Category: Reviews

REVIEW: Pitch Perfect 2

pitch-perfect-2-e1443040937587-9300817Pitch Perfect snuck up on us as a charming, funny film that took the national interest in all things acapella and grafted it onto the teen Coming of Age story template from Bring it On. With a strong ensemble and winning soundtrack, it wowed at the box office, making a singing star of Anna Kendrick, and ensuring there’d be a sequel.

If the film had any fault it was that some elements were so outsized they seemed incongruous with the rest of the story, such as the force and volume of Anna Camp’s projectile vomiting or Renee Wilson’s super-sized characterization.

Unfortunately, the trend towards bigger and more preposterous elements plagues Pitch Perfect 2, out now on Blu-ray Combo Pack from Universal Home Entertainment. At a performance before President Obama, Fat Amy has a wardrobe malfunction that gets televised but the reaction is far more extreme than Janet Jackson’s real life exposure during the far better watched Super Bowl.

As a result, the Barden Bellas are now pariahs both on campus and in the acapella competition world. Of course, there’s a loophole which they exploit so the disgraced national champions prepare to compete in the International Competition against a German team that works with stereotypical efficiency. They are the goliaths to beat and we all know they will be taken down a notch with heart and soul.

The film barely pauses to introduce the full Bella squadron so few actually feel like characters as opposed to window dressing. Instead, we focus on Kendrick’s character, who has over the last three years become the leader. But, she wants more and secretly takes an internship at a recording company where she faces new challenges, shaking her from her mash-up comfort zone.

Impossibly, the Bellas are all seniors so graduation looms and until a freshman arrives to join the team, there is little thinking about continuing their legacy or domination. But legacy becomes an undercurrent as Emily (Hailee Steinfeld), daughter of a former Bella (Katy Segal) forces her way into the group. Being the younger outsider does for this film what Kendrick’s Beca did in the first and she is utterly charming in her innocence.

pitch-perfect-finale-8372806The broad humor does not work for me at all, as I prefer the subtler, funnier bits such as Kendrick’s fascination with her German rival Kommissar (Birgitte Hjort-Sørensen). Or the clearly ad-libbed and inappropriate comments from podcasters

The team’s antics reach a nadir with a senior home performance so they go to seek their mojo from Camp’s Aubrey, now a motivational guru. Cohesive once more, they work hard for worlds and win (not a spoiler) and their performance is all you want from this film.

A third installment is in the works and one hopes that the transition to a mostly-new Bellas will bring with it a downshift in tone so they avoid embarrassing themselves.

The digital transfer is just fine with an excellent 1080p transfer matched with the more important DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 lossless soundtrack that makes the songs pop.

pitch-perfect-2-emily-2409323The Combo pack comes with Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital HD. The Special Features are plentiful but perfunctory. There’s a Bonus Song Performed by The Treblemakers (3:27): The song follows an introduction; Extended Musical Performances: Bellas (1:58), Das Sound Machine (1:23), and Bellas: Finale Clap-Along (0:44); Das Sound Machine Finale Breakdown (2:06) so you can hear each layer on its own; Deleted/Extended/Alternate Scenes: Jesse Drops Off Beca At Work — Extended (1:46), Treble Party — Alternate (1:00), Bumper Arrives at Treble Party (1:18), Treble Party — Extended (1:04), Car Show: “Farter” (0:56), Intro to Mansion — Extended (1:35), Beat Box — Extended (1:21), Setting Up Tents — Deleted (1:50), and Amy and Bumper Make-Up — Alternate (1:32); a fun Gag Reel (3:08);  Line-Aca-Rama (3:36), alternate takes; Green Bay Rap (0:52), yes, those are the pro football players and film fans in their glory;  Elizabeth Banks’ Directorial Debut (5:20), a celebration of the actress’ ascension to behind the camera; The Bellas Are Back (6:13); Aca-Camp (1080p, 5:04);  The Making of the Riff-Off (6:02), a closer look at the underground sing off that seems out of place until they explain why it’s in the film; The World Championships of A Cappella (9:30), when Baton Rouge was used as Denmark; Snoop Is in the House (2:53), Snoop Dogg’s cameo is highlighted; Residual Heat Internship (2:26), as Beca works for the unnamed character played by Keegan-Michael Key; An Aca-Love Story: Bumper and Fat Amy (5:26), exploring the improbable Adam DeVine-Rebel Wilson romance; and finally,  Legacy: Hailee Steinfeld (6:04).

There is additional Audio Commentary from Director/Producer Elizabeth Banks and Producers Paul Brooks and Max Handelman which actually tells you more about the film’s production than all of the above.

