Category: Reviews

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Two More Minxes

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A few months back, I reviewed the second and third graphic novels from Minx (DC’s new line aimed at teenage girls, published in a manga-ish size and format but not otherwise much like manga). I’ve since dug up the first and fourth Minx titles, The Plain Janes and Good As Lily, for another compare-and-contrast.

The Plain Janes was the Minx launch title, back in May, and was the only one of the first wave of Minx books to have any female creators involved. (Which lack, if you recall, caused somewhat of a hue and cry in some circles.) The writer, Cecil Castellucci (that single female creator), is an established Young Adult novelist, and, perhaps because of that, [[[The Plain Janes]]] is the closest to mainstream realistic fiction of any of the Minx books I’ve seen so far.

Our heroine, Jane, is a young teen who lived in “Metro City” until she was caught at the edge of a random bombing, which made her parents paranoid enough to move the family to the suburbs. (Jane is presumably an only child; we don’t see any siblings.) The bombing affected her just as strongly as it did her parents, but in a different way: it shocked her out of her old complacent life (concerned with boys and clothes) and turned her into An Artist. So she resists the urge to fall in with the same sort of crowd she hung out with at her old school, and tries to make friends with a group of outcast girls.

Unfortunately, those girls are straight from Central Casting: the brainy one, the sporty one, and the theatrical one. (There’s even the school’s token One Gay Guy, who gets involved later on.) Worse, their names are all versions of “Jane,” telegraphing the manipulation even further. They’re all decent characters – well differentiated from each other and generally believable – but it didn’t make much sense to me that the three of them would be friends, and each have no other friends, when they have nothing in common but their outcast status. (Then again, I was never a high school girl, and the social structures boys set up can be quite different.)

Our Jane has to work to get the other Janes to like her – she’s pretty and should be popular, so why would she be hanging out with them? – and keeps turning down the friendship advances of the local Queen Bee. But, eventually, her plan comes together, and she recruits the other Janes into her secret organization P.L.A.I.N. – People Loving Art in Neighborhoods – to do various bizarre “art” events secretly around town. They are, of course, the very po-mo kind of art that doesn’t require any ability to draw or paint or otherwise create something specific; it’s all installation-style pieces that only are art because someone says they are.

This leads to the expected, and overwritten, trouble from the authorities, who clamp down hard on any sign of rebellion in their community. (Sadly, this was all done more deftly, and with a lighter touch, in the ‘80s movie Footloose. Yes, it’s that sort of thing all over again.) But, in the end, art, and P.L.A.I.N., prevail.

So The Plain Janes is a bit obvious and a bit too much – at least for me, jaded thirty-something that I am. It may be much more exciting for a teenage girl who hasn’t seen this plot before and doesn’t realize she can pick her friends and do the things she wants to do. And, if so, then it will do its job just fine.

(I don’t have much to say about the art – it’s solid, in a mostly mainstream-comics style, with lots of close-ups on faces. It’s noticeably less stylized than the art in the other Minx titles I’ve seen, which fits this more grounded, mostly real-world story.)

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MINI-REVIEW: Groo 25th Anniversary Special

Let’s see… we need a couple of sure-fire topics of humor. How about… child labor exploitation and the deadly thievery of Big Pharmaceutical makers? I’ll bet you’re giggling just thinking about that stuff.

Well, in the hands of Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier, or, more appropriately, in the hands of Groo, the laughs work out just fine.

These are two of the topics covered in the [[[Groo 25th Anniversary Special]]] released by Dark Horse last week, and as one of America’s pre-eminent creator-owned series it deserves serious recognition for its success. But when it comes to Groo, it’s so damned hard to be serious.

So, suffice it for us to shout a big Happy Anniversary to the intrepid bumbler, his dog Rufferto, and his chroniclers Sergio and Mark. It’s quite an achievement.

If you haven’t checked out the Groo 25th Anniversary Special, just go out and read a newspaper. Then you’ll really need Groo.

MOVIE REVIEW: Halloween 9

10m-9837040It feels like just yesterday that the summer blockbuster season was here, but I suppose we’ve already moved on from there and straight into that time of year when thriller/horror movies come out of the woodwork, and usually sink rather than swim. This year we’re subjected treated to another Japanese thriller remake with One Missed Call, another underground-graphic-novel-turned-award-winning-film with 30 Days of Night, and yes: yet another Saw movie – because they cost about $8.50 to make.

