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Box Office Democracy: Home

  • News
  • April 1, 2015

The epigraph on the second episode of the HBO series The Wire reads “You cannot lose if you do not play” which is a quote that really epitomizes the world view of the more entrenched characters on that show, they don’t believe in making waves, even to make things better, because they prefer the stability of the status quo. I worry that the people responsible for Home saw that quote and took it to heart in all the wrong ways because they have produced one of the safest, least ambitious movies I’ve ever seen. Home is less a piece of art and more a survey of focus groups and Q ratings with a heavy influence from a room full of executives free-associating with the phrase “what do kids think is funny?” written on a white board.

When I reviewed The Imitation Game I criticized Benedict Cumberbatch for a performance that I thought was one-third Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory and if only I could go back in time and tell myself to savor that performance. Jim Parsons plays the lead, an alien named Oh, and plays it in a way that if it weren’t for his screwy alien grammar you could probably convince me was recompiled dialogue directly from his show. It’s not that that character can’t work or that I never find it funny, far from it honestly, but if I wanted to hear Jim Parsons take things too literally, not understand typical human behavior, and embarrass himself in front of people he thinks are far beneath him I could do it at home on my television for free. There’s very little new he’s bringing to the table as an actor except for an accelerated story arc and way of speaking that feels like the Boovs learned English from lolcats.

Rihanna stars opposite Parsons as the infuriatingly named Gratuity “Tip” Tucci, a name I sincerely hope no one in the real world has because it’s just terrible. It helps that they cast Jennifer Lopez as her mom because it sort of seems within the realm of possibility that she would name her kid something like that. Rihanna does a passable job as a voice artist but she doesn’t do anything that ever lets you forget it’s Rihanna talking. It becomes especially unsettling when she turns on a radio at one point to teach Oh about music and it plays a Rihanna song, sung in basically the same voice the character talks in and no one brings it up or cares. Hiring honest-to-goodness voice actors would go a long way. Steve Martin is delightful in a rather small part as the leader of the aliens and I have now mentioned all but one of the credited voice actors in the movie in this paragraph.

Home simply feels like a movie with no effort exerted at any point. The script is good enough, funny but not really funny, passably suspenseful and emotional but not memorable in any way, uplifting but with no clear moral. The animation is at about the baseline for a modern animated film, it helps a lot that they remove all the humans from earth early in the film as it explains away their painfully static backgrounds. One of their big deal set pieces animation-wise is a swimming scene through the ocean at night, so it’s never quite as delightful as a Pixar film or even the other, more ambitious Dreamworks Animation projects like How to Train Your Dragon but it’s not the dreck that was the Ice Age franchise or anything. Home is a movie that a child would sit through happily and probably wouldn’t love enough to demand all of the toys afterward. There’s a place for movies like this but it’s the same kind of place as October horror movies and low-tier summer action movies. It’s a movie that wants to find an audience not by being special but just by showing up.

Mike Gold: Roseanne Roseannadanna Was Right!

“It just goes to show ya, it’s always something. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”

Deathless words from the late Roseanne Roseannadanna. And, as the saying goes, truer words were never spoken. Today’s column almost didn’t happen, and I’m writing this so late that it’s possible my editor won’t be able to take a whack at it.

Yes, I am a firm believer in people not editing themselves. Even the editor-in-chief gets edited. Of course in that situation the EIC becomes just another freelancer, and freelancers know all the tricks of getting stuff past their editor. The most effective way is to turn in your stuff so late that the editor can’t get to it. Unfortunately, assistant editor Adriane Nash knows that stunt. Nonetheless, all the mistakes and typos herein today are the writer’s, and I’m mostly using only nine fingers so give me a break.

You might recall that last year at roughly this time I shattered all the bones from my shoulder down to almost my elbow, resulting in bionic replacements. This time around, I fucked up less dramatically but more whimsically. The bones in the middle finger of my right hand somehow got screwed up and for the last couple of months I stoically dealt with the pain and discomfort until I decided that stoicism sucks. So Monday I went to the doctor who would decide if I needed to be cut up or just given a shot. Together, we decided to give the shot a shot; we could always cut me up later.

