Category: Reviews

ComicMix Six: Top Six Movies of 2014

With the 2014 cinematic year in the books it’s time to do the time-honored tradition of the film reviewer, making a list of the top movies of the year. It makes us feel important and it’s an easy ay to fill space during the dreadful early January period for movies. Here are my top six movies of 2014. I’ll be back in just a little bit with the six worst movies.

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6. [[[Godzilla]]] – I wasn’t big on Godzilla when it came out, I though that it cheated me out of many of the giant monster fight that they owed me when I paid $15 for a ticket. But when I was gathering my list of top movies of the year I remembered the movie quite fondly. It’s suspenseful and, honestly, has plenty of action. It doesn’t reach the frenetic peaks that Pacific Rim did but then again Pacific Rim did not make my top 10 list last year. With more Bryan Cranston, this might have been my favorite movie of the year.

Tweeks: From Darkest Peru to the Big Screen, Paddington Bear

paddington-poster-s-8840026The Tweeks grew up listening to Stephen Fry reading Michael Bond’s Paddington series on all of our car trips giving us a great fondness for that bear,  worrisome Marmalade habit not withstanding.  So, of course we had to get straight to the cinema (with a group of Brit ex-Pats — who really really love their Paddington) as soon as the movie opened in the US.  We didn’t even know The Doctor was in it, but we think it serves as proof to any one still wondering if Peter Capaldi holds a connection to the younger Whovian set!  Staring Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville and the cutest CGI bear ever, it’s a great movie for the whole family.  No, really.  Adults will love it too.

Box Office Democracy: Blackhat

Blackhat has a germ of a good movie buried in it; I was very interested to see how a director like Michael Mann would make a movie where most of the action happens in a virtual world. Hacking is perhaps the least visually interesting thing there is you’re probably doing something very similar to it right now while reading this article. Early in the film there are signs that Mann plans to tackle this dilemma there are sweeping, focused, shots of the inside of computers that switch to shots of code moving through virtual space. Unfortunately, it seems that Blackhat completely lost its collective nerve in this regard as after the first act the movie basically refuses to return to any kind of hacker stuff and just becomes a bad action movie.

The clichés in Blackhat are so brazen that I had to stop and consider that it might be some kind of brilliant subversion of the form, it isn’t. Viola Davis plays an FBI agent who cares more about stopping criminals than following the rules because her husband died on 9/11. Chris Hemsworth talks about being in prison and sounds like a professional wrestler doing a bad interview segment. Characters die but usually only after they have a moment of catharsis with another character. These Are things that have been tired and overdone longer than I’ve been alive and I can’t understand why anyone thinks it can fly anymore.

I always hate being this person but the movie is so spectacularly implausible that it destroys my suspension of disbelief. The movie opens with a nuclear reactor exploding and our heroes are walking around inside of it within a handful of days and perhaps this isn’t common knowledge but nuclear meltdowns make places completely inhabitable for centuries. They follow that up almost immediately by having a hack push the price for soybeans up by 250% and that’s almost equally impossible. There are so many ways to make money if you’re a crazy genius hacker and I wish they had picked one that wasn’t completely impossible. Furthermore, I don’t think you can have a private army roving through and shooting up Hong Kong murdering police whenever you want without having some kind of response from the Chinese government. These are immersion destroyers.

This isn’t directly related to the quality of the movie per se but I spent a lot of time focused on the aesthetics of Chris Hemsworth in Blackhat. He’s so much less bulky than he is when he’s playing Thor and I can’t decide if I think this is his natural size and he bulks up for Marvel films or if this kind of dramatic change in physique is just par for the course if you’re in the Chris Hemsworth position in Hollywood these days. He spends an incredible amount of time wearing button down shirts with the buttons open to the navel which is a look I’ve never seen in real life and can’t imagine a context where it makes sense outside of a beach. It felt like objectifying of Chris Hemsworth in a way that I’m quite surprised to see in a movie seemingly exclusively aimed at men. I don’t know how many women you can get to a rather violent movie advertised as a dry cyber crime film just by having a bunch of strong PG-13 male nudity. It’s another curious choice in a movie that can’t stop making head scratching decisions long enough to string together anything remotely coherent.

