Okay, after my way-too-long hiatus, I'm back to begin a stint of semi-regular blogging. I don't want to promise daily posts, or even weekly posts, but you can be sure that I will keep this blog relatively up-to-date on my comings and goings, since I have a new writing gig that I'll be promoting pretty darn soon, along with whatever else keeps me busy over the summer.
(And, sadly, no, I didn't keep up with the sketching, and that's just not something I can devote myself to these days, when the paychecks are coming in for my writing, not my drawing.)
I put a little picture of John Hawkes here to remind myself that I'm only halfway through "Winter's Bone" and I really have no interest in watching the rest of it, even though everyone tells me it's a great film. Does it get better after the first hour? I mean, sure, it looks good, but it's a hell of a lot less interesting than, say, David Gordon Green's "Undertow," which is kind of a similar white trash on-the-run tragedy, and that movie didn't get anywhere near the accolades as "Winter's Bone." Maybe I'll watch the rest of it before I judge it. That would probably be smart.
And, hey, did you see that I write for Marvel.com now, too? I turned a Walt Simonson phone conversation into two Marvel.com posts and two "When Words Collide" columns, mostly because it was a pretty fascinating conversation, but also because Walt Simonson had a LOT to say. Looks like I might be doing some other things for Marvel.com over the summer months.
I'm sort of caught up at work too. I mean, I'll never really be caught up. But I can see over the pile of papers on my desk, now. I'm not buried like I was.
Also, it turns out that we canceled The Splash Page podcast. Well, I suppose I canceled it, by saying, "I'm done." And Chad didn't want to carry on without me, though I would listen to him and Sean Witzke talk every week if I could. But it's probably for the best that they aren't doing that, so I'll have an extra three or four hours a week to get things done.
So we all went to see "Avatar 3D" today (and by all, I mean Television's Ryan Callahan (@TheTVRC), my wife, my son, and I -- my daughter didn't want to see it, and she would have been bored and restless anyway). Here are some thoughts.
1. TheTVRC pointed out that James Cameron's movies tend to age poorly because he's always right on the cutting edge of new cinema technology. That is true. And it will surely be true for "Avatar" as well, though it looks pretty damn good for a movie that's so CGI-heavy.
2. TheTVRC also pointed out that the movie (SPOILER, of sorts) features a literal deus ex machina, so there's that.
3. My son gave a thumbs up during the movie and an even bigger one at the end. His verdict: it's the best movie he's EVER seen. (He's 8, but he's seen a lot of movies.)
4. My wife had a headache afterward.
5. As the aliens-as-American-Indian thing became more and more clear (and I joked about this being "Pocahontas in Space" based on the trailer, but I didn't realize how James Cameron didn't even try to make up an alien culture, except superficially), I thought to myself, "if Wes Studi shows up as the tribal chief, that would be perfect." Wes Studi IS the tribal chief, and it's perfect. I mean that sarcastically. Because it's dumb as hell to be so on-the-nose.
6. "Unobtainium" is what the bad corporate guys are trying to obtain. On. The. Nose.
7. Giovanni Ribisi plays the Paul Riser role, though his future fashion sense is slightly better than Paul Riser's future fashion sense.
8. If we did not watch the movie in 3D, I'm not sure I would have sat through the whole movie. The first hour is just setting the scene, over and over and over. It's a Disney 3D attraction of "Alien Landscape." Minus the 3D, what is the appeal of hour one?
9. The final battle is pretty damn awesome, though. Really awesome.
10. The movie's pretty clearly about the insurgents slaughtering American soldiers, which is shocking for a big Christmas release. The audience literally clapped at the end.
11. There is not one twist or turn in this entire movie. The plot line is straight.
12. But that final battle IS awesome, as I said. The last 30 minutes makes up for the first two hours of Mr. Jimbo's not-so-wild 3D ride.
This past week, in celebration of the recent release of "Inglorious Basterds," Television's Ryan Callahan hosted an ambitious film festival in the mean back alleys of Los Angeles. Though the line-up was an industry secret before, during, and after the event, my spies in the greater Koreatown area were able to intercept a memo about the clandestine screening schedule, complete with The TVRC's personal notations:
Pre-festival viewing: Inglorious Bastards (Not any better the second time) Manaja: A Man Called Blade (The last great Spaghetti Western) Man Hunt (A must-see. A perfect companion for Inglorious Basterds) Pan's Labyrinth (Not sure if you've heard of this film, but it's actually pretty good.) Memories of Murder (Fantastic Korean police procedural. Same star director of the host) Repulsion (One of the better crazy person films I've ever seen.) The Big, Red One (Less erotic than expected. Great war film.) Breaking News (From PTU director Johnnie To. Much better than PTU. Open shooting worth price of admission alone and since I watched it on my couch that price was only 3 dollars.) Le Doulos (Yeah, this movie's great)
Actual Marathon Card (Card subject to change) 12 - Jackie Brown 2:35 - The Good, The Bad and the Ugly 5:35 - Man Hunt 7:20 - Black Sabbath 8:50 - Blow Out 10:40 - His Girl Friday 12:15 - Battle Royale 2:15 - Used Cars 4:15 - Coffy 5:35 - All Monsters Attack 6:45 - The Killers 8:15 - Magnificent Obsession 10:00 - Pulp Fiction
Just missing the cut: City on Fire Lady Snowblade The Great Silence They All Laughed Vanishing Point Seven Men From Now Kiss Me Deadly The Killing
Now you, too, can pretend you were hanging out with The TVRC, drinking Mexican Coke and eating melted candy bars. If you're man enough.
A non-review of "Watchmen," by Zack Snyder, in 12 parts:
1. The movie is somehow really close to being excellent and simultaneously very, very far away from quality. That's kind of weird.
2. I thought the casting of Danny Bonaduce as Rorschach was provocative at first, but it turns out that he's the best part of the movie. Yes, this joke is terrible, but I couldn't resist. (I blame it on the wig.)
3. The opening credits sequence is really and truly the best part, and it's pretty great.
4. And the Oscar for "Worst Wigs in a Movie Ever. Seriously, Ever!" goes to..."Watchmen."
5. The deep focus and over-lighting make the movie look a lot like the comic but those wigs are really, really terrible.
6. I need to talk about the wigs some more. Maybe there's an in-story reason for the badness of the wigs. I mean, you'd think Adrian Veidt could afford a better rug and all, but Rorschach's a crazy person so he's off the hook. Sally Jupiter: she's old, and probably crazy as well, so maybe she just likes bad wigs. I don't know. Maybe hanging out with Dr. Manhattan did make all their hair fall out and part of the conspiracy is the let's-not-point-out-how-bad-everyone's-wigs-are thing that's going on in the movie.
