Author Archives: Michael Arce

Air

To have life, we need energy.  To gain energy, we need air.  To have air, we need to breathe.  In order to breathe, we need life.

It’s always easier to understand life when you can make it into a circle (cue Lion King music here) – its actions and reactions constantly giving and taking.  All circles are different, and none of them are perfect.  While they differ in size, shape, depth, color, and gradient, every circle can make an impact.

Last week, I had the honor to meet a beautiful baby girl named Leona.  She was born in the early evening of a late August day in Palo Alto as the daughter of not only two great friends of mine, but two of the kindest souls I know – Mac and Kim.  I must admit that prior to meeting Leona, I was rabid with excitement, nervousness, pride, fear – while I felt everything, I knew nothing.

All I knew, was to breathe.

When I arrived to the hospital, it didn’t feel like a hospital, and I really liked that.  After a few hours of catching up with Leona’s parents and other friends, it was my turn to see her.  All those uncontrollable feelings came back again and any senses of calm I gathered before dissipated.  So, I leaned back on what I knew, back to the basics: breathing.

Mac led me to another room to Leona.  I checked in, turned a few corners, and ensured that I applied enough antibacterial on my quaking hands.  After treading through showering sounds of beeping machines, overlaying voices of nurses, and a handful of other crying babies in the room, I was finally in the grace of Leona’s presence.  And the moment I laid my eyes on Mac and Kim’s daughter, in absolutely every sense I was swept off my feet.

Leona moved, albeit in small doses, with curiosity.  Her scent was sweet and refreshing.  She was unburdened with worries and new to earth, and in this moment with Leona she made me feel what I can only imagine what she felt – unsusceptible to gravity.  Most of all, Leona was full of might.  More might than I can ever gain in my lifetime, more might than I have seen from a team of champions.

Leona’s story, unfortunately, is one with complications.  She required the aid of a machine to breathe, and the burden of this condition on Leona and her parents is one I will never be able to fathom.  She fought and defied every single odd that went against her and her family.  She made every play on the field, threw every pitch with pinpoint perfection, and had a batting average of 1.000 at the plate.

She did it all.  And she did so, for seven days.

My one and only meeting I will ever have with Leona is on repeat in my memories.  While she was not granted a full life, she put on a dazzling display of courage over fear, and risk over regret.  We are reminded that life is short, whether it be seven days or seventy years.  And in that time, while life simply means that you’re breathing, the meaning of life depends on what you do in between the breaths that you take.  This is the story of Mighty Leona, a story that will never end.

All that might, she got from her parents.

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Ant

Marvel’s Ant-Man is both a prequel to their own and recently released masterpiece, Avengers: Age of Ultron and the set before the spike with Captain America: Civil War.  And in case you aren’t aware, Ant-Man is due to release on July 17 of this year, starring Michael Douglas and Paul Rudd as Hank Pym/Ant-Man and Scott Lang/Ant-Man redux, respectively.

Rarely do I dive into a fight with a haymaker like that, but my mind is currently a packed New York subway train, and each passenger is a detail that needs to get off so I can sift through my head with a bit more clarity.

Now, this is just my own theory.  As much of an honor it would be, I don’t work for Marvel.  And if I did, I’d probably get all sorts of crud for posting such details of their unreleased cinematic endeavors.

It’s a fairly heavy idea, and I do have all the why’s and how’s to back this up.  So before I continue on, I have an obligation to warn you that, if you haven’t seen AofU yet (have you been living under a rock for the last week?!) and you want the thrill of surprise, you probably shouldn’t delve in any further as I will go into depths that would ruin the film for you.

For all of you that fit the aforementioned – this is your stop.  Get off the train.  Thanks for the visit.  Come back in 67 days to see if I was right.  Seriously just stop reading.

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And for those of you who wish to continue on to the next several stops – hold onto something.

Several months ago, Marvel openly announced their cinematic schematics, listing every film and its release date for the next 10-15 years.  Although an enormous mountain to climb, the folks at Marvel are master storytellers, and if anyone can map their way to the top, it’s them.  To explain this theory, however, I’m going to hone in on just two other films – Age of Ultron and Captain America: Civil War, the latter releasing in May of 2016.  So, in chronological order, we have:

Avengers: Age of Ultron
Ant-Man
Captain America: Civil War

Think about that for a second: the sequel to the most ambitious film project in history on the left, and a film adaptation of a Marvel event that changed the foundation of Marvel on the right.  And smack in the middle of these two… is an ant?  Really?

