Hey, that was my face while watching, too! We can totes share the same emoji!
MCC 2014 Pilot Binge #2: “Selfie”
Tag Archives: reviews
The MCC 2014 Pilot Binge: Kickoff and First Down
Not a codeword for the new fall TV lineup.
And now for something completely regrettable:
I have a short list of TV shows I follow every year, but I don’t watch nearly as much TV as the average internet user my age. I don’t connect with what many of today’s sitcoms consider “humor”. The Wire ruined all ordinary police shows for me for all time. We don’t subscribe to any premium cable channels. I’m not remotely interested in any show that describes itself as “sexy”. My list of disqualifiers goes on and on.
This year I’ve decided against my better judgment to dare myself to do something different. I spent time this weekend reading the official annual “Fall TV Preview” cover features in the latest issues of Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide, and compiled a list of the new shows that merited full articles or capsule previews. I omitted a few premium-cable shows for the one reason mentioned above (the pirating option is off the table) and a few online-only streaming shows for assorted logistical reasons. That left me with a list of twenty-six TV shows in all.
Apple’s 9/9/14 Superinfomercial and the New U2 Album, Track by Track
Ready and waiting for its future home on a Starbucks spinner rack.
But I’ve never owned an Apple product, bearing in mind that digital downloads barely count as “ownership” in my mind, and my iTunes “library” so far is more like a Hot Wheels bookmobile. Apple’s ostentatious new-product announcements are usually outside my fields of interest. I’m not an early adopter in any tech-related areas. At all.
New iPhone? Pass. My phone is a Samsung S2 that accomplishes my simple daily needs as long as I remember to reboot once a week. (Longtime MCC readers may recall I was once staunchly anti-smartphone in general, until life gave me reasons not to be.) My phone isn’t broken, and once survived a ten-foot drop onto a metal catwalk with zero damage. I’m good for now.
New smartwatch with triple-digit price tag? Pass. I can’t function away from home without wearing a watch (see: “old”), but I rarely need to shop for a new one because any given fifteen-dollar waterproof department-store digital watch with a lithium battery will last me years. They’re arguably one of Walmart’s most durable products, and it’s faster for me to glance at my wrist than it is to pocket and unpocket any other time-telling gizmo, including my phone. And that lithium battery drains ten thousand times more slowly than any phone battery will.
But then Apple went in an unexpected direction with their third platform plank: a new U2 album. For free. Finally, a product in my price range and tangential to my personal interests. Sold!
My Labor Day Weekend 2014 TV Marathon Report
Tyrion Lannister wishes you would go away.
I’m grateful every day to have a job that observes the largely superfluous privilege of Labor Day. I spent most of the weekend recovering from “con crud” and saving up energy and money for future chores and exploits. It was nice to have the time and excuse to make headway into my infinite viewing pile — with my wife’s blessing, no less. I’ll make a point of mowing the lawn some other week, just for her.
The weekend’s results, in no particular order:
* The Station Agent (Netflix): Before Game of Thrones, and slightly before his winning scene in Elf, Peter Dinklage starred in this 2003 indie, a low-key character piece about a railroad enthusiast who retreats to small-town New Jersey after his best friend dies and his model-train hobby shop is sold off. His attempts at hermitage are thwarted daily as life pushes other people into his path — a happy-go-lucky food-truck runner (Bobby Cannavale), a separated wife and grieving mother (Patricia Clarkson), a teen librarian with a secret (frequent Oscar nominee Michelle Williams), an unassuming young black girl, the backwater citizens who mock his stature, and Mad Men‘s John Slattery in a bit part as a disgruntled husband. Dinklage barely talks, letting his doleful gaze speak or deflect for him, but he slowly emerges from inner captivity as the tracks are laid for new connections to new friends, each overlooking the others’ outward differences and recognizing their inner wounds.
Yes, There’s a Scene After the “Guardians of the Galaxy” End Credits
Spoiler photo of Bradley Cooper from The Expendables 7.
The raccoon! The tree! The wrestler! The funnyman! The female! Together they’re the hottest new super-team in the Marvel universe, and you probably saw their first movie before I did! If so, congratulations on doing your part to turn Guardians of the Galaxy into one of the summer’s biggest success stories with a boffo opening weekend despite an unproven leading man and not one single popular hero on their roster.
If you didn’t see GoTG before I did…well, that’s what entries like this are for.