7. Because the wigs are really bad. And the old age makeup doesn't work at all either.
8. Hollis Mason is cool. There should have been more of him. Note that they didn't go with old age makeup on him, they just cast two completely different actors for the young and old versions and, wow, it actually looks so much better that way.
9. The musican cues are as bad and cheesy as everyone says. At one point, "99 Luftballoons" kicks in, because it's the 80's I guess, and though I am a proponent of two things in movies (the use of "99 Luftballoons" whenever possible -- see "Nights, Boogie" for a great example -- and freeze-frame jumps to close things out -- see "Gordon, Flash" for a great example of that), Snyder throws in the Nena musical gem and then doesn't seem to know what to do with it so it just awkwardly fades out. Poor form, Mr. Snyder. Nena needs nourishment. Though if the movie ended with a freeze frame high-five between Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, it could have redeemed itself.
10. I really like Patrick Wilson.
11. One of the questions people had after seeing early clips from this movie was how well Zack Snyder can direct actors. The answer is pretty clear: he can't do it well at all. It's not that the performances were bad, it's that they were wildly inconsistent, with some actors hamming it up like crazy (like Max Headroom as Moloch -- though, really, what do you expect when you cast Max Headroom in a role?) and some actors playing it kind of straight and somewhat subtle (sort of). Part of the problem was that Alan Moore's dialogue doesn't work that well when spoken aloud, but part of it was that some actors seemed to think they were in "Mystery Men" (Carla Gugino), while others seemed to think they were in "The Big Chill" (Patrick Wilson). Matthew Goode didn't seem to know what movie he was in, but he knew that it was one that involved a lot of stylized movements and an ever-changing accent. His performance doesn't really work well at all.
12. Seeing the movie divorced from its comic book context made two things apparent: (a) there's really no in-story reason for the characters to wear costumes (with the exception of maybe Rorschach, who keeps screaming about his "face"), and while costumes seem perfectly natural in a superhero comic, they seem perfectly silly in a superhero movie, and that's hard to get past; (b) "Watchmen" is really a story about Batman vs. Superman. I never realized it before, because I was always reading it as a book about Charlton analogues, but the movie doesn't have that same context and so the movie becomes about the three aspects of Batman (the obsessed vigilante, Rorschach; the kind-hearted gadgeteer, Nite Owl; and the self-made fighting machine with a gazillion bucks, Ozymandias) in conflict with an ever-distant, alien Superman (Dr. Manhattan, obviously). As a Batman vs. Superman movie, "Watchmen" is pretty cool.
And a bonus #13: I actually liked "Watchmen," even with all of its flaws. It's an imperfect, not-even-close-to-a-masterpiece of artificiality. But I enjoyed it.
I have a few episodes of "Important Things with Demetri Martin" on my DVR, and I finally got around to watching the one titled "Brains." While the "Jokes" segment isn't very funny, the sketch involving Ben Franklin, Shakespeare, and Galileo was genius.
And the stroller battle between the two dads was laugh-out-loud funny.
Martin's style of comedy (obsessive, conceptual, visual, faux-naive, and yet highly intelligent) works well in small doses, and this show breaks everything up into tiny segments, so the bits that miss the mark don't sting as much, and the bits that are hilarious leave a quick impression and then disappear. It's a good show.
I also caught up with some movie watching this week (and though I may have seen "Watchmen" by the time this is posted, I haven't seen it as of Friday afternoon's writing). I saw "Milk" and "Gran Torino," thanks to some screener dvds.
"Milk" is a good movie, and I liked Gus Van Sant's use of documentary footage mixed in with his own stuff. Van Sant also shot some new footage to match the grainy documentary sequences, but he mostly doesn't even try to make it match, visually. The cinematography between the in-movie Harvey Milk scenes looks like its a different universe from the documentary pieces, and I like the artificiality of the juxtaposition. It's one of the most interesting things about the movie, I think.
I talked about how Mickey Rourke deserved the Oscar in last week's "What I'm Watching" post, and even though I hadn't seen "Milk" at that time, I was confident in my assertion that Sean Penn wasn't as good as Rourke. And I was definitely right. Penn plays Harvey Milk as a gay caricature, which wasn't super-distracting as I was watching the film (it's a consistent and fully realized performance), but I have since seen some footage of the real Harvey Milk in various clips on YouTube, and Milk, in real life, was nowhere near as mannered and fidgety as Penn is in the film. Putting the real Milk next to the movie Milk makes Penn's performance seem almost embarrassing.
But nothing about "Milk" is anywhere nearly as embarassing as the abysmal "Gran Torino." If this is, indeed, Clint Eastwood's last performance, then it's a shame. He literally growls his way through the performance as Archie-Bunker-in-the-Hood, and the whole movie feels like a silly made-for-tv production, with 99% more racism.
You know what it reminds me of? Did you see "Million Dollar Baby"? You know that one really out-of-place scene where the the boxer girl's family visits her in the hospital, and they come in with their Disney gear and the whole scene is tonally unlike everything in the movie? "Gran Torino" feels like that for two hours. Every scene feels wrong, feels out of place, whether it's the embarrassing moments of Eastwood pounding the Pabst and growling racial epithets, or the cartoonish Hmong neighbors, or the after-school-special priest character and his awkward advice.
Andre de Toth's 1959 snowbound western "Day of the Outlaw" features the incomparable Burl Ives as Captain Jack Bruhn, a military man who leads a pack of roaming outlaws into a small frontier town. Like pretty much everyone from my generation, I only really know Ives as the snowman narrator of "Ruldolph the Red-Nosed Raindeer," so hearing his familiar voice come out of a hardened killer was startling and wonderful.
Startling, because his sweet, soothing voice commands the respect of his men and creates some sympathy from Robert Ryan's Blaise Starrett. Wonderful, because unlike the typical Western villain, Ives seems like a kindly grandfather burdened by difficult choices. He's evil, but it's an evil built upon a series of choices made long ago -- decisions he may regret, but he cannot change the past.
But that spark of redemption drives the film, as Ryan -- a cattleman not without his own dark flaws -- tries to appeal to the best of Ives's morality in an attempt to keep the outlaw gang from destroying the town. The gang wants nothing more than to drink whatever the tavern has to offer and grope whatever women happen by. Ives has more dignity than that -- he forbids whiskey and women -- but he's dying from a bullet wound, and that ticking clock amplifies the tension significantly.
