What lies within…Item 37? (Hint: it’s bigger than a breadbox, smaller than the Ark of the Covenant.)
For those who missed out, my attempt to streamline the basic events follows after this courtesy spoiler alert for the sake of time-shifted viewers.
So…who wants to learn the Big Bad’s true name? Show of hands?
Zero-g leaves zero margin for error.
While we eavesdropped on the cast’s interplay during their distant grand entrance, the ambiance of their stage-setting was slightly disrupted by the sounds of the peckish viewers seated around me, rustling plastic wrappers and scarfing whatever snacks they couldn’t be bothered to finish during the preceding 25-minute trailer marathon. This sort of aural dissonance isn’t an issue when you’re watching the average summer action blockbuster that kicks off with a twenty-minute 200-decibel set piece that eradicates all sound and vibration in its path.
More about this weekend’s #1 film, which presently sits at 98% on the Tomatometer…
The Smoke/Ashes two-in-one limited hardcover edition was made possible through Kickstarter and conscientious perseverance. Art by Tomer Hanuka.
This fabulous package was the result of a Kickstarter campaign that was launched in October 2011, successfully funded in December 2011, announced with a delivery date of December 2012, and plagued by setbacks too numerous to recount. Through frequent updates composed with above-and-beyond personal candor, DeCampi kept in touch throughout the process, provided backers with access to a digital version months ago, and generally gave the impression that she had every intention of fulfilling her commitments, no matter how much it would end up costing her in the long run, all without passing the budget overruns on to us. Congress should be so conscientious.
More than a few Kickstarter projects out there can’t say the same.
Tonight on the new episode of NBC’s Revolution, “There Will Be Blood”, the game is afoot for our hero, Tom Neville. The alleged President of the United States of America has returned to the mainland from his/her getaway in Guantanamo Bay and set up camp in Savannah, but his/her representatives are presenting themselves as the people’s rescuers through the use of big fat lies. Our hero knows the truth, believes nuclear madman Randall Flagg was working for them, and can second-guess their devious plan from a mile away: “Create the problem. Be the solution.” And Neville hates it when anyone lies but him.
The other six Endless cannot save you now!
For those who missed out, my attempt to streamline the basic events follows after this courtesy spoiler alert for the sake of time-shifted viewers.
The Siskel Film Center: sincere, comfy, willing to showcase material beyond the major studios’ low-budget farm teams. Two thumbs up.
Indianapolis has exactly (1) one art-film theater, which leavens its offerings with a mixture of big studio fare presumably for the sake of ticket sales, thus minimizing the number of small films they can truly show during any given week. It doesn’t help that this theater and our house are on opposite ends of town. It’s my understanding other, larger cities have more options for moviegoers who yearn for something besides sequels, explosions, and big budgets. The advent of Video on Demand has charitably broadened our access to new limited-release fare, but there’s something I like about seeing films in their natural habitat.
This weekend my wife and I journeyed once again to Chicago via reasonably priced group tour. While our fellow passengers availed themselves of the Magnificent Mile’s upscale merchandise or gallivanted around Lake Michigan on water taxis, she and I paid our first visit to the Gene Siskel Film Center to view the kind of real, live documentary that rarely plays within fifty miles of our house.
Click here for more about the theater and the documentary “Deceptive Practice”…
Tom Neville is back. And this time…he’s still mad.
Revolution is back! And this time, it’s sorry if it made you unhappy and it swears it can change!
The gentleman doth protest his receipt. From tonight’s cute scene in which Crane learns about the pitfalls of taxation with representation.
For those who missed out, my attempt to streamline the basic events follows after this courtesy spoiler alert for the sake of time-shifted viewers.
Tonight’s Sleepy Hollow was brought to you by Overtaxed Donut Holes. 8.25% government-levied, 100% delicious!
It’s a major award! To some!
The preceding paragraph was copied-‘n’-pasted from last year’s Emmys entry. Not much has changed, so why reinvent the butter knife?
Back then, I thought it would be fun to sort through all the Emmy nominations just to see how many would actually matter to me. I’d committed to that night’s writing topic before I analyzed the list. My conclusion: it wasn’t fun after all.
