Just this past week, I stated seeing ‘Best of’ lists all over the place, specifically, the ‘Best’ science-fiction of the last decade. Typically, such all of the lists I found looked something like this:
1. ‘Children of Men’
2. ‘Moon’
3. ‘District 9′ [Read more →]
With the publication of Watchmen in 1985, comic books took a sudden, dark and grity turn, similar to police drama after Steven Bochco’s ‘Hill Street Blues’. Like Grant Morrison’s ‘Doom Patrol‘, and later, ‘The Authority‘ and Marvel’s ‘Ultimates‘, ‘Watchmen’, the book is not about about capes and tights, but rather the misfits who choose to pursue auperheroics. In ‘Watchmen’, Alan Moore seizes upon the idea that great power might produce monsters — individuals devoid of values and restraint even as they fight the ‘good’ fight.
Terry Gilliam attempted to bring ‘Watchmen’ to life twice, once in 1989 and a decade later, in 1999. He gave up because he felt that the story couldn’t be adequately covered in 2 hours’ time and that the material might be better dealt with as a miniseries, Though there is no Gilliam ‘Watchmen’, I credit ‘Watchmen’ and it’s alternate-apocalyptic 1985 for the rich visual landscape of thr film that Gilliam went on to produce in the mid-’90′s, ’12 Monkeys’ (1995). [Read more →]
I didn’t read ‘X-Men’ as a kid (I was more of a ‘Fantastic Four’ nerd myself) so I can only judge this film based on how well it hews to the bible it has already set up in the first three ‘X-Men’ films. By that standard, ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ succeeds…mostly.
Wolverine is by far one of the more interesting of the first-generation X-Men. He’s cranky; he carries his own moral code around like an invisible cloud often circumventing plans and strategies to do what he believes is right; he’s confident, and he’s practically indestructible. [Read more →]
Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Dark Knight‘ is the latest addition to the trend of painfully overplotted comic book movies. I’m not exactly certain when the habit of inflating a paper-thin pulp story into a full-blown bildungsroman. But since the late ’80′s it’s been necessary for each comic book movie to have at least two villains and as many as 4. (Notably, Tim Burton’s 1989 movie only had one villain, The Joker.)
While this installment of Batman seems to be the most successful commercial film since James Cameron’s ‘Titanic‘, you’d think that such a movie would have to have a simple storyline to keep selling tickets at such a rapid pace, week after week. Not so, here. [Read more →]
During a summer that’s seen an effort of recycling everybody’s syndicated childhood programming — Get Smart, Speed Racer, live-action versions of ‘The Hulk’ and ‘Iron Man’ — some of the good stuff is getting lost over at ABC Family. “The Middleman” is Javier Grillo-Marxuach‘s television adaptation of his eponymous series of graphic novels.
But The Middleman isn’t just some dime-store comic book property, it’s a fun, literate and self-conscious treatment of semi-secret agents, superheroes and villains, a pop-culture confiture that rivals anything Joss Whedon and the Gilmore Girls ever offered up in zither’s fast-paced talk-fests. While I’ve not read the comic book, it is said to be ingenious.
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‘Hancock‘ started it’s journey to the screen 12 years ago as a spec-screenplay by first-timer Ny Vincent Ngo, titled ‘Tonight He Comes’.
I first learned about Ngo’s screenplay through some fanboy site like Harry Knowles’ AintItCool.com. Ngo’s script created something of an uproar in Hollywood despite comic book properties being at a fallow moment after Joel Schumacher’s assumption of the Batman franchise with ‘s ‘Batman Forever‘ (1995) and the revolving door that the title role became after the departure of Tim Burton and Michael Keaton.
‘Tonight’ launched a bidding war and got Ngo signed by CAA, jump-starting Ngo’s screenwriting career and several premium-cable writing gigs. But along the way, the script also got the attention of Writer-Producer Akiva Goldsman who bought the script and subsequently doctored it to fit his number one screen-doctoring client, Will Smith. [Read more →]
While most superhero origin stories are simple – the protagonist has a life, something happens to change that life, and the protagonist dedicates the remainder of his or her life to a new cause as a result – they don’t have to be simplistic. The best origin stories grapple with the complexities of both the human condition and with our often conflicting motivations. Unfortunately, despite all the high-gloss special effects, ‘Iron Man’ fails to embrace those subtleties and instead looks at the world from that either/or perspective that has been so popular in America in the last decade. [Read more →]
This past Saturday, the LA Times ran a piece about how Marvel, now Marvel Studios the feature-shingle of parent corporation Marvel Entertainment now has to resort to their B-list of characters now that their A-listers, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and the X-Men have now run their courses as franchises and are only going to become more expensive with the increasing salary demands as the actors who created the onscreen characters are likely only to become more and more expensive.
Sure, there’s an Iron Man movie in the works, an Ant-Man movie and ‘Fantastic Four II‘ coming this summer. [Read more →]
Despite the mixed reviews coming from the fans, Marvel’s Civil War is a momentous event. People can talk their DC Kingdom Come stuff as much as they want, but Civil War is the book that they’ll be talking about in the graduate-level Ivy seminars and MLA conferences ten years from now.
Why? Well, it’s certainly not the subtlety.
Most of the fan-problem with CW is that many characters are depicted out-of-character. After a 40 year friendship, Captain America (Steve Rogers) and Iron Man (Tony Stark) have suddenly been depicted as rivals. In Marvel’s continuity, Rogers and Stark have been friends and teammates on the Avengers for more than 40 years, yet, in an almost painful evocation of the McCarthy era and the Alien and Sedition Acts, Marvel has created a ‘Super-Hero Registration Act’ (SHRA) that requires all super-powered persons to register with the Federal Gov’t, otherwise face lifetime incarceration. [Read more →]
O.k., it’s been on for 2 months and I was initially non-plussed when I saw a preview back at the end of August.
As ‘Unbreakable:The Series’, I was sure it would be cancelled before October, but it’s managed to hold on, and gain my attention, in part owing to my brother retuning from Europe and taking an immediate interest.
Personally, I’m not invested in the drug-addicted (cliché) artist, though his dealer is a hottie. And the A.D.A.-turned-politician (played by Adrian Pasdar) is as much a non-entity as is his brother, the lover of the art-dealing hottie. OTOH, what’s drawn me into the show are a number of tertiary characters — specifically Charlie, the Odessa TX waitress that Hiro time-travels 6 months into the past to try to save from Sylar the Hero killer. And Claire the cheerleader daughter of the would-be bad guy with the horn-rimmed glasses calling the shots for all of the mind-controlling hero-types. [Read more →]
