Category: 2009
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The first half of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest falls victim to the Halloween II phenomenon. The main character–in this case Noomi Rapace–is in the hospital and out of commission. Hornet’s Nest is never comfortable giving insight into Rapace’s actions, which makes it a mildly pointless final entry. I mean, a Hollywood ending…
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Calling The Girl Who Played with Fire pointless is an insult to all the other pointless sequels out there. Fire–and I’m sure it’s a faithful adaptation of the source novel, which is undoubtedly pointless as well–is the worst kind of sequel. It has no new story, so it just goes back and forces one out…
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Ingenious is a struggling artist picture, only the struggling artist in question (Dallas Roberts) is a tchotchke designer, not a painter. The film mostly centers on Roberts, but also his sidekick (Jeremy Renner as the somewhat dangerous comic relief) and long-suffering wife (Ayelet Zurer). It’s a little unclear why director Balsmeyer and writer Mike Cram…
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Has any good ever come from digital video being used instead of film? The Stolen Wings suggests no. Director of photography Greg Rouladh doesn’t know how to light for video, but he also doesn’t know how to light for angles. It’s also director Lough’s fault. He should’ve caught the five or six garish jump cuts.…
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There’s enough story for three really good movies in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, maybe even four. The film opens with two of them, a good, old fashioned journalism movie, and then the very serious experiences of Noomi Rapace. There’s some crossover, but it’s all contrived. Then the film blossoms and has two more…
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I really wish this issue had a better colorist. Well, I guess Jay Fotos isn’t bad overall, he just doesn’t seem comfortable making the lead character, who’s Black, have black skin. Instead it’s a shiny tan; the guy looks like Tyrone Power. There are a bunch of puzzling lines about race until halfway through, when…
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Funny People plays a little like Judd Apatow wrote two-thirds of something he really loved so he decided to keep going… adding another two-thirds. So he ended up with four-thirds of a movie and because he’s Judd Apatow, he got to make it without skinning it down. I don’t think I’d even call him on…
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Could Paul Rudd make less of an impression in I Love You, Man? Even before Jason Segel shows up, Rudd is completely ineffectual. He’s supposed to be ineffectual, of course, but he’s also the protagonist of the movie. He doesn’t garner sympathy, he garners pity. But Hamburg’s whole approach is peculiar. He opens the movie…
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The Winning Season mentions Hoosiers at one point, which is good. It’s set in Indiana, it’s a basketball movie about an underdog team… there needs to be a Hoosiers reference. But it’s not Hoosiers with a girls basketball team, because it’s not really about the games. Strouse’s approach is traditional. Take a lovable alcoholic misanthropic…
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Moon is quite good. Moon’s not the most impossible film to talk about without spoiling… but some of its goodness is wrapped up in its plot developments. The viewer should get to enjoy Moon without knowing about them in advance. I have to be very careful in terms of those developments. I’ll try to avoid…
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Leave it to Steven Seagal to make a boring vampire movie. Worse, it’s not even the traditional vampires; instead, it’s the zombies from 28 Days Later… only they’re vampires here—Against the Dark is sort of like “Die Hard (with vampire-zombies) in a hospital.” Crudo is a terrible director. The action sequences (the ones I saw,…
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Castaway on the Moon explores one of those great urban questions… could you ever get stuck on one of those conservation islands in a city’s river? Despite being a South Korean film, it’d be hard to find a more universal story—deeply indebted Jeong Jae-yeong throws himself off a bridge after his girlfriend’s dumped him and…
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Okay, Tischman’s starting to confuse me. The problem with Red Herring is the narration. It’s this close third person—with a bit of second mixed in—narration and it’s never clear who it’s talking about. The problem is clear this issue, as I have no idea if aliens are real or if they’re just a big business…
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Okay, I forgot to mention the alien conspiracy thing. Tischman comes up with this great explanation for Area 51 and so on—well, it seems like he’s come up with one (he might have the little green men show up in the last issue anyway). The U.S. government is so stupid, they were duped by big…
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It’s hard, from the first issue, to guess where David Tischmann is going with Red Herring. As it turns out—unexpectedly—it appears to be a comedic political thriller, something along the lines of a national Carl Hiaasen novel (instead of just Florida). Also of note is how little Tischmann seems to care about making the characters…
