What If Brother Banenose Was A Movie?

Thank you to everyone who celebrated my blog’s birthday with me! I hope you enjoy your 99¢ eBooks & remember to leave a review!

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John “Finn the human” Boyega retweed me!

@JohnBoyega Iron Man's plan to stop Hulk was to punch the rage-powered monster through a populated African city instead of pacifying him.

— Matthew Catania (@MattTheCatania) March 11, 2016

Now I can’t stop getting notifications. If only there was some way to get everyone who hearted it to read a specific book…

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Did you know that if an image contains 20% text, Facebook won’t take your money to boost that post? Weird, eh?

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I’m disappointed that red Kryptonite on Supergirl just made her a jerk. They shouldn’t be repeating Smallville’s mistakes. Red Kryptonite can have any surreal effect writers dream of, so making it so cliche was a waste. She didn’t even go full world-conquering evil with a snazzy pope hat!

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Did you know I started writing a screenplay for The Dolorous Adventure of Brother Banenose before Booktrope made it available to purchase as a book? I’d still love to see it adapted into a feature film. Perhaps a limited run TV series like Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell would be even better so less would need to be cut for time constraints. So I’ve taken the liberty of fan-casting (until the book’s popularity takes off, I must serve additionally as its biggest fan) a possible live action adaptation. My absurdly extensive cast list has shifted a bit over the years, but this is who I’d go with if production started right now:

Brother Banenose – Ian Holm

With range spanning Napoleon Bonaparte to Bilbo Baggins, Ian Holm can make a befuddled monk compelling. If you think he’s too old, then know that Derek Jacobi is my second choice. We’re going full ageist on this one.

Fairuza – Annet Mahendru

I cycled through a bunch of actresses before it struck me that Annet Mahendru was the perfect Fairuza. She’ll get to be more screwball & less dour than she is on The Americans. All she needs is a fancy dagger, a rawhide ensemble, & a necklace of teeth!

Norbert – Dylan Moran

Dylan Moran starred as an irascible character with just enough charm that you didn’t want him booted off screen in Black Books. This will be crucial as Norbert goes full dirtbag.

Stephfi the Marauderatrix – Rachel Skarsten

Stephfi was tough to cast until I realized that superhero movies prove any thespian can upgrade their physique for a role. All Lost Girl’s Rachel Skarsten has to do is massively bulk up & wear lifts in her boots. She already has the warrior attitude.

The All-Seeing Insect Of Doom – Kristen Schaal

Kristen Schaal’s voice can oscillate between irritating & adorable, so she’ll find the ideal medium for The All-Seeing Insect Of Doom’s squawks of ill tiding. Muppeteers will bring its body to life.

Read on, for I’ve cast even more obscure characters after the break!

No Time For Champions, ‘Cause We Are The Losers!

Another reader has professed her love of The Dolorous Adventure of Brother Banenose with a snapshot!

It’s always heartening to know there are fans somewhere out there, so be not shy! As an indie author who didn’t receive an advance, I appreciate & depend upon everybody who generously patronizes me! If you have a camera & a copy of my book (print or digital), you too can wind up on this blog!

Killer Robots Made Me Late For A Very Important Date

Headlines be damned! It looks like plenty of people are interested in Jemmacide! Last week’s post cleared 100 views in under two days! That’s more than any other post on my humble blog so far. Then it kept getting more views. In less than a week, it’s cracked 300 views, making it over quadruple times more popular than the previous leading post. It’s even surpassed my home page in viewership. If the rest of my articles don’t pull in similar numbers I’m going to be so mad at them! Total viewership of the blog is now north of 1,000. The amount of unique international viewers who’ve visited my blog has just hit 700. So thank you very much to everyone who Shared, Favorited, Retweeted, Liked, or simply clicked on the link for breaking all of my meager records. A very special thanks to the mystery person who searched for “jemmacide marvel comics,” without whose curiosity that rant would’ve never been written.

