Henry Cavil seems like a very charismatic actor, but is he mighty enough to carry a franchise? I am deliberately not including the Superman reboot, “Man of Steel” – you don’t carry films with Superman, Batman or Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr. may be the exception), they carry you – but because Cavil is in discussions to replace Tom Cruise in a film version of “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”
Just about anyone could be Superman – though it helps if they’re white, because of past depictions of the character as well as the expectations of the fan base – and that movie will rise of fall on the strength of Cavil convincing people that he’s worthy of wearing that famous red cape.
But millions won’t want to see it because of Cavil, just as relatively few people probably went to see “Superman Returns” on the strength of Brandon Routh in the title role.
I have been watching a lot of Netflix since I have been working getting over my cold. I finished watching “Firefly” – as a result I think I better understand the fixation the fans known as Browncoats have with the show; as an added bonus I appreciate Joss Whedon’s “Serentity” even more.
I am also watching – as I type – “Tron: Uprising.” It hasn’t been renewed by Disney despite being one of the most visually innovative television series on television. Its won numerous Annie Awards, and is breathtakingly beautiful at times.
Oddly enough, it has significantly more depth than “Tron: Legacy,” the movie that inspired it. This can be partially attributed to having more time to unfold its storyline, though truth be told “Tron” Legacy ” was more interested in being visually appealing than telling a cohesive and engaging story.
Thinking about the series two thoughts came to mind, one revolving around Paul Rubens (who voiced a treacherous assistant to General Tessler named Pavel) which will be the subject of another column, and another speculating as to why the series was cancelled.
While I have no hate for Zach Braff or Rob Thomas, the creator of “Veronica Mars,” this is what a Kickstarter should be. The Kickstarter campaign for Armand Villavert Jr. and Mark Andrew Smith’s (the writer of the awesome “Sullivan’s Sluggers,” a graphic novel that somehow managed to successfully tie together two of America’s greatest past times: Baseball and violence) “Gladstone’s School For World Conquerors” ended a day or so ago.
Gladstone is a school for the children of supervillains, like Hogworts for the criminally inclined. In the latest chapter of their adventures they decide to seek some Tarantino-esque vengeance against the superhero known as StormBreaker, who also happened to have defeated their parents.
According to Villavert Jr. the cost of a 22 page section of the comic costs $1000, and that’s only for coloring and lettering, which is probably why the Kickstarter is offered as a PDF instead of an actual graphic novel. That being said I intend to contact the backers of this Kickstarter to see if it will eventually be offered in a physical format because a good book needs to be appreciated, and the best way to do that is to actually hold it in your hands, something that you cannot do with a PDF.
And as far as I know, Mark Andrew Smith isn’t rolling in dough, which happens to be the case with most writers.
Below is a review of the first series of ‘Gladstone’s.’ The review itself is a bit irritating, though it does illustrate the artwork.
image courtesy of IMDb
Guillermo Del Toro rocks. Why, you ask? Sure, it has more than a little to do with him being the director of “Hellboy,” “Hellboy 2,” “Blade 2,” The Devil’s Backbone,” Pan’s Labyrinth, among others.
It also has to do with tenaciousness, and following your dreams, no matter how bleak things may seem (it also never hurts to do the right sacrifices, at the right time.
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!).
As I posted a few months ago, Universal abandoned Del Toro’s passion project, a movie based upon H.P. Lovecraft’s “At The Mountains Of Madness,” a part of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos (an interconnected series of stories that revolve around a common thematic element: horrific alien beings intent upon reclaiming the earth and oftentimes subverting everything that makes us human).
I like Louis Leterrier as a director. His reboot of “The Incredible Hulk” captured the essence of the character without being as angsty as Ang Lee’s somewhat torutured version. He also seems to approach his projects with genuine passion for the subject matter.
Then again, he also directed the reboot of “Clash Of The Titans,” which is forgivable as long as he doesn’t continue to feature actors such as Sam Worthington, who’s not exactly the most expressive thespian there is.
I want to like “Now you Seem Me,” and think that I’ll see it, but the trailer has got to be one of the least substantial that I have seen in awhile. It’s like a trick pulled by one of the four magicians that the film revolves around, and almost as ephemeral.
And since I am bitching, Morgan Freeman is perhaps one of the best actors working today. That being said, I just saw him in “Oblivion” and get the feeling that he’s playing the same ‘Magical Negro‘ role here.
We’ll see, but it doesn’t take a Houdini to tell that I will probably be right.
That title was harder to come up with than it looks.
Let me begin by saying that I don’t care for soap operas, which isn’t to say that I have never watched any. In the day I used to watch “Flamingo Road,” and “Days Of Our Lives” but that was more of – in hindsight – an odd fixation I had with NBC (which is perhaps putting it mildly because, as a young person, I religiously followed NBC-related news to such a degree that I was probably one of the only teenagers who knew who Grant Tinker and Brandon Tartikoff were).
Though speaking of soap operas, “The Edge Of Night,” while not on NBC, had an awesome opening theme.