We proudly start off this traditional season with Rob Zombie’s faux remake/prequel of John Carpenter’s quintessential slasher flick Halloween. Now not to play into the web-gossip, but there was quite some controversy about this film’s script, involving a leak and a very critical critic from a website which I choose not to mention (I will give a hint though: it rhymes with Paint it Drool Booze). But all of that aside, it was rumored that Zombie went into rewrites only a few short weeks before shooting. Now I felt this was relatively unwise, but as usual, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start as we usually do, in the OCD fashion of a film breakdown.

Starting off with my favorite aspect of the film, the acting; I have almost nothing to complain about here. It’s evident in all of Zombie’s work (a whopping three films) that he is a huge fanboy, and while every fanboy has their niche (Smith has Star Wars, Tarantino has chatty women, and Favreau has Vince Vaughn) Zombie’s niche is easily noticed as B-Movies. This film is a practical who’s who of B-Movie actors, much like his previous two films were. To name a few, we movie geeks get Danny Trejo, Brad Dourif, Malcolm McDowell, Sid Haig, William Forsythe, Udo Kier, Clint Howard, and of course Tyler Mane as our masked pro/antagonist. With a cast like this, topped off with Zombie’s frightening-yet-gorgeous wife, Sheri Moon, this film was meant for every fanboy in the theater to swoon with joy every time we get another cameo, much like this reviewer did. Though it probably isn’t necessary for me to reveal, each actor pulled off their creepy-yet-impressive roles to a tee.

Moving onto the technical aspect of this film, I was torn. Another one of Zombie’s trademarks is complete filth, and not in the sense of obligatory nudity (of which there was plenty in this film), but in the sense that the film and setting as a whole made me long for a shower once the credits rolled. From the very start, we’re treated to visuals of a completely rundown, white-trash home in which almost everything looks dirty and unpleasant, all the way to the end of the film where just about everything/one is covered in blood. Much like House of 1000 Corpses and Devil’s Rejects, this film definitely adapted the feeling of grittiness that the horror movies of yesteryear prided themselves on.

One trait that Zombie seemed to pick up in this movie that was thankfully left out of his two previous pieces was the use of unnecessary camera shakiness. I’m not sure if its his way of falling in line with popular films like the Bourne trilogy and the use of shaky camera work, or if it was a cheap way to add tension to a scene that already displayed it, but it was not only unnecessary, but distracting. When a filmmaker prides himself for turning heads with the amount of gore and violence he uses in films, there is no need to strap the camera to a rabid dog every time he feels the need to add more tension to the scene. The close angles and fast cuts during action sequenced made it feel like a bad episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and that’s not good, especially when the substance is far too good for any overuse of style.

Finally we move on to the pièce de résistance: in talking about the script/plot of the film. Going into a straight-up slasher film, my expectations never soar, in fact I usually leave my brain at the door. But when a movie is hyped as giving more substance to a horror movie that I practically grew up on, I wanted there to be substance and closure to a 30 year old story. Instead we get half-assed character development and dialogue that actually had me laughing out loud when it wasn’t exactly necessary. I’m proud of the fact that we took a snippet of Donald Pleasance’s dialogue from the 1978 film and turned it into an hour of film, but this should have been about what makes one of the greatest Monsters of American Cinema tick, rather than just explaining who he is and that he likes to stab things. I call him the pro/antagonist because if the character development was done properly, it would show that Michael Myers killed to protect his family, and hurt those who threatened that. Instead we barely touch on that subject, and spend more time watching Myers kill naked teens while they have drunken unprotected sex.

Overall, looking at this film as another slasher film with a great supporting cast, it exceeds almost all expectations. But this film had to potential of being the Batman Begins of a potentially dead horror franchise, and instead of turning this into a trend in the genre and possibly getting the chance to see Peter Berg’s Friday the 13th, we’ll more than likely be subjected to another ten years of Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash vs. Godzilla vs. Kramer.

I reluctantly give the film a 7/10, only because while it may be an American pastime and one of my favorite weekend activities, a movie needs to be more than an hour plus of killing naked drunken teens having unprotected sex.

