Category: 2009
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Why can the British make better sensationalist telefilms than Hollywood can make non-sensationalist theatricals? Maybe because the acting is better. There isn’t a single not good performance–meaning, there aren’t any mediocre performances–in Whitechapel. Amid its sensationalist, what if someone copycatted the Jack the Ripper murders in the modern day (oddly, after the first mention of…
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Why can the British make better sensationalist telefilms than Hollywood can make non-sensationalist theatricals? Maybe because the acting is better. There isn’t a single not good performance–meaning, there aren’t any mediocre performances–in Whitechapel. Amid its sensationalist, what if someone copycatted the Jack the Ripper murders in the modern day (oddly, after the first mention of…
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Wow, Peter Hyams made the only sequel to a Stanley Kubrick film and now he’s the director of photography on garbage like Universal Soldier: Regeneration. What’s so exceptionally lame about this movie is Hyams–the director–and the screenwriter’s disinterest is making an interesting story for original stars Jean-Claude Van Damme (though he comes a little closer)…
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Langridge returns to form, storytelling-wise, for his Miss Piggy issue. She’s not the issue’s protagonist, but she’s not the subject either; instead, Langridge treats it as a jumble. The show needs a guest and can’t afford anyone (it’s rather unfortunate Langridge doesn’t get to use real celebrities, since it always made the actual show so…
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How does Langridge deal with his Gonzo issue? Unoriginally, unfortunately. Langridge’s focus on Gonzo is the traditional “what species is Gonzo” question. He has Scooter go around trying to figure it out. This issue is definitely the quickest read of the issues so far (and, I hate to say it, the least artistically–that adjective having…
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Langridge gives himself a difficult task with his Fozzie issue. He has to make a comic about Fozzie getting funny again. Fozzie, of course, is painfully unfunny. The issue opens with Fozzie bombing, then we move through the standard Muppet sketches (some featuring Fozzie, some not) and Fozzie’s attempts at reinventing his comic style. So…
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I’ve read Langridge’s Muppet Show before and remembered it was excellent, but I didn’t exactly remember why it was excellent. Langridge mixes humor and quite a bit of sentiment here but also introduces the Muppets being the focus of the off-stage antics. In other words, without a “guest star,” Langridge makes it all about the…
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I’ve read some reviews describe Give ’em Hell, Malone‘s genre as a mix of noir and action. Genre assignations are utterly useless, but in this case, it might actually be an amusing diversion. It’s hard to assign a genre to a picture where a bunch of characters acting like they’re in a film noir while…
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Fingerman gets a little harsher here–Bill O’Riley is the evil superbrain who is killing conservative numbskulls and championing liberals (or Rile O’Biley as he’s known here)–and Fingerman makes some Tom Cruise being gay jokes, which is… dated. The first issue presented the apocalypse as this walking tour the two main characters would be going on.…
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Come on, really? The edgiest humor Fingerman can get is even in the apocalypse there are a bunch of fundamentalist Christian jerks? He introduces a whole lot this issue. I guess the open about the characters being the last people on earth is long over… they’re just the last normal people on earth. Here Fingerman…
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I didn’t realize they quoted neo-con dipwad Matt Parker on the cover of this comic book. It’s a terrible blurb, so it’s kind of funny I’m opening with it. From the Ashes, from the first issue, is a little bland. I’ve never read any Fingerman before so I didn’t know what to expect from his…
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So, for a forty year old comic, originally serialized in back-ups (and a double sized reprint), this issue is essentially a done in one. Thor and his sidekicks (are they called the Warriors Three?) hunt down this bad guy (called Mogul, no relation to the intergalactic Superman villain–this Mogul is from the Mystic Mountain, or…
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This adaptation runs almost ninety minutes (almost) and the source novel is, according to Amazon, 400 pages. So I’m guessing the novel doesn’t read like a disjointed, James Ellroy goes to England, but what do I know, I’ve only seen the movie. But it’d be hard at 400 pages… even with a big font. There’s…
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It’s Thor versus Fanfir for the (first?) time and Odin busts out his awesome “Star Trek” viewscreen to see everything going on. The way Lee lays out the story… while it was originally serialized, plays well read in a sitting. Thor and his sidekicks have to go fight Ragnarök’s coming–by preventing an arms race it…
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How did Stan Lee–I mean, seriously–how did he okay Colletta’s inks? I mean, I’m not a salivating Kirby enthusiast, but Colletta just sucks the life out of his art here. I’m thinking the eighties Super Powers books from DC to tie in to the action figures had more merit. And it’s really a darn shame,…
