Category: Reviews

REVIEW: Star Trek: The Next Generation 365

Star Trek: The Next Generation 365
By Paula M. Block and Terry J. Erdman
Abrams Books, 744 pages, $29.95

Let me state upfront that Paula and Terry have been friends for a long time, but I adamantly maintain that they were the ideal people to write Star Trek 365 and the recently released Star Trek: The Next generation 365. Why? Because Paula has been intimately involved with the franchise since the 1980s and knows every nook and cranny within Paramount Pictures to find rare images or information. Terry is an experienced film publicist and has a keen understanding of what people like to know and has an engaging way of sharing that with enthusiasm.

Being the series’ 25th anniversary makes this a nice companion volume to the series; chock full of images, architectural and production drawings, special effects pictures, and some on set antics. Every episode from each of the seven seasons receives not only a brief synopsis but then stories about the show, told from a wide variety of angles. You get some of the best known tales such as the banana clip that became Geordi’s VISOR to lesser known stories in how episodes were conceived. Some of the best are the ones demonstrating how a kernel of a story lingered until the right opportunity, or the right writer, or both, arrived to solve the conundrum. A good example is how long it took to produce the acclaimed “Darmok”.

Given how many images Paula approved for use through the years, she knew which ones to avoid in the hopes of finding a fresh look at the series. One approach meant leaning more towards the black and white shots the still photographer took that have rarely been used, and that adds a nice quality to the book. Many of these are behind-the-scenes and between takes shots of the cast relaxing, prepping or goofing off.

To find fresh nuggets of information about the 178 episodes, the pair interviewed dozens of people who worked on the show over the eight years it took from conception to finale. As a result, they got not only interesting new anecdotes but found additional graphics for use, especially from production designer Richard James and visual effects producer Dan Curry. Effects associate Eric Alba is also credited for coming up with a variety of candid photos for use. All of this enriches the book and ensures that it’s not a retread of previously seen images or twice-told tales.

The comes with a foreword by Ronald D. Moore, who got his big break with an unsolicited script and has gone on to a creative career among the stars. The 365 series of pop culture books are nice, compact treasure troves that are well worth a look.

Review: “Lust” by Ellen Forney

Like many papers, Seattle’s weekly — I think I’m supposed to say “alternative weekly,” though there’s no established industry of stodgy weeklies for those alt-weeklies to be the alternative to — The Stranger has personal ads, in which its lovelorn or just horny readers try to find each other for mutually beneficial activities. Unlike other papers, though, The Stranger has Ellen Forney (cartoonist and teacher of cartooning, author of Monkey Food, which I just realized I read and reviewed a couple of years back) illustrating one of those ads — from the LustLab section, where strangers anatomize in explicit detail their sexual needs and wants to find just the perfect kinky partner — every week.

Lust collects a whole bunch of those ads, along with five interviews that Forney did with some ad-writers. And I will warn you: a number of the ads and folks in here are certainly kinkier than you are, no matter how kinky you are — kink isn’t a linear spectrum, and there are folks here off in various directions, seeking their very particular nirvana. Assuming you can handle the idea of other people having sex in ways you don’t think you would enjoy, Lust is cute and fun — each of Forney’s illustrations is like a little advertisement or calling card (like those cards that used to paper London) for that person’s desires, with a clean, illustrative style that varies a lot for the different pieces.

REVIEW: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns Part 1

dkr-1-box-art-300x408-5015305Years in the making, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns was never intended to rewrite the rules for the Caped Crusader or become the template for a generation of storytelling. It was, though, the culmination of a series of events that occurred at DC Comics and in Miller’s professional development that nicely dovetailed together. The right book, character, and creator all arrived at the right time, when an audience was ready to accept the radical re-imagining.

