Tweeks: Wynonna Earp Comics
This week Maddy talks all about Beau Smith’s Wynonna Earp comics — both old & new (there’s a blonde AND a brunette Wynonna… kind of like another favorite of hers, Gidget)!
Category: Reviews
Box Office Democracy: Split
Split is over a week old and that’s usually enough to disqualify a movie from coverage here. (This is the policy that keeps me from reviewing Blade 2 every six months in a vain attempt to force it in to the conversation for best superhero movie of all time.) But Split had a secret, and that secret didn’t get out until the movie had released and I had already watched the movie for last week. I’m going to talk about this secret right off the bat so if you have somehow avoided this piece of information I will tell you that Split is an excellent horror movie that might be a bit tame in the sheer terror aspects but is totally worth watching especially if you’ve liked M. Night Shyamalan’s works in the past. From here on it’s spoilers on; stop reading if you want that undisturbed experience.
We’ll wait for you below.
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Box Office Democracy: xXx: Return of Xander Cage
I was extremely excited when I walked out of the original xXx back in the summer of 2002. Finally, a spy film for my generation. Something that could mix international espionage and the X-Games aesthetic that seemed poised to take over the world. I’ve rewatched xXx recently and it does not hold up at all. Also, I never participated in any extreme sports or watched very much of any X-Games so I have no idea why embracing this culture appealed to me at all. In retrospect, the original xXx was an okay action movie with some fantastic costuming and an awful lot of dated references. 15 years later xXx: Return of Xander Cage is still trying to traffic in counter-culture hipness, but it doesn’t feel like anyone involved in the production has talked to a cool person or a youth in decades. Return of Xander Cage is jam-packed with the kind of disingenuous focus-grouped edginess the characters would claim to hate. Too bad they’re fictional and not writing this or any other better movies.
In Return of Xander Cage everyone who is part of the establishment is bad. I’m not against this general ethos, the establishment is generally a terrible thing— but the medium has to inform the message. This is a film made by a major studio, so when the burly special forces soldier who doesn’t care for Xander Cage and his alternative ways taunts him saying that he must love Red Bull and Mountain Dew, I can’t help but wonder if those companies paid for that placement. I see the two leads of these extreme spy teams being played by two actors with a combined age of 102 and I can’t help but think of that 30 Rock meme with Steve Buscemi pretending to be a high school student.
Return of Xander Cage could be so much more cool if it wasn’t so intent on telling me that it was cool all the time. (I don’t even want to get in to how 44 year-old Toni Collette is kind of made to look like an old crone next to her older male co-stars but it’s also bad, I just don’t want to be here all night.)
There’s also a sense that Return of Xander Cage is trying to capture some of the magic of Vin Diesel’s other, more successful franchise, The Fast and the Furious, but it’s not clear that anyone involved knows what made those work. They copied the big multicultural cast, they copied the never-ending banter, they copied the ambitious action sequence, and they copied the requirement of having a few party scenes full of beautiful people dancing to music. None of it works as well. Most of the supporting characters feel like quick thumbnail sketches instead of people, and for a movie that literally circumnavigates the world it feels rather small. There’s a secret sauce in the Fast and Furious movies and it might just be as simple as star power or sharper action choreography or even just familiarity with the universe, but those movies are just as far fetched and just as ridiculous and they work.
I’m usually not on a high horse about sequels or Hollywood running out of ideas, but this feels like a spot that should have gone to a new idea. Return of Xander Cage feels weighed down with the baggage of the two previous movies and I can’t imagine that enough people where clamoring for more xXx to necessitate this (and the box office results seem to back me up on that). There are a couple usable ideas here, and maybe on their own they could have blossomed in to something else but instead they’re just drowned out by the baggage of trying to live up to this X-Games early-2000s rebelliousness. Return of Xander Cage is the cinematic equivalent of the guy in his early 20s hanging around the park with high school kids— it isn’t making him seem cool and everyone there just kind of wishes he was doing something else.
REVIEW: Newsprints
Newsprints
By Ru Xu
208 pages, Scholastic Graphix, $12.99
A world eerily familiar to our own but not, a time of war between two neighboring nations, and a girl masquerading as a boy because she loves selling newspapers. Toss in some steampunk, some science fiction, some gender roles and identity issues, stir vigorously and you have Newsprints a refreshingly original graphic novel from Ru Xu.
