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Martha Thomases Eats Worms

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More than three weeks ago, I twisted my knee somehow in a manner that causes it to continue to hurt. A lot. I happened to have a doctor’s appointment that day, and she told me to rest it, take anti-inflammatory medicine, and drink a lot of water.

Which I have. Well, “resting” is a relative term. It’s hard to rest one’s entire leg and still get around the city and do what needs to get done. I put a brace on it. Still hurts.

When I’m in pain like this, I can’t exercise. And when I can’t exercise, I lose my main opportunity think deep thoughts about comics or anything else. I just want to sit on the couch and <a href=”

worms.

Anyway, here’s some randomness. Remember, no one suffers like I do.

The New York Comic-Con has come and gone. I went for a few hours on Thursday, and even though it was the middle of a work-day, the place was so crowded that it was impossible to move anywhere. The line for the ladies room in the press area (which requires a special badge) was a half-hour long. I shudder to think what it was like on Saturday.

It was lovely to see my friends – as I left the brand-new subway station, on line to register, at booths, in artists’ alley – and I had a great conversation with the guy hyping The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore (which is awesome and you should be watching it). I didn’t get to any panels that day or any day because my knee throbbed just thinking about getting through the crowds that made the hallways impassable.

So I didn’t get to see this. I wish I had. This is the nerd experience I most crave. The rest of the throngs can go see stars log-roll each other at over-hyped TV and movie panels. Let me listen to Paul “The Frother” Krugman talk about Star Trek.

Last year I discovered the Crazy Eight Cartoon Festival and I had a great time. You can read my brilliant insights here. It’s happening again tomorrow. If you are in the New York area, I can’t recommend it highly enough. If I get back in time from my other nerd-quest this weekend, perhaps I’ll see you there.

Very few people have raved about about My Friend Dammer more than I have. I’ve given it away to dozens of people to show them the complex insights and emotions possible in the graphic story format. So you can imagine my excitement to get a galley copy of Derf Backderf’s new book, Trashed, in my Harvey Awards gift-bag.

Trashed is the story of a crew of garbage collectors in a small Ohio town, with lots of data about the environmental impact and long-term costs of our throwaway culture. Derf was a garbage collector a few decades ago and, though he says the story isn’t autobiographical, his experiences lend a gritty (and smelly and sticky) authenticity to his tale.

Although it’s not as emotionally engaging as Dammer, this book is still an amazing accomplishment. Backdoor presents not only an environmental education, but insights into the American class system that are all too rare in any medium. That he does it with humor and grace and affection makes it that much more impressive.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, my knee hurts and I need to yell at some kids to get off my lawn.

Note: I don’t have a lawn.

The Point Radio: CASUAL Is Comedy Served Up Dark

CASUAL is the new dark comedy produced by Jason Reitman exclusively for Hulu. We talk to series stars Tommy Dewey and Michaela Watkins about how thy walk the fine line between comedy and drama. Then meet Lizzie Velasquez, branded “the world’s ugliest woman” by an online bully who turned that into an inspiring new documentary called A BRAVE HEART.

Follow us here on Instagram or on Twitter here.

Tweeks Count Down Their Top 13 Halloweenie Movies (Part 1)

Halloween is our favorite holiday, so while we decorated the house this week, we decided to share our list of the 13 Best Not Scary Halloween Movies….because we don’t do scary. (This week’s Scream Queens had us sleeping in the same bed, which we think illustrates our level of scary show discomfort.)

We hope you don’t feel cheated, but we’re doling out our list the way mean moms dole out Halloween candy. We give you numbers 13 through 7 and a bonus mini-review of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which we just saw in the theater for it’s 40th Anniversary. And then next week we’ll be back with 6 through number 1 and probably some honorable mentions — because really, Halloween movies are the best!

Molly Jackson: NYCC is Bursting at the Seams

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Unless you are living completely off the geek grid (in which case, welcome back to civilization), you know that this past weekend was New York Comic Con. It was NYCC’s 10th year and over the past decade it has grown to one of the largest comic cons in the world.

