The Mix : What are people talking about today?

Mike Gold: They Aren’t So Fantastic…

There has been a debate amongst comics wags that the rumor about Marvel cancelling their flagship title, Fantastic Four, during their 75th anniversary celebration was just that – a rumor. Marvel/Disney couldn’t possibly be that petty. Bleeding Cool.com‘s Rich Johnson, who carried the story, steadfastly stood behind his sources. Good for him.

Evidently, Marvel wasn’t happy with how 20th Century Fox was treating the property in the forthcoming movie reboot, they didn’t want to support it and so were cancelling the comic book. OK, but would they cancel all those X-Men titles if they didn’t like the way Fox handled their latest X-movie? Of course not. Nor did Marvel cancel the Spider-Man titles despite the atrocious way Columbia handled the Spidey flicks of late – and they’ve got release dates for three or four more.

To be fair, compared to the profits of the X-Men comics or even the (fewer in number) Spider-Man comics, the revenues racked in off of The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine are a fart in a blizzard. Even so, it just seemed real petty.

As it turns out, Rich was right. Kudos, pal. But it’s a damn shame anyway. Historical affinity aside, James Robinson was settling in nicely on the series and he’s one of our medium’s best writers.

Prior to this brouhaha, some cast members of this forthcoming FF flick were saying it wasn’t really based on the comics, it was an “expansion” of the concept, it wasn’t comic book shit, it’s goddamned art and they wouldn’t be associated with lesser trash. Yes, I’m wildly paraphrasing, but not out of my long-acknowledged love of the Stan Lee – Jack Kirby creation. No, I’m crabby about this because it’s a stupid business decision. Haven’t they seen any of the Marvel Studios movies? The recently concluded Batman trilogy? Any of those Marvel and DC shows on television right now?

All of these shows have one thing in common: they treated their source material with respect; Marvel Studios more than DC/Warner Bros., but at their worst neither ever distanced themselves from the comics.

Heaven forbid 20th Century Fox should have a movie as entertaining and as profitable as Guardians of the Galaxy – and that movie wasn’t based upon a comic book series that has been published since 1961. In fact, few civilians ever heard of the Guardians.

Now we have what, for me, may very well be the final nail in the new Fantastic Four movie coffin. Over at Collider, actor Toby Kebbell gave us the bird’s eye lowdown on the character he portrays in the film, somebody called “Doctor Doom.”

“I’ll tell you this because of our history.” Kebbell confided to Collider. “He’s Victor Domashev, not Victor Von Doom in our story. And I’m sure I’ll be sent to jail for telling you that. The Doom in ours – I’m (Doom) a programmer. Very anti-social programmer. And on blogging sites I’m Doom… The low-fi way he did it, the whole ultra-real, it was just nice to be doing that, it was nice to be feeling we had come to terms with what we had been given.”

Hey, what were you given, Toby, other than characters and a concept that had been around for 53 years and raised three generations of followers in comics and on radio, television and movies?

By the way, as of this writing IMDB is wrong. They still list the character as Victor Von Doom.

So… maybe Marvel/Disney’s reaction was not so petty. Maybe it was more fanboy, and I mean that in the most positive sense of the term.

Fine. One less movie to see and, sadly, one less favored comic book to read.

 

Box Office Democracy: “Interstellar”

Interstellar is a movie that in the hands of most directors would be a failure. It’s a movie about space and time that assumes an awful lot of knowledge on both subjects from the audience. It’s a movie with a moral compass that swings so wildly that at the end I can only point to three characters and say I absolutely know how the film wants us to feel about them. There’s a healthy dose of paradox and deus ex machina flowing through the third act of the movie. Even good directors would mess this up; this script could have been Neill Blomkamp’s Waterloo. Christopher Nolan turned it in to one of the best science fiction movies in years. I was delighted to watch this movie and hope that every bit of Nolan’s post-Batman career can be this enjoyable.

