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Tweeks: From Darkest Peru to the Big Screen, Paddington Bear

paddington-poster-s-8840026The Tweeks grew up listening to Stephen Fry reading Michael Bond’s Paddington series on all of our car trips giving us a great fondness for that bear,  worrisome Marmalade habit not withstanding.  So, of course we had to get straight to the cinema (with a group of Brit ex-Pats — who really really love their Paddington) as soon as the movie opened in the US.  We didn’t even know The Doctor was in it, but we think it serves as proof to any one still wondering if Peter Capaldi holds a connection to the younger Whovian set!  Staring Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville and the cutest CGI bear ever, it’s a great movie for the whole family.  No, really.  Adults will love it too.

Dennis O’Neil: The Ice Man Fallith

Ye Ed here. Denny’s words will not appear in this space this week.

Remember all that ice and snow and stuff? You might have some of your own. So does Denny. It’s possible you may have slipped on the ice at some time during your ventures around the sun; well, so has our erstwhile columnist.

Marifran tells me he hurt his back. That’s great – Denny didn’t break anything and hopefully will be back at the Mighty Wurlitzer before too long.

It was 75 Years Ago The Shadow hit the Comic Racks

  • News
  • January 21, 2015

shadow-comics-e1421883416738-1901679Seventy-five years ago, The Shadow and Doc Savage made their four-color debut on January 21st, 1940 in SHADOW COMICS #1, which also featured the first comic book appearances of Nick Carter, Bill Barnes, Frank Merriwell, Iron Munro and a variety of other popular Street & Smith pulp characters.

With the possible exception of WALT DISNEY’S COMICS & STORIES, it is unlikely that any other comic magazine ever debuted with as many pre-proven famous characters. The Shadow had already starred in nearly 200 pulp novels and several films, while his weekly radio show had the highest audience ratings in daytime radio. Iron Munro was based on John W. Campbell’s novel THE MIGHTIEST MACHINE, one of the inspirations for Jerry Siegel’s SUPERMAN, and featured the exploits of a human born and raised under Jupiter’s high gravity who arrived on Earth to discover that his denser molecular structure gave him invulnerability, super strength and the ability to leap huge distances. Doc Savage’s monthly pulp magazine was reputed to have the highest per-issue circulation of any hero pulp, while Nick Carter and Frank Merriwell had been American icons going back to the Dime Novel era of the previous century. SHADOW #1 also featured adventures of CRIME BUSTERS’ distaff detective Carrie Cashin, the Air Trails Boys and famous Street & Smith dime novel properties including Diamond Dick and Horatio Alger’s Bob Burton and Mark the Match Boy.

In creating the earliest comic book superheroes, Superman’s Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Batman’s Bob Kane and Bill Finger, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and Will Eisner took inspiration from the supermen of their own youth: legendary pulp heroes like The Shadow, Doc Savage, Zorro and The Whisperer. Bill Finger even acknowledged that his “first script was a take-off on a Shadow story” and that “I patterned my style of writing after The Shadow.” Bob Kane agreed, saying: “I suppose both The Shadow’s cloaked costume and double-identity role, as well as the extraordinary acrobatics of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., did more to my subconscious to create the character and personality of Batman than any other factors.”

Though Street & Smith had pioneered the hero magazine genre with its SHADOW and DOC SAVAGE pulps, the nation’s largest publisher of pulp fiction magazines was slow to move into the rapidly expanding comics market, initially rejecting comics because it avoided publishing material that couldn’t be printed on its own Manhattan in-house presses.

In 1937, Shadow wordsmith Walter B. Gibson had attempted to interest Street & Smith in a Shadow comic book after noticing that the new comic strip reprint magazines were successfully competing for newsstand space with THE SHADOW MAGAZINE. When promotions manager William de Grouchy pointed out that the most popular newspaper strips had already been bought up by rival publishers, Gibson countered, “Why not get up some and sell them to syndicates and get the rights to use them in comic books?  And we should begin with The Shadow.” Unfortunately, the executive initially rejected Gibson’s suggestion which could have resulted in The Shadow and other Street & Smith characters debuting in comics ahead of Superman and Batman (whose first appearance in DETECTIVE COMICS #27 was an unauthorized adaptation of “Partners of Peril,” a 1936 Shadow pulp novel).

