Best part of today’s Rally to Restore Sanity (and/or Fear)? Why that would be Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s reference to The Corbomite Maneuver!!
Long-time Trekkies like myself know, of course, that The Corbomite Maneuver is a classic episode of the original Star Trek series. Check out this clip:
Note Uhura’s gold uniform, which Stewart and Colbert mentioned. Well played, sirs!
After re-watching Jurassic Park (click here for my review) and The Lost World (click here for my review) last month (as part of my look back at the last decade-and-a-half’s worth of films directed by Steven Spielberg) I figured, what the heck, why not take another look at Jurassic Park III (executive produced by Mr. Spielberg and directed by Joe Johnston).
While not as bad as I’d remembered, like The Lost World this third Jurassic Park film is a pale reflection of the first one.
In some respects, I think I like Jurassic Park III better than the second installment. Whereas The Lost World was slow and rambling — with a story that was all over the place — Jurassic Park III has a much leaner, meaner narrative: a group of people crash on the island and must find a way to survive long enough to reach the coast where rescue hopefully awaits. That’s a simple hook, and I think it serves the film well. The story gets going quickly, and from there moves right along like gangbusters straight through to the end. There’s an intensity and sense of danger that I felt the second film was completely missing.
There are also some terrific action set-pieces. Here is where Joe Johnston’s background in the world of visual effects serves him well. We finally get to see some Pterodactyls (teased by the first two films), and they’re worth the wait — the whole sequence in the Pterodactyl cage is a tense, exciting adventure. I also love the Spinosaur/T-Rex fight early in the film (shades of the King Kong/T-Rex fight, I felt, but that amused me rather than annoying me), as well as the Spinosaur attack on the river, in the rain, that takes place late in the film.
Whereas The Lost World chose — mistakenly, I think — to focus entirely on Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm, this third film wisely returns the focus to Sam Neill as Dr. Alan Grant. I love Mr. Neill in this role, and it’s great to see him back front-and-center in this film.
Unfortunately, despite those strengths, there’s also quite a lot of weaknesses to Jurassic Park III, things that keep the film squarely mediocre in my mind.
First of all, other than Sam Neill, I think the film’s ensemble is pretty weak. One of the key components to the first film’s success was how many great characters there were in the piece — and the great actors chosen to portray them. But like The Lost World, while the lead character in Jurassic Park III is interesting and sympathetic, the rest of the ensemble is flat. I love William H. Macy, but he… [continued]
In celebration of the film’s 25th anniversary (and also, not coincidentally, to promote yesterday’s release of the trilogy on blu-ray), movie theatres across this great nation of ours screened Back to the Future this past Monday night. I’m thrilled to say that I had tickets to the showing here in Boston, and it was an absolutely magnificent event. It’s been a long time since I’ve had more fun in a movie theatre!!
What a delight it was to get to see this spectacular film on the big screen! The film played like gangbusters — the audience I was in was captivated by the movie from minute one. Of course everyone in the theatre knew the movie backwards and forwards, but that could lead to an audience laughing at the film, and the experience becoming more like watching the Rocky Horror Picture Show. (Not necessarily a bad thing, but certainly a different experience from when an audience is really engaged by a film’s story.) But the audience I was with was kept spellbound by the film all the way through — laughing hard at all the jokes (even the subtle ones) and cheering at all the key places.
It’s hard to believe that Back to the Future is a quarter-century old. The film holds up remarkably well. The acting, the direction, the score, the visual effects — everything works almost exactly as well as it did back in 1985 when the film was released. OK, there are one or two dodgy moments (like the effects shot when Marty & Doc whip around to look at the fire tracks left by the just-vanished DeLorean in the Twin Pines Mall — if you look closely, Marty and the Doc appear to be floating in the frame) but these are barely noticeable and, really, sort of endearing if you do pick up on any of those tiny flaws.
At the screening, the film looked and sounded amazing. The print that we were shown had been gorgeously restored. The image was sharp and with vibrant colors. The dialogue was clear, the music was rocking, and the effects were booming (especially the climactic clock tower lightning strike!).