Ever since the four-part story heralded the arrival of the Prestige Format and was the first entry in the current field of graphic novels, The Dark Knight Returns has been an influential touchstone to storytellers. Its use of character, page construction, color, and theme showed that four-color heroes can be used for darker concepts, exploring new ideas. As a result, people have been clamoring to see it adapted for the screen, any screen, so it could continue to thrill us. We were teased with the folk at Warner Animation paying homage to Miller’s art style and now-iconic imagery in Animaniacs and Batman the Animated Series.

dkr_r1_22695-300x168-1421279At long last, Warner Premiere has delivered their finest effort, paying tribute to the story written and pencilled by Miller, inked by Klaus Janson, and colored by Lynn Varley. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns Part 1 is out on home video, as a Combo Pack (Blu-ray, DVD, Ultraviolet) and shows the affection from the first frame.

Bob Goodman remained utterly faithful to the story, compressing the first half of the graphic novel into a brisk 76 minutes that still contains the moments you want. Commissioner James Gordon and Bruce Wayne have a nice, warm friendship, Alfred remains his acerbic self, and Carrie Kelly is gung-ho and awkward. The first half of the story deals with several threats to Gotham City, first the gang known as the Mutants and their muscle-bound leader who wants to own the town; and Harvey Dent, seemingly physically cured but proving his mind is as fractured as ever. And watching from confinement is a homicidal maniac long-thought drugged into submission.

silhouette-300x168-9408823The best thing director Jay Oliva, who cut his teeth on Man of Steel and Green Lantern: Emerald Knights), did was show us what Miller could only hint at: a 50-year old man who really has to struggle to keep up. He strains to climb a rope and isn’t fast enough to take down the mutant leader the first time they brawl (in fact their two fights is almost a template for the Batman-Bane confrontations in The Dark Knight Rises). This is a 50+ hero who hasn’t seen action in a decade, but we know from the opening scene he remains addicted to adrenaline and action. His return evokes the creature of the night that first established his reputation in the city and once more inspires the populace.

batman-300x168-4756800Visually, Miller’s beefed up main characters and gritty style is nicely replicated, complete with making Batman larger-than-life so he dwarfs Carrie and most other mortals. The story remains a future from the fixed point of the 1980s since the story is dependent on that particular view of America, which means so much of the technology appears antiquated by today’s standards but works wonderfully. There’s also a nice meta shout-out to other titles from 1985-87 that helped reshape comics: Crisis on Infinite Earths, Watchmen, and V for Vendetta.

inside-tank-300x168-3332752As usual Andrea Romano has assembled a stellar cast for the voices and while most will lament the absence of Kevin Conroy as Batman, Peter Weller more than ably fills the cape and cowl with gravitas. He’s older, wearier. David Selby’s Gordon has much of the same feeling which is nicely contrasted by Ariel Winter’s Carrie. Wade Williams as Dent and Michael McKean as a blowhard psychiatrist nicely round out the cast.

Interestingly, the packaging avoids imitating Miller’s style, a curious choice. Similarly, Miller, Janson and Varley’s lack of participation in the extras is glaring. They are merely represented with a digital comic excerpt from issue one of The Dark Knight. Instead, we get “Her Name if Carrie…Her Role is Robin” (12:00) with Grant Morrison, Mike Carlin, Alan Burnett, Bruce Timm, and others discussing the radical use of a girl as the new sidekick. There are some nice bits placing this in an historic context.  The 2008 “Batman and Me: The Bob Kane Story” (38:00) is reused here and we’re reminded of the egotistical Kane avoiding sharing credit with anyone.

On the Blu-ray is a Two-Face two-parter from Batman the Animated Series. There’s also a sneak peek of part two, due out in early 2013.

It’s a shame Miller wouldn’t participate and the film lacks a commentary track since bringing this to life appears to have been a labor of love for all involved.

New Who Review – “The Power of Three”

The Doctor is very good at saving the world, but very poor at sitting still.  So when he’s stuck waiting a full year for an invasion to start, it gives a new meaning to cabin fever.  The Year of the Slow Invasion, the year The Doctor got involved in Amy and Rory’s life and not the other way around.  A very personal episode (featuring the entire world), rife with spoilers, so sit back, and keep your eye on the box.