To steal a line from Loki from the first Avengers flick, “An ant has no quarrel with a boot.”  Well, this one is dealing with two boots, and has no reason being in the same vicinity.

Don’t get me wrong, while I enjoy the Ant-Man character in the books, he’s not a starting pitcher like Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, or Hulk on the big screen.  They could have done a sequel for any of these characters post-AofU, but instead took a very unconventional route.  Marvel Studios has yet to fail in the cinemas since Robert Downey Jr. put on the iron suit in 2008, so I’m compelled to trust their judgement.  An Ant-Man film is not a sign that they’re running out of ideas, instead it’s an intricate and designed placement of a character that has every necessary component to bridge the two huge events in AofU and Civil War.

So how, then?  First we’ll have to look at AofU and Civil War each separately.  AofU birthed one of the team’s primary villains in their history; if you cause enough ruckus to get the band of all bands back together to stop you, then you’re probably doing something wrong, really right (see what I did there?).  So Ultron attempts to end the world by shooting a city-sized vibranium bullet through its chest, and the Avengers find a way to work out their differences and overcome enormous odds to save the world once again.  Fan-friggin’-tastic.

So if Ultron is an exterior threat, what happens when there’s deep conflict within?  That’s essentially the chorus to Civil War.  Marvel Studios is proving over and over again that they don’t have any interest in following their books line for line when making their films.  Civil War, however, will be very close to the source material, and this is what we know:

Tony Stark and Steve Rogers have conflicting stances over the Hero Registration Act, which requires all masked and/or costumed heroes to be registered with S.H.I.E.L.D.  This means full disclosure – name, date of birth, address, shirt size, favorite baseball team, and how you like your coffee.  You can imagine that this doesn’t sit well with the vigilantes of the Marvel universe such as Spider-Man (a character that they recently re-acquired from Sony Pictures and is confirmed to be in the Civil War film), and Daredevil (if you haven’t caught the Netflix Original Series, it’s a must).  Vigilantes protect their identities by design.  They have a 9-5, they have friends and family to protect, and they choose to fight crime outside the confines of the law.  The second their name is out, everyone they care about is now tied to the train tracks.

Stark is pro-registration, and feels that this is necessary information for everyone to know.  Rogers is anti-registration and sees it as an outright violation of civil rights.  Marvel ran this storyline in 2006-2007, and whether you picked up the books or not, many were forced to answer one of Marvel’s most important questions in their history –

“Whose side are you on?”

Registration Act – why did it come up in the first place?  In a nutshell, a group of B-list heroes that had their own reality TV series tried to save the day by stopping an equally B-list villain.  The results were not so ideal – the bad guy blew himself up… along with an elementary school of 60+ innocent children.  Public anger and outcry ensues.  Demands for action from the government becomes required.  S.H.I.E.L.D. comes up with the Registration Act to keep a lid on everyone.  It’s a perfect formula for conflict between Stark and Rogers, hence, civil war.

You can imagine and anticipate the difficulty of having to choose a side.  In every way, you don’t want to choose.  You want both, especially with the way they adored each other at the end of AofU.  This wasn’t and will not be the case, and the brutality of their fight will come with miles and miles of emotion.

Short recap: you have Avengers vs. Ultron, then Avengers vs. Avengers.  HUGE, right?  So why and how does Ant-Man fit in the middle of these two?

Just like this –

Here’s what we know about Ant-Man as a film from the trailers:

  1. Hank Pym, who is in every way a genius in the realm of Tony Stark and Bruce Banner, is a seasoned old man. He is the original Ant-Man of yesteryears.
  2. Scott Lang is a younger man than Pym. He’s a thief that has ran from the law for much of his life, but wants to make things right.
  3. Pym has chosen Lang to bring the ant back.
  4. Pym has asked Lang to break in somewhere and steal something for him.
  5. San Francisco is an important setting in Ant-Man.

As a stand alone film, you can kind of see where it’s heading – master finds a student, master teaches and molds the student, student is successful in the third act and makes master proud, right?  Well, good thing Marvel Studios isn’t filming The Karate Kid.  There has to be more to Ant-Man.