Box Office Democracy: Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials

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It’s really easy to dismiss a film by calling it nonsense, and this particular pitfall is one I feel I fall into too many times. I’ve cried nonsense on the plots of so many films over the course of my years reviewing films when I really meant muddled or confusing or pointless that now when I need it most I worry it won’t be taken seriously. Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials is nonsense in the purest form of the word; the movie has nothing resembling coherence or reason and it is a constant struggle just to understand what the hell is happening, let alone why it’s happening. I understand why these characters need to run away from bad things, but just about nothing else about the entire film. I derided the first Maze Runner film for being cliché and boring but it’s so much better to be boring than to be utterly incomprehensible.

You would think that by picking up directly where the last film left off The Scorch Trials could have some sense of narrative continuity, but you would be completely wrong. This film starts with the idea that everything we knew in the first movie was wrong but never bothers to explain what’s right. There’s some disease out there and for some reason it turns people in to zombies. The lab where they’re researching this disease has some weird shrimp monsters in glass tubes but no one acknowledges them in a serious way and they’re never spoken of or seen again. The outside world is one of sandstorms and powerful lightning storms but I can’t imagine that was caused by the zombie shrimp virus. The city they visit (or cities— it’s very hard to tell visually and the narrative gives no clues) is completely trashed with skyscrapers collapsing and fallen bridges, but none of that seems like zombies or sandstorms would cause it. The movie feels like the sets and locations were made with a paint-by-numbers set of post-apocalyptic clichés, and I could probably abide by it if they dedicated any time at all to justifying any of it. It wouldn’t even be that hard to slide this exposition when you consider all of the primary antagonists have amnesia, a disease practically invented to provide opportunities for simple things to be explained.

There’s also a stunning lack of consistency in the simple facts of the world. The kids travel by days on foot apparently risking dehydration and death by exposure to get from this ruined city to a secluded rebel outpost at the base of a far-off mountain. Then when things in the base go wrong two characters run around an underground tunnel for less than ten minutes before being deposited back out in to a giant city that we definitely couldn’t see in any of the establishing shots of that camp. When they leave this new city a few minutes later, they do it in a truck on a paved road. Civilization returned to this part of the world quickly in the maximum three days these events took place in. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt like my intelligence has been insulted so much by a movie, and I saw the Twilight film where the whole climax was a dream twice.

For two movies in all the characters are remarkably thin. I couldn’t come up with descriptions for any of them that last more than a sentence or contain more than two adjectives. I suppose Minho is the brave one and Thomas is the reckless hero. Newt has an English accent and Aris has a weird name. I think Frypan is supposed to be the strong one but I might be wrong. Teresa has almost nothing to do in this movie and barely speaks until it’s almost over but they still expect me to believe she and Thomas have some special connection, maybe by the time this is all over it will be somewhat believable. Patricia Clarkson is suitably menacing in her slightly expanded part as the series’ apparent big bad, but she’s starting to sort of fade in to the scenery as the famous older blond actress playing the big bad has become the new fad among the YA movie swarm. Giancarlo Esposito is a treasure and he gets the most real acting to do in this and while he crushes it I sincerely hope he gets better opportunities soon or that this paid enormously well. Alan Tudyk is featured in a very small role and while he’s utterly transfixing it seems as if the direction offered him was “take everything you’ve ever seen a junkie do on film and do all of it on every line” and it’s awfully strange to see.

While trying to figure out how much of what I didn’t get in this film came from some struggle to adapt the book into the film I read a summary of the book and discovered it basically has nothing to do with the movie they made. Some of the characters are the same and the second act seems to hit a few of the same beats but what are we even doing here at this point? Why make a film so unfaithful to the source material and also so staggeringly terrible? Who is being pleased by this film? Surely not the fans of the book and certainly not the poor audience members with no affinity for this franchise at all. The Scorch Trials is a failure as a film and a failure as an adaptation and it seems like somewhere, with enough effort, they could have gotten one of these things right.

Review: Fires Above Hyperion

Fires Above HyperionI love autobio graphic novels. I love them to the point that I hope to do one of my own. Fun Home, Blankets, Persepolis, Marbles, Epileptic, Clumsy, there are far too many excellent examples to name. Keeping all this in mind, ComicMix’s own Martha Thomases suggested I read Patrick Atangan’s Fires Above Hyperion to get my thoughts on it. I did in fact read it, and I did in fact have thoughts.

Prior to holding a copy of Fires Above Hyperion I was unfamiliar with Patrick Atangan. He’s an openly gay, multiracial author who has written and drawn many graphic novels before this, including Silk Tapestry and The Yellow Jar, and you can find out more about his work at www.nbmpub.com. This particular story documents his often antagonist relationship with dating and gay culture spanning two decades.

The story is told chronologically, starting with his Junior Prom, and goes into about eight different anecdotes over the course of twenty years of men he’s been involved with. There was very little reference to what the actual years are that these stories take place, if at all. I’m not sure I realized how much of a pet peeve that is for me until I read this book. When dealing with actual events that happened in real life, I like to have an idea of when they occurred, as it is made clear that gaps do exist between stories. Though, since it is in chronological order, it does make it easy to follow, and this might just be me being nit picky.