That’s when he warned me the shot would cause agonizing pain for about 30 seconds. Evidently, the last guy who got this shot from him loudly and repeatedly called the doctor a cocksucker, which, he assured me, was incorrect. So I went through my mental thesaurus in a vain attempt to come up with an epithet that would be both clever and accurate.

That was needless. Whatever came out of my mouth was sub-articulate. I writhed and flinched and buckled so hard my chauffeur, the aforementioned Ms. Nash, thought I was going to break something. That thought crossed my mind as well. Thirty seconds never lasted so long.

GB2-logo-ghostbusters-33868869-726-1000Afterwards, my middle finger went completely numb – as it was supposed to. It felt like it was made of rubber and it ballooned up to the size of one of Fatso’s fingers, Fatso being of The Ghostly Trio fame. And that allusion to Casper the Friendly Ghost is about as close to comics as I’m going to get this week.

There are many things you cannot do with a totally numb middle finger, and typing heads the list. Adriane stepped in to edit Emily’s and Molly’s columns – she routinely handles Bob’s and the Tweeks – and I took the rest of the day off. Much like the previous month, I believe.

I woke up Tuesday morning intending to write about Hawkgirlwoman being part of next year’s new CW superhero series and the difficulties inherent therein. Hopefully, I’ll be able to do that next week. It’s an interesting idea, but I couldn’t execute it because that damn finger was still numb. Slowly, very slowly, the numbness wore off. Well, not totally, but it’s twelve hours before publication and it’s sufficiently functional for me to write about my favorite topic: me and my pain and agony.

It’s always something. If I didn’t need the middle finger of my right hand to communicate with my fellow Fairfield County Connecticut drivers, I would have chopped it off and worn it around my neck. But now that my middle finger is slowly regaining function, I can drive to the Indiana governors’ mansion and put that very finger to good use.

Yes. I know today is April Fool’s Day. I’ll celebrate later.

Emily S. Whitten: Caprica: Before the Fall

it-has-the-word-avatar-in-it-lets-throw-it-some-of-that-money-guys-2791875Caprica, the 2010 prequel show to the 2003 reimagining of Battlestar Galactica, has been on my Netflix watch list for some time; but I blame Mindy Newell’s recent column for bumping it up to the top and getting me to actually start watching (I’m about five episodes in now). I love the modern Battlestar Galactica series, and thus would naturally have a desire to watch anything related to it; but BSG was such an entity unto itself that I was a little afraid of re-visiting it in this prequel format for fear it wouldn’t measure up. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to. It’s a different kind of show, and self-contained enough while still referencing BSG to be enjoyably tied to BSG without having to match it measure-for-measure.

For those who aren’t familiar with the prequel series, Caprica takes place “58 years before the Fall” of the Colonies that kicks off BSG, and focuses heavily on two families, the Greystones and the Adamas (yes, those Adamas) It’s the story of how the first AI robots, i.e. the Cylons, were created; and it’s a much richer story than I would have imagined, stemming from love and loss and grief, and the inability to let go coupled with society’s reckless and headlong quest towards building increasingly advanced technology. Injecting humanity into the robots’ point of view is what the creators of BSG and Caprica do so well; and Caprica‘s story starts with a human girl and computer genius, Zoe Greystone, being killed in a bombing after downloading her personality into a virtual world avatar formed of all documented computer data about her life. This avatar eventually ends up installed in what becomes the first Cylon.

Zoe is a compelling character, played arrestingly by Alessandra Torresani, who does a great job of switching between her roles as human Zoe, avatar Zoe, and eventually, Cylon Zoe (I love the shooting method which shows Cylon Zoe in action as the robot, and then switches perspectives to show her as the girl in the same scene, i.e. how the personality inside the robot would see herself). It’s interesting to think that while in BSG, at least at first, the Cylons were completely unsympathetic characters, in Caprica, thus far a Cylon is the character I’m most invested in. So far, Torresani as Zoe really holds the show together, although the acting overall is excellent. The pacing does feel a bit slow; but then, this show was not intended to be like BSG in action and pace.