(more…)

REVIEW: Terra Nova

Any time Steven Spielberg comes to television, it’s always with something different. He honored the anthology series of his youth with Amazing Stories and lent his storytelling expertise to get ER launched, making that into a smash hit for NBC. So, when Fox heard of a series about humans and dinosaurs and Spielberg, it seemed like a no brainer. If anyone could get dinosaurs to work convincingly on the small screen, it was the director of Jurassic Park. What the network couldn’t count on was the full extent of Spielberg’s involvement and in time the series was placed under showrunner Brannon Braga’s control. Braga cut his teeth on Star Trek: The Next Generation and has gone on to do other genre fare, but he can’t seem to repeatedly sacrifice characterization in favor of conspiracy and that’s where Terra Nova fell off the rails.

Delayed by schedule issues as the massive CGI prehistoric creatures proved more difficult to execute on a budget, the series debuted last fall and for 14 episodes, we were treated to a series with tremendous potential, most of it wasted.

In 2149, mankind has choked the world so badly that time travel to resettle humanity in the past was the best hope for survival. A colony was established and those fortunate enough to be picked were sent in waves, controlling the impact of man altering the past. We follow the Shannon family from this wretched dystopia to the clean air of the past and see if people can do better when given a better chance. Jim Shannon (Jason O’Mara) is in jail for violating population laws and conceiving a third child but is broken free and joins his wife, Dr. Elisabeth Shannon (Shelley Conn), 17 year old son Josh (Landon Liboiron), 16 year old daughter Maddy (Naomi Scott), and five year old Zoe (Alana Mansour), as they join the Tenth Pilgrimage 85 Million years back in time.

Terra Nova is a thriving colony under the command of Commander Nathaniel Taylor (Stephen Lang) and contains enough raw power to protect the populace from the mammoth critters that wander the jungles just beyond their walls. While the thrust of the stories should have been the struggle to adapt to the environment and its deadly inhabitants, Braga had other ideas. Apparently, The Others, I mean the Sixers split back during the sixth pilgrimage and are working with unknown forces back in the future to seize the pristine world’s resources. Then there’s the mystery of Taylor’s son, a genius who was either part of the conspiracy or its pawn. Add in a blackmarketeer, a teen turned traitor to save her ill mother, young romance, and a few other threads, you get a crazy quilt of plots that could actually be told in any other environment.

The show failed to be different from its genre competitors because it avoided the most unique element going for it: dinosaurs! Man versus nature! How do the people adapt to diseases, microbes, and minerals they never encountered before? How do they ensure each step they take beyond the colony does not in some way create a vastly different tomorrow? Nope, the show skips all of those possibilities for conspiracies and soap operas.

The appealing cast does its best with weak material but by the end of the series, it was clear that there would be little progress in solving these dilemmas and when the plug was mercifully pulled in March, it vanished without much of an imprint in the genre or prime time television.

The complete series is presented on four standard definition discs from 20th Century Home Entertainment. In addition to fourteen hours of drama, the set comes with complete with some vaguely interesting deleted scenes and an extended version of “Occupation/Resistance”, the two-part finale (there’s also an audio commentary from Stephen Lang, Brannon Braga and Rene Echevarria). There are a handful of somewhat interesting “Director’s Diaries – Making the Pilot” with comments from Alex Graves, whose work I have generally admired. Finally, there is a brief look at “Cretaceous Life: The Dinosaurs of Terra Nova”, which should enlighten younger viewers who can’t get enough dinosaurs, and “Mysteries Explored”, delving into the less interest aspects of this failed series. Rounding things out is a gag reel.

A series with potential like this is all the more disappointing when it does not embrace its strengths in favor of a creator’s personal interests. Had Spielberg been more hands on, things might have turned out differently, but as it stands, the show is a mildly engaging misfire.

Everything you wanted to know about the “Pond Life” prequel to new Doctor Who season 7

newwhoreview-550x211-5733917

It’s all fun and games until someone loses a…well, anyway.

This week, as a run-up to the season premiere of Doctor Who, a mini web-series titled “Pond Life”, intended to share a look at the Ponds’ home life in between visits by The Doctor. It was four episodes of entertaining fun, right up until the moment Steven Moffat and writer Chris Chibnall seized our hearts, turned them sideways, and made a tasty broth from our tears.