Fires Above Hyperion comes in at ninety-six pages. With about eight anecdotes to cover, it gives very little time to delve into the one time encounters, flings, and deeper relationships that make up the story. This ends up getting frustrating for me as the reader, when one of the early anecdotes is about a six-year relationship and how that has as much precious story real estate as an anecdote about a guy Patrick goes on a date with once.

Ultimately, this makes me feel like too much of an outsider. What makes books like Blankets and Clumsy so powerful is that they shared all sorts of little details. It felt like you were going through all the emotions with the author. It’s not as personal and intimate an experience here, and not only does it take away from the story overall, it prevents the humor from landing just right. The dark humor is present, but because I feel detached from the story as I’m reading it, it doesn’t seem to work. Instead of feeling a situation is funny, I end up just feeling kind of bad for Patrick or the person he was with, depending on the particular anecdote.

There is something in this story that is important for the medium, and that’s Patrick’s perspective as a gay man that’s part Latino and part Asian. The vast majority of graphic memoirs dealing with an author who is part of the LGBT community tend to be from a white author. Although this does not take up a lot of Fires Above Hyperion, it is brought up closer to the end of the story, and for me was the most interesting part to read.

Patrick Atangan is certainly talented and was able to lay out this book in a way that was easy to read, and that’s tougher than it sounds. The art itself simple, and in this instance I would argue that it is a bit too simple. Being done digitally, I noticed throughout the book a lot of copying and pasting different illustrations into later panels, and some of the men from earlier in the books are palette swapped and reused later. That did cause confusion at a couple of points, where I was wondering why this character from earlier in the book was back, until I figured out that this was actually a new character. While I don’t think that art being done that way is inherently bad, at ninety-six pages and a price point of $14.99, I think it’s a bit much.

I can’t say I’d give this an overall recommendation.  I think it’s a flawed piece that does genuinely try to hit the mark and falls short. However, if you love graphic memoirs, and in particular if you love graphic memoirs from LGBT creators, I encourage you to give Fires Above Hyperion a read. Patrick Atangan has a unique voice and perspective in this field, and this book’s success can help usher in more graphic memoirs by more people whose voices we so desperately need to hear.

Ed Catto: Our Geek Economy

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In recent years we’ve seen big changes in the Pop Culture retail landscape. Record stores are a thing of the past, of course. We all buy, own and experience music in very different ways than we did even ten years ago. Big toy stores like Toys R Us continue to struggle while small stores become as rare as Tickle Me Elmo was a decade ago. Independent bookstores have struggled, clobbered by online sales and the big chains. In fact, the remaining big retail chains are struggling too.

bookends-9770257Barnes & Noble reported that revenue for its fiscal first quarter (which ended on Aug 1st – contradicting all those calendars they sell) at its retail stores and website fell to $939 million, a drop of 1.7% vs. the previous year. EBIDA (earnings before interest, depreciation and amortization) for their retail business fell $21 million, to $45 million, versus a year ago.

But independent bookstores that focus on events, such as author signings and book premiere parties, perform better. In my suburban community just outside of New York City, we have a fantastic bookstore called Bookends. When traffic is clogged in our little downtown, the first thought that comes to mind is “Bookends must have a big celebrity in today for a book signing.”

hagar-5175215And my cousin, Yamu, drove five hours to attend the Sammy Hagar book signing at Bookends.

Similarly, comic shops seem to be doing pretty well. The general media has done a good job reporting how comic conventions continue to grow, but the other half of the story is that comic shops, as specialty retailers, are doing pretty well.

two-fer-8892542I’m researching for more hard data, but there is an undeniable optimism in the air. One unnamed source at a leading publisher told me, ”I can also add to your anecdotal data from retailers by adding that in conversations I’ve had over the past two months with approximately a dozen retailers I have heard YOY gains ranging from 4-9%, and no downturns amongst those I’ve spoken with.”

There are undoubtedly a myriad of reasons contributing to the health of this retail sector. “Success has many fathers…” as the old saying goes. But I’m convinced that one of the key drivers is the ability of comic stores to provide those special events and moments that create memorable experiences for fans.

three-fer-6662868Sometimes a comic retail shop is like the proverbial office water cooler. Today, passionate fans come armed with their own opinions and news (so much is gleaned from the Internet) eager for the opportunity to share one-to-one.

Today, fans come with a clear expectation of what new products will be available, but are simultaneously ready for a weekly treasure hunt for new goodies. Today, fans come for author/artist signings or to buy tickets to conventions.

It’s so much more about the experience than it is about the accumulation of stuff.

the-brooding-hulk-6257828Visits to comic shops are about seeing what’s out there, learning what other people like and finding out about upcoming movies, TV shows and products.

It was in 1998 when the Harvard Business Review published Pine and Gilbert’s Experience Economy article. They argued that American culture had started as an agriculturally based society, then morphed with the industrial revolution, shifted into a service economy and had blossomed into an experiential-based economy.

