Author: Andrew Wickliffe
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O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a frustrating, adequate success. There’s some excellent filmmaking and even better performances. Still, the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey is at times too stringent and, at other times, narrative spaghetti on the wall. The falling pieces are co-stars John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson, who spend the…
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Creator Sas Milledge is masterful when it comes to introspection. Despite Mamo often being full of expository dialogue, it’s about the characters when they’re not talking, why they’re not talking, what they’re thinking about instead, and so on. Just like most of the book, it’s understated, thoughtful, and fantastic. The issue begins with teenager Jo…
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There are numerous things to talk about this issue, but the teaser for next issue muscles them all out. Next issue is Lissa’s eighteenth birthday, an event the series has been promising for twenty issues and three years. I’m not taking the teaser as a promise, especially when writer Doug Moench is so comfortable retconning.…
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If I knew there was a licensed Terminator monthly from the late eighties, I’d forgotten. I knew there was the Burning Earth limited (which concludes the NOW Comics license, with Terminator then headed to Dark Horse), but I didn’t remember there was a regular series. Though after one issue, it’s got squat to do with…
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I had a variety of ways I was going to open this post. I was going to make a Robert Palmer reference for my apparent target demographic (it would have read: Director Fuller has cranes and knows how to use them). Except it turns out… Fuller didn’t have a dozen cranes roaming the Tokyo streets.…
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Last issue ended with Holly, on assignment from Selina (but maybe a little too gung ho), shot by dirty cops. This issue opens with them approaching; luckily, Selina gets there in time. Selina rushes Holly to Leslie Thompkins’s clinic and reveals she knew Holly was a recovering addict this whole time. As Leslie gets to…
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I remembered Priest and Mark Texeira’s Black Panther being good, but I didn’t remember it being a comedy. I also didn’t remember Black man Priest writing it for the white audience. His protagonist is CIA guy Everett K. Ross, who thinks T’Challa’s just like any other diplomatic liaison and isn’t anywhere near as badass as…
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When I was a kid reading Who’s Who, I always thought Wildfire had one of the coolest designs. I can’t believe I hadn’t seen Cosmic Boy or whoever’s dressed like a male stripper (maybe I blocked it). But, as ever, Wildfire proves to be not cool; two big examples this issue, first being shitty to…
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There’s something about the comics form and wrestling. The way an artist can choreograph the fight to emphasize the danger and drama. Because of the ring, much like boxing, the attention can better focus on the action. Unlike boxing, there are flamboyant outfits and a range of moves, though Powerbomb creator Daniel Warren Johnson doesn’t…
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Daughters of the Dust is an epical story told lyrically. Set in 1902, the film tells the story about the time a specific Gullah family headed to the mainland and north into the twentieth century. It opens with Cheryl Lynn Bruce returning home to make the crossing, bringing along photographer Tommy Redmond Hicks to document…
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It’s never good when the worst thing about a Steven Seagal performance isn’t the Steven Seagal performance. Kidding. Sort of. And while he’s terrible in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, he’s far from the worst performance. Stunt cast villain Eric Bogosian is much worse, for instance. As is Seagal’s sidekick, Morris Chestnut, who’s playing a…
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Despite the Blade Runner font on the cover and the future vibe, Absolution is—so far—just a future dystopia action comic. I’m hesitant even to call it sci-fi. The potential science behind the fiction is all general stuff: the protagonist, Nina, is an assassin on potential parole. Potential meaning if she gets a high enough score…
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It’s all hands on deck for this episode (except for Brenda Bakke), like everyone wanted a chance to work with guest stars Matt Craven and Richard Edson. Craven and Edson are in town to shake down the local business owners. They’ve got a couple more in their gang, doofus Jim Gloster and rapist Joseph Granda.…
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I love how writer Marv Wolfman makes sure Dracula’s racist towards Blade to in-virtue signal, except van Helsing and his daughter were racist towards Blade too. And hero Frank Drake is constantly racist towards Taj. It’s an unfortunate trivia note to an otherwise solid fill-in issue. Or at least, the Tomb of Dracula version of…
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This episode picks up some hours after last episode’s “all the characters are probably babies now” cliffhanger. While fixing up a car (with some great Riley Shanahan bodywork), Brendan Fraser explains to Diane Guerrero he’s had an epiphany, and they’re all about to die, so they better get their houses in order. Guerrero wanted to…