I spent all four days at the convention, from open to close and occasionally even later. My one word summation is “OWWWWW.” Lots of walking and standing on concrete while carrying heavy books is equal to “OWWWWW” – and then some.

The biggest takeaway from NYCC for me is how big it has really become. It was wall to wall people. All ages, all groups just filling this too small venue for four days. In fact, it was the thing most people talked about. It replaced weather as the small talk of choice. Crowd management became a huge safety issue as the large mass of people made it almost impossible to move quickly.

With the growth comes a lot of perks though. More companies need to do something exciting to get your attention. DC Comics had Jim Lee signing three days in a row, Dark Horse had Frank Miller signing, and comiXology had paper copies of some digital only titles. Booths like DC and Image were telling people were to get their books signed by creators in Artist Alley. Some select panels were shown at the Hammerstein Ballroom a few blocks away. I predict as the area around the Javits convention center develops, we will see more and more convention events happens off-site.

Growth also meant most panels were packed. Some were insanely popular and some were just a good spot to sit down. (Chairs were at a premium all weekend.) I like to believe that this means a tired person got to test the waters on something new and maybe found a new book/tv show/website to try.

I remember when NYCC just used a portion of the Javits, and there might be a different show going on at the same time! Now the place is bursting at the seams with all the booths, creators, and cosplayers. Every year it morphs into something a little different but always bigger. Hopefully we can all keep up with the growth.

Dennis O’Neil: Keeping Up With The Avengers

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Saturday night and the old folks are not in Manhattan attending the convention. For many con goers, Saturday night is par-tay time, as it was for me in days of yore. But not now. If we were there we wouldn’t be partying and anyway, we weren’t there, so why the blather?

So: ordinary Saturday night. Does that mean it has to be boring? Wellll… Hey! I know, Let’s watch a movie on teevee – and don’t let me hear anyone say that senior citizens don’t know how to rip it loose! But which movie (and must life be one dilemma after another)? Hey, I know! Let’s pay homage to the fact that we’re not at the convention by watching… a superhero movie! Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?

But – darn these dilemmas – which superhero movie? We missed a number of films we might have been expected to see – pretty arid summer, cinema-wise – and so, with a bit of channel scouring, we should be able to find a satisfactory non-convention-attending entertainment.

And lo and behold, there it is, available at the on-demand channel, for less than half the price of one theater ticket; a movie we actually wanted to see but for some reason didn’t – The Avengers: Age of Ultron. Life is good.

But the movie…?

Let’s put it this way:

BANG BANG BOOM talk talk BANG BANG BOOM talk BANGEDY BOOMBOOM

Open on a protracted and noisy fight and then more of the same. Structurally, the film reminded me of the old kiddie matinees shown at neighborhood theaters, in which one plot/story was stretched over months by dividing it into chapters, each ending on a suspense hook to pull you back for the next installment. Here’s how it parsed: Protagonist encounters adversary in battles that end indecisively until one doesn’t and the good guy wins. If he’s a cowboy, maybe he rides off into the sunset.

As noted, the opening scene in Ultron is loud and busy. In this it echoes one of the not-quite-rules that my merry men and I observed when we were Batman’s bosses: open on action. But a comic book is not a movie and anyhow, our debut action didn’t eat up much print space. Oh, and it was quiet. Little mousey quiet. Quiet as ink on a page.

One of my worries – okay, a small worry – is that film folk believe that audiences have come to expect – demand? – large portions of pyrotechnics and noise and in providing it they neglect others storytelling techniques. (Already, unless I’m missing something, they don’t seem much concerned with rising action.)

But maybe I shouldn’t expect expert storytelling. Maybe these entertainments are really about spectacle, closer to the offerings of P.T. Barnum than those of William Shakespeare. And in that case… next time you’re seeing a superhero flick, be sure to pop for a 3-D screening. When it comes to spectacle…hey, can it ever be too splashy?

Box Office Democracy: The Final Girls

The Final Girls is a movie that came to a crossroad about what kind of movie it wanted to be, and instead of making the choice stayed at that point reading the signs until it wasted away. There’s a good madcap comedy in there spoofing the Friday the 13th series and slasher movies in general, but it feels a little superficial when you consider that horror parody has been a persistent genre over the last two decades. Likewise, there’s a good metaphor in here about getting over grief and moving on after the death of a loved one, and at times it feels like the film wants to be very powerful on this topic, but it only feels like it exists in the scenes specifically designed to deal with it. Without walking down either path quite far enough, we’re left with a journey that never feels complete.