There were so many aspects of the film that were really highlighted when seeing it on the big screen. First and foremost is the eyeball-acting of Christopher Lloyd. Seriously, I could spend the entire run-time of the film just watching Mr. Lloyd’s eyeballs pop and squint and wriggle. Lloyd is a riot, and he makes then most of every single second he has on screen. Take the scene in the Doc’s garage, when Lorraine shows up (having trailed Marty there). Doc has maybe one line of dialogue in the… [continued]
Yesterday I wrote about the wonderfully intelligent, compelling comic-book series Ex Machina.
Last month, series creators Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris unveiled the series’ final issue: number 50. So what did I think of it?
(I’ll try to be vague about the details, but of course there are SPOILERS ahead.)
In short, it’s a poignant and gut-wrenchingly emotional end to the series, wonderfully written by Mr. Vaughan and gorgeously illustrated by Mr. Harris. I do have some lingering dissatisfaction, though, which I’ll get to in a minute.
For the most part, during the run of the series, ex-super-hero Mitchell Hundred managed to overcome all of the obstacles that he encountered — whether they were of the super-villain OR New York political opponent variety. But the first two pages of issue #1 (which I had quite forgotten about until re-reading the entire series from start-to-finish last month) warned readers that the story of Mitchell Hundred “may look like a comic, but it’s really a tragedy.” With that in mind, as the series approached its end I have been nervously waiting for the other shoe to drop. In issue # 50, it dropped, and it dropped hard.
Although the stories they told were completely different, Ex Machina bore a number of stylistic similarities to Mr. Vaughan’s other amazing comic-book series, Y: The Last Man. Both series utilized flashbacks in almost every issue; both series used a device of giving an exact date for every issue’s events as well as for the flashback scenes; both series revealed the title of each issue on the final page; etc. And in Y: The Last Man as in Ex Machina, the protagonist and his friends seemed to be able to always best their opponents throughout the series. That all changed in the final issue (#60) of Y, which is one of the most emotionally devastating comic books I have ever read. Spanning many years, that final issue presents the fates of Yorick and the rest of the primary characters in the series — and in almost every case, those fates are horrifically tragic. I have a lot of problems with that final issue of Y. While I must doff my proverbial hat to Mr. Vaughan for being able to write a comic-book that so profoundly affected me emotionally, I am to this day upset at the practically unremittingly tragic fates that befell the main cast of the series, all of whom I had grown to love over the run of the book. It seemed needlessly cruel to the readership to have crafted such a bleak ending, and while emotionally powerful, it felt to me to have been somewhat out-of-step with the tone of all the… [continued]
7 PM. Can’t wait!
One of my favorite comic-book series of the last decade, Ex Machina, drew to a close last month. Before reading the 50th and final issue, I decided to go back and re-read the entire run of this extraordinary series.
Ex Machina tells the story of Mitchell Hundred. In a world very much like our own (i.e., a world without any super-heroes like the ones you find in comic books), an accident on the docks gifts him with the mysterious ability to communicate with and control machines. As a life-long comic-book reader (and egged on by his gruff but idealistic mentor, nicknamed Kremlin), Mitchell decides to become a super-hero, The Great Machine, and fight crime in New York City. After a series of rather hapless adventures (more like misadventures), he decides that he could accomplish more within the system, so he runs for Mayor of New York City. Though Hundred is first treated like a joke, his actions on September 11th, 2001 (the details of which are slowly revealed over the run of the series, but the gist of which are captured by the staggering final page of the first issue — more on this in a minute) lead to his being shockingly victorious at the poles. Ex Machina chronicles his tumultuous four years (from 2002-2005) as Mayor of New York City.
What’s extraordinarily impressive about Ex Machina is its verisimilitude. That’s a strange word to use in connection with a story about a former super-hero, but I think it’s appropriate. Author Brian K. Vaughan takes his fictional characters and weaves them in and out of the real events that transpired in New York City and the country in the years 2002-2005. Although there are a few super-heroic smack-downs (unsurprisingly, a few out-of-the-ordinary figures from Mayor Hundred’s super-hero past do show up during the course of his four-year term), for the most part Ex Machina deals with Mayor Hundred and his friends & staff (an extraordinarily well-realized ensemble of characters) wrestling with potent, real political issues: gay marriage, censorship in art, education reform, abortion, and more. Ex Machina is a very “talky” series, but that’s not a criticism — Mr. Vaughan’s scripts are dense with fascinating political intrigue and conversation. As someone who follows politics pretty attentively, I was continually impressed with the historical details constantly woven into the stories. This is a smart book.
