Category: Reviews

A Doctor a Day – “The Long Game”

Using the new Doctor Who Limited Edition Gift Set, your noble author will make his way through as much of the modern series as he can before the Christmas episode, The Snowmen.

Making the same move for new Companion Adam he did for Rose, The Doctor takes the trio to the year 200,000 – the middle of the fourth great empire, mankind at its height.  So when everyone seems to be not a lot further up the social advancement scale than the 20th century, he suspects something’s wrong.  Someone is trying to change things, very slowly, playing…

THE LONG GAME
by Russell T Davies
Directed by Brian Grant

“Time travel’s like visiting Paris; you can’t just read the guidebook, you gotta throw yourself in. Eat the food, use the wrong verbs! Get charged double and end up kissing complete strangers! Or is that just me?”jagrafess-300x198-4119236The Doctor and co arrive on Satellite Five, news center for the empire, streaming information from everywhere, to everywhere. Journalists and techs are all angling for promotion to Floor 500, where it’s said the walls are made of gold. They’re off by one letter – it’s deathly cold, to ensure the health of the mysterious “Editor-in Chief”, the Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe. The Jagrafess has been stunting the advancement of the human race, keeping them from achieving its potential.  His assistant, played with style by Simon Pegg, works for a consortium of banks who are manipulating the news, and as a result, the people, to make things better for their investments.

(Eerily prophetic, isn’t it?)

And meanwhile, new companion Adam has decided to take advantage of the opportunities that access to 198,000 years of future history can provide, and attempt to download enough info to make his former employer look like the owner of a lemonade stand.

A simple done-in-one episode with a strong message and a solid monster, It’s a great example of how much Russell could get into his stories.  The set is both well designed and very efficient, budget wise – a bit of redressing and it takes the role of several separate floors.  And it’ll return later in the season as the plot threads of the season start to get tied up.

Russell T Davies made a running gag of the alien and planet names getting progressively more complex, all culminating in next season’s “cheap episode”, Love and Monsters, where the baddie is from the planet Clom.

Simon Pegg is the first big name to appear in the series, the first of a still-growing list who are all too happy to become a part of the show’s history.  Simon also narrated the first season of Doctor Who Confidential.  While she’s not as well known in the US, Tamsin Greig is a popular comedic actress in the UK. She recently played Sacharissa Cripslock in the two part mini-series Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal.

Interestingly enough, in an earlier draft, Adam has quite a different reason for doing the old Back to the Future Sports Almanac trick.  Originally, it was written that Adam’s father has a disease of some type, and he tries to access medical information in the hopes of saving him. It’s an interesting idea, but for The Doctor to take the information away and chuck him out of the TARDIS in punishment would make him the jerk.  It’d be warranted for breaking the laws of time and space and all, but it would still come off as a dick move.  The idea that he simply wants to profit works much better, and it shows that once again, this new Doctor is not infallible.

REVIEW: Dick Tracy

Today, comic book fans may recall Warren Beatty’s adaptation of Dick Tracy as a memorable misfire. When it was released in 1990, it was met with, at best, mixed reviews and while it performed respectably at the box office, missed Walt Disney’s estimates so the hoped for franchise was stillborn. Blame could be squarely placed at Beatty’s feet since he had a strangle hold on the film as its director, producer, and star. It got so crazy that poor Kyle Baker had to use only three approved head shots for the 64-page comics adaptation, which stretched even his considerable skills.

We have a great opportunity to reconsider this film now that Disney is releasing it tomorrow on Blu-ray.  One of the things about the production is that Beatty wanted to recreate Chester Gould’s strip as faithfully as possible, which meant he limited the color palette to a mere seven colors, predominantly red, blue, yellow, and green – all the same shade. Surrounding himself with a veteran crew consisting of production designer Richard Sylbert, set decorator Rick Simpson, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, visual effects supervisors Michael Lloyd and Harrison Ellenshaw, and costume designer Milena Canonero, Beatty got the best looking film possible. The translation was so faithful that mainstream audiences took issue with the look.

