Category: Columns

Emily S. Whitten: Small Stories Writ Large

This week, Marvel released both the “ant-sized” and then “human-sized” trailers for Ant-Man. A clever marketing trick, and one that made me smile.

It also got me thinking – not particularly about the Ant-Man movie, although I am curious to see how it turns out, but about a couple of movies released in 2014 and why I liked them so much. Those movies were Guardians of the Galaxy and Mockingjay (Part I).

In Guardians, as I’m sure everyone knows by now, Marvel took one of their lesser-known properties and made a big, big splash with it. It really is a wild, fun ride – and I think one of the reasons for that is that the property was a bit more obscure. That perhaps (or at least this is what I extrapolate from the end result) allowed the studio not to take it all too seriously even in the realm of their Epic Marvel Movie Plan, and not to forget that comics are supposed to be fun; symbolic; intense; hopeful; and sometimes ridiculous.

From a talking raccoon and a pretty goofy prison break to the amazingly heartwarming moments with Groot, the movie definitely did things a little differently than what we may have come to expect from our superhero films (while, to be fair, still hitting the big-budget notes of explosions and fight scenes and daring space escapes). Even the end credits scene was a little wink and a nod to the fans. And that sense of individuality and fun made Guardians stand out in my mind.

Mockingjay (Part I) stands out for a different reason. This is the third of four movies in a fairly serious and intense storyline based on The Hunger Games book series, and sure, it has fight scenes, and planes crashing from the sky, and all of that – but mostly, what it has is a series of small moments, just like in the first half of the third book it is based on. Moments of character development that make the whole sense of the movie quiet but intense. Scenes between Plutarch and Coin, or Katniss and Snow. Scenes like Katniss at the river, or Peeta being “interviewed” on TV. Scenes that look at one small space in time and how the characters in the story are being shaped by it. And that’s something that, while we get it all the time in books, is often not translated well to or given time on the big screen.

Even in book-to-movie transitions, the translators of great stories often fail to understand the draw of quiet moments of character development, and that they can be done well to build the story on the screen. (One sad example of this is The Seeker, which was a not-so-successful translation of Susan Cooper’s excellent young adult fantasy series The Dark is Rising.)

What’s interesting about both of these movies is that although very different, they share the thread of small stories writ large – either in the sense of more obscure properties being brought bombastically into the limelight, or of little bits of people’s characters being slowly threaded together into a greater story. And that through this, they also brought me either a sense of joy and fun or a sense of emotional involvement. What’s also interesting is the lack of that sense in some of the action, superhero, or fantasy movies out there in the last few years (Man of Steel being a glaring example, despite the enjoyment of seeing Henry Cavill on the big screen).

It continues to puzzle me why some movies forget that they are supposed to be fun, or interesting and unique, or at the very least true to their written origins when they have them. While I don’t necessarily think studios are losing that insight altogether, I do think it’s nice to remind them sometimes of why I, at least, like to see movies – not for the mindless big-budget fight scenes and explosions, or the clichéd and predictable good-versus-bad standoff, but for the fun, the excitement of something new and different, the sense of hope or meaning, or the insights that can leak out of fiction to inform our views of reality.

So movie studios, this is just me saying, at the start of 2015: in the midst of all the business of moviemaking, please don’t forget to make your movies fun, or meaningful, or (hopefully) both. Thanks.

And until next time, Servo Lectio!

 

Michael Davis: Never Say Never

AjalaHappy New Year!

I was never so glad to say those words as I was at midnight, seven days ago.

2014 was the best year of my life professionally. Without saying why, that’s saying something. On the flip side, 2014 was the worst year of my life personally.

All my life I’ve known that money can’t buy happiness. This pass year I’ve learned money can’t buy anything of real value. Not in my life anyhow, or so I thought.

What I want and need, I can’t have. Dead Presidents can do a lot but raising the dead it can’t and with that, way to telling line, I’m done with my self pity shit.

In six days, if Mr. Gold is nice and runs this piece today or in five days if he runs it tomorrow, the crowd funding efforts of Bad Boy Studio alumni, Eisner Award Nominee, N. Steven Harris and writer/creator Robert Garrett, will come to an end.

Hopefully it will come to a successful end because what they are attempting to fund is nothing short of fantastic.

Ajala: A Series Of Adventures is a coming of age story about a young black girl growing up in New York City’s Harlem. Among her series of adventures, discovering what it means to be a hero in a time and place where just being can be trouble is worth the price of admission.

Promoting a crowd funded project is something I’ve never done and for good reason. Once done, I can no longer tell people, “if I do it for you I’ll have to do it for everybody.”

Yeah, that’s out the window, just like I was when her husband came home. Be that as it may, this project is incredible, so I’ll gladly make an exception. I wrote earlier that money couldn’t buy anything of real value but added, or “so I thought.” Well, after seeing what this creative team has done I stand corrected, this story has value, this project has value.

If you take a look and find it interesting, please, drop some coin on the project and lets make it real.

Again, Happy New Year. Make it a good one.