This rather intellectual approach to a super-hero story is extraordinarily well-matched by the art of Tony Harris (ably enhanced by inkers Tom Feister and Jim Clark and colorist JD Mettler). The bulk of the drama in Ex Machina, as I just mentioned, comes not from super-hero slug-fests but from people talking with one another, and there… [continued]
Usually I dread the ads that we’re all forced to sit through in movie theaters these days when waiting for one’s chosen film to start. But this one I could watch a hundred times:
Conan’s new show premieres on TBS in November. Can’t wait.
I was blown away by Ben Affleck’s directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, and so I was of course eager to see his second film: The Town. While I don’t think it’s nearly as strong as Gone Baby Gone, The Town is as an engaging and confident sophomore effort from Mr. Affleck, and definitely worth your time.
As with Gone Baby Gone, The Town is set in Boston (in this case, specifically, Charlestown). In both films, one of Mr. Affleck’s primary accomplishments has been in bringing that Boston setting to life to the degree that the film’s story is indelibly linked with the Boston location. By shooting in Boston, by casting naturalistic actors (as well as a variety of local non-actors), and by a million other details that Mr. Affleck and his team get just right, the streets of Boston become the film’s beating heart.
In addition to directing and co-writing the film (“It’s going to be awfully tough to walk away from this one,” Mr. Affleck told Jon Stewart on The Daily Show last month, referring to his triple-threat role), Mr. Affleck stars as Doug, a hardened young man who works for a sand and gravel company breaking rocks — that is, when he’s not robbing Charlestown banks with his crew. In the heist that opens the film, Doug’s close friend (the two are practically brothers) Jem briefly takes the young bank manager, Claire, hostage in order to have some insurance in case the cops show up earlier than expected. They let her go, but Jem worries that she could incriminate them, so Doug agrees to discreetly find out what she knows. He arranges to accidentally bump into her at the laundromat, but quickly finds himself drawn to this young woman who, to Doug, represents his idealized vision of a life outside of The Town.
That doesn’t stike me as a terribly original hook for a film (troubled guy falls for a girl who makes him, you know, want to be a better man), and nothing in the narrative of The Town feels especially surprising. This, to me, is the main reason why I didn’t find The Town to be nearly as gripping as the edge-of-your-seat, where-the-heck-is-this-all-going narrative of Gone Baby Gone. I haven’t read Chuck Hogan’s novel, Prince of Thieves, on which The Town is based, but I can’t imagine it’s as strong a source material as was the novel by Dennis Lehane that was adapted for Gone Baby Gone.
But, OK, though The Town isn’t as good as Gone Baby Gone, it’s still a very well-made and entertaining thriller.
Mr. Affleck is a way better actor than he’s usually given credit for, and he’s great in the lead as Doug. He’s eminently believable as the street tough… [continued]
Now that we’ve arrived at 2001′s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, I can finally start calling this series looking back at the recent films of Steven Spielberg by the original title I’d thought up: “Spielberg in the Aughts.” (My first thought, last month, was that I’d look back at the last decade of Mr. Spielberg’s films, none of which I’d ever revisited after seeing them in theatres — but then I realized there were several of his films from the ’90s that I wanted to revisit, too, while I was at it! Click here for my review of Jurassic Park, here for my review of The Lost World, and here for my review of Amistad.)
I hated A.I.: Artificial Intelligence when I saw it in theatres. Well, that’s not entirely true. I thought the first three-fourths of the movie — right up to the point when Haley Joel Osment’s David finds himself trapped underwater staring at the Blue Fairy but unable to reach her — was a solid if somewhat dour sci-fi film. But then the movie kept going. I felt those last 25 minutes-or-so were the worst 25 minutes that Steven Spielberg had ever committed to film. Those 25 minutes were so bad that, for me, they entirely destroyed the film.
So what did I think, a decade later?
Well, after nearly ten years of having the thought in my head that the final 25 minutes of A.I. were the worst 25 minutes of film that Steven Spielberg had ever shot, those 25 minutes had been quite built up in my mind, so not surprisingly they didn’t quite live up to the heights of awfulness that I had remembered. Also, after having seen the entirety of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I can no longer state with certainty that the end of A.I. represents the worst 25 minutes that Steven Spielberg has ever put on film.
But I will say that I still thought the ending was entirely awful on almost every level.
