Tagged: DVD

Early Review: ‘Justice League: New Frontier’

 

Like many of you out there, a bad taste was left in my mouth coming off of Superman: Doomsday, so of course I was wary of DC’s next direct-to-DVD flick. I wasn’t a huge fan of the graphic novels (Isn’t that what we call thick comic books these days?), but I am certainly a fan of the [[[Justice League]]] and its animated counterpart. 
 
I’ll start with a warning to those who aren’t totally familiar with The New Frontier and its universe, but ARE fans of the established animated DC universe: this is a whole new direction from shows like Justice League Unlimited and others, but it is full of exciting DCU fan favorites. In fact, my biggest complaint about [[[Superman: Doomsday]]] was that there were no outside DC heroes, even though they were all over the original story. But I digress.
 
Looking at the animation first, I was very pleased that Bruce Timm (main creator of the animated DCU) and Darwyn Cooke (wirter/artist of The New Frontier graphic novel) were able to find a happy medium between the already established look of the animated Justice League and the very stylized look of Cooke’s art, thought I do think the eye-slits works much better for Superman than the baby blues. The entire artistic feel practically beamed with that golden age look, which is what attracted me to the books in the first place.

 

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Turok: Son of Stanley Kramer, by Ric Meyers

  • News
  • February 10, 2008

 

Unarguably, one of the things DVD has way over VHS is its compression. Far more discs fit in any given space than cassettes – allowing producers to create compact yet extensive homages to filmmakers or genres. A welcome addition to this group arrives this week in the form of the Stanley Kramer Film Collection. We’ll now take a moment for average film-goers to say “who?” and film-lovers to go “ahhhhh!”
 
For the a.f.g.’s amongst you, Kramer was a true maverick-altruist among those about whom the great comedian Fred Allen once said: “You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer’s heart.” Kramer’s filmography was chock-ablock with socially-conscious challenges which were as ground-breaking as they were entertaining. As producer and/or director, he constantly strove to do both the right and best thing, including breaking the iron rule of the blacklist and rampant racism.
 
Amongst his classics not in this six-DVD set are The Defiant Ones, Death of a Salesman, High Noon, Inherit the Wind, Judgment at Nuremberg, The Caine Mutiny, and (arguably) It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. This collection, however, features some of his rarer (The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T), most influential (The Wild One), heartfelt (The Member of the Wedding, and ambitious [Ship of Fools)] efforts — culminating with the 40th Anniversary release of his last great masterpiece Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. 
 
The latter film has a special edition disc of its own, featuring deserved kow-tows from Steven Spielberg, Quincy Jones, Tom Brokaw, Alec Baldwin, and many others. It also has a two-part “making of:” one for the daring interracial romantic comedy-drama itself, and one just on its final pairing of Katherine Hepburn and the dying Spencer Tracy (when the cast and crew recount his final day on the set, delivering the film’s final speech just a fortnight before he passed away, I’ll defy you not to be as misty-eyed as they are).

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Across the Midnight Express Universe, by Ric Meyers

  • News
  • February 3, 2008
 
This week I watched two DVDs that considered the same turbulent period, but from two wildly divergent vantage points. 
 
First, the divider. Reviewers were almost totally at odds over Across the Universe, director Julie Taymor’s “homage” to The Beatles. Homage is in quotation marks because half the critics thought its liberties and excesses were trumped by its imagination, while the other half thought it was simply, cringingly, awful. 
 
I doubt the 2-Disc Deluxe Edition that’s showing up next Tuesday will do anything to dispel the opposites. It’s obvious that Taymor – best known as the director of Broadway’s The Lion King — was aiming for the same sort of cinematic success as The Who’s Tommy or Pink Floyd’s The Wall, but the nay-sayers pushed it toward 1978’s campy bomb, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band starring the Bee Gees. 
 
The talented Taymor dodged that bullet, but couldn’t Matrix them all. The Beatles are a creative touchstone, all right, but not always for the best. Just as it’s more difficult to adapt a great book to film (The Kite Runner, Love in the Time of Cholera, etc.) than it is a pulpy one (Jaws, Psycho, The Godfather), it’s also extremely problematic to create a new musical from iconic music. And there’s hardly anything more iconic than The Beatles. The new, obviously far less talented, interpreters will always come out the short end.
 
To her credit, Taymor doesn’t try to overwhelm the music with vocal gymnastics (save for one exception) or distract audiences with stunt casting (save for the welcome inclusion of Bono and Joe Cocker in the supporting cast). But, apparently she can’t resist hurling buckets of creative energy all over the Frankenstein-stitched, wedged-in soundtrack. There are two kinds of directors: those who say “I” and those who say “you”: you’ll feel this, you’ll think this. Guess which one Taymor is.
 