There’s not a lot of new space to make jokes about slasher movies. Scream gave everyone a full rundown of many of the clichés, but the genre has been firmly entrenched in self-parody almost from the very beginning. To point out that there are specific character archetypes or that certain behaviors will often lead to character death isn’t clever anymore and it’s only fleetingly funny. The bits that do work usually work because one of the better actors is delivering the material. Adam DeVine is a transfixing comedic presence that makes bad jokes seem good and good jokes seem amazing. Alia Shawkat is similarly magnetic in her screen time and it’s unfortunate that her character seems to fade further and further in to the background as the movie progresses and it becomes clear that her relationship with the main character is not the important one.

The main character, Max, is perhaps the biggest source of my frustration. I’m not entirely clear if the problem is the part is underwritten or if Taissa Farmiga is just in a bit over her head, and it’s probably a little bit of both. Max is supposed to be consumed by grief, and while that might explain her tendency to drift through the events of the film it doesn’t make her feel like a compelling character. At the end of the film the only things I felt like I knew for sure about Max is that she was sad a lot, she has a crush on a boy, and she was capable of remembering a pop song from the 80s. Farmiga also feels like a less compelling screen presence than her co-stars, particularly Malin Akerman, DeVine, and Shawkat. More than anything else, the poor casting underscores that this is an indie movie, and is stuck in my craw as a great “what might have been” for the film.

I am probably being too harsh with The Final Girls, or at the very least underrating how pleasantly surprised I was that this wasn’t another horror movie parody that’s really about sex politics. I don’t mean that there isn’t a place for those kind of critiques, but I feel like they’ve been done to death and I’m a little tired of them from a narrative sense. Instead, The Final Girls is about grief and the struggles to move on from an important loss, and the decisions made around this theme are so much more clever than the jokes they string up to hold the plot segments apart. The looping events and paradoxical geography of the camp are something I’ve never seen used before to talk about the feelings one can get stuck in after the loss of a close family member. It felt so much fresher than some of the other stuff, and I wish that whoever made the choice thought that stuff was more interesting that another round of jokes about how alcohol is always around cursed campgrounds.

Mike Gold: Friendship

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Yeah, yeah. Another major convention, a huge mother called the “New York Comic Con.” Emily wrote about some of it yesterday and Martha will be talking about it on Friday and maybe Marc will do the same on Saturday – yep, Marc actually went to New York City while the Chicago Cubs were working their way towards the pennant. He’s a southsider, so I’ll give him a pass. Not sure John Ostrander will.

Ergo, there is no need for me to write about the show. All those folks, as well as ComicMix Utility Infielder Glenn Hauman and columnists Ed Catto, Molly Jackson and Bob Ingersoll, were there and I think all or most were actually on the Javits Center floor more than I was. Besides, if you’ve read my deathless prose long enough you could probably write my review yourself. All I’ll say is, the major difference between the New York Comic Con and the Black Hole of Calcutta is that the latter has free parking.

So, instead, I want to talk about friendship.

Missing from the floor was my friend Jamie Graham. He’s the guy who lent his name to the Graham Crackers chain of comic book shops, which is one of the larger chains around. I’ve known the guy since, roughly, the Year Gimmel. In addition to comics and our common antiquity, Jamie and I have a lot in common – we’re both Chicagoans, we’re both hockey fans, and we’re both mindlessly acerbic.

You’re probably thinking by the end of this column, Jamie is going to wind up dead. This is not the case, and that is not a spoiler alert.

Last Thursday, my daughter and fellow ComicMix staffer Adriane Nash received a call from Jamie saying he had a personal emergency and he would not be accompanying his crew to the New York show. Well, that sucks but, honestly, I saw him two weeks before at the Baltimore Comic Con and about two weeks before that at Chicago Wizard World, so missing him in New York wasn’t a catastrophe. I haven’t had the chance to connect with him since the show ended – after each four-day convention comes about three solid weeks of catch-up. Four, if you count catching up on your sleep.