The basic plot of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence was developed, over many years, by Stanley Kubrick. As the story goes, Mr. Kubrick worked on the film for years — and often discussed the project with his friend Steven Spielberg — but for a variety of reasons never actually made the movie. Following his death, Mr. Spielberg got involved with the project in an attempt to realize this unfinished work that Mr. Kubrick had begun.
As a movie-fan back in 2001, I was ecstatic that Steven Spielberg (the man who made E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind) was returning, at long-last, to sci-fi. I was intrigued to see Mr. Spielberg bring the extraordinary visual expertise and… [continued]
Last week, Virgin Galactic conducted the first piloted gliding flight of its commercial sub-orbital spaceship.
The name of the craft? The VSS Enterprise.
It’s hard for me to a recall another film that has so bravely allowed its lead character to come off as so completely unlikable. In The Social Network‘s power-house of a first scene, Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) is clearly presented to us as a Grade-A, prime-cut jackass. It’s a hell of a way to start a movie!
As you are all probably aware, this arrogant Harvard undergrad is the man who will go on to become the billionaire creator of Facebook. Based on Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaire, The Social Network follows Mark from his days at Harvard through the world-wide explosion of Facebook and the eventual lawsuits brought against him by several former Harvard classmates, including the young man who had once been his closest friend.
There has been some questioning of the accuracy of The Social Network, but screenwriter Aaron Sorkin defends the film. He told Entertainment Weekly: “If we know what brand of beer Mark was drinking on a Tuesday night in October seven years ago when there were only three other people in the room, it should tell you something about how close our research sources were to the subject and to the events.” Producer Scott Rudin makes similar statements: “You can’t make untrue statements about someone without running the risk of getting sued. Look around and notice that nobody has sued us.”
While of course I myself have no idea about whether events truly unfolded the way they are depicted in The Social Network, I can say that the film FEELS real to me. All of the characters in the film — including Mark Zuckerberg — are depicted in a three-dimensional way. There aren’t easy heroes and villains in the film — most of the characters seem likable and unlikable at different points in the narrative, just as real human beings are. (This, to me, is in contrast to a film like A Beautiful Mind, in which it seemed so clear to me as a viewer that the filmmakers had shaved away any unlikable aspects to John Nash in order to create a more heroic lead for the film.)
But knowing that the parties involved strongly dispute just what went down over the course of the creation of Facebook, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin cleverly decided to embrace that ambuguity with the film’s structure. As we watch events unfold chronologically, the film regularly cuts forward in time to the depositions in the two lawsuits eventually brought against Zuckerberg. In those scenes, we see the participants debate and argue about the moments that we, the viewers, just saw occur. This is a really smart way to allow the film to incorporate the characters’ different viewpoints… [continued]
After re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird last month, I couldn’t resist re-watching the famous film adaptation from 1962 starring Gregory Peck. I’d seen the film before, many years ago, but I hardly remembered it. After having devoured Harper Lee’s magnificent novel, reminding myself in the process of what an amazing achievement in literature it is, I was eager to take another look at the film.
Sadly, whereas re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird only elevated it further in my mind, I found myself fairly disappointed by the film version.
It’s a fairly faithful adaptation. Almost all of the key characters and scenes from the novel are present in the film. Events are slightly re-organized, and the time-frame is condensed (the film takes place over a single year, from one summer to the next, while the novel is spread out over two years and three summers), but nothing major is left out. Yet the whole thing seems sort of flat and lifeless. The familiar scenes are all there, but they’re drained of much of the emotional context that I felt in the book.
Where the film really fell down, for me, was in the performances of the kids. Frankly, I just didn’t care for any of the three child actors chosen to play Scout, Jem, and Dill. I have written often on this blog that I think the failure or success of child actors rests on how they are handled by the director, so I don’t just fault the kids. I also acknowledge that standards and styles of performance were quite different in the 1960′s than they are today. One can’t expect to see the type of viscerally honest performance by a child actor such as Max Records as Max in Spike Jonze’s recent adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are (click here for my review of that amazing film) in a movie from that era. But whatever the reason, I just didn’t feel the performances of the three kids. It felt like three kids acting out scenes from To Kill a Mockingbird, rather than my believing that I’m watching three real characters interact.