After all that, I want to see Elizabeth Henstridge become Jemmacide on season three of Agents of SHIELD more than ever. Even if it does happen in some form, it’ll still probably be much less cool than I imagined. After all, I was so pumped when Raina underwent Terragenesis only to be so disappointed when she became even more sidelined than usual. Ruth Negga nabbing a lead in Preacher had better be worth Raina getting fridged. I demand a Marvel Legends Raina action figure with swappable heads in reparation! While I’m making outrageous demands I might as well also request Melinda May, Mockingbird, Sif (armored not incognito), Mr. Hyde, Jiaying, and Jemmacide to go with the Phil Coulson I already have. They’ve got better odds of being made now that Marvel is being so petty about not having the X-Men movie rights.

I’ve already alerted most of the pertinent Agents of SHIELD people about the essay on the Twitter, the preferred social platform for irritating celebrities. It was met with a deafening silence. So it’s either completely right but they can’t confirm it this early, so completely off base they won’t dignify it with a response, or not what they had in mind originally but now they’re scrapping the previous plans to make Jemmacide a reality & ninjas are en route to my home. Occam’s Razor says they just hate me & want to be left alone. It’s up to you to contact your Member of Parliament and demand Jemmacide. Just be absolutely certain you spell her name right. No autocorrect!

Oh, here’s what I was planning to write before I was completely sidetracked by Jemmacide:

“The Mystery of the Missing Moustaches!”

I watched the entire first season of Gotham so you didn’t have to. It has a dopey charm, but watching The F-Lash (it had a whole episode about a psionic gorilla!) would be a better use of your time. I don’t want to tell Gotham how to do its job, but here’s what Gotham needs to fix for season 2:

10 Ways To Fix Gotham For Season 2 

This guy knows what I’m talking about.

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I guess I need to ramble on to make this post worth your while if you’ve already had my latest Topless Robot list foisted upon you.

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This blog has finally received some visitors from Africa! Now all we need is a visitor from Antarctica & all the continents will be covered! Anybody know people in Antarctica?

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Not nearly enough of you are using the #SchaalForSquirrelGirl hashtag I invented.

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Robert Malmont’s The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is hardcore pulp. It’s like The League of Extraordinary Writers. Unfortunately the ending has a Deus Ex Machina.

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Creators Kurt Busiek & Benjamin Dewey agree with me that Goldfoot of Tooth & Claw: The Autumnlands (it has interspecies lesbians!) sounds like Holly Hunter.

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Agents of SHIELD season 2 finale SPOILERS! Cal singing “Daisy Bell” was the finale highlight. Kyle Maclachlan really deserves an Emmy (as do Tatiana Maslany & Tom Cavanagh). I’m so bummed that Raina got killed just to show Quake her mom is evil. I was rooting for her to achieve Peak Supervillainy. Symbiote Simmons’s name should be Jemmacide! I have typed it therefore Jemmacide is canon now!

Now See The Movie That Has A Cameo By The Book You Can’t Read Yet!

Back in 2011, I entered The Dolorous Adventure of Brother Banenose into Amazon’s CreateSpace Breakthrough Novel Contest. It proceeded to not win. As a consolation prize, Amazon gave me physical copy of my book for free. I got to design my own cover for it too, although it’s not as grand as one I would like for the mass market version.  I really want the book to be bound in leather with gold lettering for that Folio Society effect. If I’m going to be delusional, I might as well have delusions of grandeur. But the important thing was that I now have a limited edition of the book I wrote!

As fate would have it, Jack Gattanella (with whom I had previously worked with on FILLER!) was putting together his first feature film, Green Eyes, around the same time. I kept pestering him that he should include my spiffy new book in the movie, especially as he & his wife, Korey Hughes, had already been forced to read it. After much cajoling, he finally consented. He invited me to play a guest for the party scene. For the most part, I can be seen passed out on the couch clutching The Dolorous Adventure of Banenose, because who goes to parties to socialize anyway? I am further notable for my bootleg Multiple Man (sometime mistaken for Irish Thor) shirt.

For one sequence, Jack had me sit up on the couch next to star Audrey Lorea whilst she has a conversation with someone else & then departs. I improved slumping across the newly vacant sofa space & asking the other actress “Did I ever tell you about THE TIME?” Jack laughed, so I continued to do this for the rest of the takes.

