http://thedissolve.com/features/exposition/618-were-losing-all-our-strong-female-characters-to-tr/
Many modern action movies, including How To Train Your Dragon 2, are visibly trying to make their female characters more than trophies and are only making them set pieces…
He’s “That Guy” – the funny one! Ron Funches is making a big name for himself, taking his unique style of comedy to NBC’s UNDATEABLE and @MIDNIGHT on Comedy Central. So what makes HIM laugh? We find out, then we explore the CSI reality show that started it all. MEDICAL DETECTIVES is headed back to cable and we talk to the guy who is guiding it there – plus Rosario Dawson becomes a part of DAREDEVIL.
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.
When was the last time a comic artist switching companies made the New York Times?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/23/books/leaping-from-marvel-to-dc-in-a-single-bound.html
John Romita Jr. will makes his series debut on Superman at DC Comics on Wednesday.
A quarter of a century ago, I went into New York to catch the first showing of a movie starring a certain caped crusader, and then went over to DC Comics to talk with everybody there. I had to do it in that order, because there would be no other topic of discussion in the office that day. Not that there had been much of one in the country before that, as any flat surface in America had a bat-logo pasted on it.
Now there are many retrospectives about the release of [[[Batman]]] out today and how it changed the comics and movie industry forever. But what I want to point out is that in comics, we can’t help but poke fun at our neighbors’s failures and successes. And so it was that Steve Gerber, Bryan Hitch, and Jim Sanders III gave us The Sensational She-Hulk #19 and Nosferata the She-Bat:
The Sergio Leone “Spaghetti Westerns” did not simply add a new chapter to the genre…they reinvented it. From his shockingly violent and stylized breakthrough, A Fistful Of Dollars, to the film Quentin Tarantino calls “the best-directed movie of all time,” The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, Leone’s vision elevated Westerns to an entirely new art form. This definitive Leone collection of the most ambitious and influential Westerns ever made includes more than five hours of special features that uncover buried gold in these gritty classics – plus a newly remastered version of The Good, The Bad And The Ugly.To win this copy, tell us why you think the Man With No Name has become an iconic pop culture figure. We want your submissions no later than 11:59 p.m. Friday, June 27. The decision of ComicMix‘s judges will be final. This contest is available only to readers in the United States and Canada.
For your information here are more details on the release.
Bonus Features:
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Meet the most dangerous bounty hunter of all, Ooga Chaka, in this modern trailer for Star Wars.
“How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!” — Maya Angelou
Don’t you love getting excited and worked up about movies that you can’t wait to see or television shows that you can’t wait to watch or comics that you can’t wait to read?
You know what I mean. I remember reading everything I could get my hands on about Star Wars, especially in Starlog magazine – that’s for you, Bob Greenberger. (I also remember being incredibly pissed coming home from work that May 25, 1977 to find that my then-husband, Steven, had gone to see Star Wars with his friends while I was stuck at work, and then incredibly happy and excited because he said that he would go see it again. Immediately. And out we went.) I remember standing on what seemed an endless line three years later and worrying that we wouldn’t get in to see The Empire Strikes Back. And I remember the insanity that led me to taking 3 ½ year-old Alixandra to an 11 a.m. showing of Return Of The Jedi because I couldn’t wait to see it and I didn’t want to go to the movies alone. (She was remarkably good, too; didn’t have to bribe her with candy…much.)
I remember reserving a copy of Crisis On Infinite Earths #1 at my local comic book store (now unfortunately defunct) and still worrying that it wouldn’t be there when I got finally got there. Yes, I know that I was freelancing at DC at that time, but I didn’t want to wait for my freelancer’s pack, and, besides, I liked supporting the shop. I remember when Alan Moore took over Saga Of The Swamp Thing and I read his first issue (“The Anatomy Lesson,” Saga of the Swamp Thing #21, February 1984) not because I was into shambling muck monsters, but because Karen Berger was my editor at the time and she was raving over it. Then the time between issues seemed not a month of waiting, but years of impatience.
Do I still feel that excitement?
Sadly, these days…
Not so much.
It isn’t that there aren’t movies and TV shows that excite me; I think it’s a product of being older and being jaded and knowing that if I miss X-Men: Days Of Future Passed, for example, in the theater – and no, I haven’t yet seen it – I will be able to watch it in a few short months courtesy of Netflix or Amazon Prime or iTunes. And certainly the price of one movie ticket these days also holds me back. And I hate going to the movies alone; for me part of the joy of going to see Star Trek: The Motion Picture or any of the Star Wars movies – well, the first three, anyway – is the communal experience.
One of the best times I’ve ever had in a movie theatre was back in the 90s, when I was working at Marvel full-time. A whole bunch of us – Mark Gruenwald among them – went uptown to the Museum of Television and Radio on W.52nd St. to see a showing of two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation about time travel: Yesterday’s Enterprise and Cause And Effect. It was absolute heaven watching them in a roomful of ST geeks who were my friends, and it was absolutely joyful to talk about them afterwards.