The female lead, so lasciviously shown on the movie poster, is none other than Tina Louise from "Gilligan's Island" fame. She's great in this role (a much more conservative one than the poster would indicate), and she's almost unrecognizable for those of us who grew up on her Marilyn Monroe caricature in reruns. Here, she's fierce and stoic, and she doesn't have enough to do, but what she does, she does well.
"Day of the Outlaw" ends with an anticlimactic showdown in the snow, as Robert Ryan's character leads the outlaws over a mountain pass that doesn't really exist, and one by one, the gang members fall prey to the harsh wintry conditions.
But when Burl Ives is on screen, it's a captivating film, and definitely worth a look.
This is a half-formed thought, but I want to throw it out into the blogosphere and see what everyone else thinks about it: the coloring in a comic book basically acts as its musical score.
This may be blatantly obvious to some people (I'm sure this isn't the first time anyone's mentioned such a thing), and it may seem completely deranged to others, but hear me out. First, this coloring=musical score notion struck me this week for two reasons: (1) Because Dean Trippe mentioned that he and I are the only two reviewers who talk consistently about colorists (which isn't exactly true, but he's a coloring damned expert, and I sure do gripe about bad coloring whenever I feel the need), and (2) Because I was showing "The Departed" in my cinema class this week, and that Dropkick Murphys' music is oppressive as hell (in a good way).
Since comics don't have musical accompaniment (and though I've had friends who listen to music while reading comics, I've never been able to do that without getting annoyed), what do they use to establish a strong emotional impact? What do they do to cue the reader on how he or she is supposed to feel?
Color.
Obviously, this notion doesn't make sense for black and white comics, but the spotting of blacks does provide a rhythm, a beat, around which the narrative whirls.
So when the coloring is wrong for the comic -- like David Curiel on the Atlas arc in "Superman" or Frank D'Armata on "Captain America" or all of the "painted" color on the "Project: Superpowers" nonsense -- then it's like taking out the Dropkick Murphys and replacing it with late career Billy Idol. It's like taking John Williams's "Star Wars" score and putting in Queen. It changes everything.
Thus, color is to comics as musical score is to movies, and if it doesn't fit, then the whole thing is ruined.
Television's Ryan Callahan gave me Season One of Mad Men for Christmas, and I spent the following week caught up in the 1960s world of the Sterling Cooper ad agency. As I usually do when I dive into a new series and meet a whole bunch of actors I don't know much about, I hopped over to imdb to check out who's who and what's what.
That's how I learned that Bertram Cooper, he of the Ayn Rand obsession and the barefoot walking about, was played by none other than an aged Robert Morse, from the 1965 movie version of The Loved One.
I teach The Loved One, and it's not only my favorite Evelyn Waugh novel, but it's one of my all-time favorite novels by anyone, ever. If you haven't read it, it's a satire of Hollywood and America, circa 1948, but it resonates just as deeply in our shallow world of 2009.
I should have recognized his famous gap-toothed grin from the halls of Sterling Cooper, but the thing is that Robert Morse isn't exactly all that super-famous, and The Loved One was the only thing I'd ever seen him in before the twelve spectacular Mad Men episodes.
And it's not like the movie version of The Loved One was particularly memorable -- it's not even a film I bother to own, and I own a ton of 'em. The problem with the movie is that is that Joyboy is completely miscast with the legendary Rod Steiger. Steiger is maybe one of the greatest film actors ever --well, some people say things like that, but I actually don't think he's all that great, to be honest -- but his puffy physical presence doesn't capture the creepy sadness of the Liberace-esque Mr. Joyboy. Liberace is actually in the movie in a tiny role, by the way, and I can only imagine that he was invited to try out for Joyboy but either the studio wanted a more seasoned actor in the role or Liberace didn't have the dramatic range for the part. Not that Joyboy needs all that much range. He just has to go from creepy to joyously creepy then to sadly creepy. That's pretty much all Liberace can do, anyway, so he would have been a perfect fit.
And getting back to the whole Loved One/Mad Men connection: Robert Morse is in both. Both are about the superficiality of American culture and the way desire is cultivated to make a profit. Mad Men star Jon Hamm, playing the tormented but manly-man Don Draper, has a line in an early episode where he says something like, "love doesn't exist. Guys like me invented it." That pretty much sums up the bought-and-sold notion of the American Dream, and it sums up The Loved One too. Everything that might have once been pure and innocent has been artificially recreated for your mourning pleasure, mechanical beehives and all.
But, seriously, the movie has way too little Liberace.
When the credits rolled at the end of The Spirit, and Television's Ryan Callahan (visiting for the Holidays from sunny California) handed me my jacket and prepared to leave the theater, I said, "Why leave now? This is the best part."
I was referring to the Frank Miller black-and-white illustrations that accompanied the credits, and I wasn't joking. His bold, blocky pen and ink drawings of the Spirit displayed the stark visual aesthetic that would have made a Frank Miller version of The Spirit worth sitting through for nearly two hours.
I'm on the Geoff Klock train of thought regarding this movie, by the way: there's no point even thinking of it as any kind of adaptation of Will Eisner's work. You basically have to approach it as a new creation by Frank Miller, and by taking that angle you don't have to worry about who's going to be rolling over in any graves.
Even by that standard -- even if you look at The Spirit as a cinematic culmination of the Frank Miller sensibility and nothing more -- this thing is a complete failure as a film.
And as a movie that anyone with a heart, mind, and/or soul would want to spend more than a handful of minutes with, it's an unwatchable disaster.
The Spirit is like Sin City mixed with Looney Tunes, minus the humor.
The Spirit is like those bootleg dvds of student film versions of Batman or Spider-Man stories, but with more inconsistent visual appeal.
The Spirit is the kind of movie that might anger you, physically, in nearly every scene.
The Spirit is Boondock Saints for comic book fans, except maybe even worse.
Did you ever see that fight scene that was screened at San Diego this summer? It was on YouTube for a while, though I can't find it now. It had Sam Jackson and Gabe Macht smacking each other around in a mud flat and it was embarassingly bad? The one with the toilet? That scene comes pretty early on in the film, and it sets the tone for what will be a pretty painful experience at the cinema.
One of the running gags in this movie involves the cloned minions of Sam Jackson's Octopus character. They always have names that end in "-os" and at first we get "Pathos" and "Ethos" and "Logos." They don't last all that long, but one of the perks of clone minions is their nearly endless supply (though a non-hilarious plot point is that the supply won't last forever), and so we get more minions later in the film. Like "Huevos" and "Rancheros" and let's not forget "Dildos." And, at the end, what else would we expect but "Adios" and "Amigos."
