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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Answering the most important question first: no, Elysium is nowhere near as revelatory as writer/director Neill Blomkamp’s previous film, the Oscar-nominated District 9. Constructed with four times the budget and ten times the star power, Blomkamp’s latest Important-Message sci-fi actioner is just as visually accomplished, but delivers a fraction of the impact.
When I was a kid, Adam West and Burt Ward were the first super-heroes I remember following on TV. Less wooden than the Super-Friends, beset by better villains than Marvel’s 1970s live-action TV offerings, and a few years ahead of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, syndicated reruns of the 1966-1968 Batman TV show were a staple of my afternoon viewing.
For the first 2½ acts, The Wolverine is an engrossing slow-burn psychological thriller about the crippling effects of grief, powerlessness, sin, rediscovering your life’s purpose, and stranger-in-a-strange-land culture clash, all nestled inside an outlandish but well-oiled martial-arts flick that easily outclasses the previous Wolverine solo film. That being said, this is a rare instance of a Marvel film that would’ve functioned more cohesively if super-villains had been kept out of it altogether.
Reynolds. Giamatti. Turbo.
That was my first impression, anyway. It’s rare that Hollywood sets a big-budget motion picture in my hometown. The last film to use us, Eagle Eye for a single action scene, couldn’t be bothered to research our geography on Google Maps and pretended that 72 West 56th Street is a crowded financial district like downtown Boston. Local pro tip for future filmmakers: 72 West 56th puts you in a highly tree-filled residential area between the wooded Butler University campus and the trendy bars of Broad Ripple.
Midlife Crisis Crossover calls Pacific Rim the Best Men’s-Adventure Film of the Year!
So far, anyway. I’ll admit my opinion is skewed because I don’t watch every theatrical release. I certainly didn’t see 6 Fast 6 Furious, which might or might not be a five-star men’s-adventure flick for all I know, but the 6F6F trailers showed a sign of weakness: two female characters sharing a scene, even though it was a scene of angry pummeling. Not counting extras or one-line background fillers, I counted four female characters in all of Pacific Rim: two robot drivers; one of those drivers as a young girl; and, with 95% certainty, at least one of the monsters. None are onscreen at the same time, spaced apart by several men and minutes, just as you’d expect from an awesome boys-club tale of manly-man heroics.
Shark from above!
Last week during our vacation, all the chatter from our usual signals was about two different travesties. One was covered on a dozen different TV channels and therefore lost me on oversaturation principle. The other was the latest Syfy Original Movie, Sharknado. It’s not often that my wife and I watch something on TV simply because other people won’t shut up about it, but we were curious as to why this particular cheesy production received more attention than Syfy’s last fifty slapdash offerings. I can report with a straight face that it met my exact expectations, by which I mean UGH.
Wesley and Fred, together at last!
Seriously, in a world where romantic comedies are either R-rated sexfests or direct-to-video beneath-my-notice nice tries, how many true romantic comedies are the studios releasing theatrically per year now? Two? Maybe three? Of which I see zero per year at most. According to my personal moviegoing records, the last romantic comedy I paid to see writ large was 2003’s Down with Love. It’s been a while.
Honest truth as of this evening: Midlife Crisis Crossover calls Monsters University “the Best Film of the Year”! So far. Yes, the year is young. Proclamation subject to change without notice, possibly during Oscar preseason.
Seriously, though: looking back at my last several summer action blockbuster spectacular experiences, this Disney/Pixar reboot of Revenge of the Nerds requires less forgiveness of plot holes; boasts characterization truer to the original cast; doesn’t overwrite wide-scale urban destruction with perfunctory offscreen-slapdash-reconstruction happy ending; refuses to play bait-and-switch with its antagonists; and, like Toy Story 3, is a surprisingly top-notch sequel with its own topic to explore rather than acting as a hollow, superfluous extension of the original.
In Part One of this two-part non-epic, I covered what I liked best about Man of Steel, the new Superman treatment from director Zack Snyder, producer Christopher Nolan, and screenwriter David S. Goyer. As I mentioned there, despite the team’s successes on numerous fronts, I thought the film had room for improvement.