I mentioned Jamie and I are hockey fans, as is Adriane. This is true, but Jamie’s dedication to the sport exceeds mine, and perhaps exceeds reason as well. If his enthusiasm was akin to Stumbo the Giant, then I, as a hockey fan, am at best the mayor of Tinytown. As such, my friend had tickets to the New York Islanders/Chicago Blackhawks game held last Friday night. The Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup last year, and the Islanders were having their home opener in their new home, Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. That means tickets were almost as hard to acquire as fresh air was at the New York Comic Con.

So I get a call from Adriane. She says Jamie has a present for us and he’s Fed-Exing it overnight for receipt Friday morning. OK, we both figured out what it probably was… as did you. While I was in Manhattan Friday hobnobbing with the elite, Adriane called to confirm our suspicions. She had the valued tickets in hand.

She was in Connecticut so she jumped into her car – named Brak, by the way – and I waddled out of my friend’s apartment in the city. Shortly thereafter, both of us were hit with a cloudburst of biblical proportions. We weren’t happy, but we would swim to the Barclays if we had to. For me, the arena was only a 25 minute subway ride away and, because subways run in a hole in the ground (as the song goes), the massive rain delayed me and about a billion other people waiting for the Lexington Avenue express. I got there, sweating profusely due to the heat of compressed humanity, an hour later. Hell, if I wanted to sweat I would have spent that time at NYCC.

The new arena is elegant with great sight lines but lousy bathroom placement (again; I could have stayed at NYCC for that). The game was great and the Islanders were sharp in their new home debut. I’m a Blackhawks fan, so you’ll forgive me if I point out that my team won – in overtime.

Jamie could have, please forgive the pun, hawked those tickets, probably for serious money. Nope. He sent them, at some expense, to Adriane and me. That, folks, is friendship.

I’ve said before that the best part of being in the comic book donut shop is that the folks in the adjoining seats are wonderful people. I have been blessed with a great, great many fine friendships, many quite enduring.

Like my friendship with Jamie Graham.

I love you, man. And I thank you.

NYCC 2015 Part I: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!

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So if you haven’t noticed, the Thursday of New York Comic Con has kiiiiiind of turned into “Turtles Day” for me, in the sense that Nickelodeon does their press and events for the current animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles show on that Thursday, and since I love Turtles and the current show, that’s where I’m at each year for whatever they offer.

This year, that means I had the pleasure of interviewing Ciro Nieli (Executive Producer/Director), Brandon Auman (Executive Producer/Head Writer), Hoon Lee (voice of Master Splinter), Rob Paulsen (voice of Donatello), and Greg Cipes (voice of Michelangelo) about the show. They dished about everything from the upcoming season to whether Raph and Mona Lisa are really going to maybe have babies in, like, Season 6 or something (heh). I also got to go to the rockin’ Turtles panel (in which cast and crew geeked out as much as we did when they realized their nameplates for the panel were made out of Megabloks and had TMNT character toys on them), and got to get a great Season 4 poster signed by the guys afterwards. And along with the aforementioned folks I interviewed, the panel also included Seth Green (Leonardo) and Eric Bauza (Tiger Claw), so we got to hear what they had to say as well, which was pretty cool! Not to mention there were lots of fun moments, such as <a href=”

Eric Bauza gave Rob Paulsen a “gift” onstage (heh), or when Greg Cipes got Sean Astin to say hi to all of us live on his phone (since Sean was running a marathon and couldn’t be in New York).

As you may know if you have been keeping up on the show, (Spoilers Ahead!), big changes have come to the Turtles world in the now-wrapped Season 3. Namely, Earth and everyone on it, except for the four Turtles, April, and Casey Jones, are gone. As Season 4 opens, the remaining adventurers are now zipping around space with an android named Fugitoid. (Who just happens to be voiced by David Tennant, who just happens to know a little bit about shows involving time travel, so, you know, maybe we’ll get the Earth baaaack? But in the meantime…)

I was a little skeptical about how Turtles in Space might go in the show going into Thursday; but after hearing what’s in store for the season during the interviews, and getting to see the Season 4 premiere episode, I’m totally on board. The first episode, in particular, was really fun: action-packed, with the excellent humor I’ve come to love, but also able to fit the setup for the season and the introduction of a vastly varied and fascinating new planet setting comfortably into one episode. Since the Turtles are apparently going to be bouncing around to all sorts of new planets during this season, that’s very promising.