Where the film didn’t disappoint me, though, was in Gregory Peck’s performance as Atticus Finch. Although he’s been in a number of other famous, well-made films, Mr. Peck has become indelibly linked with Atticus, and after thirty seconds on screen one can see why. Mr. Peck is perfectly cast. With his deep voice and large frame, Mr. Peck is powerfully believable both as an erudite lawyer as well as the town’s best sharp-shooter, and he embodies all the wiseness and kindness of an ideal father figure. While I felt that the kids (and several other performers in the film)… [continued]
Last month I wrote about a number of great comic books that I’d read lately. Here’s some more of the fun stuff I’ve been reading these past few weeks:
The Marvel Art of Joe Quesada — I remember taking note of a young artist named Joe Quesada back when he was illustrating Azrael for DC Comics and a variety of books for Valiant Comics (like Ninjak and, as I recall, a zero issue of X-O Manowar), and I’ve been following his work ever since. These days he’s one of the biggest superstars out there, but not just as an illustrator — Mr. Quesada has been the editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics for a decade. This gorgeous oversize hardcover is a comprehensive look back at his work for the House of Ideas. In particular, I love the spotlight given to all of his phenomenal cover work. I wish there was a little more commentary provided along with all the beautiful reproductions of his work (I’ve been spoiled by the way the Cover Run: The Art of Adam Hughes book contained commentary by Mr. Hughes for EVERY IMAGE), but that’s a minor complaint. A stunning collection that sits proudly on my bookshelf.
Baltimore: The Plague Ships — Another winner from Mike Mignola and his team. Written by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden (working together to bring the lead character from their novel Baltimore,: or, the Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire to the world of comic books) with wonderfully atmospheric art by Ben Stenbeck (and phenomenal coloring by Dave Stewart), the mini-series has me gripped so far. Lord Henry Baltimore hunts vampires across Europe in the early 1900′s. It’s grim and bloody and phenomenally good.
The Amazing Screw-On Head and Other Curious Objects — Speaking of Mike Mignola, I must also heap praise on this wonderfully loony hardcover collection of his one-off story, The Amazing Screw-On Head (about a robotic head that can screw into various elaborate action-figure bodies in order to hunt monsters for Abraham Lincoln) along with a variety of other equally bizarre short-stories (many of which were written and drawn specifically for this collection). Wonderfully off-beat and gorgeously illustrated by the phenomenally talented Mr. Mignola, I am in love with this handsomely-designed collection.
Dr. Horrible and Other Horrible Stories — I was a bit dubious that the characters from Joss Whedon’s triumphant web-series Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (read my rapturous review here) could translate to comics, but this softcover collection (reprinting Dark Horse Comics’ Dr. Horrible one-shot from earlier in the year along with several other short stories spotlighting different characters from the Dr. Horrible universe) but boy was I wrong. Zack Whedon wrote all of the stories and managed to perfectly… [continued]
My revisitation of the last decade-and-a-half of the films of Steven Spielberg continues! I’ve already looked at Jurassic Park and The Lost World, which brings me now to 1997′s Amistad.
In an attempt to recapture the magic of 1993 (in which he released two films in a single year, the dramatic historical film Schindler’s List as well as the crowd-pleasing action spectacle Jurassic Park), in 1997 Mr. Spielberg released both the Jurassic Park sequel The Lost World as well as the historical epic Amistad.
In 1839 a group of African slaves broke free aboard the Spanish slave ship Amistad and killed most of the crew. When they were intercepted by an American naval vessel, the slaves were imprisoned and brought to trial. A group of abolitionists became aware of the case, and hired a young, inexperienced lawyer named Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey) to take the case. Mr. Baldwin was forced to retry the case multiple times, as the politics of a nation heading towards Civil War bestowed upon this small case an enormous weight in the potential fate of the nation. Ultimately, the case was brought before the U.S. Supreme Court, where former president John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) assisted Mr. Baldwin in arguing for the release of the Amistad slaves.