Despite this delay, SHADOW COMICS was still one of the first comic books to bear the name of its lead character, closely following on the heels of AMAZING MAN COMICS, FLASH COMICS and BLUE BEETLE COMICS, and preceded the first issue of BATMAN by several months. However, despite its title, SHADOW COMICS was actually an anthology comic featuring a wide range of characters, and had originally been planned as ASTOUNDING COMICS and advertised as STREET & SMITH COMICS, before being retitled SHADOW COMICS in the eleventh hour to tie in with the release of Columbia’s THE SHADOW movie serial.

SHADOW COMICS sold an average of 425,000 copies per issue in 1941 and continued for 101 issues, with its final issue appearing in 1949. The Doc Savage and Bill Barnes four-color features introduced in its first issue were soon promoted to headline their own comic anthologies, with DOC SAVAGE #1 debuting in April 1940 and BILL BARNES later that same year. Supersnipe (“the boy with the most comic books in America”) also debuted in SHADOW COMICS before moving on to its own successful comic book series.

Fifteen years after the Golden Age series ended, THE SHADOW was revived first by Archie’s Radio Comics imprint, and was later published by DC Comics, Dark Horse and Dynamite, and also appeared in a Marvel Comics graphic novel by Denny O’Neil and Michael Kaluta. The original Shadow and Doc Savage pulp novels are also currently being reissued by Sanctum Books trade paperback imprint.

Mike Gold: Batman Resurrected

michael-keaton-8209952No, that’s not the title of the next Batman movie. Well, it might be. I suspect Warner Bros. hasn’t thought that far ahead. They’re too busy trying to make their Aquaman movie without giggling themselves to death.

A couple nights ago I was watching Batman Returns – you’ll recall that was Michael Keaton’s second and final Batflick. At the time of release, which was 1992, I thought it was an uneven movie. By and large, I liked the Catwoman stuff but I thought the Penguin parts were… foul. It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen the movie, so when I surfed past it at a quarter-to-two in the morning, I thought it might be fun to check it out with my older and even more jaded eyes.

I was amused to discover the movie was broader than I remembered, but just as dark. It was almost as if Stanley Kubrick made the movie as a tribute to the 1960s teevee show. The Catwoman scenes weren’t as strong as I remembered, the Penguin scenes were better acted (but no better realized) than I thought, and the scenes with Michael Keaton that didn’t include either villain were, by and large, really good.

So what happened in the past 22 years? Certainly most of us enjoy the avalanche of Marvel Studios movies, the so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe that, properly, excludes Spider-Man, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four. But the tone and texture of the DC Movie Universe should differ from the tone and texture of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, just as your average DC Universe comic book differs from its Marvel counterparts – when done right.

(Yes, you read that right: I referred to the DC movies as a separate “Universe” from the DC teevee shows for one simple reason: they are separate. Completely separate. Needlessly and confusingly separate.)

So… what changed? Batman Returns really isn’t dated. Why would I be so taken with Keaton’s work this time around?

One word. Birdman.

You know the concept: an on-the-ropes actor best known for his playing a costumed superhero on the big screen tries to resurrect his career and give his life meaning by directing and starring in a Broadway play. For this effort, Keaton has been awarded top acting honors from the Screen Actors Guild, BAFTA, the Independent Spirit Award, the Satellite Award (from the International Press Academy, not to be confused with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Golden Globes) and the AACTA International Award for Best Actor – that’s the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts.

Keaton has also received an Oscar® nomination for Birdman, in a particularly tough category this year. “It’s an honor just to be nominated…”

I always liked Keaton, and he really knocked me over in Clean and Sober. But Birdman surpasses his previous efforts because he knows we will conflate his character with his career. He relies that pre-existing relationship, and he pulls it off magnificently.