What Beatty seemed to forget is that adapting from one medium to another requires certain accommodations and this experiment just didn’t work. In vibrant Blu-ray, after a digital restoration, its sharply garish and not necessarily for the better. What did adapt better were the makeup designs that replicated the grotesque Gould rogues gallery thanks to the ministrations of prosthetic makeup designers John Caglione, Jr. and Doug Drexler.

Only someone as major as Beatty could have corralled the roster of stars to don the latex, including Dustin Hoffman (Mumbles), William Forsythe (Flattop), James Tolkan (Numbers), Mandy Patinkin (88 Keys), R. G. Armstrong (Pruneface), Henry Silva (Influence), Paul Sorvino (Lips Manlis), James Caan (Spuds Spaldoni), Catherine O’Hara (Texie Garcia), and Robert Beecher as (Ribs Mocca). In fact, there are probably half-a-dozen too many of Gould’s creations in the mix, diluting the impact of any one foe especially when they were all under the influence of Al Pacino’s Alphonse “Big Boy” Caprice.

On the side of good there’s Glenne Headly as Tracy’s longtime love, Tess Trueheart; Charlie Korsmo as The Kid, Charles Durning as Chief Brandon, and Dick Van Dyke as District Attorney John Fletcher. Headly’s little girl voice has always annoyed me and she really didn’t have much to do, which meant she was easily eclipsed by the film’s real femme fatale: Madonna as Breathless Mahoney.

The script from Jim Cash and Jack Epps, Jr. is remarkably faithful to the golden era of the strip, with the blood-soaked streets of the big city, and a cops and robbers vibe. The main story involves the Kid witnessing a mob hit from some of Big Boy’s enforcers and the crime lord wants him silenced before a possible trial. And Breathless is the only witness to a kidnapping so Tracy spends quality time with her, where she does her best to seduce the square-jawed hero. And pulling the strings from the shadows is a criminal known only as The Blank, whose true identity is revealed late in the film and may surprise a handful of viewers.

The movie crackles along but even in the rewatching, just lacks a vital spark to make us care or cheer. The story and performances almost take themselves too seriously and when set against the uniquely colorful setting is more jarring than anything else. It’s not a bad film in the end, just not a very exciting one.

The digital restoration needs to be seen to be appreciated and Disney did a lovely job, The Blu-ray comes with a digital copy but neglects to include any extras to strongly recommend its acquisition.

A Doctor a Day – “Dalek”

dalek-5464984Using the new Doctor Who Limited Edition Gift Set, your noble author will make his way through as much of the modern series as he can before the Christmas episode, The Snowmen.

Mr. Henry Van Staaten owns the Internet.  He also has a museum of alien artifacts under Utah, including a Slitheen claw, a Cyberman head, and a…

DALEK   by Robert Shearman Directed by Joe Ahearne

“Broken…broken…hair dryer…”

The TARDIS lands in 2012 (!) in Utah, or more precisely, under it.  They’re in the personal horde of Henry Van Statten, an impossibly rich American who obtains alien artifacts, reverse engineers their technology, and sells it for profit.  The Doctor picked up a distress call from his one living exhibit, a mysterious creature that Van Statten calls a Metaltron.  Only when The Doctor sees it does he realize what it truly is – a Dalek, which somehow survived the Time War and fell back in time to Earth, damaged and alone.  The Doctor immediately tried to destroy it, but Van Statten, not wanting his most valuable item damaged, stops him.  But when Rose tries to reach out to the creature, touching it, the Dalek is able to user her DNA, charged with the energy of time travel, to restore its systems.  In seconds it breaks free of his chains, absorbs the power grid of the western United States, and downloads the Internet, searching for information about his people.  Finding nothing, it resorts to the primary command of all Daleks: exterminate.

Pretty much as soon as the new show was announced, questions came up as to when the Daleks would appear.  The show was shot into the stratosphere once the Daleks appeared, and they’ve been linked inextricably ever since.  The Daleks almost didn’t make it to the new series of Doctor Who, and it was all Steve Martin’s fault.  When he was to appear in the film Looney Tunes: Back in Action, he insisted they include a Dalek in a madcap scene full of old movie aliens.  He was a big fan of the series, and thought it’d be a nice tip of the hat.  Permission was asked, but the estate of Terry Nation, who controls the rights to the characters, was not.  This caused offense, so when the BBC asked to bring them back for the new series, the estate originally refused.  When Steve Martin heard about it, he wrote a personal letter to the estate explaining the situation, and apologizing personally.  This calmed everyone down, and the proper paperwork was signed to allow the characters to appear.  But for about a month, Robert Sherman was forced to work on a draft of the script with another alien.