Now, here are the essentials that you should know about Ant-Man in the comics:

  1. Hank Pym is the discoverer of a rare group of subatomic particles, aptly named Pym Particles, which makes shrinking down to the size of an ant and back to normal possible.
  2. Hank Pym is the original father of Ultron.

Of course, in AofU, Tony Stark pushed for and fathered artificial intelligence, which then led to Ultron.  After attaining Loki’s scepter from Hydra in the opening scene, Tony discovers that there are components worth studying within the scepter, components that he believes are the missing keys to creating A.I.  This is with the help and assistance of Banner, and they spend days attempting to find success, yet to no avail.

Until, so suddenly out of left field, an automatic reattempt of their last formula triggers a successful test.  So sudden and so unlikely, that even J.A.R.V.I.S. was surprised, easily expressed and detected during his initial conversation with Ultron in super-computer talk.

Here comes my first KO punch.  Wait for it.  Not yet, not just yet.  Almost there… and…. Right, here:

What if Hank Pym asked Scott Lang to don the Ant-Man suit to steal something from Tony Stark in Avengers Tower in New York?
Then, what if Ant-Man was in the same room as Stark and Banner during their last Ultron test, right before the party scene, right before Ultron was born?
So finally, what if the successful trigger for the creation of Ultron actually had everything to do with the presence and actions of Ant-Man in that same exact room?

Remember, he gets down to the size of a freakin’ ant.  The human eye, and not even J.A.R.V.I.S., would have detected him.  To reiterate, it’s not a necessity for Marvel to hold the books high as their bible to follow in their films.  This would, however, be a nice nod to Hank Pym, in a way saying to the character, “We didn’t forget about you in all this.”

Why would Hank Pym ask Scott Lang to steal something from Stark?  That could be all kinds of things, my first initial idea being that Pym worked with Howard Stark, who is Tony’s father, decades ago and wants something back that either he and/or Tony kept and/or stole from him.  That would definitely create even more of an intricate weave of Ant-Man into the Marvel cinematic universe.

Mind blown!  At least, I’m speaking for myself.  If you share the same feeling, congratulations – you’re as much of a geek as I am.

This is still half of the theory, though right?  Where’s the Civil War tie-in?  I threw the left hook, so here comes the right cross – are you ready?  Wait for it, wait… for it.  Aaand –

Previously I mentioned the reason for the Registration Act in the comic books, with an elementary school being blown half to hell, at the fault of inexperienced heroes.  Key words there – inexperienced heroes.

With that in mind, what Hank Pym, in his quest to find a successor for the Ant-Man suit, chose poorly in Scott Lang?
Then, what if Scott Lang was at fault for something that went completely awry, ie. the deaths of many innocent people?
So finally, what if Ant-Man’s third act ends where the hero ends in utter failure, forcing the issue for the Hero Registration Act to be put on the table for the Captain America 3 film?


This is the final stop, folks.  This is where I drop the mic.  Watch your step as you exit the train.  Thank you, and I’ll see you in 67 days.

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Junior

The “Fight of the Century” between Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jr. came and went, and to say I’m disappointed would be, well, the understatement of the century.  I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one that feels that way.

Though my disappointment is not just on the verdict of the judges’ scorecards.  While I am completely behind Manny Pacquiao, I am in full admittance that he didn’t do enough to win.  Was it the lack of volume punching?  The lack of flurries?  Where was the ferocity we’ve come to expect?  Where was the sense of urgency?

Or was it Mayweather’s brilliant defense that proved to suffocate all the above?  The answer is yes, and no.  Yes, Pacquiao couldn’t find a way to break Mayweather’s defensive tactics.  And no, Mayweather’s defense is not brilliant.  And there lies my disappointment.

I’m disappointed in Floyd’s passionless career, which has damaged the sport of boxing.

Along with a sea of other celebrities with cash-heavy pockets, actor Denzel Washington was in attendance in Las Vegas last night.  In his long list of impressive films is one titled “The Hurricane.”  Highly underrated, one of my favorites, and I give it my full recommendation.