I don’t think Keaton’s career has been on the ropes, but it was no longer as high profile. I suspect he liked it that way. But, post-Birdman, he is an A-Lister once again. And this is strictly because he decided to do Batman in the first place – and because he thought it over and appreciated what that meant to both him and his audience.

All top-drawer superhero actors age… with a few unfortunate exceptions. The plot to Birdman is all about what you do with yourself after you shed your tights. Keaton figured it out.

Brilliantly.

(“Oscar” is a registered trademark of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, so watch your ass.)

 

Box Office Democracy: Blackhat

Blackhat has a germ of a good movie buried in it; I was very interested to see how a director like Michael Mann would make a movie where most of the action happens in a virtual world. Hacking is perhaps the least visually interesting thing there is you’re probably doing something very similar to it right now while reading this article. Early in the film there are signs that Mann plans to tackle this dilemma there are sweeping, focused, shots of the inside of computers that switch to shots of code moving through virtual space. Unfortunately, it seems that Blackhat completely lost its collective nerve in this regard as after the first act the movie basically refuses to return to any kind of hacker stuff and just becomes a bad action movie.

The clichés in Blackhat are so brazen that I had to stop and consider that it might be some kind of brilliant subversion of the form, it isn’t. Viola Davis plays an FBI agent who cares more about stopping criminals than following the rules because her husband died on 9/11. Chris Hemsworth talks about being in prison and sounds like a professional wrestler doing a bad interview segment. Characters die but usually only after they have a moment of catharsis with another character. These Are things that have been tired and overdone longer than I’ve been alive and I can’t understand why anyone thinks it can fly anymore.

I always hate being this person but the movie is so spectacularly implausible that it destroys my suspension of disbelief. The movie opens with a nuclear reactor exploding and our heroes are walking around inside of it within a handful of days and perhaps this isn’t common knowledge but nuclear meltdowns make places completely inhabitable for centuries. They follow that up almost immediately by having a hack push the price for soybeans up by 250% and that’s almost equally impossible. There are so many ways to make money if you’re a crazy genius hacker and I wish they had picked one that wasn’t completely impossible. Furthermore, I don’t think you can have a private army roving through and shooting up Hong Kong murdering police whenever you want without having some kind of response from the Chinese government. These are immersion destroyers.

This isn’t directly related to the quality of the movie per se but I spent a lot of time focused on the aesthetics of Chris Hemsworth in Blackhat. He’s so much less bulky than he is when he’s playing Thor and I can’t decide if I think this is his natural size and he bulks up for Marvel films or if this kind of dramatic change in physique is just par for the course if you’re in the Chris Hemsworth position in Hollywood these days. He spends an incredible amount of time wearing button down shirts with the buttons open to the navel which is a look I’ve never seen in real life and can’t imagine a context where it makes sense outside of a beach. It felt like objectifying of Chris Hemsworth in a way that I’m quite surprised to see in a movie seemingly exclusively aimed at men. I don’t know how many women you can get to a rather violent movie advertised as a dry cyber crime film just by having a bunch of strong PG-13 male nudity. It’s another curious choice in a movie that can’t stop making head scratching decisions long enough to string together anything remotely coherent.

The Point Radio: John McGinley – No Doctor Cox No More

You loved John McGinley in SCRUBS and now he’s part of the TBS comedy, GROUND FLOOR. John talks about his fairytale start in movies and why his GROUND FLOOR character couldn’t be more different that Doctor Cox on SCRUBS. Then, THE BLACKLIST is back for the second part of their sophomore season, and it kicks off with a choice time slot right after NBC’s broadcast of The Super Bowl. Star Megan Boone and EPs Jon Bokenkamp and John Eisendrath tell us why this is a great place to jump into the series.