Yeah, that's the humor of this movie.
Sam Jackson does tear it up, at least. He is maniacal in all the right ways, like he's performing for a dinner theater crowd who isn't really paying attention. Probably because we're all so engrossed in Gabriel Macht's relentless voice-over about his city. The Spirit and "The City" have a special bond, or so the voice-over keeps telling us. It's a whole lot of meaningless talk -- more in the mold of All-Star Batman and Robin parody than in the mold of any kind of noirish precursors -- and the Spirit will just not shut up about how his city "provides" for him. Sometimes he even turns and addresses the camera, just in case we didn't get the winking tone of the rest of the movie. As bad as all the voice-overs are, at least we get to watch Sam Jackson have all the fun he didn't seem to have playing a Jedi.
In the middle of it all, we get glimpses of how this movie might have worked, maybe. The flashback funeral-for-Denny-Colt sequence shows a visual grace that's missing from most of the film (which, in general, alternates between cheap-looking stagecraft and random bits of Sin City moments for no particular reason). And when the resurrected Denny Colt visits Dolan (played by Dan Lauria -- the dad from The Wonder Years -- who is really goddamn great in the film, by the way), we see a sepia-toned Dolan through a screen door and a Spirit silhouette and the whole thing just works in a way that the rest of the film doesn't.
Sure, the girls are nice. Eva Mendes is beautiful and Miller decks her out in some costumes that show her off, and Scarlett Johansson is a goofy-hot right hand woman for the Octopus, and that's all well and good, but it doesn't make the movie into anything resembling a story worth caring about (emotionally, intellectually, or even aesthetically, really -- not for 103 minutes).
The plot doesn't even try to make sense, even by what we might derisively call "comic book logic" (though we should know better that to use that term, for a variety of reasons). In once scene, the Spirit recognizes Eva Mendes's Sand Seref by the shape of her photocopied ass, even though he hadn't seen her since she was a much, much thinner teenager. It's not a detective movie, I know, but it's not really anything else either.
What it is, ultimately, is a Frank Miller-gasm all over the silver screen. It's his familiar territory (harsh city life, lethal beauties, Nazi iconography, scatology, grimly prosaic narration, bombast) writ large. It is a fiercely Milleresque vision, at least. It doesn't seem the least bit compromised by studio interference, and it certainly doesn't feel like any other movie this year. But it's still not any good.
Miller famously abandoned his Hollywood hopes a couple of decades ago after the Robocop 2 fiasco, only to be lured back by the siren song of Robert Rodriguez's green screen. The thing is, the completely compromised, soulless Robocop 2 is probably a better movie than the uncompromised, soulless The Spirit.
In response to my recent Supergirl post, regular Geniusboy Firemelon reader Vanja asked a few questions that I thought deserved a whole post of their own:
WB studios have declared that they will reboot the Superman movie franchise and darken it, bringing it more in line with Nolan's successful Batman movies.
Now, the current issue of Action Comics features the death of a member of the supporting cast, that Morrison has too disposed of in his All Star Superman (to much effect, even though it was a point done in Pre-Crisis continuity too).
I want to ask, do you think that this is the direction the eventual Superman movie will follow? Not exactly spotlighting Brainiac per se, and strengthening his bonds as an arch-villain that crossed the line and went personal with Superman (thought that could well be the case, considering the lack of key Batman villains in the Batman Begins film), but the idea of that particular death.
Does that strike you as "dark" and mature enough, to be mirrored in the movie? Has DC found a way to make Superman grim and gritty and still keep their audience engaged on the big screen?
First, I'd like to address the death of Pa Kent. You're right, Vanja, that Morrison used the scene to great effect in All-Star, as the much younger Clark realizes that he can't save everyone -- a scene which takes place within an issue that features the past, present, and future Superman (and the golden Superman from the future did, kind of, save everyone). And I think Johns handled Pa's death in the newest issue of Action Comics well, using Superman's obsession with the rescued Kryptonian cities to contrast with the death of his all-too human father.
So, even though you're not really asking, I'm going to answer the question about whether or not the death of Pa Kent is a good idea -- does it help tell better Superman stories? I think it does. Since the Byrne reboot, Superman has been the only major superhero to actually have parents who are still alive and still important. I don't know why Byrne decided to keep both Ma and Pa Kent alive in his reboot, but I suspect it was a way to keep Superman a bit emotionally lighter, and to provide a sanctuary he could return to since the Fortress of Solitude was removed from continuity. Having Ma and Pa around could emphasize Superman's Midwestern values, and his simple, humble human origins, at least morally and socially (if not genetically).
But, as I said, no other major superhero has both parents still kicking around, playing such an important role. And there's a probably a reason for that. A deeply-rooted mythical reason having to do with the son replacing the father. Can Superman realize his full potential when the comics are really Superman and his Amazing Parents? Doesn't that diminish the character's scope? I don't know, but maybe it does. Maybe he needs to step up as not just a Super-Son, but as a Super-Man in his own right, and the loss of the father has historically been the most symbolic way to demonstrate the passage into adult responsibility. I'm just throwing these ideas out there, but they seem important.
The death of Pa Kent also adds that kind of tragic undertone that makes Superman realize his tenuous relationship to humanity all the more clearly. If Johns and company use Pa's death just to emphasize the frailty of homo sapiens compared to the Kryptonians who are due to overwhelm the Earth in upcoming DC months, then I think Pa's death would have been an excessive tactic. But if Johns and company build on the emotional cost of Pa's death -- of the loss of that moral beacon in Superman's life -- and actually give Superman the agency to struggle with his own dilemmas without running home for advice all the time (and Ma is still around, of course, but her relationship with Clark is different), then I think that makes Superman a more interesting character.
Basically, Superman can grow up a bit more now, and that's an important step for the character.
Does any of this relate to Warner Brothers' supposed plans for a "darker" Superman movie? I doubt it, and as anyone with a brain knows, a "dark" Superman movie is completely ridiculous. But after The Dark Knight and the inevitable success of Watchmen in theaters next year, I'm sure we'll see a huge push to make all superhero movies "darker" and "grim and gritty." It's like the late 80's, early 90's all over again, but on the big screen.