It’s hard to watch Caprica without comparing it to BSG, despite it being a show that can stand on its own. But looking at the two together, Caprica tackles the big issues faced in BSG (the use of technology, the varying religious beliefs, etc.) from a different angle, and shows how a change in perspective can influence viewer feelings on the issues. It’s also interesting to observe that as seen in Caprica, life on the colonies wasn’t nearly the peaches and cream existence that BSG Colonial refugees might have nostalgically been longing to return to.

It’s also fun to see Intriguing little bits and pieces of information about the future characters of BSG. In particular, seeing the Adama family fifty-eight years in the past gives me a whole new perspective on Bill Adama in BSG, and makes me wonder how much little Bill Adama knew about his dad’s crime connections and his contribution to creating the Cylons. (Maybe I’ll find out?) And seeing the purposeful echo of Little Italy and mafioso culture in Little Tauron and Adama’s brother Sam’s life is an interesting approach to turning specific Earth culture traits into those distinguishing the Twelve Colonies.

While BSG is a show where humanity has been forced by circumstance to a militaristic culture and general simplicity, Caprica is rich with the diverse culture and prosperity that leads to much of the conflict sewn into the plot of BSG, as people try to hold onto their roots or what they think they are entitled to based on the old world. The setting is completely different; it’s rooted in scenes that feel technologically advanced but culturally familiar, as opposed to the epic space battles and antiseptic feel of BSG. BSG is rooted in a fear of technology; whereas Caprica is about the driving desire to create and improve on it. And while Caprica so far paints the monotheists of the plot’s religious conflict as terrorists, in BSG the “messengers” espousing the monotheistic religion are often portrayed as actually having some sort of divine or at least unique understanding of events that may happen (although even that is ambiguous, which is par for the course with BSG). 

The complexity and imperfections of the characters are akin to those in BSG, but in Caprica, it seems more like they are searching for meaning in the world they inhabit than for a way to build a system that best serves their needs. And in contrast with BSG, wherein both Commander Adama and President Roslin provide a theme of hope against all odds despite the monumental loss that begins the show and the desperate struggle that defines it, Caprica carries a sense of foreboding with it, subtly woven into the fabric of the show – although the feeling might also stem in part from my foreknowledge of the BSG storyline, or the general sense of wrongness felt when faced with the idea of humanity extending a life indefinitely by turning a machine into a “human.” And yet despite all contrasts, Caprica shares with BSG an intriguing moral complexity, and an epic feeling that makes even the opening credits give me a little chill, albeit a different, weirdly sadder chill than that I associate with the opening of Battlestar Galactica. So far, I find it worthy of continued watching, and of further thought.

That’s it from me, so until next time, Servo Lectio!

Harvey Awards Nomination Ballot for 2015 now online

  • News
  • March 31, 2015

new-harvey-logo-web-2012-2-1662015The Executive Committees of the Harvey Awards and the Baltimore Comic-Con are proud to present the official Nomination Ballot for this year’s Harvey Awards, honoring work published in the 2014 calendar year. Named in honor of the late Harvey Kurtzman, one of the industry’s most innovative talents, the Harvey Awards recognize outstanding work in comics and sequential art. The 28th Annual Harvey Awards will be presented Saturday, September 26th, 2015 as part of the Baltimore Comic-Con.

Harvey Awards nomination ballots may be submitted using an online form.  If you are a comics professional, you can vote online at harveyawards.org/2015-nomination-ballot/.  This will enable easier and faster methods for the professional community to submit their nominees. Ballots are due for submission by Monday, May 11th, 2014.

Nominations for the Harvey Awards are selected exclusively by creators: those who write, draw, ink, letter, color, design, edit or are otherwise involved in a creative capacity in the comics field. The Harvey Awards are the only industry awards both nominated and selected by the full body of comic book professionals.

This year’s Baltimore Comic-Con will be held September 25-27, 2015. The ceremony and banquet for the Harvey Awards will be held Saturday night, September 26th. Additional details about the Harvey Awards and the awards ceremony will be released over the next few months.