On Friday, we celebrate the return of KING OF THE NERDS on TBS. They’ve really upped the game this year, and we’ll tell you what’s coming up.  Be sure to follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

REVIEW: Glee the Complete Fifth Season

Glee Season 5So, when did Glee go off the rails for you? I began tiring of the show in the third season, stuck around for one more and realized it couldn’t make up its mind about the type of series it wanted to be. Part of the blame goes to Ryan Murphy and Fox for falling so in love with their core characters that they wouldn’t let them grow up and leave high school. While a spinoff set in Manhattan had been considered and discarded, trying to have it all didn’t work either. After seeing the fitting tribute to Cory Monteith, I bid Finn Hudson and the rest of Lima High an overdue farewell.

When Glee the Complete Fifth Season arrived for review, it gave me a chance to see if I made the right decision or not. The series’ musical numbers remain strong as ever but it also remains maddening. On the other hand, the various social topics it had addressed makes the show wonderful drama but the rest of it is set in a world so divorced from the one we live in, it gets infuriating.

First, the cast is too largely, too spread and too unwieldy to properly focus on one set of characters. We have Rachel, Kurt, and Santana in New York, Mercedes in Los Angeles and everyone else in Lima, OH. But, we have the originals poised to graduate and the newcomers still looking to get themselves properly established in the hearts and minds of the audience.

You still have all the adults with their own issues from Mr. Schu and Emma starting a family to Sue deposing Principal Figgins and managing to somehow shut down Glee Club.

And while the students never seem to have any classes or homework or trouble juggling extracurriculars, homework, family obligations and the like, it beggars the imagination that not one but two of the cast are such geniuses that they fight over Valedictorian. It would have been nice to see the school wrestle with the arrival of the Common Core curriculum or the pressures of standardized testing on both faculty and students.

Rachel’s assent to Broadway is the stuff of legend and her dream come true (we could have satisfactorily ended the series when she debuted) but for her to actually give it away for television makes little sense along with the decision to use Santana as her publicist.

The show veers from one emotional note to another without a lot of proper foreshadowing or setup so character traits come and go, as do their romantic feelings. Of the newcomers, the most intriguing was Marley who is gone early on after revealing her heretofore unknown songwriting skills, which conveniently come into play when the club needs a song at Regionals. And then there’s the horrid unaired Christmas special, held over from 2013 and a sad way to end the first half of the season.

This season saw the show limp to its 100th episode which Murphy and Brad Falchuk used to trash the club and scatter everyone to the four winds. As centennial episodes go, it was above average but stung with unrealistic events. Eight episodes later, the friends find themselves in many unexpected places, leaving the viewer to wonder how the sixth and final season, now airing, would tie things up.

The high definition transfers on the six disc DVD set are fine although it is noteworthy Fox has not released this on Blu-ray. As usual, the set comes with its patented Glee Musical Jukebox, allowing viewers to go straight to the musical numbers.

The smaller than usual extras include Gleeful: Celebrating 100 Episodes of Glee (8:31) with Matthew Morrison (Will Shuester) and the cast members fondly looking back when they were a phenomenon that had not been anticipated. There’s also Glee in the City (13:34) where producer/director Ian Brennan and actors Kevin McHale, Darren Criss, Amber Riley, Chris Colfer, Chord Overstreet, Adam Lambert, and Lea Michele talk about the story possibilities by being set in the center of the universe.

Review: Citizens of Earth

Allow me to be blunt – if you’re a fan of old-school RPGs, cease all bodily functions not controlled by your autonomic nervous system and obtain a copy of Citizens of Earth.

If you played the Super Nintendo classic Earthbound, you’ll recognize its inspiration of this wacky little RPG, out today for PC, Nintendo 3DS, Wii U and PS Vita.  From the spacey soundtrack to the map design, even down to the lava-lamp graphics behind the baddies in the random battles, the game makes a comfortable home in the classic’s footprint.