Hats off to the entrepreneurial comic shop retailers and to the fans that embrace Geek Culture for figuring this out and making it work. It’s a unique retail environment full of marketing potential and community building.

I’m looking forward not only to Local Comic Shop Day on November 28th, but to a lot more experiences in comic shops every week.

REVIEW: The Inker’s Shadow

The Inker’s Shadow
By Allen Say
Scholastic Graphix, 80 pages, $19.99

inkers-shadow-e1439580347531-8962486Growing up a Japanese youth during World War II must have been a dizzying time and rich with memories and material for narratives. Allen Say has been mining those remembrances in a series of graphic memoirs, the latest of which is out from Scholastic. The Inker’s Shadow picks up from his The Ink-Keeper’s Apprentice which was released in 1994.

Say was born in 1937 as Japanese aggression was at its height and was the product of a Japanese-American mother and Korean father. Four years after his parents divorced, he apprenticed himself to cartoonist, Noro Shinpei, who became his “spiritual father:” When his real father remarried and started a second family, he moved to the United States and invited Say to join him.

Being a Japanese teen in California less than a decade after the end of World War II brought with it prejudices and tensions that complicated Say’s assimilation to his new home. Here’s where this volume picks up and we see him struggle to make friends, learn English, and continue to develop his art. There was an initial, disastrous experience in military school His father’s inattention did little to help and Say struggled.

Things did not improve until he enrolled at Citrus Union High School, whose principal, Nelson Price, saw the young Say’s potential. Say studied, painted, and held a part-time job while still mastering American cultural mores.

His pages mix prose, illustration, and graphic storytelling seamlessly, carrying the reader through these trying experiences. We see close-minded adults, arrogant, privileged children, and the first true friends Say made in the United States. There’s a poignant moment toward the end as Say prepares to take a girl to the prom only to have his heart crushed.

Still, Say’s perseverance sees him through to his high school graduation and as the book concludes, one chapter closes and we see him on his way.

Overall, this provides a unique view into the immigrant experience at a particular point in American life, just as the Cold War was gripping the country’s psyche and conformity was becoming the watchword of the decade. Say’s individuality is challenged time and again but through his art and work ethic, we watch him gain confidence and skill, putting him on a path that has seen him win the coveted Caldecott Medal, Boston Globe/Horn Book Award, and ALA Notable Book and Best Book for Young Adults.

Review: Supernatural Season 10 Blu-ray/DVD Box Set

supernatural_s10_blu-e1442357780604-8584516Even though Supernatural has been on for 10 seasons, I only started watching last August.  Though I quickly became a devoted Supernatural fan and by June I wrapped up Season 9.   I figured, “Hey, I’ll just wait until season 10 comes out on Netflix,” but when they announced that the Season 10 DVD would be coming out in the Fall at the Comic Con panel, I was like, “No!”  And when I got the Blu-Ray (which was released on September 8th), I watched it all in like, a week, because that’s what I do.

The Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Blu-ray, Digital HD and DVD release of Supernatural: The Complete Tenth Season is well worth owning. It contains 23 episodes and over four hours of bonus content.  It picks up after Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles) was transformed into a demon and cursed with the Mark of Cain.  And of course, Sam (Jared Padalecki) & their angel buddy, Castiel (Misha Collins) must help his brother. This is the detour on the Road to Recovery.  Well the scenic route on the road to curing the Mark of Cain.  We also get family drama with Crowley, the King of Hell. You probably need to watch Season 10 a couple times. There’s a lot to little stuff in there that you notice after you KNOW the episode.  It’s the stuff the internet is filled with.  You can’t properly fill the world with Tumblr gifs without watching these episodes many times.  This is why you need to own the Season on DVD or Blu-Ray.

Plus the quality is great.  In HD, you can see each and every one of Jensen’s freckles.  And some might enjoy seeing how silky and soft Jared’s hair looks.  Not me, necessarily, but I did notice the Impala changing from a 2-door to a 4-door periodically.  What the what?  Though maybe you could see that on the regular DVD too.

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For those who want to watch on their phones or laptop (out of habit, maybe or because you don’t have a Blu-Ray player in your room and you need to watch with your door shut so your family doesn’t bother you), there is a code with the Blu-Ray to get the episodes on Ultraviolet. You can then watch on all compatible devices & take the Winchesters with you on the road. Yay!

There are lots of bonus features on the discs, like the much awaited gag reel, unaired episodes, episode commentaries, the ComicCon 2014 preview for the season, stuff on mythological influences this season, and more. I was most excited about the behind the scenes for the 200th episode. You should most definitely buy this on Blu-Ray or DVD if you are caught up and start watching the show if you are not. The 11th Season will start this Fall on The CW, so you might want to hurry up. Remember these are the Winchesters, not the Losechesters, so you can’t lose with Supernatural: The Complete Tenth Season.