COMICS REVIEW: Amazons Attack

23630_4_006-8429163At Heroes Con in Charlotte this past June, one convention goer asked DC EIC Dan DiDio what was the point of Amazons Attack. “What’s the point of any comic?” DiDio quipped back, leaving me to believe that the point was in fact simply to separate me from eighteen dollars and eat up ten minutes of my life for each of six months.

It’s been a couple of shaky years in the world of [[[Wonder Woman]]] fandom; turning her into a killer, handing the mantle off to Donna Troy – which you would have missed if you blinked, the “who is Wonder Woman?” plotline which I’m not even sure has started but was touted as ”next” at the end of issue #4, which then begs the mention of the sporatic publication of the book itself mere months into the re-launch of the series.

After all that, “the first major comics event of 2007,” as the house ads touted, should have given us six action packed issues that could not be contained in the regular monthly title. Instead, [[[Amazons Attack]]] was confusing, boring and left me month after month echoing that Charlotte fan’s question.

Why was this a mini-series? This story could have easily been told in the pages of the monthly [[[Wonder Woman]]] book, and then perhaps they wouldn’t have replicated numerous scenes in multiple publications across one month, while leaving questions up in the air because it was so easy to not pick up a tie-in or read them out of order. Was the project ill-conceived or just poorly managed?

The art was amazingly varied from the main AA book to the tie-ins, it was sometimes hard to see where they tied in since there visual cues were often non-existent. Sadly, the art in the main title fell short: there was something lacking in what Pete Woods did that left the characters looking very flat and ill-defined facially.

It only being a few hours since I finished the series, it hasn’t sunk in yet that the whole thing served only one purpose: to set up Jim Starlin’s The Death of the New Gods.

***Spoiler Alert (but I see it as saving you the trouble of reading this mess)**

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D2DVD REVIEW: Strange Thrills

What to do with Doctor Strange?

That’s a question Marvel creators have been asking ever since Steve Ditko left town with the original Eye of Agamotto. A lot of people gave it a shot over the past five decades, and, to be fair, several did a first-rate job. But they had a hard time recapturing the original magic.

This week, Marvel Studios released its [[[Doctor Strange]]] D2DVD, and, being a self-contained 75-minute effort, they took some liberties with the ever-evolving and sometimes contradictory comics versions. Overall, I think they did a good job.

This D2DVD is not quite a superhero effort; certainly, not as defined by their previous animated movies ([[[Ultimate Avengers]]] 1 and 2, [[[Iron Man]]]). They keep the most basic elements of the various origin stories and they don’t really alter anything of substance: Stephen Strange is still starts out as the egotistical, self-absorbed, money-grubbing surgeon supreme and within and hour and a quarter is fast-tracked to beatific altruistic sorcerer supreme. Which, if you think about it, is not a good thing for Strange’s master, The Ancient One.

Along the way, though, we see Strange’s journey to supremacy, we get to appreciate his frustrations and see him grow past his ego and get redeemed. Oh, and he gets to fight Mordo and Dormamuu and a boatload of demons along the way. Our Japanese friends could learn a thing or two from Doctor Strange’s approach to limited animation: Marvel took full advantage of the fluidity of the animation form to allow for the mystical poop to really pop.

Of course they made Wong politically correct, so I guess my desire for an all-Asian cliché-fest crossover with the Blackhawk’s Chop-Chop isn’t going to happen any time soon. And they even teased us with a sequel set-up.

The supplemental documentary is first-rate. Not as first-rate as the extras on the new [[[Popeye]]] box-set, but damn good. Their “[[[Origin of Doctor Strange]]]” delves fully into the comic book roots, showing off a lot of art, giving Stan Lee and (particularly) Steve Ditko their due, and interviewing the hell out of the always-eloquent Steve Englehart, whose own run as Doctor Strange writer (much of it with Frank Brunner as artist) was among the series’ very best.

Overall, a nice effort from supervising director Frank Paur and writer Greg Johnson. I suspect all but the most anal-retentive [[[Strange]]] fans will enjoy the experience.

TV REVIEW: Flash Gordon

083-flash-gordon-cohete-5337630Okay, I’ll get this over with real fast. Sci-Fi Channel’s new Flash Gordon show really sucks. I sat through the 90-minute pilot, and I sat through the next episode. No more. Life is too short.

Here’s the first tip-off: Flash Gordon creator Alex Raymond is not in the opening credits. Hell, he got better (far better) treatment in that campy movie from 1980. Say what you will about that movie, compared to this waste of time that movie was [[[Citizen Kane in Outer Space]]].