Best known for her webcomic Saint for Rent (http://www.saintforrent.com/comic/the-cloverhouse-inn), the SCAD graduate moves from serialized storytelling to a done-in-one adventure that breezily moves along. Lavender Blue has come to work at the Bugle, living with her fellow newsies and keeping her sex a secret because, for some inexplicable reason, girls can’t sell newspapers.
On her website, Xu states, “I’m really excited about the first book because it explores a lot of eye-opening feelings I had toward fitting in while growing up, gender identity, and dealing with the expectations of adults. I got to draw a backdrop inspired by the early 20th century and dieselpunk,”
Adolescent Blue is content for now, although she is aware her body will betray her soon enough. She winds up meeting Jack, an inventor of some sort, working in secret. They become friends and she apprentices herself to him. As a result, he brings her with him on his travels which leads to her accidental meeting with the muffled figure who only names himself Crow. She warms to the odd figure and they spend time together but slowly, we learn, that Crow is a robot, a product of Jack’s intelligence and early use of Artificial Intelligence. He was a prototype for a war machine but he chose to leave his country Grimmaea for refuge in Nautilene.
There are chases, secrets learned, relationships altered, and the like before things reach its anticipated climax and resolution. Xu tackles lots of issues and themes here and for me one of keenest was her sense of betrayal when she comes to realize the truth is the first casualty of war. Gender politics comes into play with Blue but also with an adult, Jill, who comes to play a pivotal role.
It’s 1924 and there are phrases like AI that get used so this alternate reality isn’t totally divorced from our world but the worldbuilding is sketchy at best so we don’t understand why things are the way they are or what is at stake during the prolonged war. Blue, Jack, and Crow are the only characters to move beyond two dimensions which is shame since the others, Hector, the Mayor, and Jill among them, who could use some depth and complexity.
Visually, Xu’s work is minimalist with a strong sense of design. Still, the broad strokes and spare use of line means expressions can lack subtlety when called for. Sometimes figures are moving in a panel and you can’t quite tell what is happening. Xu fills the pages and paces things nicely, sparing with splash pages or complicated designs. Xu’s color, done with her brother Eric and Liz Fleming, does a nice job with a limited palette. In Saint for Rent, she has been very disciplined with color because she embeds GIFs to enhance the webcomic and the colors have to be harmonious. Here, she works with broader colors without getting garish, helping give us a sense this is not our world.
The 8-12 year olds this is aimed at will find plenty to like and hopefully read some things that gets to them to think a bit. This nice debut work shows plenty of promise for the future.
Tweeks Review March Book One by John Lewis
While we were off school for MLK Jr. Day, we decided to spend some time honoring the incredible Congressman John Lewis and his March graphic novel trilogy with a review of the first book & rebuke to some decidedly unpresidental tweets
Box Office Democracy: “Live By Night”
I’m sure everyone thought Live By Night was going to be a big deal— Ben Affleck directing his first film since Argo won Best Picture, and this time a crime story based on a novel by the same guy who wrote Mystic River. It feels like a sure thing; America loves prestige mafia stories— just ask Scorsese, Coppola, or Chase. Unfortunately, Live by Night isn’t quite like any of those, or rather, it’s too much like those and other movies that came before that. It never quite feels like an original story, and it collapses under the pressure to be something amazing so it never settles for being just good. It could have been a great good movie.
There’s so much going on in Live By Night, it’s an endless cavalcade of story and plot points, but I’m not sure it ever gets around to figuring out what it’s about. The strongest attempt it makes is that it’s about how entrenched power strives to keep down the less fortunate but it doesn’t try very hard to get that across— just a couple scenes and then in the climax it all seems to be a metaphor. The events aren’t compelling enough or, frankly, unique enough to make an impact on their own. Everything feels lifted from something else: a better gangster movie, a better gangster TV show, even an above average video game about being a criminal from 10 years ago. It’s a tired shtick, and while it can be done well it needs to have some kind of hook, a new take, or a transcendent performance, or something… and Live By Night just doesn’t have anything to make it special.