It must be quite hard to make a movie about space travel. No one in the audience has ever been in space and I have no reason to believe that any of the depictions we’ve seen in movies over the years have been particularly accurate. Instead of trying to one-up Gravity or anything Nolan seems content to draw upon the history of the depictions of space in film. Scenes in Interstellar felt like they could have been in Alien, or 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nolan decides to use our shared visual vocabulary to tell quick, expressive stories out of fleeting shots. I don’t mean to suggest that he sits back and only uses images from other directors, far from it; the wormhole and black hole sequences are mind-bendingly wonderful images. Nolan puts more on the table than any director in the genre since Kubrick. It’s the most I’ve been impressed with just sheer directorial force of will in recent memory. Nolan elevates this move more than any acting performance could ever hope to.

It’s a good think Nolan is here because the acting is not the strength I thought it would be. We may be waist deep in the ongoing flood of latter-day Matthew McConaughey’s talent but he feels like he does little except not mess up this movie. He’s not bad or anything but he doesn’t bring anything to this part that any equivalent leading man couldn’t have brought unless Nolan thinks that halfway drawl was essential to portraying this engineer/rocket pilot. Unfortunately this kind of stretches across the cast; I only thought Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, and John Lithgow did work that was above replacement level in their roles. The cast is an embarrassment of riches and has the kind of cast that defies belief. I have a strong feeling this cast will one day be looked at like The Godfather or Murder on the Orient Express as one of those films where it’s just unbelievable the top to bottom talent they got. I wish I could come away raving about more of the performances unfortunately they’re all just really good and not spectacular.

It’s hard to walk out of a movie that’s almost three hours and not think it’s a little bloated and Interstellar is no exception. There’s a subplot that slowly worms its way in to the main plot that is just not as clever as either of the Nolan brothers think it is. It leaves us with a very long scene where the characters figure something out that was pretty obvious two hours ago. The script is just a bit shy of being as clever as it thinks it does and those moments become a little more obvious when you’ve been sitting for over two hours.

These are little, meaningless, complaints. Performances that are very good but not great, 15 minutes that could be easily trimmed from a 169 minute movie, trifling little nothings. This is a masterpiece of filmmaking and the bar that I will be measuring science fiction against for years to come. It’s a spellbinding, emotionally gripping, visually arresting piece of filmmaking that is, as of now, the best film Christopher Nolan has ever produced.

Emily S. Whitten: Sean Astin at The National Press Club

 

Actor and radio host Sean Astin applied to become a member of The National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on October 27 after speaking to a rapt audience of journalists and fans about his career and his political radio show, Vox Populi. Astin, most known to fans as Mikey in The Goonies, the title character in Rudy, and Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, started Vox Populi in 2012. Vox Populi, the “Voice of the ‘Occasionally Interested’ People,” is Astin’s vision of an arena for bi-partisan discussion about what are often hot-button issues in politics and media. As host, Astin, who has been long interested in and active in politics, moderates civilized discussions between guests with a wide variety of viewpoints, including Noam Chomsky; Representative Steve Israel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee; Ben Shapiro, author of The People vs. Barack Obama; Cullen Hoback, director of the hit information privacy and collection documentary Terms and Conditions May Apply; and many more.

In speaking about his decision to create Vox Populi, Astin cited his mother actress Patty Duke’s time as a talk show host as one source of inspiration, stating that “a good vocabulary had been implanted in me at a young age, and that, combined with my mom’s ease and comfort dealing with issues of the day and social issues and being a public figure, and then being a union leader – something in the hard-wiring happened where I felt that I had the capacity to be able to think about issues and communicate in a way that was comfortable and easy and open for people, and to facilitate learning and social discourse.”

Astin, a “C-SPAN junkie,” went on to talk about his life-long interest in politics and the interaction of his position as a public figure with his desire to be involved in political discourse. He also discussed his career in the entertainment industry, and his charity work, including running the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C. on October 26. He answered several audience questions, and then closed by saying, ” I want to be a member of this Club, so…this is my field report from yesterday,” and reading a Facebook post he wrote about his experience running the Marathon. Immediately after the event, Astin enthusiastically submitted his application to join The National Press Club.

To view Sean Astin’s entire appearance at The National Press Club, click here.

And until next time, Servo Lectio!

Michael Davis: Happy Birthday to the two Sharons

Two Sharon Hawkins

Today is my sister’s birthday.

