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Monday Mix-Up: The Midichlorian Rhapsody

  • News
  • September 13, 2010

Hey there, kids! Remember when Star Wars was awesome? Yeah, we do too. Then ole’ George fired up his bank of super computers, “wrote” a script, and here we are years later still trying to figure out what happened to the Star Wars of our youth. But, prequels be damned! Give the credit to the YouTube viral nation, for spawning an amazing creation that’ll melt that polar ice cap you have in your heart when you hear the word… midichlorian.

Well, the video vanguards have put together a mix-up of Star Wars saga of one troubled youth, and married it with “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Blend it well, add an umbrella and slice of pineapple and you get Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff’s masterpiece, the Midichlorian Rhapsody.

MOONSTONE MONDAY IS HERE!!

  • News
  • September 13, 2010

Welcome once again to MOONSTONE MONDAY, a spotlight on one of the most prolific modern publishers in the Pulp genre!  Interviews abound today from writers and staff involved in Moonstone’s comic line RETURN OF THE ORIGINALS!!! Our Featured Interview is Moonstone’s Main Man, JOE GENTILE!!! Click on the Interview tab and read words from Win Scott Eckert, Tim Lasiuta, Howard Hopkins, Eric Fein, and Aaron Shaps!  Also check out Barry Reese’s latest column for a tip of the hat to Moonstone on its handling of a classic character!  And check back in this evening for Reviews, Reviews, Reviews!!! All on ALL PULP and MOONSTONE MONDAYS!!

Review: ‘Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time’

I found myself interested in seeing Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
entirely based on the trailer, and the engaging banter between Jake Gyllenhaal and Gemma Arterton. Not being a game player, I had no frame of reference and therefore no preconceived notions when I sat down to watch the Disney production.  The visuals, largely CGI-generated, are enticing, with enough period costuming and countless extras to make it feel like a timeless Persia of story and legend.

The movie was considered a disappointment, opening weakly and garnering mixed reviews. Now, Disney Home Entertainment is releasing the film Tuesday as a single-disc Blu-ray or a combo pack. Gyllenhaal’s acrobatics makes it clear he would have been an excellent replacement for Toby Maguire in the second [[[Spider-Man]]] film, as he leaps, jumps, and acrobatically performs as Prince Dastan. While he does not at all look Persian, he also is the most empathic member of the cast, constantly looking at people with gentle eyes.

An orphan whose bravery impressed the King, he was taken into the palace and made a brother to the King’s sons. As we open the film, they have been manipulated to attack Alamut to end their treachery. Dastan, though, discovers Princess Tamnia (Arterton), attempting to hide a special dagger. From that point on, the story becomes a standard high-octane adventure story mixed with the Princess’ spiritual responsibilities. Of course, the twin themes mesh into a noisy climax set at the Hourglass of the world, or whatever it’s called.

The film is populated with stock types, the wise father, treacherous Uncle (Ben Kingsley, phoning it in), cannon fodder brothers — Tus (Richard Coyle) and Garsiv (Toby Kebbell) — and comic relief in the form of a gambler (Alfred Molina) who rails against taxes. Dastan’s greatest obstacle seems to be surviving the central casting figures to defeat the leader of the Hassansins in an overly drawn out set piece.

All the banter that appealed in the trailer was never expanded upon or deepened in the actual film and Tamina rarely acts like a princess or the keeper of a legendary trust. She certainly cowers well, though.

Director Mike Newell seemed to go out of his way to give us anything fresh and original, so scenes were reminiscent of many other genre features or even other video games. None of the characters rise above their roles so the end result is a mediocre popcorn experience.

On blu-ray, the film looks lovely, especially the exterior settings of the various kingdoms. This is one of the strongest video transfers I‘ve seen in a while. The single blu-ray contains one extra: a 1:30 deleted scene while the version in the combo pack also comes with the CineExplore feature. The Sands of Time offers up about two hours of extra material, some 40 behind-the-scenes tidbits about how the film was constructed. The annoying aspect, though, is that you have to literally sit through the film and look for a dagger icon, which triggers that moment’s video tidbit. There’s no other way to access it as there should be which makes it quite vexing. The standard DVD in the combo pack contains the obligatory Making Of featurette, which reuses much of the same material.

