entirely to talk about his relationships. The documentary mentions how he and Sarah met, glosses over the breakup, and never again talks about his love life -- which is probably for Eddie's best, but I don't think I'm the only person out there curious about his sexuality. I suspect it's a mystery with very long legs.

If you want to see it, the documentary is still screening, but only for a few more days here in L.A. Go see it!