This is what's known as "hanging a lampshade on it"

This is what’s known as “hanging a lampshade on it”

You play the newly-elected Vice-President of Earth, choosing to make a visit to your home town for a brief respite before your new career.  Alas, all is not well on the homestead – the town is surging with anti-you protesters, the manager of the local (and highly addictive) coffee shop has vanished, and more weirdness to come. The true threat that faces you and your compatriots remains hidden until well into the game, and it’s as out of left field as any surprise in any classic RPG.

You quickly begin recruiting local citizens to join your ragtag band of investigators, including your mother, brother, an odd-smelling conspiracy theorist, and the local donut chef.  Other recruits don’t unlock till later as more of the map is unlocked.  Their various powers and attacks provide a lot of ability to customize your combat strengths, as well as team bonuses for having certain members in your party. from changing the weather and time of day, to changing the difficulty from candy from a baby to what oldsters like me call “Nintendo-Hard.”

The game is funny; silly, even, with lots of wacky dialogue and throwaway gags as you read random signs and books. Lots of recorded dialogue by a strong cast, and a sound palette that keeps the old school feel while staying technically advanced.

The strength of the enemies jump up quickly once you make your way to the next  play area, leaving you to do some good old grinding. The enemies are as wacky  as they are difficult, from roving protesters to the punnish “Telefawn” and “Bubblebee,” there’s a constant variety of new monsters and foes to fight.

The game wears its throwback badge with pride, but can still hold its own with any of the recent RPGs we’ve seen recently, especially on the handhelds.  The game plays very well on the Vita, with the option to interact with the touchscreen as well as the keypads.

There’s not enough funny being put into games nowadays. Citizens of Earth is a welcome breath of fresh air.

Citizens of Earth is available for download on PC, Wii U, Nintendo 3DS, PS4 and PS Vita.

Mindy Newell Is Trekkin’

Have you heard Star Trek Continues? I happened to discover it just today, as I was surfing the web this morning. It is an award-winning …well, let me quote from the site itself:

“Star Trek Continues is a critically-acclaimed, award-winning, fan-produced webseries… the brainchild of long-time Star Trek: The Original Series fan – and producer, director, actor, voice-actor, musician – Vic Mignogna.

“Star Trek Continues is proud to be part of Trek history, aimed at completing

the final two years of the original five-year mission. After mounting a successful Kickstarter campaign, the show is already making waves and attracting guest stars such as Michael Forest, Jamie Bamber, Lou Ferrigno, and Erin Gray – as well as cameos by Star Trek alums like Marina Sirtis and Michael Dorn.”

It really is absolutely captivating. Mr. Mignogna is perfect – and I mean perfect! – William Shatner as Captain James Tiberius Kirk, down to body movements and personal tics. And Chris Doohan is the living embodiment of Lt. Commander Montgomery Scott, Chief Engineer and Second Officer of the Enterprise. Then again, he should be. Mr. Doohan is the son of the late James Doohan, who, just in case you don’t know, played Scotty in the original series. (Fun fact I discovered on the website: Chris Doohan first boarded the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC1701 in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and continues to do so, up to and including Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek Into Darkness, in which he appeared in a scene with Simon Pegg, a.k.a. the “new” Scotty.

Everyone is perfect in their roles, costuming, and make-up; except for, I have to say, Kim Stinger as Nichel Nichols as Lt. Nyota Uhura. Her 2014 hairdo and voice and physicality does absolutely nothing to remind me of Ms. Nichols or Lt. Uhura. She is the only one who takes me completely out of the spell, out of my “ suspension of disbelief.” She might as well be a new character.

Still, if you’re a Star Trek fan, you must check this website; all the music and sound effects of the original are incorporated into the series and even the special effects are so seamless and could easily “melt” into any of the episodes on your DVD set.

•     •     •     •     •

The reverberations of the attack on Charlie Hebdo continue to dominate the news cycle, even pushing the opening bell of the 2016 Presidential race here in the States to the second or third news story – yeah, here we go again – Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, and Mitt Romney (!!!) are all “exploring” the possibility of running – but as I read websites and newspapers and watch the news stations, I’m realizing that it’s about more than the right to free speech. It’s also about the rise of violence against Jews in France over the last decade, coinciding with the rise in the French Muslim population.