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Did Marvel get Matt Milla to recolor these stories to try to sell them to a broader audience (I mean, isn’t the trade just going to be a Thor product pre-movie release) or to try to make the Vince Colletta inks less horrific? I want to talk about the stories, but… after reading this issue–the…
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Included in this issue (and the previous one) are some Marvel Universe entries relating to Thor and Asgard. It’s sort of amazing to see where everything stemmed from these stories (well, not just these stories, but in part these stories). Lee’s storytelling is somewhat reductive. It’s a big world he’s telling a story in, but…
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Stan Lee writes these stories with such enthusiasm, it’s hard not to get involved with them… even when there are glaring continuity errors (Lee has Heimdall taking the assignment of guarding the Rainbow Bridge after Thor’s come of age, when just a few stories earlier, young Thor is on the bridge with an already assigned…
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When Richard Gere gives the best lead performance in a film, it’s definitely a problem. Gere doesn’t bring any gravitas to this role–a retiring police officer–and, when it gets to his redemption, it’s not clear why he needs redeeming. The film calls him a failure a lot, but it’s never clear why he’s a failure,…
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And I’m not so much on board for the conclusion. Here’s an action-packed issue. Pugh has his villain revealed, who’s really just an aggrieved party and aggrieved parties make terrible villains to demonize, since their plight makes sense. But worst is how he takes the series away from Hotwire at the end and gives it…
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This issue is Pugh’s version of an all-action issue. He fails, somewhat, because he’s still got a narrative going. It’s not just one huge action sequence, he takes the time to introduce characters and ideas, not to mention revealing the entire conspiracy (well, most of it) behind the comic book. It’s a fun issue. Not…
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Ok, some of Pugh’s dialogue panels are a little static here, but otherwise, the art’s excellent. This issue moves the story… well, not quite along, but it reveals more of it. It certainly does do a good job expanding the supporting cast, which is an interesting move for the second issue of a four issue…
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A friend of mine recommended Hotwire to me and, while I trust his opinion, I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. It’s a very stylized, painted-like (is there a term for it yet, Photoshop-painted maybe) comic and he doesn’t like photoshopping or painted comics. But Hotwire‘s not really that genre at all–if…
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I wonder if Tim Blake Nelson has read Disgrace. Cheap, cheap, cheap comment. One-liner even. It’s a one-liner. Leaves of Grass is not–if I underlined, I would here–an American Disgrace. It’s something different from that sort of attempt, but also something different from a mainstream or independent attempt… it’s a comedy drama unlike most others…
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It’s not difficult to come up with compliments for It’s Complicated. Alec Baldwin is very funny. Unfortunately, he’s very funny playing a slight variant on his character from “30 Rock.” Similarly, John Krasinski is very affable. Unfortunately, he too is simply playing a variation on his “Office” character. The film is from Universal (or NBC…
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I started Solomon Kane with a decidedly negative opinion of James Purefoy. The first twelve to fifteen minutes did nothing to change my mind. Then something happened. The script stopped being so expositive in its dialogue and all of a sudden Purefoy got really good. He kept it up until the end of the film…
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Gosh, Garth, thanks for the miserably downbeat foreshadowing at the end. Things are winding down in Crossed, obviously, and it’s kind of hurried. Not a lot of stuff happens this issue. Instead, it’s just a little bit of reaction to the last issue and a lengthy aside with Ennis filling the reader in on other…
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The seventh issue basically brings the story to where, event-wise, not location-wise (since they’ve been moving for the series), it would pick up before Ennis’s digressions into non-epical storytelling. In other words, the shit hits the fan. And there’s some bad stuff, but it’s nowhere near as affecting as the old guy’s confession scene in…
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Ennis’s goal with Crossed, I’ve decided, is to make me sorry I ever said the book wasn’t going to surprise me anymore. There are Crossed in this issue, there’s even a horse and a dog and an annoying new member of the group who’s pissing Stan off a lot because Stan feels like the first…
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I don’t think a single Crossed appears in this issue and given the previous issue ended with the Crossed targeting Cindy (she’s the leader woman) and Stan (I think the narrator’s name is Stan, nearly positive). Instead, Ennis spends the entire issue on the characters. There’s some more flashback, but it’s revelatory here, about the…
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