Right this way for more about that new movie that is NOT called “Rise of the Guardians”…
“Life Itself”: Ebert & Friends & Family & the Movies
A recently unveiled statue of Roger Ebert, seated outside the Virginia Theatre in his hometown of Champaign, IL. Photo by Anne Golden, from our 2014 road trip.
When film critic Roger Ebert passed away in April 2013, I wrote at length about the influence that he and his longtime TV debate partner Gene Siskel had upon my life. That entry is intro enough to explain why, when I heard there was a new documentary about Ebert, it was an obvious pick for my summer must-see list.
One contemporary peer labels Ebert “the definitive mainstream film critic”. Another, less charitable fellow in his field dismisses Ebert’s longtime TV career as doing their practice an injustice. (“Consumer advice is not the same as criticism.”) Several came together for the special occasion of Life Itself.
“Dawn of the Planet of the Apes”: In a World Where Apes Are No Better Than Men
Toby Kebbell takes over for Claude Akins as the Koba of a new generation. So far I’ve seen no hardcore fans protesting the decision to change Koba from gorilla to ape.
Many of us here on the internet openly lament Hollywood’s fixation on sequels, prequels, remakes, and reboots as their creative crutches of choice. Implicit in our grumbles is the broad assumption that all of those recycling methods are inherently bad by definition. We’re sometimes quick to forget within the space of 140 characters, for the sake of the snarky punchline, that such vehicles don’t have to be all bad. Their success rate is disappointing, but it’s far from 0%.
Last weekend, six of the top ten films on the box office chart were sequels. One was a sequel and a sort-of relaunch; one a sequel to a spinoff; one a sequel to a remake; and two were just plain sequels. And then there was Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, a loose do-over of 1973’s Battle for the Planet of the Apes with the additions of one large MacGuffin and some expensive set pieces, any one of which probably cost five times Battle‘s miserly budget. Also, they smartly ditched the humans’ sci-fi B-movie costumes.
So Dawn is a sequel to a reboot and it’s a remake. Its pedigree is an anti-art hat trick. Somehow it’s also one of the best films of the summer.
“Snowpiercer”: No Saints After the Apocalypse
“Marvel Team-Up” presents Captain America and the War Doctor in Snowpiercer.
Sure, a bleak Korean sci-fi film based on a French graphic novel, delayed for months while studio heads squabbled over whether or not to delete nearly 20% of it before letting Americans see it, doesn’t sound like the perfect star vehicle for Chris Evans, cinematic hero of this summer’s Captain America: the Winter Soldier. It’s certainly not a vote of confidence that the Weinstein Company compromised by leaving it intact but downgraded to a limited-release run with minimal advertising. In the hands of an unkinder corporation, Snowpiercer could’ve found itself sentenced with immediate relegation to the Walmart $5 DVD bin.
Thanks to exactly one theater in all of Indianapolis, last weekend I had the chance to witness one of the darkest, riskiest, most thought-provoking spectacles of the year. Considering the competition is mostly sequels, I’ll admit that’s not saying much.
“The Internet’s Own Boy”: For Want of Information, a Light Was Lost
If RSS feeds, Creative Commons, Reddit, Tor, or Wikipedia are part of your everyday internet life, or if you cheered when SOPA was put to sleep, you can thank Aaron Swartz for helping make those possible. The deeply affecting new documentary The Internet’s Own Boy: the Story of Aaron Swartz retraces the path of one young man whose lifelong passion for freedom of Information — not pirating HBO shows or sharing porn, but for useful, scholarly, scientific, potentially world-changing, capital-I Information — took him through countless revolutionary contributions, creations, and crusades until his sudden, unforeseen, tragic end.
“Transformers: Age of Extinction”: Public Enemy #1?
An inventive man of action, a young woman he’s sworn to protect, an amazing traveling machine, lots and lots of running, and they keep reusing the same old robot villains. So it’s like an American remake of Doctor Who.
So. Transformers: Age of Extinction, then. Last weekend the internet gave Michael Bay’s new endurance test an F-minus-minus-minus. I’m not sure if they sat through it or assumed as much based on the available evidence and testimonies. I have no idea how many critics were fans of the cartoons or other related products. I owned several toys and bought the first year’s worth of the original Marvel Comics series, but lost interest in both around age 14 and forfeited knowledge of any subsequent characters or continuity. I thought the first film was the Greatest Michael Bay Film of All Time For What That’s Worth, the second one was the complete opposite of art, and the third was somewhere in between, improved by use of real-life Chicago as a setting for the last four hours of its running time.