Second tip-off: No rocketships. Rocketships are not “dated.” In fact, we launched one into space with a whole bunch of people in it right when this show debuted. Doing Flash Gordon without rocketships is like doing The Lone Ranger without horses. Hi-yo, moccasins!

Third tip-off: They only refer to Dr. Zarkov by name once in the 90-minute pilot and once in the subsequent episode. That’s crazy. Dr. Zarkov is to Flash Gordon what Dr. Watson is to [[[Sherlock Holmes]]].

Mind you, if there were a real Hans Zarkov, he’d sue. The real Zarkov was a genius; this guy is a bumbling fool. The real Zarkov was driven mad by the fact that he could save the Earth from destruction but had no way to do it; once Flash appeared on the scene and they got to Mongo (in their rocketship!) he got better.

Fourth tip-off: No longer merciless, Ming is a dick. He’s about as threatening as [[[Garfield]]] after a place of lasagna. I understand they wanted to update the character – these guys should have taken a cue from the way Russell Davies updated The Master on Doctor Who. Ming wouldn’t even make it as a member of George Bush’s cabinet, and from the first (and for me, only) 150 minutes of the series, he’s not even that competent. Plus, he looks about seven weeks older than his daughter.

So here’s my question. Why the hell did these people pay King Features for the license? They could have saved themselves a bundle and called this limp and lame pile of fly-feed “Bill Jones.”

If you’re a fan of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon or of the 1930s serials, avoid this teevee waste like Chinese toothpaste.

Artwork copyright King Features Syndicate, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Shenanigans

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Yes, the title is “Shenanigans,” with quotation marks already in place. No, I don’t know why. It’s not a direct quote, there’s no place named Shenanigans in the story, and it doesn’t seem to be an ironic “air-quote,” either. (There’s more than one bar in this book that could easily have been named Shenanigans, but none of them actually are.) It’s just an annoying, unnecessary tic.

“Shenanigans” is pleasant but unexceptional, a frothy romantic comedy that I suspect started off as a screenplay and probably would have worked better in filmed form. It takes place in St. Louis, where our creepy main character, Holden, gets kicked out of his girlfriend’s apartment at Christmas-time for obsessively playing videogames instead of going out to dinner with her. I’m not sure how old he is; he seems to be a student, but we really don’t get a sense of his normal day-to-day life or a solid idea of what he does for a living. The one thing we see him doing seems like a college work-study program: teaching kids to play hockey. Although…he does seem to sponge off the women in his life, which may be a clue as to his lifestyle.

Holden meets a young woman named Casey, and moves in with her that night. (Help me out here: is that as weird and unrealistic as I think it is, or are twenty-somethings really that friendly these days?) They also sleep in the same bed the night they meet, but don’t have sex, which is just a bizarre combination, especially since the story takes pains to point out that they didn’t have sex. Between the scenes that we see, they drift into something like a normal boyfriend-girlfriend relationship (except for the fact that he’s sponging off her as he did with his last girlfriend), and presumably they start having sex at some point…though the story doesn’t feel the need to explain that point.

Then the story finally starts: Casey has been working as a waitress, but decides to start tutoring college students in math instead. Her qualifications: she’s really really good at mental arithmetic, and she’s totally hot. (No, seriously. There’s no sign that she has a math degree, or anything of that nature. So she seems to be coaching college students in, at best, high-school algebra. My opinion of the fine colleges of St. Louis is still diving as I type this.) Since she’s totally hot, all of her clients are horndog young men who think they’re going to score with her, so her tutoring sessions consist mostly of her edging away from them. She doesn’t seem to realize this, which I suppose makes her some sort of idiot savant…or maybe not a savant. Speaking of not realizing things, her advertisements are clearly based on those for prostitutes, which Holden instantly realized (well, he would, wouldn’t he?), but Casey just doesn’t see.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Notes for a War Story

In its original Italian form, Notes for a War Story won the 2005 Goscinny Prize for Best Script and was the Best Book of the Year for 2006 at the Angouleme comics festival, so I have to assume that it’s one of the very best European works of recent years. Which is unfortunate, since I found it only moderately successful.