Yet a Superman movie should have pathos and danger and real emotional stakes. The death of Pa Kent might achieve such an undertone, but without establishing the importance of the character substantially, I don't know that it would translate within a two-hour movie. In Donner's Superman: The Movie, it works, almost, but the emotional stakes and sense of danger is totally shattered by the time-travel ending, which automatically eliminates any meaning to any action within the movie. And, honestly, I thought Singer's Superman Returns was pretty dark already, with the creepy-stalker Superman lurking in the trees, using his x-ray spy-o-vision.
So I hope we don't see a grim The Dark Superman movie anytime soon, but I do think that you can give substance and weight to the character by making things matter. The death of Pa Kent matters, and I know Geoff Johns didn't kill off the character for frivolous reasons.
I missed Speed Racer in theaters, and I wasn't in much of a hurry to see it anyway based on the reviews I read which called it "rock candy LSD without a soul" and "bright and shiny and as directionless as the recent career of Mike Myers."
But last night, I popped in the dvd and I found myself absolutely loving the heck out of Speed Racer. It probably helped that I was watching it with my seven-year old son, and his glee was apparent. Near the climax of the movie, I turned to him and said, "I think this movie is awesome," and his response was, "this movie is SO awesome." So I recommend abducting a seven-year old when you watch this thing [note: I do not recommend abducting a seven-year old]. But "awesome" is the right word. It's like a movie from the future sent back in a time bubble for our enjoyment today.
True, the plot is overly simplistic and the stock characters are exactly what you'd expect, but who cares? It's all about the visual energy and that stuff is magnificent. This is the best-looking film of the year, without a doubt.
I'm not a huge fan of CGI in general, and I loved how relatively smoothly it was incorporated into Iron Man and The Dark Knight, but Speed Racer embraces the artifice of CGI to such an enthusiastic degree that it doesn't matter what looks fake and what doesn't. The whole thing is an imaginary world where vikings drive badass racecars and sneaky bad guys launch cobras from their car-catapults. Those are actually plot points from the movie, and if you think that stuff sounds ridiculously stupid, then you won't like Speed Racer at all. If you think they sound ridiculously glorious, especially in 8-gigawatt Technicolor, then you will have as much fun watching it as I did.
Critics who have knocked Speed Racer have compared it to a video game. Well, I can understand that feeling, because that's exactly how Clone Wars felt, but Speed Racer isn't like a video game. It's a moving digital painting, vibrant and alive and full of joy. It's not one endlessly repetitive scene after another, with blinding colors for no reason. No, there's a deeply wonderful aesthetic at play here, and while it might be ADD-addled and frenetic, it's also thrilling.
I'm really looking forward to seeing both Iron Man and The Dark Knight on dvd, and, in fact, I think I'll show them in my Cinema and Screenwriting class later this year because I'm the teacher and I say we're going to have a short superhero cinema unit in January. So there! But, honestly, I came out of The Dark Knight completely stunned by the brilliance of Heath Ledger's performance but with mixed feelings about the rest of the movie. On the other hand, I thought Iron Man was almost-pitch perfect from beginning to end. Nothing in that movie was as fascinating as Ledger's Joker, but it also wasn't as wildly inconsistent. Iron Man was a sleek, fun, thrilling exploration of that character's world, done better than any comic book incarnation of the character ever.
Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight, as excellent as it was, still had Christian Bale's terrible bat-voice (at least have a character in the movie comment upon how ridiculous he sounds, or something!), Nicky Katt (who I love, but who had a scene that was tonally out-of-place), and a lot of speechifyin' about justice.
Iron Man had evil Jeff Bridges in a giant suit of robot armor.
So, I'm tending to lean toward Iron Man as my favorite superhero movie, but that's why I'm looking forward to the dvd releases, because I want to watch them both again.
You know what, though? Even though they are surely the two best superhero movies ever made, no matter how you rank them (and I know everyone else in the world has TDK as number one, but maybe you will rethink that after the dvd releases. Or maybe I'm 100% completely and utterly wrong), I am kind of obsessed with Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog these days, and now that I've downloaded the soundtrack and have been listening to it as I drive to work, I don't know what to think anymore.
My live-action superhero judgment has gone haywire.
Seriously, though. I love Dr. Horrible so, so much. I'm not a big Joss Whedon guy, although I like Firefly quite a bit. But Dr. Horrible is the best thing he's ever done. I'd rank it as my favorite movie of the year, if it were a movie. So take that, Iron Man and Dark Knight!
Last week I posted Parts 1 and 2 of Andre Perkowski's collage of what a 1920s silent Batman film might have been like, and here's Parts 3 and 4, a two-part narrative heavily inspired by Grant Morrison's Arkham Asylum graphic novel. I conducted a lengthy Q&A with Perkowski and posted the results below.
First Part of Arkham After Midnight
Second Part of Arkham After Midnight
Tim Callahan: What's your process? How do you make these shorts?
Andre Perkowski: Digital dowsing. A random, chance-based flicking around on the timeline of the source material. If anything catches the eye, I cut it out for possible use later. Flicking around like this, you can get a frame from the first 5 minutes, a second from the middle of the film, and a bit of the ending jumbled up together very quickly. This can turn up interesting connections between the apparently divergent shots... our brains want these cuts to make sense, and they are trained by a lifetime of television to absorb images and weave a narrative around them. If you're willing to suspend your disbelief a bit and go with the oozing mood of it, it all seems to flow together as part of a whole... the oozing mood is a big part, the magic of sound welded to image is what really makes it pop and flow together. They may have been silent films, but they did have some old biddy wailing away on the organ.
I usually have a list of kinds of shots or actions I'm looking for, and haphazardly go through many films in a row just clicking around randomly until I get more than enough. Then I'm left with a big pile of seemingly disparate clips, I organize them by character and location... or sometimes they organize me, as some things just stick out and edit themselves.
TC: How much did you add to the found footage, besides the title cards? Did you add any special effects (and how did you get that Bat-Signal)?
AP: The bat-signal is untouched from 1926's The Bat. A flashlight and a moth cutout of some sort used as a calling card for the title character, but still fairly similar and you can see that image nestling in the early Batman comics crew's mind, burrowing into their brain and being regurgitated back later subconsciously. Or maybe they just plain swiped and re-appropriated it for a totally different purpose like I did.
I considered adding some creepy b&w 16mm and Super-8 stuff I shot initially, but then reconsidered and thought it would be more entertaining and less clumsy to stay roughly in the right time period. There was tracking stacking at the bottom of the 49 serial footage so I added some vignetting to mask it, trimmed frames here and there to compress scenes and give it a choppy print effect. "Cut-up, slow down, speed up, run backwards," as William S. Burroughs summed it up. I tried not to use too many jarring digital effects as the CG title cards were bad enough.