It might help if there were more characters in the film that mattered. Joe Coughlin (Affleck) matters, of course, the whole movie flows through him in his quest to, I don’t know, generally make Tampa Bay a worse place through criminal activity. Irving Figgis (Chris Cooper) matters too, he’s the police chief that makes deals with criminals and thinks himself above everything. We get to see both of those characters struggle and change, but everyone else in the film just sort of exists to move one or both of these characters through to their next thing. Elle Fanning is a delight in this movie, she plays a complicated character with a tour de force personal arc played to perfection, but her character doesn’t matter, she’s no more important than the casino Coughlin is trying to build, just another obstacle to overcome. It goes on like that— there are fine actors in this movie like Zoe Saldana and Chris Messina but they’re ultimately reduced to occasional maguffins doing accents.
Ben Affleck has acting, writing, directing and producing credits on Live By Night, so while film may be the ultimate collaborative medium it’s hard not to feel like this is on him. Ben Affleck the actor does a fine job (although accents continue to mostly elude him) but he’s let down by Ben Affleck the writer. The movie is based on a novel and I suppose it’s only sporting to give the benefit of the doubt that the source material was bad, but doesn’t that responsibility fall at least partially on Ben Affleck, producer? Director Ben Affleck must be credited for the cast delivering some standout performances, but with the exception of an early car chase there are no particularly compelling visual sequences, and it lacks the tension of The Town or Argo.
Maybe we need some sort of commission to review any new attempts to make gangster films—to monitor them to ensure that they add something worthwhile to the genre which has been mined so aggressively over the years. Live By Night had some nice moments, but if you put the DVD on my shelf next to The Godfather and Goodfellas it would never get picked up. (I don’t happen to own Goodfellas but you’ll have to take me at my word on this one.) Live By Night is an above average movie that demands to be compared to excellent movies, and it suffers for it.
Tweeks Review Amelie & Rent 20th Anniversary Tour
It was a big theatre weekend for us! We saw the new musical Amelie (starting Phillipa Soo!) at the Ahmanson Theatre before she heads off to Broadway and then saw the Rent 20th Anniversary tour as it started it’s trek across the US at the Segerstrom Center in Costa Mesa.
[editor’s note: check back tomorrow in this time slot for a BONUS EPISODE of Tweeks this week! –AN]
ComicMix Six: Box Office Democracy’s Worst Movies of 2016
Last time, I covered the best movies of 2016— and now it’s time for the flip side. Brace yourself.
#6: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice – In my top list I praised Captain America: Civil War for being a kind of triumphant pinnacle of fan service in comic book movies. Batman v Superman might well be the dark mirror of that idea: fan service run completely amok. Characters are crammed in this movie every which way along with vague concepts, half-formed ideas, and every frame of iconic superhero artwork Zack Snyder has ever seen. Batman v Superman is depressing both in tone and failed potential. The Superman that Snyder puts on the screen is the worst interpretation of the character I’ve ever seen, impulsive and violent without a trace of warmth. Only the moderately badass Wonder Woman sequences save this movie from higher placement on this list, and they desperately need to right this ship before they consider putting a Justice League movie on the screen.
#5: Allegiant – Allegiant is barely a movie at all. It’s supposed to be setting up for some grand finale, but it has so few plot points to actually dole out that we end up just endlessly spinning. There’s probably a way to do a movie like this in a better way, perhaps by diving deeply in to the characters or by some distracting world building, but even writing that I realize I’m talking about a filler episode of an hour-long TV show and not a feature film. Allegiant was a shallow cash grab by a cynical studio and they seem to have torpedoed the entire franchise with their greed. A more optimistic version of me hoped that this would be the end of splitting books in to multiple movies, but that doesn’t seem like it’s in the cards now that one Harry Potter reference book is poised to be turned in to five movies.
#4: Independence Day: Resurgence – I’m eagerly awaiting the other shoe on Independence Day: Resurgence to finally drop and to learn that the en tire movie was some sort of experiment in programming a computer to write a summer blockbuster. I would much rather that be the solution rather than a human being (or several teams of human beings as credited) sat down and wrote a movie that so transparently tried to tick every box on some sort of magical checklist. Sequel to a beloved film of the primary moviegoing populace’s childhood? Check. Jettisons the most expensive actor but brings up the character enough to try and get that secondhand rub? Check. Crucial character is Chinese to appeal to the essential audience there but don’t give her a big enough part to scare off the more xenophobic among the domestic audience? Check. Bigger badder explosions, damn the reduced emotional impact? Check. While it’s certainly possible a group of people made a movie this bad I would certainly prefer to find out it was a rogue AI trying to bring down humanity or something.