She would have been 60 years old had she lived. She’s been dead twice as long than she was alive. My sister Sharon Davis was assaulted and left for dead in a South Jamaica Queens vacant lot.

People passed her all night, if just one would have stopped and gotten help, perhaps my big sister would be alive today. Sharon was my inspiration for Sharon Hawkins who any real animation and comic fans knows is Vigil Hawkins’ (AKA Static Shock) sister.

I named all of Static’ family after mine. Among them, Virgil’s mom and dad, Jean Hawkins and Robert Hawkins, named after Jean Davis Lawrence and Robert Lawrence, named after my mom and step-dad.

Sharon Hawkins was my way of honoring and keeping the spirit of my sister alive plus it gave my mom a hoot to see her family all together in a way. My mom passed away June of this year and with her went the last of my immediate family.

Sharon Hawkins was the most popular supporting character in both the comic and the show. I’m sure she will be again when the new live action show premieres next year.

I’m happy to see my mother and sister live on. Except they aren’t, not really and why is that? Because nobody outside of my peers and extended circle know I created them.

Why is THAT?

Because motherfucking hack ass websites like Variant have ignored my pleas to set the record straight and they were asked almost a year ago and have been reminded quite a few times since. I predicted some shit would happen and make an industry mistake a national one and as always I was right.

Happy Birthday Sharon, I love ya sis, and although pussies like Variant have prevented millions of people from knowing you, you do live on in dozens maybe even hundreds of people who know you’re the real Sharon Hawkins.

Box Office Democracy: “Big Hero 6”

I never dreamed that when Disney bought Marvel it would lead to something as precious as Big Hero 6. Disney took a nothing Marvel property, one I had never heard of despite reading comic books voraciously for the first 28 years of my life, and turned it in to something quite fantastic. Big Hero 6 is a great movie and is a great example of something Disney can do for Marvel that isn’t just moving all of the Spider-Man cartoons over to Disney Channel.

The plots in Disney animated films tend to be a bit thin and while I mean that as no insult Big Hero 6 is no exception. There’s a precocious kid and a tragic incident. There’s a crew of friends that must rally around the grieving kid and help him get revenge/closure. There’s a secret to be revealed that will surprise a child but no one who’s ever watched a real mystery anymore but why am I still talking about all of this nonsense when I haven’t mentioned Baymax even once yet?

(more…)

The Point Radio: Why Chelsea Peretti Owns The Internet

Comedian Chelsea Peretti has led the pack in using social media and her reach in the online community to guide her successful stand up and TV career. Her popular podcast, Twitter feed (TIME MAGAZINE called it one of the Best of 2013) and her new association with Netflix mark her as having both feet firmly planted on the edge. We talk about how she got there plus life on BROOKLYN 99. On the flip side of being funny is Fox’s BOBS BURGERS. After winning an Emmy, H. Jon Benjamin and the cast talk about their dedication to getting weekly laughs.

THE POINT covers it 24/7! Take us ANYWHERE on ANY mobile device (Apple or Android). Just  get the free app, iNet Radio in The  iTunes App store – and it’s FREE!  The Point Radio  – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE  – and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

Mindy Newell: Depression Really Sucks

“…Depression… is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk… slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero…the body…feels sapped, drained.” Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, William Styron 

Sorry for the skip last week, everyone, but I wasn’t up to it – I was down. As in my depression said “Hello, again!” last weekend. No, I didn’t lie in bed for 48 hours, I’ve never given in to that, even back in the day before I was properly diagnosed with this goddamn thing. So on Saturday, though I could feel it banging on the door of my psyche’s house, I did get dressed and made the usual weekend runs to the supermarket and to the laundromat…but by Sunday Elvis was in the house, and even though I got up and put on my workout gear, I blew off my free personal training session that my gym offers to all members for their birthday, decided that I didn’t want to expose my grandson to his fucked-up grandma Mindy, and so just sat around in my workout gear, surfing the web and eating waaaaay too many potato chips. And I kept watching the clock tick away the hours thinking that I had to write my column, but I just couldn’t get the energy up and finally I let Editor Mike know I was sick, though I didn’t specify with what in my e-mail to him.