Each episode summarizes a month between April and August, leading into the events of the first episode, Asylum of the Daleks. All five episodes of “Pond Life” are available on the BBC YouTube channel, mirrored on numerous websites, and is written into the sullen expressions of Who-fen everywhere. Take a look, then we’ll discuss:

In April we get the distinct impression that The Doctor has been keeping in touch quite closely with the Ponds via a series of phone messages. He relates a few of his solo adventures, including surfing the Fire Falls of Florial 9 to escape a cohort of his old enemies the Sontarans. He also met “Good little dancer, terrible spy” Mata Hari, and performed backing tracks for one of those hip-hop songs the kids seem to like.

pondlife2-300x166-5826758

oodloo1-300x149-6683384

pondlife5-300x163-6985077

May is in fact the only time The Doctor and The Ponds directly meet in all five episodes. He bursts into their bedroom, begging them to get dressed, only to realize he’s arrived earlier than he expected, and they’ve no idea what he’s talking about. As flashes of the events to come in the series flash across the screen, he assures them that all is well, the future is “really, really…fine”, and bids them return to sleep.

June and July is a bit of a two-part story – The Doctor has picked up a stray Ood who is still under his conditioning as a servant. Apparently wandering off the TARDIS during a stop at their apartment, and sits waiting in their bathroom for orders. The Doctor assures them the best thing to do is let him follow his conditioning, resulting in the Ponds getting a butler for a brief time.

The Doctor’s popped by to pick the Ood up and return him to Ood-Sphere in between July and the final chapter, assumed to be August, though the date is not specifically mentioned. It’s clearly a bit longer than that, as quite a bit has happened to Amy and Rory. Unaware to The Doctor, Amy and Rory have had a falling out, and we see Rory leaving their home carrying his belongings in a trash bag. And is you look at Amy’s lips, she’s NOT saying “Come back”.

So, quite a bit going on here, lots of fun, some tears and worry – in short, a solid Doctor Who episode.

THE MONSTER FILES –

The Sontarans were introduced in the Jon Pertwee adventures The Time Warrior. A militaristic clone race, they’ve cut swaths across the galaxy, either via simple conquering raids, or as part of their protracted war with their enemy, the Rutans. They were the race behind the invasion of Gallifrey in The Invasion of Time, and almost converted the Earth’s atmosphere to suit them on The Sontaran Stratagem. Christopher Ryan, best known to Americans as Mike “The Cool person” from the punk Britcom classic The Young Ones has appeared twice as two different Sontaran leaders.

The Ood first appeared more recently, in the Tennant adventures The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit. They were portrayed as a servant race, seemingly low in intelligence, communicating via an implanted communication device. In their next appearance Planet of the Ood, it was revealed their situation was far more insidious. Ood are indeed sentient and intelligent, and are born with a second, exterior brain that they use to communicate telepathically to each other, selected people outside their race, and the physical Ood hive mind. This second brain is amputated as part of their “conditioning” process, which severs their link to the hive mind, and effectively lobotomizes them. The Doctor is horrified at the news, and helps to free them from their captivity. Their de facto leader, Ood Sigma, the first conditioned Ood to re-connect to the hive mind, returns to guide The Doctor through his final adventures before his regeneration. An Ood was found on The Junkyard at the End of the Universe in Neil Gaiman’s The Doctor’s Wife, but only because there wasn’t enough in the budget to created the alien Neil had written into the script.

The Ood bear more then a small resemblance to the Hartnell-era aliens The Sensorites, from an adventure of the same name. show runner Russell T. Davies noticed that, and as a tip of the hat, placed their homewold, Ood-Sphere in the same star system as Sense-Sphere, homeworld of the first race.

BACKGROUND BITS AND BOBS – Trivia and production details

ANY LANDING YOU CAN WALK AWAY FROM IS A GOOD ONE – The Helmic Regulator is a recurring issue in the mini-adventure. The Helmic Regulator helps control the precision of the landing of a TARDIS. If not correctly calibrated, the landing point can vary in either space or time.