TC: Why did you make these Batman films?
AP: Pure experimentation and summer holiday pleasure, as a break from working on my supposed "real" films that take years and drag on forever. This one was just an idea had walking back from seeing The Dark Knight, how would I have shot it? Being a retro freak, black and white for starters. 1939. Pulpy. Shadowy. Uncomfortable, itchy, and filled with throbbing industrial noises and wind. A bit of Lynch, a dash of Welles, a clove of Guy Maddin. Not having much money, it'd have to be non-sync sound film. Now we're getting a bit too excited so the real world kicks in: its DC's baby, the thought of making a "fan film" seems vaguely disreputable despite my own total lack of a reputation, and I have my own malnourished film toddlers to take care of! So I filed it away in the "hmmm" section. Until a few days later when I remembered The Bat and Conrad Veidt's proto-Joker. Insert light bulb and exclamation mark over head, dissolve to one long weekend of crazy editing/collaging/cobbling... there it is. I had such a huge amount of fun making the first short, turned up lots of great unused material, and seemed to entertain a decent amount of people in a short time as opposed to my usual er, peculiar stuff. So why not make a serial with what's left and put my disorienting 3 A.M. mark on the character before moving on? Cheaper than processing 16mm film, anyway. I agonize over that enough.
TC: But why Batman, exactly?
AP: So it all comes full circle. Bob Kane, Bill Finger, and Jerry Robinson took a certain amount from some of these films to create their good old-fashioned enduring icon and his adversaries. The Bat is pretty obvious: sure, the character is a burglar in it. But he also travels around buildings with ropes, has a Batsignal, and dresses up like a giant bat to scare people. Hmm. Does that ring many bells? The Joker's look in the early comics looks pretty much like Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs, and they have cited the film as well. Combined, shuffled, and rewritten, it seemed to work quite well and made this man laugh, anyway. Besides, Superman didn't have many pubic domain film influences. Metropolis doesn't count, alas it isn't PD. The German Expressionist mood lends itself really well to Mr. Wayne and his personal problems.
TC: How did you develop new stories out of bits and pieces from unrelated films?
AP: For the first one I knew I had to tell the origin story, so I'm riffing off of the Kane/Finger version and adding my own idiosyncratic spin and made-up vintage dialogue and syntax that never quite existed... being limited to 4 or 5 minutes in The Bat where he actually exists made it pretty easy to work around it.
Marv Wolfman enjoyed it, then it looks like his writer side kicked in with: "Boy it would be interesting if a story was possible, but as you said, copyright and all that." Yeah, I thought. Ah well. Then the next day took it as a challenge and thought, well - why not give it a try. Could be fun to make a little story arc with cliffhangers... of course, I was almost legally mandated to have them since I had already used up all the footage in The Bat and didn't want to bore people by repeating it. So its off to sampling the Batman and Robin 1949 serial, cropping and carefully cutting it right to the very frame JUST before Robin appears. Its a shame to lose the 20s look and attempts at aging and vignetting digitally always look fairly corny, but at least now there's a huge pool of material of the hero to use... now what does he do? For the followup, I knew I wanted to stuff it with all sorts of freaks, monsters, and villains since there are so many interesting creations in these early films. So there's my location sorted out, as there's that one lax security place in Gotham that seems to have a nice population of freaks, monsters, and villains. Also makes it easier to link prison, asylum, or just hallways from many different films to somewhat create the illusion that it's one place. These are the kinds of meaningless tasks I set for myself in the summer to stay out of the humidity and avoid thinking about actual work. I just confined myself to one month to do them all and then move on before the barrel gets scraped a bit too much.
TC: As a Batman fan, what particular incarnations of the character have you enjoyed?
AP: Almost all of them at different points in my life. I grew up with daily showings of the '66 series, hit the comics, was vaguely disappointed (and then so repulsed I opted out entirely) by the movies, stopped following most comics from 1993-2008 or so. Lately I've been digging out old boxes, cackling at the serials, and have really enjoying the quirkiness of those '39 to mid '40s Bob Kane/Bill Finger stories. Cook them all up together and there's the result ready to be scraped off your monitor.
TC:What do you think about Morrison's current Batman run?
AP: I loved Arkham Asylum, the influence dribbles all over the serials and I wish I could make such gorgeous collage paintings. Morrison's fun references were like taking a pen and checklist to my bookshelves at the time, so what's not to love. I think it holds up a lot better than a lot of Miller's hilarious patchwork right wing drool-covered rants, so when I heard about this fabled current run a few weeks ago over something inexplicably called a "German Breakfast," I ordered some after being befuddled in a nice way by the recent bits. Clearly there's an intricate lysergic backstory that needs absorbing.
TC:You said The Dark Knight movie started you thinking about manufacturing these silent versions of yours, but what are your feelings about that film?
AP: Great big gobs of summer movie fun and an enjoyable air conditioned escape from your friendly local urban hellhole. Nice to see Chicago, city of my windy nightmares twisted just so into Gotham. Must've been meticulously exhilarating to make. Properly pitched acting except the inexplicable moments of pro-wrestler outbursts from Bats. Sounded like those taunts they'd do between matches in front of a brick wall... "I'm gonnnaaa get youuuu Jokeeeer and I'm gonna shooow you that Hacksaw Jim Duggan is gonna ta-" Etc etc. When he rants about good in that voice I'm vaguely uncomfortable. Maybe some sort of pitchshifted/fx-ed Radio Shack cowl-based whisper would've worked better.
TC: What projects are you working on for the future?
AP: There are screenings and associated strangeness for my double feature of Ed Wood Jr. adaptations this year, Devil Girls and The Vampire's Tomb. Two early features finally forced out into an uncaring world. Trailers can be had at YouTube: Terminal Pictures and there are no men with huge furry ears in them that I know of, and I've checked. In theory there might even be DVDs for them along with my real epic that'll have grad students eyes a-straining to footnote about one day, "I Was a Teenage Beatnik and/or Monster for the Literal Underground!" I'll have info on that page about dates/cities as well as a site that'll pop up about 'em.
There's a ridiculous Super-8 feature length semi-surrealist ode to bad 80s kung fu being wrapped up in the editing department entitled A Belly Full of Anger that is just...beyond words. I know what you're probably thinking, but the truth is: even stranger. With voiceover cameos by Phil Proctor of the Firesign Theatre and Trace Beaulieu of Cinematic Titanic/Mystery Science Theater 3000. So we have the theatres and the theaters covered. I just need another pile of film transferred for that and it can be pretty expensive to do it right. Hence the frustrating delay leading me to playing with title cards! There's a trailer for that as well on the youtube page along with 124 other videos or so. I don't sleep much.