See, the thing about depression is that it drains the battery and warps the mirror. When it hits me I feel old and ugly and fat and powerless and oh! so! damn! alone! and my thoughts are all about the mistakes I’ve made and the lover(s) I’ve lost and the roads not taken and the…well, it gets pretty nasty and self-destructive, folks. And, for me, at least, it’s embarrassing, because…well, you know that old saw about how when animals are sick they hide away from the herd or crawl under the bed? I don’t know if it’s entirely true, but I always think that if it is, it’s because the animals feel shamed. And I get that, I really do, because, even though I know it’s completely illogical, I feel ashamed and embarrassed.

Which is why, I think, I try to be so open about my depression. It’s my way of fighting it. It makes me so! God-damned! angry! that I have had to deal with this shit for 25 years… anyway, it’s another old saw about how shadows disappear in the light, and I just wanted to let you guys know where I was last weekend.

But that was last weekend. It passed, as all things do….

Everybody stand up and cheer that our friend and fellow columnist John Ostrander came through his cabbage with flying colors! Yeah!!! And yes, we medical folk really do pronounce the acronym CABG that way. I do owe you an apology, though, John. I forgot to let you know about the shave job. Just be glad it wasn’t a body wax!

I’ve been binging on Star Trek: Voyager this week. Totally forgot how absolutely marvelous Kate Mulgrew (currently playing “den mother” Galina “Red” Reznikov on Netflix’s Orange Is The New Black) was as Captain Katherine Janeway. The lady had a lot hanging on her performance as the first woman to head a Star Trek series, though technically she wasn’t the first woman we saw command a starship – I believe that honor goes to Tricia O’Neill as Captain Rachel Garret of the U.S.S. Enterprise-C in “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” which aired on Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1990. But it’s clear in her execution that Ms. Mulgrew embraced and cherished the opportunity and the role.

All the actors were superb, but one thing I’ve always questioned is why Voyager creators Rick Berman, Michael Piller, and Jeri Taylor chose not to have Robert Duncan McNeill replay his “fallen Starfleet cadet” Nicholas Locarno in TNG’s 1992 episode “The First Duty,” instead of “bad boy” Tom Paris. It may have been just synchronicity that McNeill read for the part and won it; it may also have been that it would have been very expensive to resurrect the Locarno character, as the writers of “First Duty” would have had to receive royalties every time Locarno appeared on the screen, which would have been every episode of Voyager.

Can’t say I’m happy about the results of the midterm elections last week. I don’t understand why the Democratic candidates ran away from President Obama. Hello, Allison Grimes, did you not learn your lesson when Al Gore distanced himself from Bill Clinton? Jesus, woman, you were a delegate for Obama at the Democratic convention! Who the hell did you think you were fooling? I don’t understand any woman who votes the Republican ticket. No one’s forcing anyone to have an abortion, lady. And what business is it of yours, anyway, if another woman chooses to do so? I don’t understand why someone who is against the minimum wage, denies global warming and climate change and wants to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency (created by Republican President Richard Nixon, by the way), gets into office. Oh, I know. She can slaughter hogs.

SPOILER ALERT! STOP HERE IF YOU MISSED THE DOCTOR WHO FINALE! “Bowties are cool.” But Osgood is dead. Or is she?

Danny Pink is dead. Worse, he’s a Cyberman. Or is he?

The coordinates for Gallifrey are wrong, a lie told to the Doctor by the Master – uh, the Mistress. Or are they?

Clara and the Doctor have ended their relationship – or did they?

Is that really Santa Claus?

Ho! Ho! Ho!

Hey, at least I’m not depressed anymore.

 

Unlock Kate Stewart in Doctor Who: Legacy

  • News
  • November 9, 2014

Are you playing Doctor Who: Legacy? Would you like to try the new special levels with an extra friend by your side? SPLENDID!

Just take a look at our recap of the Doctor Season finale Death in Heaven to find a special code to automatically download Kate Stewart, Chief Scientific Officer of UNIT.

If you’re new to the game, you can also use the code 1212-1212-1212-1212 to get  a care package of bonuses to get you started properly

Doctor Who: Legacy is free for Apple, Android and Kindle devices, as well as playable online via Facebook.