When Harry Sullivan (accidentally) touched the Helmic Regulator, the TARDIS landed on Nerva Beacon instead of the moon, back in The Ark In Space.

The Doctor made special mention of it again when showing Martha Jones how he prepared the TARDIS for takeoff in Smith and Jones. In the new design (desktop setting) of that console, it resembles a bicycle pump. He was also able to use it, in concert with the thermo-buffer and the zeiton crystals, to prevent a two-Doctor paradox from blowing a hole in the universe the size of Belgium in the mini-adventure Time Crash.

While the Helmic regulator still exists on the new design of the TARDIS, it’s not yet been pointed out specifically on the show.

Interesting fact – the TARDIS console on the set has a user’s manual. The controls on each panel are specifically named, and each has a specific function. Matt Smith was given the manual and had to learn it. He had to learn a precise series of actions to launch or pilot the capsule “properly”. He’s not just making it up.

Doctor Who premieres September 1st on the BBC and BBC America.

REVIEW: Glee the Complete Third Season

glee-season-3-b_glee_bd_ssn3_spine_boxshot_jp01_rgb-300x400-2757563The greatest pitfall television series featuring high school cast members has is that the cast is already older when the series begins and they age out rapidly. Smallville stopped setting stories in the high school because the cast looked ridiculous on the sets. Confronting the inevitable graduation challenges the producers to find tortured ways to keep the cast intact after the caps and gowns are put away. Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer suffered from this challenge so it is refreshing to see Glee take graduation head on in the third season of the Fox series.

Glee the Complete Third Season came out on DVD last week and seeing it without the weeks-long breaks between cycles, allows you to see how they handled the coming graduation and choices the teens are being asked to make. While the series has never really focused on the kids’ academics, there was almost zero interest in ACTs or college visits, so it was always in the ether but never the focal point of the stories. Instead, it was all about getting to Nationals in New York and succeeding. The season opened with the need for fresh members thanks to a rival Glee Club set up by Shelby Corcoran (Idina Menzel) while Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch) ran for Congress on an anti-arts platform.

Clearly, the producers had no real idea of where to take the characters as motivations and the status quo changed, twisting them beyond recognizabilty. The most ill-served may have been Quinn (Dianna Agron) who started off trying to steal back her baby, given to Shelby for adoption,  then embracing the final year of high school until her driving accident (don’t text and drive) and recovery. Somewhere along the line, this sympathetic character, who in season two recognized she was a small town girl stuck in Ohio, gained 50 IQ points and got into Yale and was Ivy League bound. Huh? The best teen villain has become a hero. All the edges to characters are gone, from Puck (Mark Salling) to the divas Mercedes (Amber Riley), robbing the students of interesting character variety. Santana (Naya Rivera) was also softened although her coming out as a lesbian and rising as a performer were among the season’s highlights.

Finn Hudson (Cory Monteith) and Rachel Berry (Lea Michele), the romantic couple at the center of the storm, decided to get married and their arc dealt with that reality and the choices each need make for themselves and each other. This rang far more true than the disastrous marriage between Coach Beiste (Dot-Marie Jones) and Cooter Menkins (Eric Bruskotter), which formed a mini-arc in the final third of the season.

While each of the 22 episodes is entertaining and often heartfelt, as a season-long arc for the faculty and students it’s a mess and by now Ryan Murphy should have a very clear idea of who they are and where these characters are going. Instead, he seems to have lost any sense of edge in Sylvester, giving her instead a rival in Roz Washington (NeNe Leakes). Even the show’s most intriguing character, Burt Hummel (Mike O’Malley), somehow found himself running for Congress and winning, stealing him from Kurt (Chris Colfer), just as his son’s dreams of going to NYADA are crushed.

Musically, the show remains strong, aided by the welcome addition of Darren Criss’ Blaine to the New Directions. Sam Evans (Chord Overstreet) is also back after a brief contract issue. Some of the winners of the reality series, The Glee Project, wind up added to the cast but are little more than hangers-on with little learned about them and rarely given a showcase. The quest for a championship takes a backseat to the fall musical, West Side Story, which featured some terrific reimaginings of the classic numbers.