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I was a little curious whether writer Garth Ennis was going to be able to get away withJohann’s Tiger in 2023. The comic came out twenty years ago when Nazis and Nazi sympathizers weren’t (openly) part of the public discourse. Tiger is one of those “German army” stories, though. They’re not Nazis; they don’t like…
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It’s been a while since I’ve read Ginseng Roots and even longer since I’ve read the first few issues of Ginseng Roots, but I’m pretty sure when creator Craig Thompson brings up Roots’s generative problems, it’s for the first time. In issue ten of twelve, he reveals after spending months trying to turn his research…
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Giant-Size Werewolf #3 might be artist Don Perlin’s best… oh, wait. He just penciled. Sal Trapani inked. Perlin was penciling and inking over in regular Werewolf by Night at this point. Okay, never mind. I mean, it’s okay art—especially for Perlin—but it’s nowhere near as impressive with someone else helping out. Especially since my biggest…
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Wow, it’s so good. Even for “Doom Patrol,” it’s so good. It’s a very “Doom Patrol” episode, too; the team has a mission, then something happens, and they have to go on a side mission. Given guest star Mark Sheppard finally reveals there’s a narrative reason for the main cast to remain young, it’s not…
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“Doom Patrol” has been having a fine season to this point; fine enough, one hopes they’re prepared for a non-renewal, but the series hasn’t been sublime. Every so often, “Doom Patrol” has a way of being sublime, where the story’s quirkiness, the characters’ humanity, and the Kevin Kiner and Clint Mansell music is just right,…
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It’s a funny idea, and it would explain a lot about Love’s Labour’s Lost, but I don’t think screenwriter, director, and co-producer Branagh cast Alicia Silverstone on a bet regarding whether or not he could get her to deliver an okay monologue. He succeeds and she succeeds, but just okay, and it takes most of…
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Pun fully intended, Callum Woodhouse continues to show why he’s “All Creatures”’s trickiest casting but also its most successful. This Christmas special is set, appropriately, at Christmas, only war’s on, and no one’s feeling like celebrating this year. Especially not with Nicholas Ralph chomping at the bit for his chance to go—after the proper season’s…
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10 Things I Hate About You is from that strange period in American mainstream filmmaking when they knew you couldn’t make too many jokes about high school girls anymore, unless you establish at least twice they’re eighteen so it’s not technically illegal. There’s also the issue of Andrew Keegan’s sexual predator, who the film treats…
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Co-producer, co-writer, director, and editor Kurosawa loves himself some Macbeth. Throne of Blood is Macbeth in feudal Japan, with Mifune Toshiro and Yamada Isuzu as the doomed couple. Kurosawa and his co-writers structure the film as a historical war epic, with modern-day bookends, and then fit Mifune and Yamada’s Macbeth into the war epic. But…
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Richard III takes place in an alternate history where the British are five hundred years late with their royal wars, but still in the 1940s for technology and rising fascism. The film doesn’t update Shakespeare’s dialogue, so it’s the cast performing while dressed—increasingly—as Nazis. Except they’re British. Well, not Annette Bening or Robert Downey Jr.…
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I’ve been watching classic movies my whole life. As a kindergartener, I was so scared by Young and Innocent’s blinking, black-faced murderer I refused to participate in an eye-closing exercise. My childhood Saturdays were filled with Svengoolie’s best, my dad and I recording them and trying to edit out the commercials. For anyone not forty-plus…
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Wayne’s World ought to be a no-brainer. Slick, soulless media exec Rob Lowe turns public access metalhead slackers Mike Myers and Dana Carvey into real celebrities; only they don’t like the deal they’ve made with the devil. Along the way, Myers meets metal rocker chick Tia Carrere, and they fall in like until Lowe tries…
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I’m trying to imagine how Leather Underwear would’ve read when it dropped in 1990, one of the first comics from then early twenty-something creator Roger Langridge. The comic is entirely a riff on religion, specifically Christian, more specifically Catholic, starting with a strip about the Catholic abortion service run by one Sister Knuckles. She’ll be…
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This episode leaves the butts behind—had to—and gets going with the other big bad of the season. The season premiere had special cameo guest star Mark Sheppard explaining he and the other wizards knew the Doom Patrol would have to fight the butts this season, but they’ve also got to fight someone or something called…
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Still newish penciller Brad Rader (his second issue) leans a little too heavily into the Silver Age romance comic homage, but otherwise, it’s a near-perfect comic. Writer Ed Brubaker figures out how to give the story the done-in-one feel while still kicking off a new story arc. So it’s part one of four, but really…
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