REVIEW: Glee the Complete Fifth Season

Glee Season 5So, when did Glee go off the rails for you? I began tiring of the show in the third season, stuck around for one more and realized it couldn’t make up its mind about the type of series it wanted to be. Part of the blame goes to Ryan Murphy and Fox for falling so in love with their core characters that they wouldn’t let them grow up and leave high school. While a spinoff set in Manhattan had been considered and discarded, trying to have it all didn’t work either. After seeing the fitting tribute to Cory Monteith, I bid Finn Hudson and the rest of Lima High an overdue farewell.

When Glee the Complete Fifth Season arrived for review, it gave me a chance to see if I made the right decision or not. The series’ musical numbers remain strong as ever but it also remains maddening. On the other hand, the various social topics it had addressed makes the show wonderful drama but the rest of it is set in a world so divorced from the one we live in, it gets infuriating.

First, the cast is too largely, too spread and too unwieldy to properly focus on one set of characters. We have Rachel, Kurt, and Santana in New York, Mercedes in Los Angeles and everyone else in Lima, OH. But, we have the originals poised to graduate and the newcomers still looking to get themselves properly established in the hearts and minds of the audience.

You still have all the adults with their own issues from Mr. Schu and Emma starting a family to Sue deposing Principal Figgins and managing to somehow shut down Glee Club.

And while the students never seem to have any classes or homework or trouble juggling extracurriculars, homework, family obligations and the like, it beggars the imagination that not one but two of the cast are such geniuses that they fight over Valedictorian. It would have been nice to see the school wrestle with the arrival of the Common Core curriculum or the pressures of standardized testing on both faculty and students.

Rachel’s assent to Broadway is the stuff of legend and her dream come true (we could have satisfactorily ended the series when she debuted) but for her to actually give it away for television makes little sense along with the decision to use Santana as her publicist.

The show veers from one emotional note to another without a lot of proper foreshadowing or setup so character traits come and go, as do their romantic feelings. Of the newcomers, the most intriguing was Marley who is gone early on after revealing her heretofore unknown songwriting skills, which conveniently come into play when the club needs a song at Regionals. And then there’s the horrid unaired Christmas special, held over from 2013 and a sad way to end the first half of the season.

This season saw the show limp to its 100th episode which Murphy and Brad Falchuk used to trash the club and scatter everyone to the four winds. As centennial episodes go, it was above average but stung with unrealistic events. Eight episodes later, the friends find themselves in many unexpected places, leaving the viewer to wonder how the sixth and final season, now airing, would tie things up.

The high definition transfers on the six disc DVD set are fine although it is noteworthy Fox has not released this on Blu-ray. As usual, the set comes with its patented Glee Musical Jukebox, allowing viewers to go straight to the musical numbers.

The smaller than usual extras include Gleeful: Celebrating 100 Episodes of Glee (8:31) with Matthew Morrison (Will Shuester) and the cast members fondly looking back when they were a phenomenon that had not been anticipated. There’s also Glee in the City (13:34) where producer/director Ian Brennan and actors Kevin McHale, Darren Criss, Amber Riley, Chris Colfer, Chord Overstreet, Adam Lambert, and Lea Michele talk about the story possibilities by being set in the center of the universe.

Review: Citizens of Earth

Allow me to be blunt – if you’re a fan of old-school RPGs, cease all bodily functions not controlled by your autonomic nervous system and obtain a copy of Citizens of Earth.

If you played the Super Nintendo classic Earthbound, you’ll recognize its inspiration of this wacky little RPG, out today for PC, Nintendo 3DS, Wii U and PS Vita.  From the spacey soundtrack to the map design, even down to the lava-lamp graphics behind the baddies in the random battles, the game makes a comfortable home in the classic’s footprint.

This is what's known as "hanging a lampshade on it"

This is what’s known as “hanging a lampshade on it”

You play the newly-elected Vice-President of Earth, choosing to make a visit to your home town for a brief respite before your new career.  Alas, all is not well on the homestead – the town is surging with anti-you protesters, the manager of the local (and highly addictive) coffee shop has vanished, and more weirdness to come. The true threat that faces you and your compatriots remains hidden until well into the game, and it’s as out of left field as any surprise in any classic RPG.