In the finale, eight of the cast graduate and turnover in the New Directions will fuel the fourth season as it begins in a few weeks. Most of the graduates will continue to appear so the ensemble swells which is not always a good idea.

The four disc set looks amazing and of course sounds terrific but we’ve come to expect that from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. A neat feature to the set is that the menus will help you keep track as you work your way through the season, remembering where you are.

As usual, the extras are heavy on the music, the show’s hallmark. We get more from the Glee Music Jukebox, although you get clips and not the full songs that were edited to air. Some of the non-musical bits include “Glee Under the Stars” (7:45), a kickoff event at Santa Monica High School. “Glee Give a Note” (7:46) shows stars Jayma Mays and Jones present Culver City Middle School a check for $10,000 for arts education.

You can enjoy some extended and deleted scenes throughout the discs. The highlight here is a Sue Sylvester flashback that should have found its way on air. “Glee Swap: Behind the Scenes of ‘Props'” (5:41) is a nice look at the fun body-swapping episode. “Meet the Newbies” (13:20) spends more time with the new cast members than the series seemed to. “Saying Goodbye” (15:19) is a good look at the emotional toll the finale took on one and all. Lynch’s acerbic Sylvester is found on “Ask Sue: World Domination Blog” (6:07) and “Return of Sue’s Quips” (2:58).

One can hope that the freshened cast will ignite some greater dramatic consistency to match its musical excellence. For now, we have this set which is maddeningly enjoyable while being frustratingly inconsistent.

REVIEW: “Friends With Boys” by Faith Erin Hicks

Friends with Boys, the new graphic novel by Faith Erin Hicks (whose The War at Ellsmere I reviewed in a huge round-up month),has an oddly ill-fitting title; it’s the story of a teenager, Maggie, who is starting in a public highschool after her mother (who home-schooled her and her three older brothers — all of whom oddly seem to still be in the same school though there seems to be a few years in between her and her twin brothers and then the oldest one) ran away mysteriously. Maggie has trouble making friends with anyone, since she’s been so wrapped up in her family, but she’s a tomboy, and has been closer to boys (her brothers) her entire life. So being “Friends With Boys” isn’t really the big thing here — it’s that she’s in the company of people who aren’t family, or without her mother, or something along those lines. The title also makes her homeschooling sound more controlling or sinister, as if it were based on some controlling-young-women religion, and it isn’t like that at all.

But there’s nothing to stop Maggie from becoming friends with boys, or more than that — her brothers are friendly and supportive (if awfully rough-and-tumble) rather than over-protective, and even her father (the chief of police of their small town) is a support rather than an authority figure. Friends With Boys is somewhat the story of potential friendships for Maggie, but those friendships are with a brother and sister (Lucy and Alistair) that she meets at school, her brothers (as they work out their own conflicts), and a ghost that she’s been seeing in the local graveyard for the past seven years.

The ghost and the Alistair/Lucy friendship together drive much of the plot — Alistair, a mohawked punk, has a feud with the blond captain of the volleyball team (though, luckily, it’s not otherwise as cliched as that may sound), and Maggie is sure she knows what she has to do to put that ghost at rest. But, if Hicks has a message in Friends With Boys, it’s that things are more complicated than they look. There are several plot or thematic strands that are raised but never resolved — primarily among them the disappearance of Maggie’s mother just before the book starts — and the answers we do learn aren’t the ones we expected.

All of that makes Friends With Boys an excellent graphic novel for teens, its expected audience — it’s a story about walking out into a wider world, not entirely understanding it, making plans based on what you see — and then still not entirely understanding that world. So much fiction for teens tries to wrap everything up in one ball or another — that everything is horrible because adults, or that they can be perfect special snowflakes if they want, or some other pat explanation — that Hicks’ messy complications (and that’s without any kind of love-plot, too; how complicated will Maggie’s life get what that gets into the mix?) are a breath of cool air, like the dizzying view from a mountaintop. As this book ends, Maggie still hasn’t learned how to be friends with boys, but maybe she has learned how to be friends with her brothers, which is one step forward.