If it hadn’t been for the sake of father/son quality time while he’s home visiting for the weekend, I might not have seen Age of Extinction. But here he was, here the weekend was, and there the movie was.
“How to Train Your Dragon 2”: Training Day is Over
My son and I were part of the Dragon Training 101 graduating class that considers How to Train Your Dragon the Greatest DreamWorks Animated Film of All Time. In those basic studies we learned that dragons respond well to a combination of generosity and teamwork, that even the scrawniest Viking can surprise you, that Scottish Viking fathers are stubborn but negotiable, that Old World prosthetics were surprisingly advanced, and that cinematic dragons have come a long way since Dragonslayer, Dragonheart, Dungeons & Dragons, Eragon, Dragon Wars, and even Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, where those mighty beasts received fifty-eighth billing, ranking well below CG mermen, nameless wizard henchmen, and a guy who turns into a rat. So How to Train Your Dragon was a tremendous PR boost to a once-honored race of monsters that deserve better than Hollywood usually gives them.
The How to Train Your Dragon 2 intermediate course had much to live up to in our minds, both as a sequel and as the next rung on the ladder of dragon-training success. We feared whether this would be a worthwhile study or one of those unaccredited, fly-by-night scams that hopes you won’t be able to tell their “dragons” are just really ugly dogs with paper wings taped to their fur.
“Edge of Tomorrow” and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
We live in a society where a movie can rake in twenty-nine million dollars on its opening weekend in American theaters and still be declared an immediate failure. The new Tom Cruise vehicle Edge of Tomorrow was expensively constructed even by summer blockbuster standards, but it was bumped back to third place this past weekend by both the young-adult juggernaut that is The Fault in Our Stars and the ongoing smash Maleficent. Audiences are sticking to their standard demographic preferences and don’t much care that Tomorrow has the highest Tomatometer rating of the three.
The over-50 action/sci-fi veteran meets his match (or better!) in Emily Blunt, last seen being overlooked in Looper, but their pairing plus alien warfare weren’t enough of a draw in a slightly crowded field in theaters. I’m not feeling drawn to Disney’s Angelina Jolie Fairy Tale Masquerade, but when I was faced with choosing between the other two on Tuesday night, I decided to give the pricy-looking underdog some attention. (To be honest, I think I’d rather read the novel first before seeing Stars.)
Right this way for more details! Unless you’ve already read this entry several hundred times…
If Godzilla Won’t Rush to Appear in His Own Film, Why Rush to Write About It?
Elizabeth Olsen plays the obligatory Concerned Wife role and has more screen time than the King of the Monsters. Her agent must be one tough negotiator.
I saw the new Godzilla reboot over Memorial Day weekend, but we’ve had so much going on here at Midlife Crisis Crossover over the past few weeks, from my birthday road trip to the Indy 500 Festival Parade to Indy PopCon 2014, that its writeup remained relegated to the MCC reserve-topic list until those events were past. (Mostly, anyway. Officially I’m not done with one of them.) Four weeks into its American theatrical run, I figure why not get on with it.
So, monsters, then. Eventually.
Yes, There’s a Scene After the “X-Men: Days of Future Past” End Credits
James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender return for another Game of Genes.
From the same line of thought as The Avengers, Fast & Furious 6, and The Expendables comes another supermovie in which characters from other movies join forces in hopes of tripling their box office grosses while settling for a fraction of their normal screen time.
X-Men: Days of Future Past, the seventh film set in Fox’s version of Marvel’s mutantverse, may invite comparisons to the Back to the Future trilogy, but it’s based on an Uncanny X-Men two-parter cover-dated January and February 1981, four years before Marty McFly’s first trip, back in my day when the all-star creative team of Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and Terry Austin were on a roll (though Byrne and Austin exited after the next issue). Some plot elements have been added or reworked to mesh with the previous films (well, with some of them, anyway), but this adaptation doesn’t stray as far from the framework as I expected, throws in a couple of new surprises, and tries to give its award-winners reasons to return to a crowded ensemble.
Yes, There’s a Commercial During the “Amazing Spider-Man 2” End Credits
The avatars of Andrew Garfield and Jamie Foxx duel for CG supremacy in this cutscene from the new Amazing Spider-Man 2 video game. Wait, no, my fault, this is from the movie.
At long last, the sequel to the reboot of the film series based on the comics is here! In the jam-packed Amazing Spider-Man 2 director Marc Webb’s trilogy continues with more villains, more angst, more money for special effects, more merchandising tie-ins, more credited screenwriters, less closure, and much lower expectations because of all of the above elements that have made many a super-hero sequel unwatchable.