#3: The Angry Birds Movie – I was delighted by many animated movies. Two made my top six list and if we did ten over here at ComicMix I likely might have had space for two more. Children’s entertainment is at a fantastic place as most of the studios seem to have learned not to talk down to kids and to put effort in to their work in exchange for almost unheard of responses. The Angry Birds Movie is a movie that shows that not all lessons are learned by all people. Angry Birds is a barrage of ideas that presents no internal consistency or emotional stakes. Everything is 10 seconds away from being a poop joke and in 2016 that simply isn’t good enough. The fact that the movie ends with an endlessly long sequence reacting the mobile phone game everyone was sick of five years ago Is the final nail in the coffin.
#2: Sausage Party – Sausage Party would be a solidly above average sketch on Funny or Die if it ran for seven minutes. They have an interesting premise, three mediocre jokes, and an hour and a half of garbage. There are times when it’s offensive and that’s awful, but also there are interminable stretches when it’s just unbelievably boring. I felt like Sausage Party was holding me hostage in the theater until they had a chance to spit out every terrible idea they had, culminating in the orgy sequence that felt more like a desperate attempt to seem edgy than to blow off any narrative or comedic steam.
#1: Norm of the North – I have never seen a movie in the theaters as bad as Norm of the North. Honestly, that might be giving it too much credit as it certainly has to be in the conversation with cult classics of terrible cinema like The Room and Troll 2 when we discuss the worst movies ever made. It’s an incomprehensible film that changes narrative focus randomly and without justification and seems to just be hoping we don’t notice. There isn’t a single joke that hit with me. The character design and animation are so bad that I have to believe that dozens of student films this year looked better. I’m angry that someone paid for Norm of the North to get made while so many talented people must be struggling to get by in the animation industry. It’s offensive that this exists in the same medium as Frozen or Zootopia or even Shrek. Norm of the North is the worst of the animation industry, the film industry, and the worst piece of entertainment I’ve ever seen marketed to children.
REVIEW: The Accountant
Director Gavin O’Connor calls The Accountant a puzzle film because there are multiple dimensions to just about every character in this action drama. The film, out Tuesday from Warner Home Entertainment, is a largely satisfying character study with more than its necessary quota of gunfire and mayhem,
Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck) is on the Autism spectrum and through flashbacks, we learn that his parents were at a loss of how to deal with him, leading to their divorce. Their father (Robert C. Treveiler), a decorated Special Forces PSYOP Officer, is left to raise his sons as he saw fit, which meant extensive military and martial arts training around the world. As they grew up, though, the boys went their separate ways and Christian used his gifts to become a forensic accountant for the Underworld. Known only as the Accountant, he was a bane to law enforcement all over but none more so than Detective Raymond King (J.K. Simmons), who wants this man found before his retirement. He hands the assignment to Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), who proves tenacious and doggedly methodical in her investigation.
Wolff takes on a new client, Lamar Blackburn (John Lithgow), CEO of Living Robotics who has been told by one of his staff, Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick), that there may be financial irregularities. Quickly, Christian finds $61 million has been embezzled, probably by CFO Ed Chillton (Andy Umberger) who dies of a suspected insulin overdose. Christian is left dissatisfied that he is quickly dismissed but his life unravels when it’s clear he and Dana are targeted for death.
The movie kicks into a higher gear from that point on as Christian, unaccustomed to having personal attachments as an adult, finds himself yearning to find a way to connect with Dana, all the while continuing his investigation. We then have a cat and mouse game between Christian and the assassin (Jon Bernthal) and Christian and Medina. Throughout, we get the backstory slowly filled in and astute viewers can begin to connect various dots leading to some fun exchanges during the climax.
No one is entirely as they seem, which is one of the joys found in Bill Dubuque’s script. This applies to just about every character from art major turned accountant Dana to the assassin being more than a hired gun. As a result, this rises above your standard crime story or personal drama. The climax, set in Blackburn’s home, is overdone and overlong marring an otherwise very enjoyable film.