This year I altered my approach. Instead of painstakingly scrutinizing every last nominee, I decided to wait until the ceremonies were finished and the results were posted online, then check off only the winners, disregarding any of my shows that were nominated but beaten down.
The results were slightly surprising…
The underordered Dial E one-shot will become a hot item once Slub locks in a WB movie deal. (Art by Emi Lenox.)
For enraptured fans of DC’s New 52, it’s a veritable grand tapestry of drama. In a world where many of our rebooted heroes are presumed dead, all the rebooted villains have united and threaten to ruin everything everywhere for all time.
Or something like that. I think. I don’t really care.
She’s a medium-town sheriff with FBI dreams. He’s a 250-year-old Minuteman. They fight crime!
With a swing of the axe and a shotgun blast into the air, Fox brazenly kicked off the 2013-2014 fall TV season Monday night with our first new series, Sleepy Hollow. From the early ads its simple but silly premise — Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horsemen, ripped from Washington Irving’s short story and transported to the World of Tomorrow (i.e., today) — felt to me like another uninspired Hollywood reboot, scraping the bottom of the public-domain intellectual-property barrel.
If you don’t mind the occasional hour of loony, far-fetched “popcorn TV”, you can do plenty of fun things with barrel scrapings.
The drive-in nearest our house is the Tibbs, still standing after 46 years. For now. (Photo from our 2008 personal archives. To date I’ve seen only two of these timeless non-classics…)
In my early childhood years, I had only two options for seeing movies: squinting at them on my family’s thirteen-inch black-‘n’-white TV (and I was rarely allowed to choose what channels we watched); or seeing them writ large on the giant-sized, outdoor screen down at the drive-in theater. In a world where limited technology narrowed our choices, this competition was a no-brainer to me.
Those eyes are pretty in the right light, but the rest of this will have to go.
February 2014 will see The Killing‘s Joel Kinnaman taking over for Peter Weller as the new Robocop. This fall Ironside returns to TV with Blair Underwood somehow replacing Raymond Burr. Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, the Lone Ranger, and the Green Hornet are but a few of the myriad characters to return from pop-culture limbo in overhauled guises. And this is the sentence I had set aside for DC Comics if I could narrow the possible examples down to less than four hundred.
At the rate our entertainment recyclers are plowing through their back catalogs, every intellectual property from the last fifty years will have been remade and/or rebooted before I’m fifty. Even if 90% of them flop, every producer, editor, or writer will convince themselves their attempt will be different from all the rest because they truly believe in themselves, if not their work. Maybe 10% of them will hit the jackpot, reap the rewards, and retire at forty.
Sounds like a sweet deal to me, even though I’m running dozens of laps behind the competition. If I’m to win, I need to move now. That’s why I’m calling dibs on E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial. It’s not taken, right? Excellent.
Race into adventure with Kane Starkiller and his sons Annikin and Deak! Whoever they are!
In 1999 Dark Horse Comics published an intriguing experiment called Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the Origin — a comic-book adaptation of Joss Whedon’s original script for the movie, hewing more closely to what he envisioned in his head before the director and producer meddled and warped everything. Although Dark Horse’s version didn’t contain nearly enough Paul Reubens, few Buffy fans would choose the movie over The Origin. It was a rare opportunity to see a writer’s lost draft technically restored and given life anew.
In that same vein, Dark Horse now brings us The Star Wars, an eight-issue miniseries promising to adapt George Lucas’ 1974 rough-draft screenplay that would later be rethought, rewritten, rearranged, and eventually filmed as merely Star Wars. Without the “The”. Because it looked cleaner.
My wife has always been a big fan of the 1983 TV miniseries V and its 1984 sequel, V: the Final Battle. She could take or leave the short-lived series that followed, and she had no interest in sampling the recent failed reboot.
Veterans of V are an extreme rarity at local geek conventions. Until tonight she’d only met its star, Marc Singer, several years ago at a Trek con that was generous enough to incorporate other sci-fi universes. While it was interesting for us to see the original Beastmaster up close, he was never her favorite V character. Whenever she waxes nostalgic about the show, her narrative sooner or later turns to the subplot of Willie, the humble alien Visitor who would betray his race, join the human resistance, provide comic relief, and lend the show some much-appreciated heart. He may not have been a he-man like Singer, but I’ll admit he stood out in every episode I saw when she introduced me to their world.