Maddy’s Commentary & Synopsis of Season 10: For those not afraid of some potential Spoilerishness

Okay,  as far as a Season, this one was so amazing!  We picked up where we left off in Season 9 with the Mark of Cain turning Dean into a demon after his run-in with Metatron (where he died again), so now Demon!Dean and Crowley are living it up singing karaoke in bars. Meanwhile, Sam’s going nuts and torturing demons, trying to find his missing brother, not knowing he’s a demon, so there’s that. Once Sam finally gets to Dean after being kidnapped by some dude, he locks him up in the Bunker and cures him of his demon-osity. And while all this is going on, our angel buddy Castiel’s stolen grace is fading and his fellow angel, Hannah, hunts down rogue angels while she tries to get Metatron to reveal where the rest of his grace is, but to no avail.

After an episode of regular hunting, we reach my favorite episode: “Fan Fiction”. This is the fabled episode where my two favorite things, theatre and Supernatural, come together.  An all girls school performs a musical version of the Supernatural books by Carver Edlund (a.k.a Chuck Shurley) and people who try to shut it down are captured by Calliope. Also in this episode, Sam and Dean are introduced to the popular concept of Destiel (if you read The Tweeks’ column on shipping, you know it’s the Dean/Castiel ship).  By the way, you can download the Supernatural: The Musical soundtrack!  I also really enjoyed the the next episode, “Ask Jeeves” which is like Clue meets Pretty Little Liars. Everyone is a Liar and they’re solving a murder in a mansion with a bunch of rich people, it’s rad.  All the old rich ladies love Sam. 

Let’s move on to “Girls, Girls, Girls”. Enter Rowena, a ginger witch who has enemies in high places in Hell’s monarchy, as shown when there are loads of demons chasing her and eventually taking her to Hell’s dungeons. At the end of the episode it is revealed that she is Crowley’s mother and she abandoned him as a child.

In “The Hunter Games,” The Winchesters and Cas attempt to torture the cure for the Mark of Cain out of Metatron who agitates everyone and leaves a cryptic message—“The river ends at the source”. Well, okay, crazy angel scribe. But then next up is an episode where Charlie, my fave, has returned from Oz after fighting a war. She had split her soul in two, good and bad, and she teamed up with the boys to help defeat her rogue bad side.

Then we get some regular hunting episodes, but I want to mention one of them, “About A Boy”.  The witch from Hansel and Gretel turns Dean into a teenager, which is very funny. But the fun doesn’t last for the next ep. Castiel discovers that Cain’s been killing people and Crowley,  Cas, Dean, and Sam work together to kill Cain. This is when things start to get rough. Sam can tell that the Mark is overpowering Dean and that he’s trying hard to fight it.

The stories move on with more hunting and a continuation of the Rowena sub-plot. Rowena has been banned from practicing magic by the Grand Coven, so Crowley captures Olivette, the High Priestess of the Grand Coven so Rowena can make her case to practice magic. After, she turns Olivette into a hamster and puts her in one of those hamster cages with the wheel that they run around in. Sam decides that he and Cas should sneak around behind Dean’s back to try to find a cure. YOU GUYS DO THIS EVERY SEASON! Can’t you ever learn that none of the Winchesters like being kept from things?  But still, they decide to go try and torture the information out of Metatron who reveals that he doesn’t know how to cure the Mark and his message before was utter nonsense. Thanks a lot, Metatron. The only thing he was good for was leading Castiel to his grace, which had a good and a bad side. Cas got his grace back, but Metatron got the angel tablet. Booooo.

After that, Charlie is back, and she has found The Book of the Damned, a book that is believed to hold a cure for the Mark of Cain, but apparently it belongs to the Styne family and so they track Charlie down. I won’t spoil it, but what happens is what drives the rest of the season.  There’s some drama about the Book. Dean wants it destroyed, but Sam wants to keep it because he’s still trying to find a cure for Dean even though his brother has given up.

In the midst of all this, Crowley has kicked Rowena out of Hell. Sam brings the Book of the Damned to her and asks if she can read it. She says yes, but in return she wants Crowley dead.  She also says that she needs Nadya’s codex. She said that the Men of Letters took it from the Grand Coven’s archives and it’s in their archives. Easy, right? Nope, this is Supernatural. The codex is locked in a box which is protected by a very powerful spell. When you open the box, everyone else in the vicinity starts to hallucinate and is driven to suicide. Creepy. Sam doesn’t know this and so he opens the box. Guess who’s in the house with the box in it? You guessed it: Dean. Also the owner of the house who opened the box when she was a teenager and killed her family. Dean starts to hallucinates that he’s in Purgatory with his vampire friend Benny. Ah, Purgatory. Season 7 was nuts, man, with all those Leviathans.