As is often the case, Mr. Spielberg assembled a talented group of actors to embody the characters in the film. Mr. McConaughey does a fine job as the jovial, slightly naive lawyer Baldwin. The role doesn’t feel like much of a stretch for him (particularly after playing a lawyer the year before as the lead in 1996′s A Time to Kill), but he reins in some of his more over-the-top mannersisms which allows him to fit well into this historical drama. Fresh off of The Lost Word, Pete Postlewaite pops up again as an equally unlikable fellow — this time, he’s the lawyer assigned to prosecute the Amistad case. Stellan Skarsgard and Morgan Freeman play the abolitionists who are drawn to help the Amistad slaves. Though neither has much to do in the film, both make the most of their small parts. Other familiar, talented members of the cast include Nigel Hawthorne as President Martin van Buren, David Paymer (The Larry Sanders Show, State and Main) as Secretary Forsythe, Xander Berkeley (24) as the presidential advisor Hammond, Anna Paquin (X-Men, True Blood) as Queen Isabella, and I was pleasantly surprised that I had forgotten that Chiwetel Ejiofor (Serenity, Spartan) has a fairly substantial role as the translator who assists Mr. Baldwin in communicating with the Amistad slaves.
But the two standouts of Amistad are Djimon Hounsou as Cinque, the young man who who leads the Amistad revolt and as such becomes… [continued]
This past summer marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. That’s pretty amazing. Although I’d read the book several times in my life, it had been well over a decade (probably closer to fifteen years) since the last time, so last month I decided to re-read the novel.
What could I possibly say about this magnificent work that hasn’t already been said? Every couple of years I see that it has topped a list, put together by one organization or another, of the best novels ever written, and I can’t say that I disagree.
The elegant prose wraps you in its warm embrace right from page one, paragraph one. Harper Lee’s writing contains all of the wistfulness of one’s recollections of a childhood now long-passed, while also maintaining a wonderful good humor throughout. I’d remembered just how sad the novel was, in places, but I hadn’t quite recalled just how funny it is. (I love, for instance, Scout’s gentle chiding of her father’s “last will and testament diction.”)
I was also startled, as I re-read the book, by how well I remembered it even though it must have been at least fifteen years since I’d read it last. I can’t remember the details of books that I read two or three months ago, and yet scene after scene in To Kill a Mockingbird were as fresh in my mind as if I’d just read them last week. I can only marvel at the power of Harper Lee’s story that it made such an indelible impression on my memory.
Time Magazine‘s 1960 review of the book noted that Harper Lee’s tale “teaches the reader an astonishing number of useful truths about little girls and about Southern life.” Having grown up in Connecticut in the ’70s and ’80s, I can’t really vouch for the novel’s verisimilitude. But I can say that it FEELS real to me. Scout and Jem are wonderfully realized children, and Ms. Lee’s ability to put us right into their heads (or, to use an iconic phrase from the novel, to let us stand in their shoes and walk around in them for a while) is extraordinary, and to my mind it’s the key to the novel’s enduring success. Yes, the book is filled with striking episodes (Atticus’ shooting of the mad dog has always been a favorite scene of mine), and of course the sad story of Tom Robinson’s trial gives it a potent message about racism in America. But to me all of that pales before the way that To Kill a Mockingbird allows us, in a way, to step back into our own childhoods as we spend three summers,… [continued]
I wasn’t sure quite what to expect when I began reading The Dark Tower series by Stephen King. Could Mr. King’s “magnum opus” live up to all that I’d heard about it? With three (of seven) books down, I can now tell you that I am unreservedly hooked. (Click here for my thoughts on Book I: The Gunslinger, and here for my thoughts on Book II: The Drawing of the Three.)
With each of the first three installments, the novels have grown longer and the stories have grown more complex, as Mr. King gradually builds and deepens the strange and wonderful and horrifying “world that has moved on” which Roland Deschain and his new ka-tet (group of fellows) inhabit. (Looking at the enormous Book IV which is sitting on my bookshelf, it looks like that trend will continue!)
Book III: The Waste Lands, has an unusual structure in that the novel is basically split in half. Book One of the novel (subtitled Jake: Fear in a Handful of Dust) deals with a major dangling plot-line left by the conclusion of The Drawing of the Three. In that novel, the third door into another world brought Roland once again in contact with Jake, the young boy he had encountered in The Gunslinger. Except this was Jake in the past, before he had ever met Roland. Although it’s easy for a reader to miss in the intensity The Drawing of the Three‘s climax, while in Jake’s past Roland makes a critical change to Jake’s life. As The Waste Lands opens, we see that the ripple effects of that one change have devastating effects on Roland — and on young Jake — and the two must once again find one another in order to set things right.