Those examples require a courtesy spoiler alert because a few of my complaints happen toward the film’s back end and involve major plot points. If you plan to see it pristine and unspoiled for yourself, abandon the reading trail here, and I look forward to seeing you next time.
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Onward, then, to what I liked least:
After seeing Man of Steel today, that sweeping statement occurred to me and required two minutes’ worth of thought to confirm. It helps that I’ve seen all six of director Zack Snyder’s feature films to date, even the animated ones.
Of the other five: Dawn of the Dead was not bad for what it was — arguably his second-best, but not quite essential. 300 broke visual ground and set new standards for faithfulness in graphic-novel-to-movie adaptations, but makes me snicker in a few extraordinarily hammy spots. I’m glad someone finally adapted Watchmen so we could all say it’s been done and move on with our lives, but its brazen attempt to do for super-hero movies what the original miniseries did for super-hero comics didn’t have nearly the same intellectual impact or coherence. Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole admirably demonstrated the visual techniques of 300 for an all-ages audience, but was incomprehensible unless you’d read the entire book series beforehand and could spot the dozens of pages’ worth of vital backstory that was excised for the big screen. (Thankfully my son was a fan and explained the crucial omissions.) And Sucker Punch was a skeevy, disjointed orphanage for outlandish sci-fi skirmishes that had apparently wandered away from the nonexistent movies that spawned them.
In comparison to the rest of the Snyder oeuvre, Man of Steel stands tall as his boldest achievement yet.
The trailers for Now You See Me telegraph up front that you should expect a twist along the way. You’re teased and beguiled by the possibility of having the wool pulled over your eyes, and taunted for daring to look too closely. Sooner or later, this movie swears it will fool you.
It’s no spoiler, then, to reveal that yes, the movie does eventually have a twist. Despite the fancy stage-magician trappings, its base template is the heist-film genre, in which the viewer’s homework assignment is trying to guess which character will be revealed as a mole or a double-crosser by the end. In that sense, the genre expectations are fulfilled here, including the part where that big revelation turns several previous scenes into utter nonsense if you retrace your steps and rethink them too deeply.
Atomic Robo: an essential part of every Free Comic Book Day.
As previously recounted, my wife and I had a ball on Free Comic Book Day 2013 two weeks ago. Readers flocked to our local stores and had the opportunity to enjoy samplers from all the major comic companies and many of the indies.
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?
And now the conclusion, focusing on smaller publishers that demand and/or deserve equal attention:
Marble Season (Drawn & Quarterly) — Celebrated Love and Rockets co-creator Gilbert Hernandez, sallies forth into all-ages territory with slice-of-life vignettes of a ’60s childhood in which marbles were a game option before “gaming” was a common verb, kids routinely spoke in benign non sequitur, secret clubs didn’t involve violent hazing, and super-hero role-playing required neither rulebooks nor electricity. Each scene free-flows into the next without need for an overall “story arc” driving the narrative — it’s just the life of kids bouncing each off each other and drifting from one activity to the next. If Peanuts had been less punchline-driven and maybe a tad edgier (we sure never saw Linus and Lucy trying to understand a celebrity suicide) but with the same skewed innocence and underlying heart, the result would’ve looked a lot like this. One of the year’s best FCBD offerings.
The painted dragons of Aphrodite IX. Art by Stjepan Sejic.
As previously recounted, my wife and I had a ball on Free Comic Book Day 2013 two weeks ago. Readers flocked to our local stores and had the opportunity to enjoy samplers from all the major comic companies and many of the indies.
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?
More of those finished products:
Infinity (Marvel) — Fans already entrenched in current Marvel Universe continuity may enjoy this prologue to the upcoming major summer crossover event, in which an alien race that once rebuilt itself from the ground up after world-shattering decimation now finds itself entertaining a second visit from its conqueror. From a science fiction standpoint, it’s an intriguing short story even though Thanos only speaks a grand total of two words. Any first-time comic-shop visitors who know Marvel only from their movies might be disappointed that their first Marvel experience is filled with complete strangers and has virtually no Marvel heroes in it at all, save a three-panel montage at the end.
Does Benedict Cumberbatch’s new entourage stand a chance against hordes of delighted Sherlock groupies?
From “The Assasination of Darth Vader” by Brian Wood and Ryan Odagawa.
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?
My reading results were as follows:
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 