You quickly begin recruiting local citizens to join your ragtag band of investigators, including your mother, brother, an odd-smelling conspiracy theorist, and the local donut chef.  Other recruits don’t unlock till later as more of the map is unlocked.  Their various powers and attacks provide a lot of ability to customize your combat strengths, as well as team bonuses for having certain members in your party. from changing the weather and time of day, to changing the difficulty from candy from a baby to what oldsters like me call “Nintendo-Hard.”

The game is funny; silly, even, with lots of wacky dialogue and throwaway gags as you read random signs and books. Lots of recorded dialogue by a strong cast, and a sound palette that keeps the old school feel while staying technically advanced.

The strength of the enemies jump up quickly once you make your way to the next  play area, leaving you to do some good old grinding. The enemies are as wacky  as they are difficult, from roving protesters to the punnish “Telefawn” and “Bubblebee,” there’s a constant variety of new monsters and foes to fight.

The game wears its throwback badge with pride, but can still hold its own with any of the recent RPGs we’ve seen recently, especially on the handhelds.  The game plays very well on the Vita, with the option to interact with the touchscreen as well as the keypads.

There’s not enough funny being put into games nowadays. Citizens of Earth is a welcome breath of fresh air.

Citizens of Earth is available for download on PC, Wii U, Nintendo 3DS, PS4 and PS Vita.

Tweeks: Are Team Edward (Scissorhands that is)

edward-characterdesign-9c395-4866609The Tim Burton movie, Edward Scissorhands came out in 1990, so it’s totally possible that unless your parents sat you down to watch a “classic” this might not even be on your radar. Though we love Tim Burton and Johnny Depp (and our mom makes us watch a lot of old movies for our “own cultural good”) we hadn’t gotten to this one yet.  But thanks to IDW we are now fully Team Edward!  In our review of Issues 1-3, we let you know who Edward Scissorhands is and why he’s totally awesome.

Mike Gold: Time Flies When You’re Saving The World

Last week we comics fans were treated to a nice treat that, had other circumstances prevailed, would have been the big buzz in our donut shop. Instead, events mandated – properly – that we turn our attention to the Charlie Hebdo matter. That situation remains unresolved and part of a much bigger and even more disquieting picture, but if we can’t stop to smell the flowers we will surely go insane. That’s why I’m going to talk about Marvel’s Agent Carter this week.

The mini-series – it runs eight episodes, and the first two ran last week – goes a long way towards answering the question “Hey, why won’t Marvel Studios pay more attention to the female characters?” It doesn’t answer the question “Hey, why won’t Marvel Studios do a Black Widow movie?” but I suspect if the executives at Marvel understand what they’re doing on Agent Carter, there well might be.

So, what’s going on in Agent Carter that’s so special? I think the two-hour debut did more to educate people as to the inequities in the workplace than any other single event in perhaps three decades. If things are going to change, illumination through entertainment is an important part of the mix.

Seeing as the series is set in the mid-1940s post-war period – after all, it is a sequel to the first real Captain America movie – it’s all too easy to look at it and say “well, yeah, but that was 1946.” This is true, but as George Santayana said, “when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

(Actually, Santayana said a lot of interesting things, my favorite being “Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.” Check him out at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Santayana.)

Okay, back to 1946. That was a time when nobody gave a second thought about women being paid a lot less then men. That’s because nobody gave a second thought about women being given much responsibility – Santayana, I suspect, probably thought we should have remembered how women held our nation together during the world war that just ended. That was a time when newspapers carried separate want ad listings: “Help Wanted – Men,” for laborers and executives, and “Help Wanted – Women,” for secretaries, maids and cooks. This was a practice that continued until some time in the 1970s; the possibility that such segregation was illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act wasn’t even discussed until 1965. Women were fired for getting married, and society looked down upon those women who chose a career over pounding out babies every year or so.

Agent Carter is set squarely in this environment. Peggy Carter, as last seen in Marvel media, is an extremely competent field agent to say the least, but despite her wartime record she is relegated to secretarial duties at S.H.I.E.L.D’s precursor organization, the Strategic Scientific Reserve. In order to save the day and to fulfill her commitment to Howard Stark (let’s hear it for Marvel continuity!) she starts out by hiding her activities and condescending to the men who order her to do the filing.