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Youngblood, Young Avengers, Young Legion

It might be a cold January day, but ComicMix Radio warms things up. Lost returns in a bit over a week, Iron Man premieres in just over 100 days and there is a spark of light at the end of the WGA Strike tunnel.

Plus:

  • It’s a pretty good week for new comics and DVDs, including Young Avengers, more Shooter Legion and Torchwood on DVD – we cover it all!
  • Youngblood sells out and gets a "variant within a variant"
  • More on the revival of Wild Cards

Press The Button and let us fill you in on that and a lot more!

Or subscribe to our podcasts via iTunes or RSS!

Leftovers/Third Helpings, by Ric Meyers

  • News
  • December 30, 2007

 

Ah, holidays: a time to get together with family and friends … and watch all the DVDs you missed during the year. In my case, it’s with my teen and preteen nieces, so sooner or later they get control of the remote, and they call the shots. So it was in this cozy, tinsel-lined environment that we settled in to watch the special features on two of the second sequels that so galvanized marketing types a few weeks ago.
 
First up: Pirates of the Caribbean At World’s End, which more than half of the nation’s critics found loud and confusing. But I, a market share of one, have always felt that they missed the point. Lurching, unfocused, overstuffed, yes. But this effort was nothing short than a largely successful attempt to dismantle, then refashion, what it means to be a “Disney Film," a seeming attempt that successfully continued with Ratatouille and Enchanted. 
 
This, after all, is a film that starts with the death by hanging of a ten … year … old … boy, then continues with piles of corpses, cutthroats staring up Keira Knightley’s dress, extended existential sequences in the land of death itself, and a central appearance by the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards. The extras on the Two-Disc Collector’s Edition don’t rip the wrapping paper off this concept and slap it in your face, but there’s enough hints in the giddy declarations of director Gore Verbinski and writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio that something was up their sleeves besides arm hair.
 
Basically all of them contend that they were given the freedom to have fun and entertain themselves. Even so, none were absolutely sure that this independence (and the more than 200 million which bought it) wouldn’t come back to bite them. At one point, coming from the bright-eyed, sheet-eating grinning face of one writer was the passive/aggressive statement that the boy-hanging opening was his idea … except it might not have been, depending on the then-up-coming audience reaction. 
 

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The latest from Harris Polls for TV shows on DVDs

  • News
  • December 24, 2007

I found myself taking a recent Harris poll on TV shows, and they asked some questions about TV shows and DVD, asking if I’d want to buy any of these on DVD:

All of Us

Witchblade

Pushing Daisies

Chuck

Men in Trees

Big Bang Theory

Birds of Prey

Planet Earth

The New Adventures of Old Christine

Moonlight

Man from UNCLE

Big Shots

Cold Case

Gossip Girl

Fastlane

Makes you wonder what’s going to get brought to DVD soon, eh? (And yes, I know Man From Uncle just had a big release.)

How about you? Which of these do you want to see on DVD soon? And what else should be on the list?

Tom and Jerry: Doomed To Repeat History

  • News
  • September 11, 2007

282706191_694fc36373-2065235Warner Home Video released the final set in their "complete" Tom and Jerry DVD collection – and it ain’t so complete. It’s missing the cartoons "Mouse Cleaning" and "Casanova Cat."

In their official statement, WHV said they "made the decision to omit these two shorts because, regardless of their historical context and artistic value, the offensiveness of certain scenes containing inappropriate racial stereotypes would diminish the enjoyment of the Collection’s 35 other classic cartoons for a large segment of the audience." Like their Popeye and Looney Tunes series, the Tom and Jerry box sets are labeled for mature audiences.

Like so many other cowardly companies who make as if white-washing (literally) history is a means for effective change, Warners would prefer to ignore their corporate past by giving us a revisionist version of our culture, ignoring the old adage "those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it."

Or maybe they’re just too damn cheap to commission a DVD documentary that puts all this into perspective.

As for me, I’m still waiting on a tribute to formerly legendary but now all but forgotten comedian Tim Moore, one of America’s greatest performers. Viacom/Paramount, you, too, are a bunch of spinless pussies.

When androids dream, Syd Mead gets paid

  • News
  • August 1, 2007

syd-mead-9442776Syd Mead (Tron, Alien, Blade Runner) is a professional artist.   This explains why he doesn’t work more in the movies.