Review: ‘Star Trek the Original Series 365’

star-trek-365-cover-7408359Star Trek: The Original Series 365

By Paula M. Block with Terry J. Erdmann
744 Pages, Abrams, $29.95

Just in time for the television icon’s 44th birthday and your Christmas list, Abrams adds to their delightful 365 library with [[[Star Trek]]] the Original Series. Let me state upfront that co-authors Paula Block and Terry Erdmann are friends and colleagues of mine but I cannot imagine any duo better suited to select the images and write the accompanying text for this volume.

Every episode and the original pilot are covered in this book with a nice design element with the page numbers colored to denote each season. The paper stock allows for strong color photography reproduction and even if you’ve seen many of these pictures before, you have not seen them this sharp.

Star Trek may be the most exhaustively covered prime time television series in history so the question immediately becomes, do I need this book? Well, completists certainly need it, but trust me, you want this. The authors take the best known stories regarding the series’ creation and production and cover them here, plus additional tidbits even we grizzled veterans might not have known. Visually, there are some personal pictures people involved in the series provided the book along with rare production drawings and images. One of the new images is one of Spock and Carol Burnett from [[[The Carol Burnett Show]]], an appearance I never knew about.

Each episode is recapped along with a few pages discussing stories regarding its creation or filming. Obviously, we can quibble over which ones got short-shrift (“[[[Whom Gods Destroy]]]” needed a picture of Yvonne Craig, for example) but the information brings some fresh perspectives. Threads from episodes that played out in the features or subsequent series or even novels are covered.

Paula and Terry do an admirable job admitting which episodes worked and which ones didn’t (and why) while only giving you a flash of the dirty laundry that some the books covered in greater detail. If anything, alluding to but not naming Fred Freiberger as the producer who let Star Trek deteriorate in its final season was an oversight.

Throughout, we learn biographical material on much of the cast but better, the spotlight is shared with the production crew from production designer Matt Jeffries to prop genius Wah Chang,

The book also embraces the fan base that kept the show alive for a third season and beyond. Bjo Trimble gets her due her along with the earliest of the fanzines and the final pages are devoted to the birth of the conventions and merchandise surrounding the series. Its cultural impact is also covered with the first space shuttle and the restoration of the 11-foot long model now on display at the Smithsonian.

Given Paula’s 19 year tenure working as publishing director for the consumer products department at Paramount/CBS, she certainly knew where to look for graphics. After combing through the licensing department’s archives for stock shots (a library she helped create!), she cast a wider net which gives the book a nice visual variety. Given the show was produced at a time extensive graphics were not maintained and licensing was usually an afterthought, the fact that she found over 365 good images is a testament. The book even went to the expense of original photography, shooting collector Gerald Gurian’s original series props.

This all-in-one volume is the only book you need in a newcomer’s Star Trek library and it is a most welcome addition to our groaning shelves of Star Trek memorabilia.

Nine years on, I am hereby declaring it’s okay to watch this trailer again

No, we aren’t going to forget– but we aren’t going to let it paralyze us any longer either, or keep us from being kind.

If you feel like paying your respects, go watch 110 Stories. Or give a pint of blood today. Or help a scout troop. Give two Korans for every one that’s burned. Or just build something. Illegitimis non carborundum.

‘MAD’ Comes to Cartoon Network

  • News
  • September 10, 2010

alfred-3-2155511For those who missed it (including us, to be honest), on Labor Day, a funny thing happened; at 8:30 PM, Cartoon Network aired a ‘MAD‘  cartoon. And guess what? It wasn’t a one-time fluke! Our friends over at HeroComplex snagged the new animated sketch show’s producers Mark Marek (of Crank Yankers fame) and ‘Emmy winner’ Kevin Shinick (of Robot Chicken) and sat them down for an interview. For those who are too lazy to click that link and read their awesome interview, allow us to give you the 411:

The show is a 15 minute sketch cartoon show meant to carry the programming of Cartoon Network’s normal schedule to it’s [ironically bumpered] Adult Swim block of shows. Taking a ‘film festival’ approach to presentation, the MAD cartoon show will feature short cartoon sketches in a variety of styles. Mimicking the work and look of long time MAD contributors like Sergio Aragonés, the late Don Martin, and Al Jaffee, as well as including anything animated ranging from photo montages, flash animation, to stop motion sketches all in a single episode. Crediting the writing to “the Usual Gang of Idiots” means the material featured will provide wonderfully skewed takes on current events… targeting an audience that’ll range from the ‘kiddies about to say goodnight’ crowd to the ‘college frat kids just waking up’ demographic.