Despite this, Agent Carter is not a political screed. It is a solid action show set in the well-defined Marvel Cinematic Universe, complete with time-appropriate established characters such as a comparatively young Edwin Jarvis and a typically burly Dum-Dum Dugan (let’s hear it again for Marvel continuity!), and the actors whose characters appeared in the movies reprise their roles here, including Dominic Cooper as the senior Stark. Marvel’s evil corporate empire, Roxxon, plays a prominent role in this series.

Agent Carter is a very stylish, fast-acting and clever series built around the strengths of its star, Hayley Atwell. We’ll be seeing a lot of her in the future, in the second Avengers movie and in future episodes of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Crom knows where else. But I really hope that Disney/Marvel/ABC (different floors of the same company) has the budget and the audience to take this program to a weekly series.

And then do that Black Widow movie.

 

Tweeks: ABC’s New Musical Mini Galavant & Marvel’s Agent Carter

tumblr_n5ayj43uhu1r4bvu5o1_1399631441_cover-300x370-3853129Though we still haven’t forgiven ABC for canceling Selfie, we are very encouraged by the shows filling in for Once Upon A Time (8pm, Sundays) and Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D (9pm, Tuesdays) during their winter breaks.  This week we review Galavant, a comedy/musical fairytale series that reminds us a lot of Monty Python’s Spamalot and talk about how super cool it is for Marvel’s Agent Carter to be about a female hero.  And of course, Maddy goes on a rant about there not being a Black Widow movie —- because come on, all the boy superheroes seem to need special powers, but girls like Peggy Carter and Natasha Romanoff are just as awesome without them!

REVIEW: Batman The Brave and the Bold: The Complete Second Season

Batman B&B Season 2For today’s comic book readers, there’s an appetite for one flavor of Batman: brooding, angry, single-minded and largely one-dimensional. But for those of an earlier generation where the interpretation of Batman varied by editor and medium, there are other varieties to tickle the fancy and entertain the soul. After years of the unrelentingly grim animated fare, Cartoon Network and Warner Animation came up with a breath of fresh air in Batman: The Brave and the Bold. James Tucker and Michael Jelenic developed this series to mimic the days of Batman being a premier hero and collaborator, operating in a bright, colorful world filled with costumed heroes and crazy villains.

batmanbraveandboldThe show lasted three seasons and 65 wonderful episodes and late in 2014, Warner Archive finally released Batman: The Brave and the Bold: The Complete Second Season on Blu-ray. There are 26 gloriously goofy half-hour episodes here and they are at the least fun to watch and at their best, creatively satisfying. The conceit usually features a cold opening with one team-up ending as the main story develops. Whereas season one created the over-arching threat of Equinox, season two is all about Starro the Conqueror. Additionally, the emphasis has been on the full DC Universe, from the Justice Society of America to newer heroes such as the third Blue Beetle. While the more familiar Justice League colleagues are around, it’s been a lot more fun to see the first generation of heroes or lesser lights like B’Wanna Beast.

Starro_livesThis season we see Bats partner with Plastic Man, Booster Gold, Zatanna, the Spectre, Black Orchid, the Atom, Firestorm, Enemy Ace, the Haunted Tank, Detective Chimp, the Question, Dr. Magnus, Sgt. Rock and the G.I. Robot, Kamandi, Dr. Canus, the Challengers of the Unknown and the Outsiders, most animated to resemble their best known four-color version. The most radical revision remains the blowhard Aquaman, but is done with such gusto and good humor it can be forgiven.

Similarly, the full rogue’s gallery (Kite Man ,Shaggy Man, Evil Star, Blockbuster, Black Manta, Catwoman, Gentleman Ghost, Steppenwolf, Per Degaton, the Gas Gang, Chemo, and the more familiar Joker, Penguin, Riddler) has been well mined for fodder and put to excellent use.

Spectre Phantom StrangerWhile Kevin Conroy might be the animated voice for the slightly more adult animated adventures found elsewhere, Diedrich Bader does a fine job here. There were some lovely touches in the guest casting such as Conroy voicing the Batman from Zur En Arh while Adam West and Julie Newmar handle Thomas and Martha Wayne in one flashback. Conroy is back as the Phantom Stranger, paired with Mark Hamill’s Spectre which is cool. Then there’s the first television Flash, John Wesley Shipp, as Professor Zoom.