The new Dalek was designed to match the height of Billie Piper, so she could look it in the eye.  Similarly, the New Paradigm Daleks were designed to match Karen Gillan’s eyeline.  But in a recent interview on the BBC website, Steven Moffat wonders that making them too big was a mistake. “They’re scarier when they’re wee”, he says.  The scene of the Dalek at the bottom of the stairs was a clear reference to the classic gag about not being able to climb stairs. But of course, in the original series, Daleks had found a fix for this long since. They had anti-gravity mats in Planet of the Daleks, but the big reveal in Remembrance of the Daleks as the Imperial Dalek slowly floats up the stairs was the scene that had fans laughing and squeeing.

Nicholas Briggs, the voice of the Daleks, got his start working on fan productions and the Big Finish audio dramas.  He’s also provided voices for the Cybermen, the Nestene and the Judoon.

Eccleston played the episode as positively bloodthirsty.  After several episodes of offering the aliens a chance to leave in peace, he does not hesitate to try to kill it.  His rage at the Dalek, and later at Van Statten is a sight to see.  Billie Piper has equally good scenes against the Dalek from the other side of the spectrum, trying to help the unstoppable tank who is trying to get the hang of feelings.  This could have been a perfect final Dalek adventure, but as you’ll see, they’re far from gone.

There are a lot of parallels between this episode and the first of this season, Asylum of the Daleks.  Both this Dalek and the tragic prisoner in Asylum are kept in chains, and both are more than a little conflicted by being a mix of human and Dalek.  Both are capable of amazing destruction all on their own, even as far below the surface of their respective planets.  The idea of human and Dalek hybrids has been a theme as far back as Evil of the Daleks, where The Doctor introduces a “Human Factor” into a number of Daleks to start a civil war between factions.

A Doctor a Day – “Aliens of London / World War Three”

Using the new Doctor Who Limited Edition Gift Set, your noble author will make his way through as much of the modern series as he can before the Christmas episode, The Snowmen. And thank you all for wearing your ID cards…

Rose has let time get away from her a bit, but once that’s sorted, she and The Doctor have come back just in time for the…

ALIENS OF LONDON / WORLD WAR THREE
by Russell T Davies
Directed by Keith Boak

“Harriet Jones, MP, Flydale North“

Rose returns home after a brief time away…no, sorry check that; she’s come back a year after she left, relative to the current timeline. So after a great deal of explanation to friends and family as to where she’s been, she ruminates about the things she’s seen on her roof, how nobody else knows about what she knows…until the giant alien spaceship comes careening through the skies over London and into the Thames.  Unable to make it past the police blockades in central, they watch the events on the TV.

tumblr_m73r9r9f1d1qfe17ro1_1280-1703069Inside Number Ten, the Prime Minister is missing, and a minor back-bencher, in a staggering coincidence, is the highest-ranking politician in the city, and is named acting PM.  A little TOO coincidental – as soon as he and a couple of civil servants are alone in the PM’s conference room, they begin to laugh with the confidence that a plan has come together. The spaceship, and the alien within, are all a dodge to place these three people in power.  They are members of a race called the Slitheen, who are packed into the skins of the now deceased politicos like Wonder Wart-Hog into his Philbert Desanex suit.  They plan to panic the planet into releasing nuclear hell, wiping everyone out, and sell off radioactive chunks like a galactic Odd-Lot.  The Doctor needs the help of Jackie and Mickey to do the only thing that can be done to eliminate the threat – blow up Number Ten.

This is the first two-parter  of the new series, and the end of the first episode is a perfect old-school cliffhanger, with every member of the cast in peril in separate locations.  This also gives the impression there’s more than a couple Slitheen suits, as well.  Even now, the subtle art of sleight of hand can stretch a dollar.