The panel also revealed some new characters and voices that we’ll be seeing this season, including a race of “Salamandarians” which will include the character Sal Commander; Mona Lisa; the genie Wyrm; and a familiar 1987-style Krang (voiced by Pat Fraley). Other callbacks to the 1987 show include a “transdimentional” episode I’m totally psyched for, in which the 2012 show turtles encounter their 1987 counterparts in the 1987-style animated world, a CG world, and possibly a Mirage comic as well. We got to see a little clip of that work in progress, which was pretty rad; and learned that the original Turtles will be voiced by the original cast! I bet that was a trippy recording session for Rob Paulsen; but the bit we heard sounded great.

If you want to know more about what’s in store in Turtle-land, check out the interviews I did with <a href=”

Nieli and Rob Paulsen and with <a href=”

Cipes, Hoon Lee, and Brandon Auman. And if you want to see some great pics from the panel, check out my NYCC 2015 photo album.

Enjoy! And until next time: Turtle Power! Booyakabunga! And Servo Lectio!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

REVIEW The Rocky Horror Picture Show 40th Anniversary Celebration

rocky-horror-picture-show-40th-anniversary-blu-ray-e1444584586423-5512274It goes without saying that the 1970s cannot be recounted without examining certain cultural phenomena. The Godfather and star Wars certainly helped redefine filmmaking and both had major impact on pop culture. But then there was the growth of cult cinema, which endures to this day, and was sparked by the arrival of a 20th Century Fox flop, a failed adaptation of a British stage play that gained some cred when it moved to Los Angeles. Little did anyone suspect that when New York’s Waverly theater began screening The Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight, it would engage a generation.

I had heard of it soon after the screenings began but didn’t see it for the first time until my college roommate showed it in our dorm room so I could see and hear it for myself before it screened on campus with complete audience participation. I was taught which lines to repeat, when to throw toast, and the rest.

Thanks to home video, the film’s popularity has never waned as subsequent generations have discovered it and made it a part of their experience. So, here we are marking its anniversary with The Rocky Horror Picture Show 40-th Anniversary Celebration. 20th Century Home Entertainment has released it in a variety of formats but even its most basic single-disc Blu-ray edition is packed with wonderful stuff.

Richard O’Brien never expected his twisted homage to science fiction films would ever grow beyond the Royal Court Theater. Working with director Jim Sharman, they were clearly in sync and having fun. Anchored n stage by Tim Curry, the show gained a nice following, crossing the ocean to play at the Roxy Theater where core members of the film cast assembled, It was so enthusiastically received that a bidding war for film rights erupted.

The movie was shot cheaply and quickly, as befit its story, and opened in England on August 14, 1975 and at the UA Westwood in Los Angeles on September 26. Mainstream audiences and their critics didn’t get it. More, they didn’t like it and it was quickly yanked from its limited release. The Waverly began their screenings April 1, 1976 and finally, it found its intended audience.

In the current Entertainment Weekly, Curry (Dr. Frank N. Furter), Patricia Quinn (Magenta), Meat Loaf (Eddie), Barry Bostwick, and Susan Sarandon were reunited and in their reminiscences you got a sense of the organized chaos surrounding the production. It probably helped that Bostwick and Sarandon were new to the production, as were their characters Brad and Janet.

The story doesn’t always make sense but boy, does it look sharp and have a great soundtrack. The performances were spot on, with tongue just firmly enough in cheek so they got the joke and shared it with the audience. The combination of Sci-fi tropes, rock score, and amazing visuals helps keep it entertaining on repeat viewings. The high definition edition is crisp, matched with a strong audio track.