In the next episode, Sam gives the Book to Rowena who says that Nadya was a very selfish witch and encoded her codex. Sam decides to bring in the big guns to help crack the code. Welcome back, Charlie! The boys have captured one of the Stynes, Eldon, and are trying to get information out of him. He reveals that Syne is not their real name, they are actually the Frankensteins. They had to change their name after Mary Shelley discovered them and wrote a book. Rowena eventually drives Charlie nuts, so she asks Cas to let her out. He says no, but she sneaks out anyway, because she’s Charlie. She cracks the code, but Eldon escapes the Winchesters and starts to attack Charlie.  R.I.P Charlie. You were my favorite ginger to ever grace my television, except for Amy Pond, but I’m sure she’s your favorite too.

Dean and Sam give Charlie a proper hunter’s funeral and Dean orders Sam to stop searching for a cure for the Mark of Cain. Sam calls Castiel to tell him of Charlie’s grim end but discovers that her last act on this earth was emailing the code to Sam. He decides to keep going behind Deans back (?????) now that Rowena can read the book. Dean has vowed to kill the entire Frankenstein family and slaughters most of them, then returns to the bunker to find the last three raiding the archives. He kills two of them and listens to the youngest plead for his life, then kills him. This shows that the Mark is truly changing him because the Dean we have gotten to know for ten years would have spared his life. Castiel then shows up and tries to talk to Dean but Dean beats him up and comes very close to killing him while simultaneously breaking my fragile nerd heart. Here we are, the end of the line. The last episode is honestly the best one. There’s this one part where Dean feels like he’s trapped in a place where he doesn’t feel guilty for hurting his friends and after a vampire kill he washes his hands. He does a whole insane Lady MacBeth “Out damn spot” thing. I love Shakespeare so I recognized it immediately. He looks up into the mirror and sees his friends that he’s hurt all bloody and scrubs his hands harder and harder for each person. God bless the writers. He then summons Death, whom I love, and demands that he kill him. Death says that he cannot but he can send him away so he can’t hurt anyone ever again. He then decides to kill Sam so he doesn’t try to rescue him from this far away place. Death hands Dean his scythe to kill Sam, but he kills Death instead. Who knows what this means for people? Is everyone immortal? Rowena then casts the spell to cure the Mark of Cain, which unleashes the Darkness, a pre-Biblical force that is released when the Mark is removed. End of season. Major cliffhanger here, people.

What is the Darkness?

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Box Office Democracy: The Visit

the-visit-1139445It’s frustrating watching a movie where the direction is so far and away better than the script it’s stuck with. This is an infinitely more frustrating problem when the director and the writer are the same person but such is the case with M. Night Shyamalan’s latest effort The Visit. It’s a fine movie, it’s definitely a scary movie, and it’s sometimes a funny movie but not as often as it wants to be but it sort of feels like a bunch of great parts struggling to make a coherent sum. Despite these frustrations The Visit is a credible start to the fall horror movie season and a kind of fitting latest entries into the catalogue of one of Hollywood’s most maddening auteurs.

The story of The Visit is rather simple and I don’t mean that as a slight, the more complicated your horror movie plot gets the closer you are to becoming the later Nightmare on Elm Street films. Two teenagers (young teenagers it should be noted not slasher movie teens) go to visit their estranged grandparents and then thing literally start going bump in the night. The kids try to play detective and are generally bad at being detectives because they’re kids but it helps the film bounce from tense set piece to tense set piece which is good fun. All of the solutions to problems seem to fall from the sky instead of developing but I’m willing to let that go for an effective scary time.

I’m not entirely sure what’s so intrinsically terrifying about The Visit but whatever it is it works for me. Maybe it’s the empathy I feel for children being sent to a strange house, I never much cared to stay with relatives, the space always felt a little uneasy. Maybe it’s just a general fear of strangers or unease around the elderly, especially older people who are clearly not doing as well. It might just be as simple as dark places and sudden noises, the Paranormal Activity special if you will. I’m not 100% sure why but I haven’t been as uncomfortable watching a scary movie in a theater in years. The last movie that made me so uneasy, that made me watch the movies through the corners of my eyes as I stared at the wall of the theater was Mama two and a half years ago. I can’t put my finger on why The Visit was so scary but it was dreadfully so, perhaps so much that I struggle to recommend it.

The Visit is, through and through, an M. Night Shyamalan movie and I firmly believe the hate has gone too far on Shyamalan in the last few years. It’s been a while since he’s put out a good movie but that’s a deficiency of M. Night Shyamalan the screenwriter and not M. Night Shyamalan the director. Shyamalan is an excellent visual storyteller and he consistently gets solid performances out of his actors (with the exception of himself) and The Visit is no exception in that regard. It might be a little too cute to have Rebecca as an aspiring filmmaker call out the techniques Shyamalan will later use to attempt to terrify the audience but I can forgive a couple slightly flat jokes if it otherwise delivers and The Visit does. I also quite enjoyed Shyamalan playing with audience expectations with regards to plot twists. I know that one is coming (really the narrative here demands it as something must be amiss) but because it’s Shyamalan I’m looking at everything, grasping at every straw, so when the twist in this movie is a little simpler I didn’t see it coming at all. It’s good work from a good filmmaker and it’s probably time to stop demanding he constantly live up to the excellence of The Sixth Sense or Unbreakable, that isn’t going to happen.