As he did with the Nestene, The Doctor offers the Slitheen a chance to walk away.  We see that happen quite a bit in the new series; like Sun-Tzu said, do everything you can to prevent going to war, but when you have to, go in hard and fast, with intent to win. Odds are The Doctor helped co-write that book.

Once again, the collection of recurring characters grows.  Penelope Wilton brings us the spectacular Harriet Jones, MP for Flydale North, who will move on to great things in a very short period of time.  And another member of the Torchwood crew makes an appearance; Toshiko Sato, seen here as the coroner examining (and running from) the little alien.  The Slitheen themselves became recurring characters – they’ll return later this season, as well as more than a couple times on The Sarah Jane Adventures.  One recurring actor, Lachele Carl, is almost unnoticed, but she’s the only one to appear as a named character on all three Who series. The American newsreader she plays doesn’t even get a name in this adventure, but does eventually – Trinity Wells.  She appears every time news about aliens is reported from the US in future episodes throughout the Davies run of the show.

There’s an extra on the DVD that talks about the miniature work used to get the shot of the ship crashing through Big Ben.  After the shot was completed with the LEFT wing of the ship tearing through the clock, the CGI team realized it looked better with the RIGHT wing going through.  So the miniature shot was flipped, but not corrected – if you look quickly, you’ll see the number on the clock faces are reversed.

Re-watching the Eccletson season, I’m struck as how much more realistic the world feels.  The look on everyone’s faces as an alien ship crashed in their midst is that of not horror, but mild inconvenience.  Jackie’s reaction to Rose’s prodigal return is honest and angry. The series of shots as a progressively larger number of people fill up Rose and Jackie’s flat, more there to scold Rose than to see the events on the telly are hilarious. And at the same time, he shoehorns in the fact that uncontrollable flatulence is a tell for a Slitheen.  The balance of the serious and the silly is expertly done. Moffat’s interpretation of the world is much broader, more tongue in cheek,  Not better or worse, just different.  Similarly, each of The Doctor’s companions had family, as I’ve mentioned before.  Amy didn’t – no parents, just a mysterious aunt who never even appeared on screen.  This allowed the trips they took to be less tied to home.  When they brought Rory into the narrative in a larger way, he joined the crew, resulting in no substantive reason to pop back to Earth for a while.  Only in the first half of the season did we meet Rory’s Dad, and we learned that their visiting times on Earth were few and far between.

If anything, I think the more serious (relatively speaking) take Davies took in his years gave Steven the freedom go go bigger in his run of the show.  If they’d started that big, it might not have caught on.  It certainly looks like the back half of the new series will take a more serious turn, as the last couple of episode certainly did, but we’ll see how much of a balance Moffat can keep.

Review: Little Inferno

The Wii U, released on 11/18, has a good assortment of games available, both in stores and through the Nintendo E-Store.  A happy surprise is the large  number of smaller indie games available on the system, and of them all, the most blissfully wacky is Little Inferno, from the Tomorrow Corporation, makes of World of Goo.  Little Inferno combines the infuriating “What do I DO?” feeling of the open form game, the dark whimsy of a Tim Burton movie, and the purifying warmth of fire, and creates a deceptively simple game that unfolds like an onion in a deep fryer, and is just as delicious.

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The game consists of a fireplace, more specifically, the Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace.  Your job – burn things.  Buy things from a series of catalogs of flammable objects, place them in the furnace, set them aflame, find money contained within, use the money to buy more things to burn.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  As you buy objects, more become available.  As you burn more and more, you begin receiving mail from  the manufacturer, congratulating you on your proficiency.  Letters also begin arriving from another Little Inferno owner who seems to have learned a bit more about the company, and the purpose of the fireplace.

The game is dark, disturbing, and tantalizing.  Exactly WHY does the magnet make the gears in the Fireplace spin faster?  Where did Someone Else’s Credit Card come from, and why can you buy then in almost infinite quantity?  Why is the world getting colder?