This weekend that particular actor is in town, headlining a convention that’s been around for a few years. We’ve never attended it before because its primary focus really isn’t our thing. After weeks of hemming and hawing over whether or not this was a suitable idea for us, ultimately we had to ask ourselves: how many other chances will she have to meet him?
It’s in that spirit, after no small amount of deliberation, that we endured wretched construction traffic and the world’s ickiest dealer booths to grant her not-dying wish of meeting the man who brought Willie to life.
Many of you know him better for his movie work, including one specific character ten thousand times more well-known than Willie.
Under normal circumstances, a film like The World’s End would be miles outside my bailiwick. It’s been years since I could stomach flocks about man-children stalled in permanent adolescence (e.g., half the comedies starring SNL vets). I’m not interested in celebrations of the magical bonding power of alcohol (e.g., half the comedies released in the last five years). I’ve seen maybe one R-rated comedy in the last five years (Tropic Thunder had its good parts). Combine the three elements and I would anticipate the kind of mess least likely to earn a dime of my own money. Only on the strength of the talented names of Simon Pegg and director/co-writer Edgar Wright did I temporarily waive my reservations and see if the minds behind Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz came within a stone’s throw of the same achievement levels in wit and ingenuity.
Prove it’s true, you ask? I say, prove that it’s NOT true! Because impeccable internet journalism.
You love him in TV’s Sherlock. You thought he was one of the best things in Star Trek Into Darkness even though he straight-up lied to the press about his character. You were annoyed by his ten-minute role in War Horse despite having no idea who he was at the time. You’re looking forward to his dual roles in Peter Jackson’s overextended Hobbit trilogy. You’re undecided about watching him play Alexander Godunov in The Fifth Estate. You noticed his name in the fine print for August: Osage County and are weighing your options.
Today is now the best day of your week because the internet has collectively decided to buy into the sketchy rumor that Benedict Cumberbatch, England’s second-biggest export of the decade after One Direction, has allegedly been cast to play an unnamed role in JJ Abrams’ still-untitled Trek sequel, Star Wars Episode VII. On a normal news day, your competent aggregator sites and discerning bloggers prefer to wait for official word from the likes of Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Deadline Hollywood Daily, or from TV news a full two months later. Sometimes, though, some headlines are just too awesome for professional composure or baseline fact-checking. Thus, this gossip is popping up everywhere today.
Along those same lines, I’ve decided to announce the nonexistent, completely unfounded, nonetheless tantalizing rumor than Cumberbatch has also signed on to give life to the role of brave Sir Johan in Smurfs 3. Just because I can, and clearly because we geeks now demand that he star in everything ever hereafter.
In less than ninety minutes, first-time director Ryan Coogler’s straightforward yet piercing Fruitvale Station introduces you to your new best friend, lets you hang out with him for a while, shows him at his best and worst, and then punches you in the chest while forcing you to watch helplessly as his life is taken right in front of you.
It is written! Hollywood Reporter and other official sources have confirmed the Bat-hunt is over: Academy Award Winner Ben Affleck will be following in the footsteps of Christian Bale as the new Batman in the still-untitled DC film, allegedly a Man of Steel sequel even though Batman has more box-office clout, sells more comics, and inspires funnier memes.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: souvenirs from the 2013 edition of that shindig of shindigs called GenCon. Captured so far in our retrospective:
* Part One: this year’s Costume Contest winners.
* Part Two: other Costume Contest participants.
* Part Three: still other Costume Contest participants.
* Part Four: still other costumes, but not in the official contest.
* Part Five: if you guessed “costumes”, you win!
In our long-awaited miniseries finale, we look back at the scenery, the objects, and the guests of GenCon that crossed paths with our party. According to a report today on their official Facebook page, this year’s spectacle drew a record-setting 49,000 unique visitors in attendance. And everywhere around us, everyone had options to keep them busy in this massive celebration of free-time preoccupations.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 