The show comes as a welcome surprise, as the last “MAD” penned show, Fox’s MADtv did little to take the real MAD brand to the masses. For those who tried to forget, we implore you to recoil in horror as you remember that the show provided the world with a sub-SNL quality sketch show with even more annoying repetitive characters (The UPS guy! Ms. Swan!), and literally no material ever gleaned from the pages of the long-running magazine. OK, that’s a bit of a lie. The show did feature a ‘Spy vs. Spy” cartoon, but it was cut after the second season, we assume because the average Fox viewer at the time was too confused by the high brow humor and subtle racial undertones of ‘Spy vs. Spy’.

Well, let’s wash our minds of that dreck, and check out ‘MAD’ on Cartoon Network… Mondays at 8:30 CST. I mean, if the show is as good as we think it’ll be, dare we say it… “What, Me Worry?”

Check out Cartoon Network for a short sneak preview.

Painting the Pulps-Interview with David Burton

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  • September 10, 2010

Artist David Burton has a special place in his heart for painting scenes and characters from classic pulp fiction.  Learn from his interview his technique of working on pulp art, his favorite characters, and the reasons he has a passion for this medium!  Click on the INTERVIEWS tab and enjoy the full conversation!

Review: ‘A Scanner Darkly’

  • Uncategorized
  • September 10, 2010

Rarely are Philip K. Dick’s stories appealing and accessible to mass audiences. You need fights and things blowing up and Arnold Schwarzenegger to really attract a crowd because the thought-provoking subject matter doesn’t always translate well from the printed page. As a result, it was a major mistake to release [[[A Scanner Darkly]]] on July 7, 2006, in the midst of the summer blockbuster season. The movie was certainly appealingly cast and was nicely marketed, but it opened small, never caught on and vanished from the public discourse. Instead, its competition the same weekend was the seasonal popcorn favorite [[[Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest]]].

And that’s a shame because in its own way, the movie is a well-made antidrug film whose message is told in a way its target audience might hear. After all, who could be hotter and hipper than Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey, Jr., and Woody Harrelson? Reeves was just coming off [[[The Matrix]]] trilogy so was a major star while people always liked Downey despite his personal battles with addiction.

Thankfully, the movie was rushed onto DVD that year and now, Warner Home Video has given us a crisp, swell-looking Blu-ray edition. One of the odder choices made by screenwriter and director Richard Linklater was to film his talented cast then rotoscope the entire feature. On the one hand, you might miss seeing the real actors but on the other, it also allowed the animators to play with reality just enough to further the story’s message. As we learn in “[[[The Weight of the Line: Animation Tales]]]”, the actors actually broadened their performances to give the animators something to work with and that also helps given the drug-induced state most of them live in.

In a near future, the hyper-addictive Substance D has become the drug of choice and undercover cop Reeves is sent into the sub-culture to make arrests and stop the supply. Wearing a camouflage suit that perpetually alters the personal traits of the wearer, Reeves goes about his job until he encounters a group of addicted misfits — Harrelson, Downey, Winona Ryder & Rory Cochrane. As we learn who these people are, we descend into their drug-haze which is seen by increasing paranoia and inability to think rationally.

Linklater wisely gathered his cast together for two weeks of rehearsal so they could become a cohesive acting troupe before letting becoming the druggies. Better, he let them modify and add to his script. Downey, for example, converted his lines into run-on sentences which informed his quirky performance while Reeves annotated the novel the film is based on.

It has been said that Dick wrote this work based on elements of his own life and one of his themes is the role of government in dealing with personal choice in taking the drugs. In adapting the work, Linklater twists and turns the events so it actually might require more than one viewing. Thankfully, the movie is so well translated to Blu-ray this will be more pleasure than chore.