For a company as family-friendly as Nintendo to select such a bent little masterpiece for not only a game for its new console, let alone a day-of-release game, is a bold move indeed.  This is a game CLEARLY not for everybody (It’s rated T-for-Teen), but for those who like dark humor, not to mention burning things, it’s a perfect little brain-bender.

THE SHADOW FAN TAKES ON HITLER’S ASTROLOGER

The Shadow Fan Podcast returns with another action-packed episode! Barry Reese outlines the history of Harry Vincent, reviews Malmordo (1946), Dynamite’s The Shadow # 8, and Marvel’s The Shadow: Hitler’s Astrologer. Listener feedback inspires Barry to go on another rant about the Kent Allard/Shadow identity controversy!

Join the conversation about pulp’s greatest hero today at http://theshadowfan.libsyn.com/hitler-s-astrologer.

THEPULP.NET UPDATES SITE

On their Facebook Page, ThePulp.net announced some changes to their website.

Something looks different! That’s right. ThePulp.Net introduced a new format today. Based on suggestions from the survey we conducted last spring, we’ve added a bit more color and pizzazz to the site to better reflect the vivid pulps of the past. Let us know what you think!

Visit the new www.thepulp.net today.

Review: Indestructible Hulk #1

indestructiblehulk_1_cover-296x450-7160376DC and Marvel revamp their characters a lot. A lot. They’ll give suits and names to new people, give them back to the originals again, come up with interpretations so far afield of the original that there’s nothing left but the name. And they all fail or succeed at varying degrees. While it may not actually be the case, Aquaman is generally considered to be the most-rebooted character in DC Comics. There were so many versions of him that he was declared “radioactive”, and left to lay fallow for many years until Geoff Johns had the time to come back to him and start him anew, largely by going back to basics. Not exactly ignoring everything that’s come before, but by creating a good enough current version that people were willing to forgive and forget the past.

After a bit of thought, I came to the conclusion that the most rebooted character in Marvel Comics is The Hulk. Not in the sense of a new origin or person in the suit, so to speak, but in the vibe between the character and his alter-ego. The battle for control between Bruce Banner and The Hulk has been there since day one. But the winner in the game, and the playing field on which the battle has taken place, has changed more often than Katy Perry after her third encore. The Hulk has been made intelligent, made less intelligent, been shot off into space, made MORE intelligent, been separated from Bruce Banner, been re-integrated, and any number of permutations of those scenarios in between. Some have lasted years, like Peter David’s awesome run, and some, like John Byrne’s, barely got out of the gate. Most recently, we’re gained three more Hulks of varying genders, hues and textures, the original Green guy has been separated from Banner (again, see above list), and Banner was some sort of Dr. Moreauesque madman that The Hulk was out to kill. In honesty, it’s gotten so incomprehensible that I had to walk away from it all and just wait for the inevitable turn of the wheel.

And turn it has.

DC took the plunge a year ago and rebooted everything, giving them a chance to wipe the slate clean for any character that wasn’t working at what they thought at their full ability, and subtly leave alone the stuff that was (i.e., Batman and Green Lantern). And largely, it’s been a success. Marvel, all the while swearing it isn’t a knee-jerk reaction to DC’s relative win, has chosen to drink from the same hole. They’re restarting their books, with new titles, numbering and creative teams (save for Dan Slott remaining on Spider-Man, for which we are all rightly thankful). The new books do not reboot the characters in the brute-force way that DC has, but with each new creative team comes the opportunity to take the characters in A Bold New Direction.

Mark Waid, who has recently shown great style and grace on Daredevil, has been handed the reins to The Hulk in his new title, The Indestructible Hulk. Like all the new titles, it features a new hook to hang the character on. Banner and Hulk are one again, And Banner has taken a new tack in the battle – management, as opposed to containment or cure. So he resolves to do as much as he can to make amends for The Hulk’s actions while he’s in charge, and when he’s not, places himself in trust of people who can point The Hulk in the right direction so he can at least smash things that need smashing. Both of these strategies are achieved by both turning himself in to, and applying for a job with, SHIELD. He makes the case for both by presenting an invention that can purify the atmosphere and eliminate airborne diseases, and by taking out The Mad Thinker virtually single-handed – I’ll leave it to you to determine which alter-ego does which.