With a history of over 28 years, the last eight in conjunction with the Baltimore Comic-Con, the Harveys recognize outstanding achievements in 22 categories. They are the only industry awards nominated and selected by the full body of comic book professionals. For more information, please visit www.harveyawards.org.

The Baltimore Comic-Con is celebrating its 16th year of bringing the comic book industry to the Baltimore and Washington D.C. area. With a guest list unequaled in the industry, the Baltimore Comic-Con will be held September 25-27, 2015. For more information, please visit www.baltimorecomiccon.com.

Maisie Williams to guest star on Doctor Who

  • News
  • March 30, 2015

Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams was announced as one of the guest stars on the new series of Doctor Who, filming now in Wales.

maisewho-150x225-6509810While her exact role has not been revealed, Steven Moffat, lead writer and Executive Producer, added:

“We’re thrilled to have Maisie Williams joining us on Doctor Who. It’s not possible to say too much about who or what she’s playing, but she is going to challenge the Doctor in very unexpected ways. This time he might just be out of his depth, and we know Maisie is going to give him exactly the right sort of hell.”

The announcement also revealed two more episode titles for the new series, ‘The Girl Who Died’ written by Jamie Mathieson and Steven Moffat, and ‘The Woman Who Lived’ by Catherine Tregenna.  Tregenna has written several episodes of Torchwood, including “Captain Jack Harkness”, for which she received a Hugo nomination. She’s the first female writer on the show since 2008.

The titles seem thematically linked, sparking thought that they may be another two-parter, following the opening episodes “The Magician’s Apprentice” and “The Witch’s Familiar” which feature the return of Michelle Gomez as Missy, AKA the regenerated Master.

Other guest actors confirmed to appear in the new series are comedian Rufus Hound, Shakespearean actor Barnaby Kay and fellow GoT actor Paul Kaye.

Doctor Who is set to return this fall, “with further casting to be announced in due course”.

Mindy Newell: The Truth Is Out There

For nine years, from 1993 through 2002, Friday was the night to stay home or at the least to make sure your favorite television recorder was programmed correctly.

I’m talking about The X-Files, created by Chris Carter and which starred then relatively unknown actors David Duchovny as FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder, an Oxford-trained behavioral psychologist, and Gillian Anderson as FBI Special Agent Dana Scully, an M.D. specializing in forensic medicine. Together they investigated the so-called “X-Files” of the FBI: cases that involved crimes on the margins of “normal,” paranormal activities, and UFO goings-on.

It became the Fox (no pun intended) network’s highest rated show and won numerous awards over its original lifetimes, including 16 Emmy Awards, five Golden Globes, and a Peabody Award over its run; it also received nominations and wins from the Directors Guild, the Writers Guild the Screen Actors Guild, the Television Critics Association, and the Saturn Awards.

A straight line can be drawn, I think, from the classic Kolchak: The Night Stalker to X-Files. But Carl Kolchak was an investigative reporter who always seemed to accidentally get involved in “out-there” stories on his beat for a Chicago newspaper; but the FBI agents purposely sought them out.

Mulder, who at the age of ten experienced what he believed to be an alien abduction – what the “authorities” said was an “ordinary” kidnapping and/or disappearance – of his younger sister Samantha, was the staunch believer. Scully, assigned to essentially spy on Mulder (who was looked upon, at best, as a brilliant eccentric who needed to be tolerated, and, at worst, as “Spooky by superiors who believed he was a danger to the FBI’s reputation) was the “cool-headed, scientifically-aimed” skeptic of the duo. Over the course of the series’ run, it soon became apparent why there were elements in the FBI and the government who wanted to get rid of Mulder: a “black ops” organization, in order to save themselves, was cooperating with aliens to first subjugate and then wipe out the human race. This storyline became the continuing mythology and underpinning of the X-Files, as the agents’ worked together in a desperate bid to bring this underground conspiracy into the light of day.

Last week, Fox announced a new X-Files six-parter starring Duchovny and Anderson, so I started watching The X-Files again on Amazon Prime– I’m still on Season 1 – and I’m remembering why I was hooked. The show’s acting, stories, music, and cinematography all combine into an eeriness that’s impossible to ignore and stays with you even in the light of day.