The history of French cooperation with the Nazis during World War II (aside from the Free French, who made valuable contributions) does not put that country of the list of “Righteous Gentiles“ at Yad Veshem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel. Historically, France has been the center of European Jewish learning and assimilation into the greater society; after the French Revolution Jews were emancipated, and Napoleon deconstructed the ghettos.

Today the Jewish community in France numbers between 500.000 and 600,000. But over the last few years there has been a huge exodus as increasing anti-Semitism fostered by the French Muslim population has become a palpable threat, with almost 8,000 occurrences since 2000, including one very large and violent event last July in which 200 Jews were trapped inside a synagogue while the demonstrators outside shouted obscenities and threatened death.

This is why the French police and security offices have been protecting Jewish neighborhoods and sites in Paris and around the country since the assault at Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cache kosher deli, including schools and synagogues.

*sigh* And the story of Cain and Abel, and Isaac and Ishmael, just keeps on trekkin’.

 

John Ostrander: Walking Tall On the Small Screen

I was not always a big fan of Westerns. My knowledge/memory of them were largely drawn from TV shows of my childhood – and not always the best ones. They were dominated by The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry (although I was never a big Autry fan) and shows like them. Westerns dominated TV in those days in ways that I don’t think any genre dominates any more.

It was my late wife, Kimberly Yale, who really schooled me in movie Westerns and the difference between a John Ford Western, ones by Howard Hawks, and Budd Boetticher’s Westerns. I finally learned and grasped what powerful movies they were, Just a few years ago, I got to see John Ford’s masterpiece The Searchers on the big screen and it was only then that I really understood how powerful it was and why its star, John Wayne, was such an icon. In the close-ups, where Wayne’s face is two stories high, he seems like a figure off Mount Rushmore. And the famous final shot, where his character is framed by a closing door, is haunting. It’s also interesting to note that both here and in Howard Hawks’ Red River he plays something of a bastard.

It’s only been in recent years that I’ve returned to some of the Western TV shows and rediscovered them. What I discovered was some very good writing and acting, especially in the half hour shows. Have Gun, Will Travel, starring Richard Boone, featured him as a traveling gunslinger, Paladin, and a memorable and haunting title song. Wanted: Dead or Alive starred a young Steve McQueen right around the time that he broke out in films in The Magnificent Seven.

Of all of them, my favorite discovery has been The Rifleman starring Chuck Connors. Connors was a 6’6” former athlete, playing basketball for the Celtics and baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Chicago Cubs. In the show he played Lucas McCain, a homesteader who was fast with a special rapid fire Winchester. McCain was a widower although he had a son, played by Johnny Crawford. His best friend was the Marshall of the town of North Fork, Micah Torrance, played by Paul Fix. (Trivia note: Mary and I so liked the name “Micah” that we gave it to one of our cats.)

The show was also a proving ground for actors, writers, and directors who would later go on to other things. Sam Peckinpah directed several episodes and wrote a few, too. Budd Boetticher directed an episode, as did Ida Lupino. Richard Donner, who would later direct the first Superman movie with Christopher Reeve, directed seven episodes.

A number of famous (or to be famous later) actors also appeared – Agnes Moorehead did a turn, as did Martin Landau, Buddy Hackett, and Harry Dean Stanton. Sammy David Jr. acted in the series twice, once as a gunslinger. There was a time that I would have questioned the probability of that but my later researches into the history of the West revealed that there were a number of black gunslingers in the Wild West.

Connors was a better actor than I remembered and the stories were varied and almost always interesting. His Lucas McCain was a stern father but a loving one and usually reluctant to be drawn into a fight. The stories weren’t the simple good/bad confrontations I knew from shows like Roy Rogers. The characters were more complex which made the stories more interesting.

You can catch the shows on DVD and I would guess on Netflix or Hulu. They’re worth a shot. So to speak.

 

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