And yes, it’s about boxing.  But without going into the details of the flick, there’s one quote that glares out with relevance to the subject at hand:

“I was a, um, prizefighter.  My job was to… take all the hatred… and skill that I could muster, and send a man to his destruction.”  He said this as part of his closing statement to help prove his innocence in a court room.  Any who, I digress.  Again, great flick.  Catch it when you can.

Boxing, by nature, is brutal, and violent in design.  It’s not for the faint of heart.  And to “send a man to his destruction” does not mean to kill or murder (if it did, what are the padded gloves for?).  So boxers try to do one thing, right?  To skillfully put their opponents to sleep on the mat for ten seconds with jabs, power punches, fancy footwork, so on and so forth.  In short, a boxer has to light up their opponent, and if they do it enough they walk out with the W and a pot of cash.  Hence, prizefighter.

So it’s constantly and severely disappointing to see Floyd step in the ring with intent to light up the judges’ scorecards, instead.

Now, is he a first ballot hall of famer type?  Absolutely, and if I had a vote in that process, he would have mine.  That, however, doesn’t make me a fan of his fights.  I recognize that he’s good, he’s very good.  But I will not agree that he’s one of the greatest boxers of all time.  A boxer has to fight, and he simply doesn’t fight.  Watching Mayweather box is like watching a football team always opting to kick a field goal on 1st and goal at the one yard line – rather than smashing them in the mouth in the trenches for six he decides to go for three and put it through the uprights.

Are they points for Mayweather?  Of course.  But did he really score?  Did he really tap that ass, or did he just brush it?

He wins rounds, showing enough control and “dominance” and making sure the judges get a clear picture of that.

One minute rest.  Another controlling round of three minutes.  Repeat that for a minimum of seven out of twelve rounds, he’ll walk out with the W and a pot of cash.

Hence, prizefighter?

And he has 48 of those Ws, and not one loss.  If there is a fine line between boxing and displaying a glorified show of self protection, Floyd pens that line.

Now, I’m not a boxing expert, I’m just a long time fan with a fairly educated opinion.  Maybe it’s just me, because I grew up watching and admiring the likes of Sugar Ray Leonard, Mike Tyson, and Oscar De La Hoya.  Their common denominators?  They, like Pacquiao, weren’t afraid to engage in the middle of the ring.  They weren’t afraid of going for the knock out or getting caught trying.

They weren’t afraid to lose.

I’m not saying that Mayweather is and was afraid of Pacquiao.  And honestly, I’m not in agreement with that, as popular as that idea may be with a legion of other fight fans.  Freddie Roach said it best – no boxer is ever really afraid of other boxers.  If they were, they wouldn’t be boxers.  What Mayweather is afraid of, is tarnishing the untarnished with a crooked number in his loss column.  With every match he added to his resume, with every loss he avoided, it has dictated and defined how he stepped into each fight: a lack of zeal and nothing but defense.

I’ll give credit to Floyd, though.  If he showed passion for something, it was for the dollar.  His brand “The Money Team” is aptly named, as he’s earned himself more cash in his career than the gross domestic product of many small counties.  Albeit, a career that, as a main eventer and absolute magnet for boxing, slowly pierced the heart of the sport until it was sent to its destruction in Las Vegas on May 2nd, 2015.

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Untitled

I am often known to do and be many different things.  Busy-minded tends to be the best description.  As my “9-5” (as it tends to reach a lot farther than eight hours/day) I am a manager of a department.  The other side of that coin is that I am a taxpayer, too.  And a payer of many other things.  It’s always a good feeling to be able to pay the rent, the bills, all the coffees, and tip the Eat 24 delivery guys all at the same time.

The other side of what I do resides in freelancing the creative field, a field that is a true love and passion in my life.  I have worked plenty in industrial design – mainly furniture and packaging – as well as visual communication and graphic user interface.  In filmmaking, I have worked the entire process, from pre-production, principal photography, then finishing off in post in the editing room.

I have garnered success in all these fields and titles, and while in technicalities I am all of it, I don’t know if that is what I would truly refer myself as.  Am I a manager?  A designer?  A filmmaker?  Batman?

What I do know, however, is that when I write, I am me.  More than anything else.  I am both lost and found in my own little world and you all just live in it.  Everything feels… right.  And even if something goes left, it feels fine.  Because there’s a belief that it was meant to go that way, and everything will be all right in the end.

So do I call myself a writer?

How about I just keep on writing, and see what happens next.

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