Jack needed extras for a club scene, so I volunteered for a second day of filming. This time I was wearing the Canadian sweatshirt I’d recently acquired  in Winnipeg but without my book. I did, however, write “THE DOLOROUS ADVENTURE OF BROTHER BANENOSE” on the bar’s whiteboard as if it’s also the name of a band that has a gig there. I’m not sure if it’s visible in the final cut, but the implication is that Green Eyes is set in an alternate reality where The Dolorous Adventure of Brother Banenose is already A Thing.

I didn’t see Green Eyes until Jack held a premiere party for it in NYC in 2013. Unfortunately, “Did I ever tell you about THE TIME?” was nowhere to be heard in the final cut. There is also a scene where the leads discuss an unjacketed book & remark “Yeah, that wizard was pretty crap.” I was gobsmacked because this would’ve been the ideal scene to showcase The Dolorous Adventure of Brother Banenose. I would’ve lent him the book for that day of filming had I known this was going to happen in the movie (I wasn’t privy to the screenplay).

Although perhaps it’s for the best that The Dolorous Adventure of Brother Banenose didn’t have its closeup in that scene. The wizard in my book is an Anubis baboon & is therefore incapable of being crap. It also has a witch as its stealth protagonist (or antagonist, depending on your perspective) who is responsible for much of the story’s propulsive action. I wouldn’t want prospective readers in the audience to be turned off by an inaccurate remark about it.

The important thing is that I still appear in the film! I’m credited as “Dolorous Adventure Man” even though you wouldn’t notice the book was in the movie if I hadn’t just told you. Not only that, but you now purchase your own copy of Green Eyes for your viewing pleasure! You can make a (drinking?) game of looking for me & other FILLER! cast members. Get clicking on this link with your piggy bank at the ready! Amazon is even offering it at a discount off its already reasonable price. You can’t afford not to add Green Eyes to your DVD collection! It’s like owning a piece of history you didn’t even need to liberate from from a museum.

And that’s the secret origin of how I got The Dolorous Adventure of Brother Banenose a licensing placement in a feature film without having a publishing deal!

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: Whose cat has four thumbs & has a special Interwuzzle gig coming up this weekend? This Saturday, March 28, I will be guest blogging at io9! Feel free to stop by & gawp at the potential swath of devastation I leave in my wake.

P. S. Did I ever tell you about THE TIME?

Just Some FILLER!

“EH?* Two posts in as many days? But you promised you’d only post once a week! Why would you do this to me?”

Well dear hypothetical reader, it’s like how your doctor tells you to take a double dose of your medicine the first day just to get firmly on the road to recovery. Trying to build a following for a weekly blog is tricksy without enough content to convince visitors to return. So that’s why I’m doubling down on entries. Trust me, I’m a doctor.**

I need to post some substantive content to get you invested in the success of this fledgling blog. I don’t want to lead off with a repost of an article commissioned by another site. The Dolorous Adventure of Brother Banenose is not quite ready for human consumption yet. So my best option is to show you some FILLER!

Feast your eyes upon the award-winning*** short film FILLER! If you already know me then odds are I’ve already forced you to watch it. That’s why you need to forward this blog to people I don’t know so you can all commiserate in regional support groups.

I co-wrote FILLER! with Andrew Birchenough. He, Fred Henry III, Lindsay Tierstein, Kristin Allmer, Tony Lombardo, Mike Dilorenzo, Brenda Belohoubek, Korey Hughes, Jack Gattanella, Casey Walker, Christina Hoffman, Krystle Von Thaden, Matt Rosen, & I graciously agreed to star in for free. (Should I add tags for these fine thespians too?) I ended up directing it despite not being a film student. FILLER! has since gone on to be an incredibly minor Interwuzzle sensation, particularly in The Netherlands. It even has an IMDb page where you can rate it ten stars.

I am inordinately pleased with how FILLER! turned out & the response it has received. There are many more anecdotes I can share about this project. Give me some feedback about what you’d like to know more about in the comments section below. Keep your eyes figuratively peeled for more on FILLER! whenever there’s a slow week. If you’d rather not see any more FILLER!, keep your eyes peeled literally.

*’Eh?’ is a registered trademark of The Commonwealth of Canada.

**Doctor of Jurisprudence. Matt The Catania & its author are not responsible for anyone foolish enough to use this blog as a medical resource.

*** First Prize in the Alternative Film Category at the 2008 William Paterson University Film Festival