The single Blu-ray disc offers the film in in its USA and UK release versions along with Audio Commentary by O’Brien and Quinn. Most of the special features are repurposed from previous editions but is nice to have them here. Many of these can also be downloaded to your computer. These include:

  • Rocky-oke: Sing It!
  • Don’t Dream It, Be It: The Search for the 35th Anniversary Shadowcast, Part I
  • An-tic-i-pation: The Search for the 35th Anniversary Shadowcast, Part II
  • Mick Rock (A Photographer)
  • Mick Rock’s Picture Show (A Gallery)
  • A Few From The Vault
  • Outtakes
  • Alternate B&W Opening
  • Alternate Credit & Misprint Ending
  • “Rocky Horror Double Feature Video Show” (1995)
  • Beacon Theater, New York City (10th Anniversary)
  • Time Warp Music Video
  • The Midnight Experience
  • Pressbook & Poster Gallery

REVIEW: San Andreas

san-andreas-box-art-2d-e1444584443441-8866988We haven’t had a good old fashioned disaster movie in ages. The timing for San Andreas is interesting in that most Californians have stopped worrying about the big earthquake, focusing instead on the drought and/or the wildfires. But the seismologists have never stopped fretting that a quake, more devastating than the 1906 San Francisco event, is imminent. After several decades of “imminent” waiting, I can see how attention has wandered.

The Dwayne Johnson-led action film is a brutal reminder of just how much devastation is likely to result from such an earthquake. With CGI effects to enhance the imagery, this is a visual feast of destruction. And like every good epic in this genre, we follow the impossible efforts of one man not only to survive but to rescue his family despite the odds. As a result, the horrific reality is undercut by the muscular heroics. We know they’re going to nearly die but survive, the nuclear family intact, as San Francisco vanishes around them.

The movie, out now on Blu-ray from Warner Home Entertainment, is exciting and entertaining despite stretching credulity, As with so many of this films, the scenes of death and destruction are sometimes hard to watch and always prolonged beyond necessity. Whereas you could get to know the cast aboard the vessel trying to land in Airport or survive The Towering Inferno, the editing is much faster so it changes the pacing and tempo and you can get lost in the debris.

The story begins with the scientists at Cal Tech, led by Lawrence Hayes (Paul Giamatti). They believe they have perfected predicting quakes so of course, their equipment is immediately tested with the Bog One, which is bigger than most worst case scenarios imagine. We watch as Hoover Dam and Los Angeles get smashed as the wave heads north up the San Andreas Fault line.

Enter rescue helicopter pilot Ray Gaines (Johnson), abandoning his daughter Blake (Alexandra Daddario), to do his duty around Los Angeles. She accompanies her soon-to-be stepfather Daniel (Ioan Gruffudd) and her mother Emma (Carla Gugino) into and out of danger until dad has come to the rescue. They wind up being accompanied by Daniel’s sister Susan (Kylie Minogue) and things continue to move at a breathless clip.

You root for everyman Johnson to save the day time and again, because that’s all these movies want you to do. There’s no room for discussions over safety inadequacies or the general nature of human behavior. Instead, our core characters stand in for mankind and we munch our popcorn, hoping they survive without too much trouble.

Director Brad Peyton (Journey 2) keeps things moving along, sometimes too quickly, but rarely taking his eye off the family that gives the film a heart more recent efforts like 2112 skipped. We’re left reassured we will survive and rebuild.

The high definition transfer is excellent at 1080p, 2.40:1 so every bit of concrete and steel, every drop of water, and every fleck of blood is sharp. The Dolby TrueHD 7.1 lossless soundtrack is a peerless match the visuals making this one satisfying home viewing experience.

There are only a few special features included, which is surprising given the scope of the project. The Audio Commentary from Peyton offers up many a nugget of interesting information about the filmmaking process. Then there are some relatively short pieces starting with San Andreas: The Real Fault Line (6:23), as cast and crew recall shooting specific moments; Dwayne Johnson to the Rescue (9:24), as the star recounts making the film’s opening and closing sequences;  Scoring the Quake (6:13), with Composer Andrew Lockington; Deleted Scenes (4:40), a collection of eight scenes, with option commentary from Payton; a Gag Reel (1:22); and, a Stunt Reel (2:56).

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