REVIEW: “Emperor Mollusk Versus the Sinister Brain” by A. Lee Martinez

emperormollusk-5872363Martinez has been writing humorous SF novels for close to a decade now, all of which have looked like fun to me, but Emperor Mollusk versus the Sinister Brain is the first one I managed to actually read. It’s the SFnal story of a world-conquering squid from Neptune (a super-genius squid from Neptune) in a very comic-booky universe, where every planet in the solar system has an indigenous race with their own high technology.

Emperor Mollusk narrates his own story, starting well after he’s conquered Earth (for its own benefit; he’s a very benevolent tyrant) and mostly focusing on his battle with a new would-be conqueror, who may be even smarter than he is. It’s quick and zippy and colorful and amusing, filled with quips and explosions and last-minute escapes and triple reverses and more high-tech gadgets than all of the Bond movies put together.

And if I even wanted to do a serious critical take on it — and who would want to do such a thing to a book like this? — I read it too long ago to remember any of the pertinent details. Emperor Mollusk is fun, and smart about its generic materials, and thoroughly amusing. I’d be very happy to read more by Martinez if this is the way he usually works.

REVIEW: The Art and Making of the Dark Knight Trilogy

The Art and Making of the Dark Knight Trilogy
By Jody Duncan Jesser and Janine Pourroy
304 pages, Abrams, $40

There is so much visually wonderful about Christopher Nolan’s trilogy of Batman films that this book seemed an obvious event. An oversized hardcover, it has amazing production values with gorgeous photography on heavy paper, cleanly designed (thank you, Chip Kidd), and overall appealing. Clearly, the authors had access to everyone from Nolan on down and they spoke freely about the challenges of conceiving themes to marketing the films.

And yet, everything feels like we’ve just touched the surface and each chapter –Screenplay, Production Design, Cast, Costumes & Makeup, The Shoot,  Special Effects & Stunts, Editing, Music & Sound, Visual Effects, and Marketing – all leave you wondering about what else happened. For example, during the Shoot, one chapter per film, you never get a feel for how Nolan directs his cast, or how he adjusts to the needs of each actor. How did Katie Holmes and Maggie Gyllenhaal differ in their interpretation of Rachel Dawes. We’re left wondering why the comic book antecedents for most of the characters are referenced but not Henri Ducard nor are we told about the various reveals through the films (such as Ducard really being Ra’s al Ghul, echoed in the third film by Miranda Tate being revealed as Talia). Michael Caine writes an introduction that extols Nolan’s virtues as a director, but after that, we’re still left wondering what those are.

This reads about two steps above the usual press materials sent out when films open, the canned features sent to media outlets hungry for content. The writing is clear and facile, but a little too fawning in spots and far from critical about things that worked and didn’t work.

Perhaps the most glaring omission is a real in-depth look at the wildly successful viral marketing. This section needed more content, more images of the viral marketing at work, and more examples of the Internet phenomena, especially for The Dark Knight, which raised the bar for films.

You get some great shots of how the costumes, sets, and vehicles were built and see some of the shooting challenges that were presented over the last decade. It certainly works as a primer to Nolan’s take on the caped crusader and his world, but you don’t necessarily get into the filmmaker’s head, especially why he felt he was done after three. Nor does he comment how his successful reinterpretation of the hero led to supervising next summer’s Man of Steel. The contributions from screenwriters David S. Goyer and Jonathan Nolan are acknowledged but hearing more from them would have certainly helped us better understand how the films evolved, especially the themes for the final film in the wake of Heath Ledger’s death. Nolan writes in his foreword, “I never thought we’d do a third – are there any great second sequels?” Well, there’s The Last Crusade for starters, but Batman has endured monthly for seventy-five years so the answer is yes.

The book is a fine read but given the size and weight of the tome, one would have hoped for depth in the written content. It leaves you want much, much more and at this price, readers deserve all that and more.

Categories

Archives

Everything you need to make great comics!

comicmix-pro-300x69-2

Nucleus X

Bookshop Zaks