Another important thing I’ve realized is just how much of a “glass ceiling” smasher Anderson’s Dana Scully was in her individuality, her intelligence and competence, her ass-kicking, and her way with a gun. It’s easy to see that the character laid the groundwork for her television sisters such as Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes, Homeland), Chloe O’Brian (Mary Lynn Rajskub, 24), Fiona Glenanne (Gabriel Anwar, Burn Notice), Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles, Torchwood), and Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv, Fringe).

The show gave birth to two movies: 1998’s The X-Files: Fight the Future, which though appeared in theatres while the show was still on television and continued season 5’s ending, with season 6 beginning where the movie left off. It was also conceived by Mr. Carter to be able to attract audiences not familiar with the overall mythos and characters of X-Files and stand on its own as a complete story in itself. Ten years later, 2008’s The X-Files: I Want to Believe was an individual science fiction thriller in which both Mulder and Scully are no longer associated with the FBI; Mulder, in fact, is a fugitive from the organization living underground, and Scully is a doctor on staff at a hospital – though she secretly lives with Mulder.

Fans have clamored for years for a third movie, to tie up loose ends left in the 2002 final season.

Last week the Fox network answered them – sort of. They announced The X-Files is returning to television screens for a limited six-episode run. But will it live up to 13 years of hopes, wish, and frustrated dreams?

Trust No One.

But – whoo-hoo! oh, yeah! – it could be great!

I Want to Believe.

 

John Ostrander’s Writing Class: Newton’s First Law of Plot

young_bilbo_baggins-5615819Story reveals character through action – the plot. There are two primary ways that the plot works: 1) the protagonist initiates the action or 2) the protagonist is thrust into a situation and the plot reveals what happens. In each case, the character’s defenses are stripped away as we get down to who they really are – not who they (or anyone else) think they are. What is important is not what the character says (or anybody else says about them); it’s what they do. It’s what they choose to do. Their choices define them.

How do we determine what a given character will do in any given situation? It depends on their motivation. It’s not simply what they want; it’s what they need. It’s not just what they desire; it‘s what they lust for. I may want a pizza, but that’s not strong enough a motivation to drive a story. It may not drive me; I have to get into the car and go pick it up. Or, worse, make my own. How much do I really want that pizza? Maybe it comes down to how good that pizza is. I’d probably go a long way for a deep dish pizza. Mmmmmm. Deep dish pizza! Where was I?

We want something that will drive a character to action and that’s not always easy. Newton’s First Law of Motion states that a body at rest will remain at rest unless an outside force acts upon it, and a body in motion at a constant velocity will remain in motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an outside force. That’s true in a narrative as well. Maybe we’ll call it Newton’s first law of plot.

We all have a certain amount of inertia especially as we grow older. Change can be difficult. We have routine and that can be comforting. However, as Samuel Beckett noted in Waiting For Godot, “Habit can be a great deadener.” In The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins is apparently satisfied with his life – his home, his books, his tea, regular meals, and handkerchiefs. Then one day a wizard and a whole mess of dwarves invade his sanctum and, before he knows it, he finds himself running down a road, off on an adventure, forgetting his handkerchief.

Why? Because something has been stirred in his soul, the desire to see far off lands, to meet elves, to do the things he has read about in his books. It speaks to a side of him that he has not often indulged.

Bilbo wants to keep his life just as it is but he also wants to have an adventure. It’s not that he wants only the one thing. Like all of us, he has more than one desire and all are important to him. It is the decision that informs us about his character and, not coincidently, drives the story forward. It is the necessary decision for us but not the only one Bilbo could have made. The more difficult the choice, the more interesting the decision and the more it tells us about who this person is.

We rarely want one thing at a time and we often have to sort out conflicting wants and needs. The choices we make define us. As with us, so with the characters we write. What’s true in life should be true in our writing. If you want to write an interesting, and complex character, give them conflicting choices with no easy answers.

That’s the job.