And so the cycle continues. The Visit quadrupled its budget at the box office this weekend so, barring catastrophe, Shyamalan will be back with another movie in a year or so and we’ll all be back here again with jokes about twist endings and how disappointed we all were with Lady in the Water and, unless it’s another After Earth, it’ll probably be a well-directed film that doesn’t quite have a script up to that effort. Hollywood really is out of new ideas.

REVIEW: Homeland The Complete Fourth Season

homeland-s4-e1442263942481-8223366Homeland has been a strong drama series that has tackled timely issues mixed with interesting personal drama. However, its third season meandered a bit so it was refreshing to see the fourth go round return to stronger, more dynamic storytelling. With the Nicholas Brody (and his family) thread now neatly snipped off, the focus has returned to driven, flawed Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) and the shadowy world of espionage.

Homeland The Complete Fourth Season is now out on a three disc Blu-ray set from 20th Century Home Entertainment. The revitalized series picks up with Carrie now in Kabul as a station chief, using reliable intelligence fed to her from a resource to target terrorists and take them out. That is, until one attack destroys a civilian home, amidst a wedding celebration no less. The target escapes and the groom has also survived and becomes the fulcrum upon which the season’s major arc revolves.

Carrie is a great field operative but not much of a station chief, barking orders and doing nothing to build relationships with her team. Life in Afghanistan is busy enough but things change when Pakistan chief Sandy Bachman (Corey Stoll) uses bad intel that results in a civilian home being destroyed. When Bachman is attacked on the streets and killed in a retaliatory action for bombing the house, a guilty Carrie gets involved in the investigation, forcing her way into becoming his replacement where she repeats her bad management and lack of trust. This means that rather than trusting and using her team, she winds up working with those form her past including Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), who has his own issues with Dar Adal (F. Murray Abraham), Fara Sherazi (Nazanin Boniadi), and of course the enigmatic Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend). In fact, Quinn’s story arc this season started off strong and petered out once he was caught up in Carrie’s magnetic pull.

There’s a lot of plotting, moves, and countermoves but it all builds to Saul getting kidnapped and his attempts at escape while target/Taliban leader Haissam Haqqani (Numan Acar) is executing his own plot to infiltrate the CIA base and extract its secrets. The pacing is tight and builds to a nice crescendo in the final episodes as everything comes together. The larger issues reflect the contentious relationships in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and those who resettled from those lands in America along with how American diplomats have to tread a fine line between frenemies. Carrie may also have met her match in Aasar Khan (Raza Jaffrey), Pakistan’s counter-terrorism expert.

There prices to be paid all around as allies die and Carrie is made to feel guilty for not being in America to raise her child. However, once the dust settles, Carrie comes home and even reconciles with her mother while Quinn is off on a dangerous mission that apparently does not set up the soon to launch season five. But it does leave Carrie and Saul far apart, which is a shame since they work so well together. But trust and friendship remain collateral damage in the very dangerous game they play.

The high definition AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1 is perfectly fine as is the lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track. There aren’t many special features to entice you and they are fairly perfunctory. You have a few nonessential Deleted Scenes (10:52), Character Profiles (16:56) featuring Peter Quinn, Aasar Khan and Fara Sherazi; and, From Script to Screen (23:17), the most unique feature.

REVIEW: The Big Bang Theory The Complete Eight Season

1000539270brdfltuv_3c431a50-e1441556140725-5052917While one of the strongest ensembles on television today, The Big Bang Theory has come to revolve around the socially awkward Sheldon (Jim Parsons), so it makes perfect sense that the eighth season began and ended with the brilliant scientist. Sandwiched in-between, the series slowly advanced the cast of characters through their lives and thankfully Chuck Lorre has not prevented them from growing.

Warner Bros Home Entertainment releases The Big Bang Theory The Complete Eighth Season this week and the combo pack contains all 245 episodes on Blu-ray and Digital HD. We open with Sheldon, 45 days after leaving on a train, only to call Leonard (Johnny Galecki) to come rescue him from Kingman, Arizona. Accompany him is Amy (Mayim Bialik), who has been hurt by Sheldon’s actions, which remains a recurring theme through the season, setting up the finale, where she puts their relationship on hold just as he was about to propose.

While their relationship foundered, the real winner this year has to be Penny (Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting) since she has come to realize she won’t make it as an actress and gives up waitressing to become a pharmaceutical salesman. And guess what? She’s good at it and is finally making money so we see how this does and does not change her as she and Leonard keep talking about their impending marriage.

 

The character who may have grown the most this season was Raj (Kunal Nayyar). Not only has he felt comfortable speaking to women, but he has endured one breakup and is now involved with Emily (Laura Spencer). At first, we think it’s an odd but sweet pairing but by the finale, we realize just how creepy she is which apparently propels Raj’s arc in the coming ninth season.