That synopsis makes it sound like The Waste Lands has a story in common with a great many Star Trek episodes, but trust me that things are really must weirder than that. Mr. King’s story has little to do with the butterfly-effect changes to a timeline caused by time travel. Rather, this story is a vehicle for us to learn more Roland and Jake — and also about Eddie and Susannah — as all four must set their doubts aside and go to incredible lengths in order to make their ka-tet whole once again. As a back-drop, we also gain fascinating hints about the nature of the parallel worlds in the Dark Tower universe, how they are structured and how that structure is breaking down due to the as-yet-unrevealed malady that has apparently affected the Dark Tower.
This half of the novel is absolutely stuffed with incredibly bizarre “wha??” moments. (None more bizarre than… [continued]
Quint over at AICN has posted an amazing, career-spanning interview with the extraordinarily talented Drew Struzan. Mr. Struzan has illustrated many of the most iconic movie posters of the last several decades — posters I’m sure you’d recognize for all of the Indiana Jones films, the Star Wars films, the Back to the Future films, and so many more. The man is an incredible talent. I have already ordered my copy of The Art of Drew Struzan, and I can’t wait for it to arrive!
The AICN seaman has also been posting a really fun series called The Behind the Scenes Pic of the Day that is definitely worth checking out if you haven’t already been following it. Maybe you’ll want to start with this one that has done far worse than kill you, he’s hurt you, and he wishes to go on hurting you. Heh — fits right in with my current run of cartoons!!
A fun animation test for the abandoned Roger Rabbit 2 project, from 1998, has recently surfaced on-line. Worth checking out.
This recent brief interview with Joss Whedon, discussing his work on the upcoming Avengers film, has been making the rounds of the net but it’s worth reading if you haven’t seen it yet. I love Mr. Whedon’s comment that “I would like to put these actors in a room and just make Glengarry Glen Ross.” Boy would I happily pay to see that!!
This is an interesting list of the 33 Greatest Movie Trilogies of all time, as voted for by readers of Empire magazine. There are some weird choices (I think the terrible fourth entries in the Die Hard and Indiana Jones series would disqualify those as trilogies — and what the hell is the Star Wars prequel trilogy doing on that list???) but it’s a fun read.
So actor Robert Wuhl, who once played a sports agent on the TV show Arliss, is now hosting an actual sports radio show? That’s pretty funny.
I love this:
Last week I began my look back at the last decade-and-a-half of Steven Spielberg films with Jurassic Park. Now my project to revisit all of the films that Mr. Spielberg has made since 1993 — films that, with the exception of Saving Private Ryan, I have only seen once — continues with Mr. Spielberg’s 1997 Jurassic Park sequel, The Lost World. (I’ll be calling this series Spielberg in the Aughts, but I can’t really use that title for a film made in 1997…!)
I remember being very disappointed with this film when I saw it back in 1997. It was the first time I had gone to see a Steven Spielberg film in theatres and come out disappointed. (But not the last…) So when I watched this film on DVD, I was curious to see if I liked it any more now, so many years later and divorced from all the hype of the time.
In a word: no.
I will say that The Lost World looks great. Mr. Spielberg and his frequent collaborator, genius-level cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, have darkened their palette this time out. Whereas the first Jurassic Park was quite bright for much of it’s run-time, The Lost World has a much more shadowy look to it, and that is effective at adding a layer of spookiness and mystery to the proceedings. The dinosaur CGI effects still look pretty great. One of the few scenes that takes place in bright daylight is the introduction to Pete Postlewaite’s great white hunter Roland Dembo and his team, as they attempt to capture a number of dinosaurs in the midst of a high-speed run across a plain. There are no shadows in which to hide dodgy effects, but none are needed — ILM’s CGI creatures (combined with some top-notch work from Stan Winston’s animatronic workshop) look fabulous.
But that’s pretty much the only good thing I can say about The Lost World. I found the story to be a mess, and the characters flat and uninvolving. From the get-go, The Lost World was operating at a disadvantage to its predecessor, Jurassic Park, because its source material was much weaker.
I still remember being blown away when I first read Michael Crichton’s novel, Jurassic Park (well-before the movie came out), and I was so excited when the news broke that he was working on a sequel book. But I was underwhelmed by The Lost World when the novel was released. It just didn’t seem anywhere near as interesting as the first. Wisely, Mr. Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp chose to jettison much of the source material — but what they came up with in its place wasn’t much better.