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Okay, the sidekick’s name is Wendell. Not sure why it stuck with me this time since he’s not in the issue very much. Instead, it’s Lou and this other character off fighting border hoppers. Except they’re not really border hoppers, at least not in the traditional sense. I won’t spoil, since Kelly spends half the…
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Kelly follows the same format as before, with some minor changes. There’s a lot of humor, then some action, then some more humor and then the serious stuff. The humor goes a little crazy here, actually, overloading the book. Kelly implies the serious material more than concentrates on it, instead emphasizing the absurdity of the…
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The most striking thing about Bad Dog is Diego Greco’s painted art. Besides one problem, it’s some of the finer painted comic book art. Joe Kelly’s characters and situations tend to be absurd and Greco turns Bad Dog into this incredibly polished political cartoon. He’s very talented. Except when it comes to werewolves. The protagonist…
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It’s understandable Push bombed at the box office. It’s hard to find a film so with much intelligence in the filmmaking, casting and acting applied to such a subpar script. Strangely, David Bourla’s script isn’t bad in regard to dialogue—there are some great exchanges between Dakota Fanning and Chris Evans—or in how it’s plotted—the narrative…
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Kidnapping Caitlynn is a couples’ film and not just because it’s about a woman breaking into her ex-boyfriend’s house. Stars Jenny Mollen and Jason Biggs, who concocted the story together, are married (Mollen scripted). Director Coiro is married to supporting actor Rhys Coiro. If it were just four people making some stupid home movie because…
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Dagnino’s art isn’t bad–in fact it’s good a lot of the time–but why does he draw Lana Lang like she’s about thirteen years old? She looks the same age as Kara or younger. Gates tries to come up with an affecting story but it’s pretty pat. Supergirl foils a bank robbery and inadvertently outs some…
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Wow. Gillen wants the reader to through pages and pages of poorly written text with bad punctuation. The writing eventually gets so bad I had to give it up. Here, instead of a bad person in Phonogram, Gillen wants the reader to enjoy making fun of the loser. I’m not sure why he included this…
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Here we get the story of another depressed girl–she opens the issue cutting herself–and she tells most of her story in quotes from songs. While it’s admirable how much work Gillen put into finding those quotes and making them work in the narration, it’s not good writing. His first person narrator is talking directly to…
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Whether Gillen intends it to be or not, this issue is more a concept issue than anything else. The protagonists are the two DJs at the club and we pretty much don’t see anyone but them for the entire issue. There’s a lot of affected dialogue, but Gillen can get away with it because of…
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Not sure how you’re supposed to read this one. Gillen’s protagonist this issue is Emily, a supporting cast member from the first series. But it ends with her having casual sex with a complete stranger in order to forget her past. I’m not sure if we’re supposed to judge her for it–Gillen would probably argue…
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Oh, wait, the girl from the first issue isn’t really that terrible and didn’t deserve to be treated so meanly? Gillen is apparently doing a night at the club from everyone’s perspective, so this issue we get to see how some other guy spent the night. Basically, it was him being depressed over some foreign…
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Antal’s composition is so strong, I would have thought Armored could get away with almost anything and still be a solid diversion. The action direction is good but not anything special–the chase sequences are boring, for example. But Antal’s composition for conversations? It’s amazing; sort of a cross between Michael Mann and seventies Steven Spielberg.…
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I love not reading the other parts of this crossover, it makes my brain work a little to catch up. Rucka’s back as co-writer here (and Igle and Sibal get help from Pansica and Ferreira). Again, no idea what Rucka does and doesn’t do. Similarly, Pansica matches Igle (especially with Sibal on inks) close enough…
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And now it’s in the middle of another crossover… I love it when comic book publishers are hostile to casual readers. Umm. Rucka co-writes here. Not sure what contributions he made. From what I can tell, the world now knows Sam Lane is alive and he’s a hero and the Kryptonians (Superman included?) are the…
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I really don’t like Sibal’s inks on Igle. He’s way too reductive. It’s almost like he’s trying to make it look like Ian Churchill or something. This issue is part of a Superman family crossover. It seems like Sam Lane is trying to get a Kryptonian to assassinate the President. So Gates has to compete…
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