Free Comic Book Day 2014 Results, Part 2 of 2: the Other Half of the Stack
Batman Beyond vs. Batwingbot and Squirebot in DC’s apocalyptic Futures End. Art by Patrick Zircher.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
…my wife and I had a ball on Free Comic Book Day 2014 this past Saturday. Readers of multiple demographics, especially a heartening number of youngsters, flocked to our local stores and had the opportunity to enjoy samplers from all the major comic companies and dozens of indie publishers.
How did the finished works do? Did they present an enjoyable, self-contained experience? Were they welcoming to new readers? Did they adhere to the old adage that every comic is someone’s first?
Part One was an overview of my favorites from this year’s haul. Covered here are the rest, from those nearly good enough to those I wish I’d left behind. On with the countdown:
Free Comic Book Day Results, Part 1 of 2: the Better Half of the Stack
Even in the world of Avatar: the Last Airbender. some guys think they gotta dominate everything. Art by Faith Erin Hicks.
As previously recounted, my wife and I had a ball on Free Comic Book Day 2014 this past Saturday. Readers of multiple demographics, especially a heartening number of youngsters, flocked to our local stores and had the opportunity to enjoy samplers from all the major comic companies and dozens of indie publishers.
How did the finished works do? Did they present an enjoyable, self-contained experience? Were they welcoming to new readers? Did they adhere to the old adage that every comic is someone’s first?
Of the nearly five dozen items offered to retailers nationwide, my wife and I carried away twenty-five in all, in addition to numerous other items I purchased using money instead of good will. My favorites from my FCBD 2014 reading pile were the following:
“The Raid 2”: Another Rendezvous with Rama
An imprisoned Rama (Iko Uwais) prepares for the most creative use of a broomstick since the Harry Potter series.
Midlife Crisis Crossover calls The Raid 2 the Bloodiest Film of the Year!
A safe bet, considering I stopped going out of my way for horror movies years ago and I’m not part of the macho-demographic target for Schwarzenegger’s post-political film career. But one of my guilty pleasures is an infrequent indulgence in films that I can best describe as tough-guy ballet. For me the Indonesian martial-arts flick The Raid: Redemption — which I watched a few months ago, a former Redbox disc I bought for a buck at a Family Dollar store — had been on my radar after reading online recommendations that piqued my curiosity. Between its straightforward obstacle-course premise and slickly shot martial-arts choreography, it was ideal Saturday afternoon programming for any discerning fight-scene fan who’s cool with subtitles and appreciates how the (comparatively) small screen trapped and shrank all that violence to minimize the ick factor.
After Redemption pulled in a modest $4 million in its 2012 art-house run, I was surprised that the sequel opened in quite a few screens ’round town this weekend, albeit without its original overseas title, The Raid 2: Berendal, which I suppose for us simple Americans might read too confusingly as a subtitle that needs its own subtitle.
Yes, There’s a Scene After the “Captain America: the Winter Soldier” End Credits
The Winter Soldier meets his worst enemy: springtime.
That’s why Midlife Crisis Crossover includes end-credits coverage in its consumer-reporting movie coverage. If we see a movie, we’re there till the bitter end whether there’s a treat waiting for us or not. My wife and I are sticklers for getting our money’s worth for the ticket price, even if it means skimming past listings for quasi-participants such as Production Babies, legal counsel, and caterers’ gofers. Imagine the pride they’ll feel, knowing there’s a remote chance that someone besides their parents spotted their names at the end.
…what were we talking about? Oh, yeah — Captain America: the Winter Soldier, my new favorite 2014 movie so far.
MCC Request Line #7: “Take Shelter”
Hey, wow, it’s a supposedly recurring feature everyone forgot because it stopped recurring!
Dormant but far from nonexistent, the Midlife Crisis Crossover Request Line is always open and accepting recommendations from MCC fans for stuff I can or should read, watch, or experience and then relay the results here, whether it’s high art or deep hurting. Today’s suggestion was offered a while back by British film reviewer Natalie Stendall, whose current home is at Writer Loves Movies.
Our feature presentation: the 2011 indie drama Take Shelter, starring Man of Steel‘s Michael Shannon and Academy Award Nominee Jessica Chastain. Writer/director Jeff Nichols would later go on to greater acclaim with 2013’s Mud, which signaled the beginning of Best Year Ever for its star Matthew McConaughey.
But before Mud…there was General Zod going mad in a quiet little town.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 