Right from the beginning… [continued]
I was delighted to have had a chance, last week, to see the new Reduced Shakespeare Company play, The Complete World of Sports (Abridged) at the Merrimack Repertory Theatre. This run of performances was the East Coast premiere of this new show, and it was a blast!
The Reduced Shakespeare Company’s first play, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) was first performed back in 1987 — although the company’s origin really begins with Daniel Singer’s 25-minute version of Hamlet from 1981. In 1994, Adam Long, Reed Martin, and Austin Tichenor created a six-part radio show for the BBC called The Reduced Shakespeare Radio Show. Somehow, when I was in college, I got ahold of casette tapes of those six half-hour broadcasts, which is when I fell in love with the RSC.
In the ’90s, Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor began expanding the RSC’s repertoire by penning a series of new plays: The Complete History of America (Abridged), The Bible: The Complete Word of God (Abridged), and more. I had the pleasure of seeing their performance of Completely Hollywood (Abridged) at the Merrimack Repertory Theatre a few years ago, and so when I read about their launching of a new play, The Complete World of Sports (Abridged), I eagerly snapped up some tickets.
While I’m not sure that any of these subsequent plays can really rival The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), I am happy to report that this new sports-themed show is quite a hoot. In an hour and a half, the three-man troupe attempts to present before the audience the complete history of every sport known to mankind.
From what I’ve read, the RSC has different troupes that travel and perform their shows. I was thilled that in the performance I saw, both Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor appeared. Having listened to those radio show tapes many, many times, I know their voices quite well so it was a lot of fun to get to see them perform in person. The third member of the ensemble was Matt Rippy, and he was great too — easily holding his own along with Reed and Austin. The three had an extraordinary fluidity in their interactions — my favorite parts of the show were when all three actors were on stage bouncing off of one another. A sharp script helps, of course, but it was exciting to see three actors who could be so quick and naturalistic with one another when interacting on-stage. Particularly when things went awry — in the performance I saw it seems that Austin was having a spot of trouble with his lines, which led to some good fun at his expense when Reed and Matt noticed that he seemed to… [continued]
I once considered Tim Burton one of my very favorite directors, but recent years have changed that somewhat for me. I still think he’s an extraordinary talent who has given us some incredible films, but since 1999′s Sleepy Hollow, in my opinion Mr. Burton has directed two mediocre films (Big Fish and Sweeney Todd) and two absolutely terrible films (Planet of the Apes and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory).
When I first heard that Mr. Burton would be directing an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, I thought at first that that was an inspired idea — that the weirdness of Alice in Wonderland would be a great match for Mr. Burton’s bizarre sensibilities. But when I started seeing trailers for the film, I thought it looked terrible. The glimpses I got of Johnny Depp’s totally wacky portrayal of the Mad Hatter didn’t interest me, the design of the film looked garish, and it seemed to me that the dark terror of Sleepy Hollow had been replaced by lowest-common-denominator all-ages pap. For the first time that I could ever remember, here was a new Tim Burton film that I was not interested in seeing. Once I started to read the poor reviews (and, in particular, the on-line eviscerations of the 3-D conversion), I decided to pass on seeing the film in theatres.
But, you know, it’s a new Tim Burton movie! Even though it didn’t look like a film I would enjoy, I do admit to remaining sort of curious to see what Mr. Burton had come up with. Was the film really as bad as it looked to me in the trailers, and as I’d read? When I saw the film in the “new releases” section of my local video store, I decided to rent it so I could see for myself.
Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is not a total catastrophe. There are some bits and pieces of the film that I liked. But as you could probably tell from my recent cartoons, I found the whole thing to be exceedingly mediocre, and quite a disappointment coming from the talented Tim Burton.
The film started off well. I quite liked Mia Wasikowska’s performance as Alice. She’s certainly quirky enough to feel right at home as the lead in a Tim Burton film, but her Alice also felt recognizably vulnerable and human. Her trip down the rabbit-hole and entrance into Wonderland was sufficiently weird and spooky, and I quite liked the build-up of hints that this wasn’t Alice’s first trip to Wonderland. That was a surprising choice on Mr. Burton’s part (and that of screenwriter Linda Woolverton), but I really dug it. I liked the sense of history and mystory that gave the… [continued]