 

The Point Radio: Zombies Done Different On IZOMBIE

They aren’t your cable zombies, which might be what makes The CW’s version of the hit Vertigo comic, IZOMBIE,  so appealing. EP Rob Thomas and star Rose McIver talk about all the ways they strive to keep it both fresh and centered on the comic series. Plus thanks to the success of AMERICAN SNIPER, more Americans that ever are aware of the challenges facing today’s veterans. Now a new documentary explores that further and you can see it for free.

In a few days, we sit down with former HAPPY ENDINGS star, Eliza Coupe, and get a sneak peek at her new indy movie project.
Be sure to follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

Marc Alan Fishman: A Law Worthy of a Super-Villain

As I trolled my Facebook feed this morning, I was caught off guard by some Indiana-dwelling friends. It would seem what I’d thought was an Onion news item was in fact real news. The Indiana state legislature passed a bill – the re-imagining of the “Religious Freedom and Restoration Act” – and upon reading what it allows… well, it sounds like the plot of a Garth Ennis yarn.

And yes, I know that ComicMix is a site for us to post about comics, pop culture, and the other related minutiae of geekery. This law represents nothing related to popular culture outside the fact that the Indianapolis Star reported GenCon threatened to move their large convention to a state that doesn’t allow businesses to discriminate under the pretense of religious freedom. And while I’d hope that Indiana Governor Pence takes the threat under advisement, let’s be honest. He’s far more interested in thwarting legions of Storm Troopers’ ability to purchase goods and services… because they enjoy sodomy and Satan worship, don’t you know.

Unlucky for us pinko-commie-liberals (those who support Obama, and/or think war is dumb), this law isn’t anything new. Indiana is now amongst 19 states that all passed similar legislation. This was to combat the atrocity of Obamacare forcing businesses to pay for healthcare that allowed for the proliferation of birth control, as well as combat all those laws allowing “the Gays™” to marry.

If I recall my US history lessons, I remember that the United States of America was founded in part because crazy folks began to realize that a government need not control, nor be controlled by a central religion. They dreamed of a land where people would have the right to free speech. To gather as they see fit, and worship whomever they chose to. And after a little genocide, they got a huge chuck of land with which to do it. After some wars, death, taxes, and whatnot, the US even adopted the crazy idea that all men are created equal, and gave equal rights to people of all colors, ethnicities, and (eventually) genders. Insane, I know. And after even more death, wars, taxes, the rise and fall of MTV, and a little bit of space travel (if you believe it was real), this same country even started to realize that all people are created equal, and started allowing identify as gay have those very same rights that straight people had.

Well, obviously this is all too much to handle. Thank Rao for red states. I don’t mean to be partisan about the issue, but it’s rare I hear from someone left of center decrying the wasteland of debochery we obviously live in. I’ve seen nary a single soul with an Obama sticker adorned on their VW Jetta lambasting the heathens who shop openly at Whole Foods. But I digress.

The simple truth is that this law (both in Indiana and in all states who adopted similar laws) is unconstitutional. While I agree that a business can put up a “No shirt, no shoes, no service” sign, and stick to it, putting one up that declares “no gays” infringes on the rights of personal freedom. Not wearing a shirt or shoes could be argued for via sanitary needs. Being gay, a Satanist, or a Cherokee doesn’t introduce potentially harmful bacteria to available merchandise. And if a store is to be open to the public, then the public – with all their beliefs in tact – should have the right to shop in said store. Of course I’d rather know up front if a store I planned to support did not support gay rights, so I could be quick to never shop there again.

This is the world we live in, kiddos. Our federal government can’t find a reason to not allow people of the same sex to marry, so the individual states choose to do it instead. I’d say we’re on the verge of a Civil War, but frankly I know we’re not. We’re amidst a time where the old guard clings to their outdated views, and the next generation removes the idiocy in due time. In this case? I just wish I could fast forward to the time where the bigots and ignorant decide to secede from the Union, and hold shop somewhere I’m not. Because the “Religious Freedom and Restoration Act” is something even Doctor Doom would identify as futile.

Doom / Sanity 2016, folks.

 

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