 

That’s professional artist.  He does a lot of work for major corporations who are happy to meet his fee for his services without any phony penny pinching.  When it’s the movies calling, he says, the price “starts at zero” and the artist has to “work his way up.”

 

There are many needy artists. Producers always can find someone to work on spec.

 

But they won’t get Syd Mead.

 

He also insists on a “one to one relationship with the director,” which means no intermediaries or departments of intermediation. And if they do agree to his fee, and his working conditions, he then makes sure that the exact amount of work is specified and the fees due for anything more.  That means anything.

 

The last picture he worked on was Mission Impossible III, on the Mask Maker sequence.

 

I’m one of Syd Mead’s newest fans.  Before I signed up to cover his panel at Comic-Con I didn’t know his name, though I’d enjoyed his work.

Though “artist” is a big enough term to hold him, he is sometimes called a “visual futurist.”  But that’s a little silly.  No one can predict the future.  But an artist who is good enough can make images that speak to our sense of how we would like to improve the way things look and our need to make things that are better and more useful than the things that went before.  Henry Ford wasn’t being a futurist when he made a Model A to replace his Model T automobile, but today we would call him one.

 

Most designers are making good livings doing renderings that gently recycle the images of the past, the better to please the client.  This is why there are several hundred fake Tudor houses on Shady Bend for every saucer shape clinging to a hillside.

 

He is best known for his work on Blade Runner, though his career began in industrial design.  Like many successful designers, his career has made many twists and turns.  Designers work alone when they’re putting pencil marks and paint on illustration board, but they turn their work over to dozens, even hundreds of people who will then make a car or a building or a movie along the lines the designer suggests.  Good designers like this process.  They like working with directors and architects and other confident, creative people.  People who are in charge of insane amounts of money, risked by other people to create things people will buy and take to their hearts.

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Back to the Futurama

  • News
  • July 29, 2007

futuramairobot-8267542In the future, there will be no graves and nothing will stay dead. Motor-shock is coming.

The first original Futurama production since the series was canceled in 2003 will be a feature-length film, Futurama: Bender’s Big Score that will go directly to DVD and be available on November 27th. The new film features the show’s original cast and crew, and its release marks the second time that a Fox cartoon series has spawned a direct-to-DVD film after cancellation (Family Guy: Stewie Griffin, the Untold Story was the first). Previews were shown at SDCC with the crowd going nuts, as you’d expect.

Fox is planning to release three additional Futurama direct-to-DVD features during 2008, Futurama: The Beast With a Billion Backs, Futurama: Bender’s Game, and Futurama: Into the Wild, Green Yonder.  In addition to the original cast each Futurama film will feature guest stars.  Al Gore, Sarah Silverman and Coolio appear in Bender’s Big Score.

The release of the direct-to-DVD features doesn’t affect the previously announced plans to revive Futurama in episodic form on Comedy Central in 2008 (see "Futurama Revived"). The producers of the series plan on chopping up the features, adding new material and airing the resulting reconfigured new 22-minute episodes on Comedy Central during 2008 along with reruns of the original 72 episodes, much as they did with Stewie Griffin, the Untold Story. Click here to see a faux trailer.

Overheard at San Diego, part 5

  • News
  • July 28, 2007

cherrydarling-8053988People keep talking, and we keep taking notes…

"One guy asked me if I had my leg amputated to get the job." — Lacey Henderson, pictured at right, who’s been appearing as Cherry Darling to promote the DVD release of Grindhouse. Via USA Today.

"How did they make her look like that?" — A mother with two kids looking at Ms. Henderson working at the booth.

"How do they post for a job like that?" — ComicMix‘s Matt Raub

At the pilot screening for ABC’s Pushing Daisies:

Audience member: "There seem to a be a lot of symetric and palindromic references in this show — can you explain?"

(long pause from the writer, director, and cast)

Chi McBride: "Ummm, what?  What did you say? This is COMIC CON.  Repeat your question."

In the hall between panels: "It’s so crowded I couldn’t even get into the ballrooms for the studio panels, and I’m writing for Entertainment Weekly!"

“Hellboy plus Pan’s Labyrinth on steroids.” —Javier Soto describing next year’s Hellboy 2: The Golden Army

Introducing themselves at the GameTap Tomb Raider Re-envisioned panel:

"I’m Stan Lee." –Warren Ellis

"I’m Jack Kirby." –Brian Pulido

"I’m Peter Chung." –Peter Chung

Contributing spies: Kai Connolly, Adriane Nash.

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