Then I have to edit yet another backlog feature, a grimy industrial noir entitled The Man Who Couldn't Lose shot in B&W 16mm/Super-8... how do I describe that one? The mood at 2am around that stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike heading out of NYC when it suddenly gets all Blade Runner-y on you... smoke, stink, grease, and discolored quasi-darkness lit by blinking lights cutting through toxic fumes.
As if that's not enough, there are piles of sketches, faux trailers, and shorts to edit, plus an endless documentary on fringe filmmaking with all the folks I've stumbled into or admired. So until this editing work is done I'm not taking on anything new until next year, probably. Unless I suddenly decide walking back from the new Woody Allen movie that I have to retell Annie Hall using a magic lantern.
Being a no-budget underground filmmaker mostly working with hideously expensive (for me, anyway) filmstocks due to a profound loathing of digital video, I work in spurts and like a painter. A very disorganized, very eccentric painter. Picking up one canvas, tossing another aside, trying to rescue one months later. If its my money, my debt, my pain, why not? I figure if I ever get sucked into more commercial work full-time instead of occasional dabbles and quick retreats, I'll cherish these years of futzing around with whatever I wanted to with no limitations but money, actors aging, and sanity. On second thought, please assist me in selling out right now and I'll helm a Solomon Grundy direct to video movie.
Using silent film footage reconfigured, edited, and transposed with new title cards, filmmaker Andre Perkowski has created a look at what a Batman film might have looked like, circa 1926. Part One features the origin of the Bat-Man:
Part Two features the Bat-Man's greatest enemies:
Perkowski has posted the first part of a two-part "Arkham Asylum" movie, but I'll link to that later this weekend, when the second part becomes available as well. I also have an exclusive interview with the filmmaker coming soon!
Forgotten imaginary Bat-Man films of the 1920's are good.
On Sunday, I told my kids they could write down any two things they wanted to do this week, and if the requests were reasonable (Disney World, for example, would be out of the question) we could do what they wanted. My four-year-old daughter wanted to (1) play with her toys [DONE!] and (2) go swimming [not yet done, but the weather around here hasn't exactly co-operated], while my seven-year-old son listed (1) buy a pack of Chaotic game cards [DONE!] and the thing he really wanted to do most was (2) go to the theater and see Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
He even got my daughter excited about it. Every day this week, she'd ask, "is it Clone Wars today?"
I don't hate the Star Wars prequels. They just make me sad, and I don't have any desire to watch them again. Particular scenes? Maybe. The entire movie of episode one, two, or three? Not so much. But this Clone Wars movie seemed interesting. Sure, the last I'd heard, it was supposed to be a television show and the pilot somehow ended up with a theatrical release. Sure, the designs were a strange mix of the Cartoon Network Clone Wars animation and some bad video game modeling. Sure, I really had little interest in the adventures of young Anakin.
But an action-packed Star Wars movie sounded like fun at least.
It is not.
It is a very bad movie.
My son liked it, and but he likes every animated movie, and he's a video game addict, so the look of this movie was just what he was used to. But that's the problem with the movie--it is a video game, except you don't get to control it. It's got those cinematics where the characters describe the mission and tell you what's at stake, only instead of reaching for your controller to bust out some lightsaber skills or pilot your ship through an asteroid field you watch as the animators do it for you. And not in any particularly exciting way.
My daughter, who sat through Indiana JonesIV totally engrossed, couldn't sit still during this movie. She not only squirmed around and looked bored, but she actually asked to leave. She's never done that in a movie before. I would have left, too, except my son was enjoying the action.
I will say this: the stiffly animated Anakin Skywalker was a more interesting portrayal than the Hayden Christensen performance in the prequels. I'm not saying that to be snarky. I'm serious. The pixellated Jedi was far more engaging than his real-life counterpart. But it still wasn't enough to make the movie watchable.
I won't bother you with plot specifics, but the main thread deals with Anakin and his precocious young apprentice trying to get Jabba the Hutt's kidnapped baby back from the bad guys. There are plenty of jokes about how stinky the baby is, and tons of scenes about Anakin not knowing how to handle a trainee, and important life lessons about not judging a book by its cover, and plenty of dull, poorly paced fight scenes.
I didn't expect much from this direct-to-video, but-somehow-on-the-big-screen little Star Wars movie. And it still felt like a waste of time for everyone involved.
Half the people in the audience clapped at the end of the screening. I wonder if they were celebrating because it was finally over.
Errol Morris's "The Thin Blue Line" was unlike anything else screened at film fest HQ this week.
The documentary feature detailed the farcical trial of Randall Dale Adams--who was so clearly wrongly accused of murdering a police officer in in 1976. Using interviews with Adams, the defense team, super-creepy and obvious murderer David Ray Harris, Morris lays out the case for Adams's innocence. But he doesn't do it in the Michael Moore style of, "can you believe this??? I can't believe this??? Can you???" He lets the characters speak for themselves, and uses moody and cinematic re-enactments to show how the murder might have occurred and how the witnesses may have been more than a little unreliable.
Above all, we at film fest HQ were astounded by the film's fascinatingly structured escalation, as the details of the case came more clearly into focus with each interview--even when the interviews didn't describe events in the same way.
"The Thin Blue Line" is about a justice system determined to close the case by the most expedient means necessary, and if an innocent man had to pay the price, then it was for the greater good of the justice system. To keep those monster truck wheels of justice rolling.
This was the first real, substantial film screened at The First Annual GeniusboyFiremelon Bi-Coastal 24-Hour (Non-Consecutive) Film Festival, and it may yet win the coveted Blazing Melonball Award for Best in Show.
Richard Oldstate adds, "this was not the delightful Rowan Atkinson romp I expected. Three and one-eighth stars.
After the Batman wars, the only ethical choice was to look outside the country for cinema, and thus, when Johnny To's PTU: Police Tactical Unit appeared atop the spinner rack, we knew that we could find sanctuary.
Unfortunately, we at film fest HQ discovered that PTU was one of To's lesser-known works for a reason. While still hauntingly evocative and stylish, it's slow, dream-like unfolding is too subtle for most American audiences. Thirty seven participants fell asleep during the screening, and the remaining forty five spent the bulk of the movie pondering the post-Batman and Robin cinematic fate of Alicia Silverstone and Chris O'Donnell. Only Richard Oldstate remained actively engaged in the film, which slowly unfolds the tale of a police officer seeking his missing gun as the forces of crime and policing build to a Leone-esque confrontation in the final minutes.