BTBTB-Emperor Joker Screenshot 02The scripts include ones from comic veterans J.M. DeMatteis, Greg Weisman, and Gail Simone among others and they often have homages to stories from throughout DC’s 75 year history which is just a bonus for longtime fans. One example would be one with Firefly and his Rainbow Creature in a homage to Detective Comics #241 and Batman #134. None, though, can beat the Paul Dini written “Bat-Mite Presents: Batman’s Strangest Cases!” that includes a recreation of the Mad magazine parody “Bat Boy and Rubin”, Jiro Kuwata’s Batman featured in Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan, and New Scooby-Doo Movies.

While the set lacks any extras, to be expected from Warner Archive releases, it does come complete including “The Mask of Matches Malone!” which was never broadcast stateside thanks a harmless sexual innuendo in a musical number. The version we get is the edited one with revised animation that still didn’t master CN muster.

The high definition transfer is strong accompanied with a good DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 stereo mix.

The two-disc set of Batman: The Brave and the Bold – The Complete Second Season includes the following episodes:

DISC #1

1 Death Race to Oblivion
2 Long Arm of the Law!
3 Revenge of the Reach!
4 Aquaman’s Outrageous Adventur
5 The Golden Age of Justice!
6 Sidekicks Assemble!
7 Clash of the Metal Men!
8 A Bat Divided!
9 Super-Batman of Planet X!
10 The Power of Shazam!
11 Chill of the Night!
12 Gorillas in Our Midst!
13 The Siege of Starro! Part 1

DISC #2

14 The Siege of Starro! Part 2
15 Requiem for a Scarlet Speedster!
16 The Last Patrol!
17 The Mask of Matches Malone!
18 Menace of the Madniks!
19 Emperor Joker!
20 The Criss Cross Conspiracy
21 Plague of the Prototypes!
22 Cry Freedom Fighters!
23 The Knights of Tomorrow!
24 Darkseid Descending!
25 Bat-Mite Presents: Batman’s Strangest Cases!
26 The Malicious Mr. Mind!

Box Office Democracy: “The Interview”

The Interview is a movie doomed to collapse under the weight of all the external nonsense forced upon it. It is not a movie worth being called an act of war. It is not a movie worthy of being the standard bearer for free speech against real or imagined tyranny. It’s not a movie worth the total public embarrassment of Sony Pictures. It’s just a stupid comedy. I don’t even mean “stupid” pejoratively here, it is in the same grand tradition of stupid comedies that has brought us movies like There’s Something About Mary and Caddyshack. Both movies I like a great deal, neither of them worth an international incident.

When it’s on, The Interview is quite funny. The bit with Eminem that I saw all over Facebook this weekend is my favorite so it’s a shame that that’s in the first ten minutes of the film. Otherwise the film hits on more joke attempts than it misses. Seth Rogen and James Franco have an undeniable comedic chemistry and it’s just fun to watch them bounce of each other. Randall Park is outstanding playing Kim Jong-Un, as is his Veep co-star Timothy Simons in a terribly small part. It’s also important to recognize Diana Bang who is fantastically funny as the leading lady in this film, a part that often doesn’t get a ton of space under the Apatow-Rogen film umbrella but Bang is electric and hopefully gets to do bigger and better things in comedy going forward.

The entire movie is dragged down to mediocre by a poor second act. After the first round of North Korean hijinks, the movie grinds to a halt as the characters slowly get in to their positions or the finale. This leads to a seemingly endless number of scenes of conversations that move the plot along at a glacial pace while not being particularly funny. It’s inexcusable. Add this to the frequent book-report-esque need to put in North Korea facts and statistics and there’s a lot of drag pulling down what might have been a better movie set in a fictional country.

I appreciate that Rogen, along with his directing partner Evan Goldberg, are continuing to be ambitious with their visuals. It would be very easy (and probably profoundly more profitable) for them to continue making Superbad knockoffs until they all died when their houses collapsed from carrying too much money, but much like This is the End there’s a lot going on here. Sure, they’re taking advantage of the fact that no one has any idea if North Korea looks like the outskirts of Vancouver but there are some real sets here and an honest-to-goodness war at the end. When you compare it to the costless dreck that you get from Adam Sandler or the Twilight movies and it’s just so nice to see people take a simple guaranteed paycheck and make a movie that’s actually interesting to look at on a screen. This sounds like an incredibly backhanded compliment but it’s becoming less and less common.

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