The season is also one of loss. First, and perhaps to foreshadow matters, the team clean out the office of a decease105193_wb_d0551r-e1441556184805-7490799d professor and find a bottle of champagne he had stored for the day he made his big discovery, which never happened. And then, just as Stuart (Kevin Sussman) reopens the comic book store, Howard (Simon Helberg) learns of his mother’s death (prompted by the quick death of actress Carol Ann Susi). The remainder of the season follows the repercussions of her absence culminating in the wonderfully touching “The Leftover Thermalization”.

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The season is filled with all the usual supporting players without losing the focus on the core characters, as the guests serve as foils such as when Wil Wheaton and Penny discuss the horrible film they made together. In some ways the strongest episode of the season is a result of the combustible meeting between Mary Cooper (Laurie Metcalf) and Beverly Hofstadler (Christine Beranski). And the geek quotient may have been diluted by the various romantic entanglements, it is not gone. The impromptu visit to Skywalker Ranch was a highlight.

The season-long threads come to a head in the finale which sees Sheldon and Amy in crisis while Leonard and Penny are ion the process of eloping. If there’s a false note in any of the brilliance, it’s Penny’s overreaction to the news that Leonard had a drunken kiss with a colleague while in Antarctica. Given her sexual past, her reaction, spilling into the season premiere in a few weeks, rings falsely.

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Still, the series has sustained its premise and become a rich, endearing, and still uproariously funny series. The high definition transfer and audio are superb. There are six special features spaced between the two discs. We have the 2014 Comic-Con Panel, which is interesting for archival purposes, and Shooting Stars: BBT on BBT, a cleverly named bit about Billy Bon Thornton’s turn as a lecherous doctor.

It’s a Quark…It’s an Atom…It’s the #BBTSuperfnas! Which shows the winners of the international contest brought to the soundstage. While engaging, it would have been nicer to show us how they won and the challenges that earned them the points. Best is the loving tribute Here’s to You, Carol Ann Susi and cast and crew talked about the unseen actress’ impact on them and their characters. Finally, there’s a lengthy Gag Reel showing that the complicated dialogue is quite difficult to master.

Box Office Democracy: Hand of God

Hand Of God, with Ron Perlman and Dana DelanyHand of God is a perfectly enjoyable TV show that has fallen in to the same trap that dozens of other shows in the last decade have fallen in to: it isn’t the high art it thinks it is. This isn’t The Sopranos or Breaking Bad or The Wire. It doesn’t reach the depths of John from Cincinnati or The Leftovers because it has a dynamite cast and a clever premise but it isn’t quite as clever as it thinks it is. It wants to be a spellbinding mystery but it just isn’t that well crafted. Hand of God is a marvelous show to get lost in but if you look to closely you’ll see how poorly tended the forest is.

There’s a lot of top-notch acting on Hand of God and I’m not entirely sure if I mean from series lead Ron Perlman. Perlman chews the scenery as is his wont and it works, he’s a very convincing man having a psychotic break but it’s the rest of the cast that does most of the heavy lifting, perhaps because they have to ground this insanity. Dana Delany is the standout; she gives a tour de force performance where seemingly every episode has her pushing at some new corner of her character but in a way where the myriad personality revelations feel organic and not contrived, and this is a show that knows its way around contrived. Andre Royo is a delight as always, but I’m not sure it was the perfect directorial note to tell him to play the mayor of a small city the same way he played Bubbles. Camryn Manheim has a two-episode arc as a psychiatrist that is just so perfect and the exact energy the show needed and I sincerely hope she’s brought back if the series continues.

The thematic content in Hand of God all worked for me. Pernell Harris (Perlman) is a judge in a small town who starts to get what he believes are divine hallucinations after the attempted suicide of his son and he believes he has to use these to solve the sexual assault of his daughter-in-law. Pernell gets drawn in to an evangelical born-again church that has cropped up in his town and all of the ways they tie the various plot lines in to these religious narratives was effective for me. It’s not a groundbreaking piece of theological discourse or anything but it’s fun to watch and to talk about with other people watching, especially when the alternatives are some of the grislier aspects of the show. “Do you think those were really divine visions?” is a fun question to ask, “what do you think happened with that parking lot murder?” is not.

Where Hand of God falls apart is the story. It’s clear that the show wants to be a sweeping mystery that people discuss how clever it is; it wants to be Scandal at a confessional but is missing the complexity. Unless I miscounted, all but one of the series regulars has a big secret related to the central mystery and most of them are pretty obvious. There are no red herrings, everything just leads linearly to the next thing and the only way to not be ahead of the plot is to just not be paying enough attention. It’s an awkward feeling when the show thinks it’s making a big revelation and the audience watching look at each other and shrug. I’m interested in some of the loose threads they left for a potential season two so it’s not as if this is a total loss, but every thread that wasn’t loose was tied in to a too perfect bow for my taste.

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