REVIEW: True Blood: The Complete Seventh Season

true-blood-the-complete-seventh-season-blu-ray-with-digital-hd_500-e1415467787782-7913238All things come to an end and the true death arrived for HBO’s True Blood earlier this year. This week, HBO Home Entertainment offers up The Complete Seventh Season along with a mammoth complete series box set. In looking back on the series, it probably hung around a little longer than necessary, especially as things spiraled from over-the-top to insane crazy after series creator Alan Ball left.

true-blood-season-7-e1415468047318-6568879The seventy episodes veered further and further from Charlaine Harris’s The Southern Vampire Mysteries novels and even she wrapped up her prose stories recognizing the time had come.

Bon Temps is under attack as things open up, picking up where season six dropped us. The Hep V Vampires are running amuck as many of our favorite supporting characters have been threatened. Pam continues her hunt for Eric leaving Sookie as the calming voice of reason and she’s not feeling all that steady. Meantime, Bill is on his own and every scene brings us closer to the end of his arc and there’s a sense of inevitable melancholy from the beginning.

true-blood-bill-s7-e8-e1415468074301-9508350His arc is the only one that gets the right amount of time to resolve. While things ratchet up in intensity, we watch one familiar face after another die in vastly imaginative ways. But it also brings several sub-plots to hasty or abrupt conclusions. Luke Grimes, who played James, walked away when he was unhappy with his story and was replaced with Australian actor Nathan Parsons, who is fine. The uneven pacing also serves to winnow down the cast for the final two episodes when the main figures take center stage. As usual, poor Tara gets the worst treatment as if the writers could never get a handle on her after the first brilliant season. Alcide’s departure barely gets noticed.

On the other, it’s nice to have Hoyt back and reaching a satisfying hoyt-3877081conclusion with Jessica so it isn’t all gruesome. With Jessica back in Hoy’t sarms, Jason needed someone to love – as befit his character from the first episode. However, how quickly he found it with Bridget and received Sookie’s blessing came way too fast for my taste.

true_blood_season_7_trailer_1_hbo-e1415468152341-2934458And then we’re down to Bill, Eric, and Sookie the enduring triangle that was twisted like so much Silly Putty across the years. Is it entirely a happy or unhappy ending? Your call but it does wrap things up in a tidy package which is fine. The show grew more and more uneven through the seasons so this was about as good a wrap-up as one can expect. (And there’s a lovely cameo of novelist Charlaine Harris in the final episode, her way of saying bye-bye.)

tumblr_mp8jgvwyyw1qc5buuo1_1280-e1415468185773-2619978As we have come to expect, the three disc set comes packed with the usual assortment of special features starting with audio commentaries for five of the ten episodes. Directors Howard Deutch, Gregg Fienberg, Angela Robinson, and, Simon Jayes; screenwriters Kate Barnow, Daniel Kenneth, Craig Chester, and Brian Buckner; and actors Kristen Bauer van Straten, Carrie Preston, Lauren Bowles, Chris Bauer, Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer all weigh in on the stories. It’s nice to hear from Paquin and Moyer in the final episode since they carried the emotional load and saying farewell to the show they fell in love with (along with one another).

There’s the fifteen minute True Death: The Final Days On Set, an informal look as the cast and crew wind up their work. Then there’s True Blood: A Farewell To Bon Temps, a twenty-eight minute retrospective that explores the attraction of vampires with Ball, Buckner, and the main cast offering their well-earned observations on that and other aspects of making the series. An updated True Blood Lines timeline is offered once again along with the previews and recaps.

New Who Review – “Death in Heaven”

When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth.  As Cybermen.  See what he did there?  The Master is back, and has been working on this plot for QUITE a long time. Some old friends return for the fight, we say goodbye (for now, anyway) to some others, and oh goodness, were there still surprises.  I don’t know why you’d be reading this recap before you saw the episode, but if you are, don’t.  Because it makes much more sense to know about the…

DEATH IN HEAVEN
By  Steven Moffat
Directed by Rachel Talalay

(more…)

Categories

Archives

Everything you need to make great comics!

comicmix-pro-300x69-2

Nucleus X

Bookshop Zaks