It’s a neat idea that goes in new directions. Like Hank Pym and Peter Parker, most writers forget that Bruce Banner is a top-level scientist, one of the greatest minds in the world. But, as he says in the book, he’s largely courted not for his brains but his body. In the past, Banner’s role has largely been that of plot-device. When he’s not his own hapless sidekick that gets in trouble at the worst moments, he’s the guy who creates a device at the last moment to control The Hulk, or at least try to. Both Pym and Parker have gotten more of a chance to let their genius shine brighter, and so far it’s stuck. Giving Banner a chance to do the same is a good idea.

I have worries, or more correctly, facets of the same worry. Namely, the book is eternally named after the muscular side of the pairing, and I’ll be curious to see how long readers will read about a scientist before they demand they <a href=”

target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>Get To The Fucking Monkey. Waid has done an astounding job at character work in his career, and it’s that talent that will be needed to make the readers care as much about the brains as they do about the brawn. The first issue goes a long way towards that goal – Hulk appears less than Banner does, and Banner’s scenes in a small town diner do more to drive the plot than the Hulk pager do. Banner talks a good game, but his words could just as easily be interpreted as those of an addict trying to explain how he’s got it all figured out, this time it’ll work, he can cope with his issues.

And that sort of leads into the other facet of my worry. Like Aquaman, Hulk has been re-imagined SO many times, it’s hard for me to imagine a take that will last. It seems almost as if Waid has taken that into consideration here. Anything, ANYTHING that Banner tries to do with The Hulk is one tantrum away from falling apart. This seems like a very good idea, and Waid’s writing makes me want it to last. But too often in comics is the desire, both by the readers and the company, for a character to return to first position. So as much as I like the new improved Hank Pym, I fear that another writer is going to revert him to the bitch-slapping paranoid. So too here – I dread the day that Banner’s best-laid plans go astray once again. This is a good enough take that I WANT it to succeed, though I know that it will be decided by a power over which Banner has no control: the readership.

Holiday Gifts For Comics and Pop Culture Fans

I don’t know why they call today Black Friday. It sounds like a superhero version of Gulliver’s Travels, as published by DC or Marvel in the 1970s. And that might be the quickest digression we’ve had on ComicMix to date.

A bunch of the ComicMix columnists contributed a list of gift suggestions, all with snappy convenient links to Amazon for your shopping pleasure. Well, Mindy ran her list in her column last Monday; you’ve probably already read that but if not, click through in awe and wonder. Please note: I asked each contributor to include one item that they were directly involved in, so don’t think they’re pandering. That’s not necessarily the case.

john-ostrander-2929455John Ostrander suggests:

GrimJack: Killer Instinct 

Star Wars: Agent of the Empire Vol. 1 Iron Eclipse

Timothy and Ben Truman’s Hawken

Max Allan Collins’ Chicago Lightning: The Collected Short Stories of Nate Heller

Storm Front: Book 1 of the Dresden Files

And, a musical interlude, The Blue Nile: Hats

Martha Thomases recommends:

Larry Hama’s The Stranger (that’s the first of a three-volume Vampire fun-packed thriller in e-book format; Amazon will lead you to the other two)

Knits for Nerds:  30 Projects: Science Fiction, Comic Books, Fantasy, by Toni Carr

My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf

Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland 

And a book Martha wrote with Fran Pelzman and Trina Robbins, Cute Guys:  All You Need To Know

Michael Davis recommends:

The Avengers movie in Blu-Ray, the two-disc set.

Watchmen

The Beatles Anthology

My Best Friend’s Wedding

And The Littlest Bitch, the not-children’s book the book Michael wrote with David Quinn and Devon Devereaux.