The high definition transfer and Dolby soundtrack are both excellent, making for a fine home viewing experience. The film can be found in 4K or your typical combo pack (Blu-ray, DVD, Digital HD).
Unfortunately, we are given three perfunctory special features: Inside the Man (10:36), Behavioral Science (8:02), and The Accountant in Action (7:12) where the cast and crew extol their efforts. The middle piece is the most interesting as a doctor talks about how Affleck and others worked with people on the spectrum in order to hone their performances and do them justice.
ComicMix Six: Box Office Democracy’s Top Six Movies of 2016
6. Captain America: Civil War – There are so many fantastic moments in Civil War. The easy one is the fight at the airport where we finally get that big super hero battle we’ve seen in a thousand different comic books (and acted out with action figures at least that many times) put on the silver screen in all its glory. The three-way fight at the end might be even better because it’s a crisp action beat full of emotion that is rare anywhere these days, and is honestly pretty uncommon even in print. It’s not a perfect movie, but it might be the perfect application of fan service. Every other Marvel movie has to either top this in terms of fan service (and they honestly probably shouldn’t try) or do something new and exciting. The gauntlet has been thrown down (this is not an Infinity Gauntlet pun I swear).
5. Moana – This is the pick I am most concerned is recency bias messing with me. I saw Moana recently, and while it completely delighted me, I’m concerned in a few years time I’ll look back at this pick and think it should have been The Accountant or Kubo and the Two Strings or really anything else. I loved Moana, it’s a sweet movie with a good heart, a great set of characters, and a soundtrack that I can’t stop humming to myself. When we spend the next two months marching towards the Oscars falling over ourselves to talk about what a historical accomplishment La La Land is, I hope people remember it wasn’t even the best musical released within two weeks of its release date.
4. Rogue One – This might seem a little high for a movie I reviewed two weeks ago and was kind of hard on but while it was easy to harp on the stuff that didn’t quite work I’m still quite fond of the stuff that did. Rogue One brings a bunch of new stuff to the action vocabulary of the franchise and while it might not have wowed us as an independent sci-fi film, as a Star Wars film it feels like a revelation. There’s an honest-to-goodness war happening in Rogue One for the first time in eight movies with “War” in the title. Weak central characters may keep Rogue One from joining the top tier but in a soft year for movies overall a compelling B+ can make the top list.
3. Zootopia – Zootopia is a great movie. It’s funny, touching, and with a decent bit of intricate noir-inspired plotting for a kids movie. It is worthy of being a standard bearer in the Disney Revival era and standing next to Frozen and Wreck-it-Ralph. That would probably be enough to get it on this list but what makes me actually proud is that Disney decided to use their giant influence on the youth of America and make a movie about institutionalized prejudice. They’ve done “don’t judge a book by its cover” movies before but Zootopia is about how the whole system can be against people because of what they look like and that makes it a more special movie and one that I would be proud to show my own children.
2. The Nice Guys – I did not review The Nice Guys for ComicMix this year (I watched The Angry Birds Movie that week) and it’s rare I go see a new release movie on my own anymore— but for Shane Black I was willing to do it and it was worth it. The Nice Guys is very funny, certainly the best comedy of the year, but more than that it was so inescapably fun. That’s a strange thing to say about a movie that is sort of about a string of murders in the seedy world of the 1970s porn industry. The chemistry between Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe is delightful— I would watch that pair do seven buddy movies like Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. I think a premium cable network should commission a junior detective show staring the daughter character. I want to live in the world of The Nice Guys as much as I can, and that’s such a fantastic thing to get from a movie.
1. Arrival – For the second year in a row my top movie of the year is a non-franchise science fiction film with a third act that’s a little out of left field. I guess we all have a type. Arrival is a movie that establishes a high degree of difficulty with its concept and then crafts a simply perfect film to go with it. It’s tense and thought provoking and beautiful and cripplingly sad. I went in to Arrival with no idea what I was getting or what to expect and then spent the next three weeks recommending it to literally every person I spoke to. In 2017 I would consider myself beyond lucky if I saw another movie that completely delights me like Arrival did; I would settle for the new Blade Runner being a passable attempt.