It’s set in an unnamed European country, during an unnamed conflict among unspecified groups, in the vaguely recent past. All the non-specificity is meant to give it an aura of timelessness, or of dislocation, or something like that, but it left this reader feeling as if I were wandering about in a fog. Compared to the specificity and closely-observed detail of a book like Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde, Notes from a [[[War Story]]] is thin and ineffectual, unwilling to commit to being for anything, or against anything other than the very abstract idea of war.

The plot follows three young men – Giuliano, Christian, and Little Killer – who are scavenging in a region of small villages being bombed by enemy forces. They’re not in the armed forces, and they never encounter anything like regular armed forces, not even as much as seeing a bomber in the sky. They’re supposedly in the middle of a war, but they are actually seen in a mostly-depopulated landscape, drifting into gangsterhood.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Laika

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This graphic novel is pretty good just on its own terms, but it’s an excellent object lesson. If you know of anyone who thinks that comics are essentially limited in scope to brightly-clad folks punching each other with great vigor, this will help to expand their horizons. It’s the story of Laika, a Russian dog who was the first living creature from Earth deliberately sent outside the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s an impressively-researched story braiding a fictional back-story for Laika (and several other characters I believe are also fictionalized) with the story of the “Chief Designer” of the early Russian space program, Sergei Korolev. And all that is told in comics, and, I suspect, primarily aimed at the grade 6-12 audience.

I’m not familiar with Adadzis’s work, but the note on him in [[[Laika]]] calls him an editorial consultant who “creates words and pictures for a living and loves both equally.” According to his website, muck of his work has been for children, especially recently, though he did something called Millennium Fever (with Duncan Fegredo) for Vertigo in 1995 and [[[Children of the Voyager]]] (with Paul Johnson) for Marvel in 1993.

Laika is a dense book; we start off with a flashback to Korolev’s release from the gulag in 1939, stop briefly at the first successful Sputnik launch in 1957, and then dive back into a long account of the life of a dog. (Who, as we all can guess, eventually becomes Laika.) This graphic novel is about two hundred pages long, and each page has about ten small panels, in shifting grids with occasional snippets of white space. And there’s quite a lot of dialogue along the way, in what I’m tempted to call the Russian manner. It’s not a quick read by any means, and the panels can get quite cramped at times. It’s never difficult to read, but there is an awful lot here. Those who judge books by how much time they take to read should enjoy Laika.

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D2DVD REVIEW: The Film Crew

 

51yyhys0wyl-_aa240_-9001373Okay, I admit it. I’m still a fan of [[[Mystery Science Theater 3000]]], the long-running teevee series that featured four robots and a loser riffing on a couple hundred B-flicks… if you’re feeling particularly generous about that “B” part. Michael J. Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy were among the show’s writers and producers. They were also performers – Corbett with the eighth season, Murphy with second season. Nelson, who was head writer from the start, played odd parts for the first four seasons and took over the lead when creator Joel Hodgson left the show at the beginning of season five. The show ran from 1988 through 1999 and begat a feature film.

And I miss it a lot. Particularly after a presidential press conference.

So it was with missed emotions that I popped the first D2DVD by The Film Crew, [[[Hollywood After Dark]]], into my machine. This can’t possibly be as cool as Mystery Science Theater 3000, I thought. And I was only barely right. Nelson, Corbett and Murphy did what they do best: use a contrived reason to sit in a darkened theater and make jokes about a really horrible movie… but without the trademarked silhouette.

If the phrase “sexy Rue McClanahan” sounds like an oxymoron, Hollywood After Dark certainly provides the proof. It is perfectly horrible; it was made for Nelson, Corbett and Murphy to eviscerate. They were fully up to the task, and since the three were also the voices of the featured riffers in MST3K’s last three seasons, if you close your eyes it seems a lot like the original. They only have about half the number of writers, so the material isn’t quite as sharp.

The presentation was bisected by one studio bit, and here’s where I’m having a hard time shaking off MST3K. The ‘Bots had wonderfully wacky and occasionally evil personalities; the Film Crew enjoys its work and is perfectly fine with their environs. No tension, at least not in this first offering.

Shout! will be releasing three more Film Crew D2DVDs this year, and I suspect they’re already looking at their orders and deciding if there will be more. I have great confidence in the Film Crew, and Hollywood After Dark was a good if not great first offering. They will settle comfortably in their new roles.

I recommend this to my fellow MSTies. Yeah, there’s no ‘Bots. Deal with it.

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