The extras from the original DVD mostly remain, including the so-so commentary from Linklater, Reeves, Dick’s daughter Isa Dick Hackett, Producer Tommy Palloton and Dick historian/novelist Jonathan Lethem. “Weight” is a lengthy and fascinating look at the rotoscoping process and why it took twice as long as anticipated. Oddly missing is “One Summer in Austin: The Story of Filming A Scanner Darkly” which was a making of featurette.

Spider-Man The Musical Sneak Preview on GMA – UPDATED

  • News
  • September 10, 2010

Spidey-Fans, make sure you’re up Friday morning for a chance to sneak a peek at the upcoming Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark on Good Morning America. The musical, which is rumored to be one of the priciest to swing into the Foxwoods Theatre, opens November 15. Lucky for all us musical theater geeks, director Julie Taymor and Spidey himself, Reeve Carney, will bring a solo song to GMA via a performance at the Hudson Theater, with fans invited to come down for the free show. We television viewers will enjoy a post-performance interview with the director and the authors of the music and lyrics, Bono and The Edge. Word has it that aside from this musical, both men dabble in rock and roll in a quartet by the name of U2.

While most comic fans are skeptical of their favorite web-spinning hero spinning songs and soliloquies on the Broadway stage, stranger things have become a success. Lest we forget, the Evil Dead Musical was damn good. So, before we light our torches, let’s give the ol’ webhead a chance to sing his spandex off.

UPDATE: So, we watched the telecast, action figure firmly placed in our palms, ready to watch our hero make his way to the stage. Would it be webtastic or a kill a little bit of our soul, like One More Day? Let’s let some pasty white people wax poetic first:

A “pop-up book” set? Those costumes? The Swiss Miss? Is this some kind of cruel joke? Is Norman Osbourne financing this play in hopes of murdering the wall-crawler on the stage? Our high hopes haven’t been crushed this hard since the dance sequence of Spider-Man 3: Attack of Emo Parker. And to put the final nail in the coffin? How about a song from the show:

Let’s be honest here. The song is actually catchy. And because it’s being performed with a rock band, with absolutely no context to the final play, we’ve no idea how terrible this will be once it’s sewn into the “pop-up book” scenery and gaudy costumes. Kudos to Bono and The Edge for writing a catchy rock song (a feat that shouldn’t be that hard, given their 20+ years doing it), but frankly we’re scared for the final product. A lanky rock singer running around in a body sock, whilst a cast of dancing, prancing chorusmen flail about over a rock-and-roll score? Someone give us a copy of the “Death of Gwen Stacy” so we can recall the last time Spider-Man was worth our fanfare.

Talking Games and Movies with Jordan Mechner

  • News
  • September 10, 2010

Jordan Mechner’s Prince of Persia has been an acclaimed video game and he is one of the fortunate creators to be intimately involved in the adaptation from game to feature film. Mechner managed to write the screen adaptation, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Gemma Arterton. The Disney feature was released to middling reviews and so-so box office in May and comes to home video tomorrow. Disney provided us with this conversation.

QUESTION: What were your feelings when you finally saw the film?

JORDAN MECHNER: Firstly, the original Prince of Persia was a character 40 pixels high on the Apple II screen, running and jumping. The technology at the time was quite primitive, I think in my mind I imagined a much grander spectacle, and to see Jake [Gyllenhaal] in the best shape of his life running around the rooftops of Morocco and doing parkour and all this stuff was more than I could imagine.

QUESTION:  What initially drew you to the setting of Ancient Persia? And how does that culture and mythology inspire you?

JORDAN MECHNER: I was inspired 25 years ago to make the game really by the tales of the Arabian Nights, and by old Persian legends like the Shahnameh, the Persian Book of Kings. And also those great old Hollywood swashbuckling movies like the 1940 Thief of Baghdad, by Alexander Korda.  As a kid I must have heard those stories, the storybook versions are in all of our cultural DNA. We know of that world without really knowing exactly where or when we first heard it.

QUESTION:  How did you start the world of Prince of Persia ?

JORDAN MECHNER: You go back to 1985 when I was right out of college and I took my brother down to the parking lot across the street from the high school. He was in a pair of baggy trousers and I had him run and jump and climb and fall down and I video-taped him doing these moves. Then I set about the three year process of bringing these animations into the computer and that was the first Prince of Persia . (more…)

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