But these days I’ve either lost touch with some fellow geeks, or they live too far away to just call up and say, “hey, let’s go to the movies tonight/today/this afternoon (that’s you, Mike and John), or as working adults everyone’s schedule is too crazed and too hard to synchronize. And when Alix, of whom I’ve proud to say may not be a total geek but absolutely gets her geek mom, and Jeff, her wonderful husband with whom I share some geek qualities, want to go out for the night, who gets called to babysit with little Meyer (which is how we distinguish him from my father and his great-grandfather)?
And of course I will gladly give up going to see The Hunger Games: Mockingbird to be with my grandchild, if called upon to do so.
The last movie I didn’t wait to see was Star Trek: Into Darkness. I went to see it by myself on a Sunday afternoon. And you know what? I didn’t enjoy it as much as I was expecting to – my biggest disappointment was the lack of imagination in that J. J. Abrams (and the studio?) decided to remake The Wrath Of Khan; I still think that retelling the Gary Mitchell story would be a home run for the rebooted series – because I was alone, and there wasn’t anybody that I could “ooh” and “aah” with during the viewing, or share the “tingles” with as Alexander Courage’s iconic theme came up, and afterwards go for a drink and dissect the film and bitch and moan about “why did they remake TWOK, the perfect ST story and film?”
Still…
There’s one movie that I’m already feeling the shivers and pricklings and quiverings of excitement for.
One movie about which I am already saying, “Fuck Netflix! Fuck Amazon Prime! Fuck iTunes! I’m going to see it now, with or without company!”
One movie that’s already got me searching the web for tidbits of information.
Mark Hamill. Carrie Fisher. And…
Oh, no! Harrison Ford broke his ankle while shooting on the set! Is he okay? Will he be able to continue? And it could screw up the schedule?
That one.
If you’ve been watching any sort of television recently or have even just been clicking around online, you have probably heard of a series called ‘Penny Dreadful‘. Since the second last episode of the first season airs this evening, I wanted to do a short post as to why you should all be watching it.
(If you are not already.)
Starting first, it has the lovely Eva Green as Vanessa Ives, who is not only fabulous but is mysterious, and has some demons she’s fighting. Literally. (more…)
The Blu-ray edition of 300: Fall of an Empire comes out on Tuesday from Warner Home Entertainment and there’s still no sign of the source material. Nearly four years after promising Xerxes, the sequel to his acclaimed 300, Frank Miller is apparently nowhere near done. As a result, it’s very hard to tell how well director Noam Murrow did. Instead, we have Zack Snyder’s visual feast adaptation of 300 to compare this with and the bottom line is that Rise is a pale comparison.
The Greeks who died at Thermopylae holding off the Persians have inspired story, song, and film in the past but Miller returned it to the public consciousness with a stark artistic retelling that Snyder lovingly reworked for film, helping create a new vocabulary for cinematic storytelling. It also had Gerard Butler and an army of incredibly fit men, brutal bloodshed, and the rallying cry of “We are Sparta!” This time around, Butler is gone, replaced with Sullivan Stapleton as Themistokles, an Athenian who happens to have killed God-king Xerxes’ (Rodrigo Santoro) father.
The problem is, we have nothing new to offer. More six-pack abs, Eva Green and Lena Headey, more bloodshed, more of the same sort of storytelling. Told from the Athenian side of the fight, Themistocles and his navy take on the Persians, knowing Leonidas was holding back the towering Xerxes,. Miller tends not to repeat himself,, adding something fresh to his sequels be it the resurrection of Elektra, the Dark Knight Strikes Again, or Sin City. What he brought to Xerxes remains to be seen so it’s hard to say if screenwriters Snyder and Kurt Johnistad had much to work with.
Watching the film, it has a familiar feel and not a pleasant one because the first was fresh and exciting. Less so the second time around without a new ingredient. Stapleton is not Butler and it robs the army of a charismatic leader. There is no nobility to the battle, no poetry to the dialogue, and no acting to make you root for the Greeks.
The video transfer is just fine and needs to be since this is visual interesting despite the repetitive feel. Colors are rich, blood soaks into sand quite nicely. The DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 surround track is up to task so every effect, every grunt, every musical note is clear.
There are a fine assortment of Special Features, including Behind the Scenes: The 300 Effect (30:00) which traces Miller’s idea for a sequel to film production; Real Leaders & Legends (23:00), which compares fact to fiction; Women Warriors (12:00), spotlighting Green’s Artemisia and Lena Headey’s Queen Gorgo; Savage Warships (11:00), giving us a look at the actual Naval vessels and strategies employed in our world; and, Becoming a Warrior (5:00), the obligatory training segment.