Emily S. Whitten suggests:

Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere

Warren Ellis’s Iron Man: Extremis

Bill Willingham’s Fables

Fabian Nicieza’s Cable & Deadpool

Terry Pratchett’s Dodger

Stuart Moore’s Marvel Civil War prose novel 

Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man 

The Philip K. Dick Reader 

The Firefly Jayne’s Fighting Elves women’s tee

Blue Sun shirt 

The Britishcomedy Black Books  

Marc Alan Fishman teamed up with his fellow Unshaven boys to offer:

Crumb (the movie) (that was Marc’s pick)

Courtney Crumrin Volume 1: The Night Things  (that was Kyle Gnepper’s pick)

Witch Doctor, Vol 1: Under the Knife (Matt Wright’s pick)

And the whole group picks Samurai Jack – Season 1 “We owe so much of what Samurnauts are to this amazing series by Gendy Tartakovsky. And the performance by Phil Lamarr is nuanced and brilliant.”

On behalf of our friend Dennis O’Neil, I would like to recommend each and every item he’s recommended in the Recommended Reading portion of his weekly ComicMix column… and I also suggest when you’re at Amazon you check out his own billion or so books – you can’t go wrong with any of them. But, of course, particularly the ones I recommend at the end of this column.

And, finally, I recommend:

The Manhattan Projects, Vol. 1: Science Bad by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Pitarra

Judge Dredd: The Complete Brian Bolland  by John Wagner and (go figure)Brian Bolland

Avengers 1959 by Howard Chaykin

And, finally, The Question trade paperbacks, written by Dennis O’Neil, drawn by Denys Cowan, and edited by Ye Olde Editor. I linked the first of the series; Amazon will guide you to the rest.

Have a great shopping season, drive carefully, don’t lose your cool and start gunning down your fellow shoppers, and unless you start shooting tell ’em ComicMix sent you!

 

REVIEW: Patton

In 1970, the Vietnam war was still raging, people were debating and protesting the Asian struggle and the Greatest generation was wondering what happened to duty, service, and love of country. After a period when World War II movies appeared to have exhausted their welcome at the movie theater, along came Patton with a riveting performance of a true American hero from George C. Scott. Few images that year surpassed the one of Patton on the stage, flanked by the largest American flag ever seen. It seared patriotism into our hearts and minds, reminding us all what it took to win a war.

It did not ignite a fresh wave of war films, but it did stand the test of time, often appearing on Best War Films of All Times lists and Scott will be forever connected with Patton. After all, the film earned seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor (George C. Scott), Best Director (Franklin Schaffner), and Best Original Screenplay (Francis Ford Coppola). This 2:52 movie is an unsparing look at a controversial war hero given his rebellious nature, something military command usually frowns on.

The new Blu-ray release from 20th Century Home Entertainment is most welcome and a vast upgrade from the 2008 Blu-ray edition. That was an early conversion of an older film and it didn’t work terribly well, but this new release is fully restored and brings the grime and grit of the European Theater of War into sharp focus. The 65mm production has finally been brought to modern discs in a way that embraces the subject matter and makes for good viewing at home.

General George S. Patton Jr.  was a military genius and he was the first to admit it. He was a harsh, brutal megalomaniac who was also a brilliant strategist. He had the highest casualty count among generals in the field, but he was also the one the Nazi regime feared the most. There is a definite connection between the two facts and exploring that propels the film. Coppola’s script does a fine job exploring the contradictory nature of the man. Additionally, this is one of the first films to portray a less than idealized version of the Allied effort, showing rivalries between American generals and a less than stellar relationship between the British and American commands. Patton himself was driven and therefore drove his men beyond endurance. Nothing would stand in his way, be it shell-shocked soldiers (who deserved a slap in the face, not sympathy) or mules that blocked the road. He gets him comeuppance, though, sent by Dwight D. Eisenhower as a decoy to keep the Germans from stumbling over the Normandy invasion.

The original assortment of special features from the 2008 release are all here in standard definition and it’s fun to hear Coppola in the intro and commentary talk about these early days in his career. The highlight though is History Through the Lens: Patton: A Rebel Revisited (1:30), a feature-length documentary by Ken Burns on the real Patton. Additionally, there are Patton’s Ghost Corps (46:38), giving dozens of surviving veterans a chance to share their memories of serving under Patton; Michael Arick’s 1997 The Making of Patton (49:46), with Scott, Oliver Stone, Richard Zanuck, Jerry Goldsmith, and others talking about the production; Production Still Gallery (36:24); and a Behind the Scenes Gallery (53:19).

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