Accustomed, as we were, to garish costumes, hilarious cold-related puns, and AWESOME VEHICLES, PTU suffered by comparison. It was a ponderous masterpiece, no doubt, but it lacked motorcycle stunts and Nicky Katt.
In the genre of cop-loses-gun, PTU doesn't even rank in the top three, falling just behind Kurosawa's Stray Dog, P.T. Anderson's Magnolia, and that sequence in season three of The Wire.
Says Richard Oldstate: "I found this feature film hilarious. I always enjoy a good farce, and this one was certainly up to snuff. Speaking of snuff, it reminds me of several snuff films I participated in during the '70s. They say it's easy to kill a man, but not when you use only a matchbook."
The only possible retaliation against Richard Oldstate's deployment of the Batman Forever gambit was to attack with what is considered the worst superhero movie in history: Batman and Robin. But here at film fest HQ, we didn't just want to watch the fantastical adventures of George Clooney and his band of merry men. We wanted to gain only the deepest insight into the creative process behind the film, so we turned to director Joel Schumacher--or to his commentary track.
Schumacher teaches us a few things about filmmaking, and here are the important lessons everyone should know:
1) Feign ignorance, or, if that fails, actually be ignorant. Schumacher acts surprised when he says people compared this movie to the Adam West television show, with its campy humor, bright colors, and cornball dialogue.
2) Don't be afraid to ask a six-year-old. Schumacher had no ideas for the sequel to his previous Bat-box office smash, so he asked his little godson which characters he liked, and that's why Mr. Freeze is in the movie, and Poison Ivy, and Bane. Even though there's no story that links them together at all logically.
3) Movies are for selling toys. Why all the silly vehicles and costume changes? Schumacher was told to have those things to make the movie more "toyetic."
4) Alicia Silverstone is a skilled actress. Who else can play a mildly retarded young woman with a puffy face and a speech impediment who's really good at computers. "I can do it. I'm a big girl!" she seems to say, in that Life Goes On way of hers.
5) Nicky Katt rides motorcycles.
As terrible as Batman and Robin truly is, we at film fest HQ found it far superior to Batman Forever, largely due to the math involved. While Jim Carrey = Arnold Schwarzeneggar, Tommy Lee Jones < style="font-style: italic;">Batman and Robin is a better looking movie than Batman Forever. And not having to listen to the dialogue while Schumacher droned on about how much contempt he has for the source material, "It's just a comic book movie," he repeatedly declared--well, that was painful gravy.
None of us at film fest HQ had seen Batman Forever since its original theatrical release, but when it popped up on the spinner rack, in position #1... (okay, who am I kidding? It was the special selection of film fest founder and secretary Richard Oldstate. He of the tweed slacks and the seafoam ascot. One would think he'd be above such superhero spectacle, especially after the disappointment of Gotham Knight, but as he held the Batman Forever dvd in his meaty hands, he giggled like a seven-year-old who'd just found his father's stash of Gary Panter art books).
As we screened this film, we, at film fest HQ, wondered (vocally) why Batman and Robin was thought of as the film that killed the Batman franchise, when Batman Forever was clearly a work of utter horribleness. How the franchise survived this movie--how this movie earned hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide--we could not decipher, as we sat in loud silence watching Nicole Kidman throw herself at a pre-puffy Val Kilmer; as we watched Tommy Lee Jones take cinematic performance in a direction best left to lesser actors; as we watched Jim Carrey give one of the most grating acting lessons of his long and painful career; as we watched Chris O'Donnell do his laundry karate.
This is the worst movie in GeniusboyFiremelon Bi-Coastal 24-Hour (Non-Consecutive) Film Festival history.
Jon Favreau's the best thing in this movie, and he has no lines. Somehow, he survived this monstrosity.
After mocking the crimes against theatricality perpetrated by Joel Schumacher and company, we knew there was only one way to redeem ourselves and save our film festival from the fate of its lesser competitors. We had to go the distance.
Next up: Batman and Robin (1997)
[Note: Richard Oldstate adds, "I am a fan of acting and a fan of the actor, and I chose this film because I so admire the nuances and restraint shown in the performances of Mr. James Carrey and Sir Thomas Lee Jones. I have no comment on Mr. Timothy Callahan's improper impression of the film. He was clearly watching a different movie.]
When Shoot 'em Up rotated to the front of the film fest HQ spinner rack, we knew we were in for a very special 86 minutes of cinematic profundity.
The title of the movie does not lie. There is shooting, and the shooting is...up. (Actually, I don't really know where the "up" comes in, but "Shoot 'em real good, a lot" isn't as catchy.)
Director Michael Davis has made other films, all of which I have neglected to see--even his screenwriting debut, Double Dragon, which sounds like something everyone would love since it features Alyssa Milano, Mark Dacascos, and The Lady and the Tramp II's Scott Wolf. And it's based on a video game. And there's kicking. But here at film fest HQ, we didn't watch that--we screened Davis's newest feature: Shoot 'em Up.
I took a bathroom break about 45 minutes into the movie, and when I came out: more shooting. I apparently missed the plot, which dealt with some baby harvesting/gun control hot button issues, during my little break. The five minutes of missed plot did not hamper my enjoyment of this movie, which is one ridiculous set piece after another. This movie is one scene after another about a badass holding a baby, shooting everything in sight while chomping carrots. That's it. It doesn't aspire to more. The baby is clearly a doll in several sequences, and the filmmakers don't seem to mind one bit. You have to admire their willingness to abandon any pretense at realism. This is a gleeful romp through the streets of violence, and it has no redeeming qualities other than its self-conscious joy.
Here at film fest HQ, we thought it was a terrible movie, but an entertaining one nonetheless. It cleansed our palatte for the next film. It prepared us for the immense epic of cinematic genius that would soon follow in The First Annual GeniusboyFiremelon Bi-Coastal 24-Hour (Non-Consecutive) Film Festival. We were ready.
Okay, after my way-too-long hiatus, I'm back to begin a stint of semi-regular blogging. I don't want to promise daily posts, or even weekly posts, but you can be sure that I will keep this blog relatively up-to-date on my comings and goings, since I have a new writing gig that I'll be promoting pretty darn soon, along with whatever else keeps me busy over the summer.