My pal Bob Greenberger did a nice review this week of the TV show Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson; the TV series is now out on BluRay. I was particularly struck by two facts about the show when it first aired. 1) It was shown on two TV networks, National Geographic and Fox. Nat Geo doesn’t surprise me, but Fox? 2) It was exec produced by Seth MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy, American Dad, Ted, and A Million Ways to Die in the West (which several million people, including myself, have opted out of seeing). I’ll be honest; I’m not a fan of MacFarlane. His humor doesn’t work for me. However, I have a ton of respect for his getting Cosmos on the air. He used his considerable clout to make it happen, and that’s a service to us all.
For those who bypassed the series, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey is the sequel to Carl Sagan’s noted and much respected PBS series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, from 35 years ago. Both series have sought to explore and explain concepts of science in ways that are comprehensible to those of us who struggled with algebra in high school. (I’m raising my hand here; I squeaked out of algebra, failed horribly at chemistry and math is Greek to me).
Both shows had charismatic and brilliant hosts – the early version with Dr. Sagan and the recent one with Dr. DeGrasse Tyson, who has to be the foremost communicator of science for our time. An astrophysicist, he is the Frederick P. Rose Director of New York’s Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space and a research associate in the department of astrophysics at the American Museum “The goal is to convey why science matters to the person, to our society, to us as shepherds of this planet. It involves presenting science in ways that connect to you, so ‘Cosmos’ can influence you not only intellectually but emotionally, with a celebration of wonder and awe,” Tyson says about the series, according to USA Today.
In both versions of Cosmos, there was a basic desire to entertain, to make the show visually stunning, to make it accessible. Tyson said that it’s goal “is not that you become a scientist. It’s that at the end of the series, you will embrace science and recognize its role in who and what you are.” It used animation in a graphic novel style and hired noted composer Alan Silvestri to do the music. It was popular culture in the best sense and use of that concept.
The series wasn’t afraid to ruffle feathers. It talked about evolution, it talked about climate change, it talked about the science of both of these and of other things, it gave the scientific dating of the earth and the Universe. The Creationists, predictably, were not amused.
Danny Faulkner of Answers In Genesis voiced his complaints about Cosmos and how the 13-episode series has described scientific theories such as evolution, but has failed to shed light on dissenting creationist viewpoints. AiG maintained that God is the Creator, who “was the only eyewitness to the time of origins and that He has given us the truth about how He created everything in His Word. He is the one that created the natural laws that govern the physical world and make science possible.”
“Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey, if the first segment is any indication, will attempt to package unconditional blind faith in evolution as scientific literacy in an effort to create interest in science,” wrote Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell on the AiG blog.
Creationism tries to explain the Bible in a scientific or quasi-scientific way but it insists on the existence of God, specifically the Judao-Christian God, as a prerequisite. Its proponents want it taught in schools as a viable alternative to the theory of evolution and the creationists are upset with how Cosmos presents evolution and some want equal time to explain their view, preferably on Cosmos itself. Opposing views should get equal time, right? That’s only fair, after all.
Except it isn’t.
Tyson, in an interview on CNN, said “You don’t talk about the spherical earth with NASA and then say let’s give equal time to the flat-earthers.” Kate Mulgrew, the former Capt. Janeway of Star Trek: Voyager, was the narrator on a documentary that tried to promote the theory that sun did, if fact, revolve around the Earth. Should she have a voice on Cosmos as well?
Creationism is not equal to the scientific method. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the scientific method as “a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.” Boiled down – observation, theory, experiment and test to ratify the theory, repeat the experiment to verify the results. Confirm or change the hypotheses.
Creationism doesn’t do that. It starts from a specific conclusion – that the Bible is factually true and God exists – and draws its theories from that. That’s not science. That’s belief. Dr. Mitchell’s assertion of a “blind faith” in evolution is simply wrong; science doesn’t ask for blind faith. It accepts as true what can be proven from observation and experiment. That is why it remains a “theory” even after it has been universally accepted. If you can prove something wrong, science can and will accept that, if sometimes a little belatedly. (Cosmos itself illustrated that.) Science acknowledges that a theory can be mistaken; creationism does not.
I continue to have problems with those who insist that the Bible is a history or a science book or an infallible source of information. It’s not meant to be taken literally. It is full of myth and poetry and metaphor and in that lies its power. It isn’t meant to stand up to the same rigors by which science holds itself. My former pastor, Phillip Wilson, used to say there is a difference between the road map and the road. The former is not the same as the latter but it may be able to guide you. If we understand that Genesis is a metaphor and evolution is a description, then perhaps the two can live together. The Bible can have truths in it without needing to be literally true.
Science and religion have the same origin – gazing at the stars and the world around us and asking, “Why? How did this come to be? How did we come to be here?” Religion has come up with answers and has stopped questioning; it has dogma and that’s where questions go to die. Science continues to question even after it has a reasonable answer.
As for having creationists have equal time on Cosmos – maybe Neil deGrasse Tyson might consider it. Right after he’s given equal time on the 700 Club.
I mean, that would be fair, right?
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
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