That being said I am genuinely curious as to why Snoop Lion (né Snoop Doggy Dog; né Calvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr.) would be doing the theme for “One Life To Live.” I mean, will the opening consist of some tragically unhip actors pretending to dig Lion’s sound or will he do something in the vein of the current theme.
Either way, it’s either the most brilliant idea ever, or the dumbest.
This is the opening as of two years ago (I couldn’t find anything more recent on YouTube, though admittedly I didn’t look too hard).
Snoop Lion isn’t enough to actually get me to watch the show, but I am genuinely curious (in the same way that natural disasters and automobile crashes tend to captivate me. I hope that no one is harmed, but that’s not to say that I don’t enjoy seeming cars in various states of wreckage).
Maybe when it hits YouTube…
Another interesting little factoid: Né is actually a word. It’s the masculine form of née.
It it isn’t blame my naiveté and Random House.
On second thought, just blame Random House.
Success should be rewarded. If you’re good at what you do, you should be paid for it.
Sometimes, handsomely.
But when such things grow out of proportion, it borders on insanity.
For instance, the head of the Walt Disney Company, Bob Iger, recently announced that there would be layoffs to cut costs, which is an idea I can get behind.
Sometimes companies, like people, can become fat, making them slower and less able to compete (though making films like “John Carter,” which lost around $200 million doesn’t help the old bottom line) though my BS detector goes off when I learned that Iger earned around $31.4 million in compensation last year, and now the company he’s leading is laying off people.
If Disney needs to downsize operations to be more efficient, then I get it. If they’re trying to save money, then why doesn’t Iger start with some of those ducats he’s earning, then go to his employees?
Such huge numbers, like $31 million dollars, are almost meaningless to me. I am aware of them, in a mathematical, abstract sense, though in terms of something real, something I can touch, it’s beyond my comprehension.
And to clarify: I am not saying that rich people can’t have their money, and the toys that accompany it, though I would wish that they cared a little more about the lives their actions touch.
Because, when all is said and done, the “little” guy that is the real engine of the economy, and creating more unemployed people doesn’t benefit anyone.
Today Roger Ebert died after a hard fought battle with cancer. He was 70 years old, and – at least for me – humanized movie reviewing, making it feel like it was something that anyone, including myself, could do.
I remember watching both him and Gene Siskel – who died in February, 1999 – on the “At The Movies” TV show, and in retrospect, what amazed me most about it in general and Roger Ebert in particular was that he was never snobby or demeaning toward the films he reviewed, despite not being afraid to call out films that were particularly bad.
As they do below with Joel Schumacher’s 1997 film, “Batman and Robin.”
Ebert was also one of the fairest critics that I had ever seen. By which I mean that he liked all sorts of films, and didn’t disregard something because it was a scifi or horror film, which many critics seemed to have a knee-jerk negative reaction toward.
He seemed to genuinely love the medium of moviemaking, and the its possibilities, which, somehow elevated him beyond the constraints of advocating only for a particular type of film.
By way of example, I believe that he would have probably disliked the movie adaptation of Stephanie Meyer’s “The Host,” though he would have given it a fair shot, and not pan it because it was from the person who sexlessly birthed the ‘Twilight’ novels that the films were based upon.
That’s why he was so awesome, and why I’ll miss him.
I get that I am not exactly the target audience for this movie, but the trailer struck me as cloyingly cute. So cute in fact that if I were a diabetic I would keep my insulin at the ready, just in case. Gru, the villainous, though he was more misunderstood than evil, main character of 2010′s eponymously titled film now definitely appears to be on the side of the angels.
This time around he seems to have been enlisted–though shanghaied would probably be a more accurate–by the Anti-Villain League to aid in their efforts to rid the world of villains.
Despite the change in allegiance and storyline, Gru appears just as inept as he was in the earlier film, though what Universal hopes most is that “Despicable Me 2″ is like the first film in terms of its box office potential, which pulled in almost $550 million, on an investment of $69 million (which doesn’t include marketing costs, though I am reasonably sure it earned a huge profit).
What I like is that despite knowing that Gru is voiced by Steve Carell, (who can use a hit after the abysmal performance of “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone”) the character sounded different enough that I didn’t flashback to Michael Scott at any point during the trailer.
Which is a very good thing.
Why ‘Escape From L.A.’ Is Much Better Than I Remember It Being
John Carpenter’s “Escape From L.A.” isn’t a great movie, mainly because on the surface it’s essentially “Escape From New York,” with a change of locale. It’s currently on Netflix, though as I watch I have come to the conclusion that it’s much better – and a tad deeper – than I remember it being (Sure, the surfing scene was odd, and probably a bit beyond Pliskin’s skill set, if the original film was any indication).
‘New York’ dealt with an America where things are so far gone that someone gets the idea that it would be easier to just corral all the deviants, criminals and anyone else unable to fit easily into the New World Order, in New York (which some may perhaps consider to be redundant), which would be walled off.
The first film is very much self-contained, in that you don’t get much information about the rest of the country (though the force that keeps the inmates within the city walls –the United States Police Force – hints at the rise of military-styled fascism).
This idea is expanded upon in “Escape From L.A, which uses the entire country as a canvas, though the prison that is L.A. is emphasized.
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