 

Mindy Newell: To Resolve Not To Resolve

Today we are five days into the New Year, and I hope that for all of you 2015 has been rocking.

As Martha mentioned in her latest column, January is the traditional time for making resolutions. Well, I’m not much for making resolutions generally, and January is my least favorite month. It’s drab and dull and boring, a big letdown after the “holiday season,” with not much to look forward to other than lousy weather and 31 days to get through until February – not that I’m so nuts about February, except that it’s short and the days are just beginning to get noticeably longer. But, back to January.

There should be a national holiday in the middle of the month, “National Doldrums Day” to break up the monotony. All right, if your birthday or wedding anniversary or some other personal celebration is in January, I apologize, but there should be something for the rest of us, don’cha think?

Also, I’ve always thought that resolution is a funny word to use when referring to a new start or a new promise. As a writer, resolution means the end of the story’s conflict or problem, as in:

The Guardians of the Galaxy are no longer criminals, their crimes having been erased. Quill opens the last present he mother gave him, a cassette of her favorite songs, and also discovers that he isn’t fully human; his father came from an ancient, but unknown, species. They board the rebuilt Milano, carrying a sapling of Groot.

And as an operating room nurse, resolution refers to the clarity of an image from an MRI or X-ray, as in:

Surgeon: “The resolution sucks. I can’t see a fucking thing.”

X-ray Tech: “What the fuck you want from me? Goddamn C-arm is about 100 years old and the hospital is too cheap to buy a new one.”

I’ll leave it up to you to decide if that’s a verbatim conversation or not.

It’s actually September that feels like the beginning of the year for me (and I would guess most of you) thanks to the indoctrination of the American school system… and perhaps just a bit due to the Jewish New Year occurring in the fall.

But of course resolution also means “to make a decision,” which accounts for how crowded my gym gets right after New Year’s every January – and also around April or May, as the summer nears – as people “resolve” to lose weight and/or get buff. Which is another reason why I hate January. The Body Pump class is so damn crowded and just try getting on the treadmill.

And the other thing about resolutions in January is that, let’s face, they’re so often the exact same ones a person made the year before.

“Okay, I mean it this time. I’m going to:

  1. Fill in here.
  2. Fill in here.
  3. Fill in here.
  4. Fill in here.
  5. Fill in here.

Hey, why should I embarrass myself by repeating the same old same-olds?

Check back here next year for my 2016 resolutions.

•     •     •     •     •

But there is one think I’m going to do this year; in fact I’m going to do it as soon as I’m done writing this and sending it off to Mike to edit.

I’m going to donate to the Norm Breyfogle Medical Stroke Fund. See that box over to the right?

Make a resolution to click on it as soon as you’re done reading this.

Make a resolution to donate as much as you can afford, even if it’s only $1.00

Make a resolution.

Just do it.

 

John Ostrander: Newspapers and their Great Comics

Dick TracyI’m a fossil. I know it. Proof positive: I read the daily newspaper. Not on a pad or tablet or my computer, I go out and actually buy the blamed thing. I read it during breakfast. Yes, I still get a certain percentage of my news from the computer and/or Jon Stewart and The Daily Show but I like having the physical newspaper, just as I prefer actual books to an e-reader. If I don’t get to read the paper, I get cranky. Or crankier.

I think I got that from my father, Joel W. Ostrander Sr. He was always the first up in the morning but, during my high school years, I was up second. We’d both be at breakfast and we would read the newspaper. I’d get the sections he was done with; that’s where I learned to be possessive about my newspaper. If I buy the newspaper, you get it when I’m done. If you want to read it sooner, go buy your own.

Dad and I would have breakfast and read in a comfortable silence unless my mother decided to get up early and join us. Mom was a talker in the morning. Worse, she would expect you to talk back and on the topic she started so you had to listen. You couldn’t just fake it or grunt replies. She expected coherent sentences. I can do that in the morning but it takes an effort and more concentration than I care to give. Just let me read my newspaper and no one gets hurt.

When I move to a new location, I always have to decide which of the available newspapers I’m going to read (assuming I have a choice which is increasingly becoming difficult as newspapers fold up). So I have to choose which newspaper is going to be my regular. While the editorial bent is an important factor (politically left of center is a prerequisite), the determining factor is usually what comic strips they have. I was raised on the Chicago Tribune but I would also buy the Sunday Chicago American because I enjoyed the comics there. Dad would bring home the Chicago Daily News in the evening so, all in all, I got a goodly number of strips.

Chester Gould was still doing Dick Tracy when I was younger (my buddy Joe Staton now draws it) and Harold Gray was doing Little Orphan Annie. Al Capp was doing L’il Abner, Hal Foster was doing Prince Valiant, Walt Kelly was doing Pogo, and Milton Caniff was doing Steve Canyon. I don’t know if music was better back then but, yes, the comic strips certainly were. Perhaps even more than the comic books I read, comic strips were influential in my development as a writer, especially in graphic literature.

Some of the strips are no longer around. Leonard Starr’s On Stage was beautifully drawn and wonderfully written. I would later come across the British strip Modesty Blaise, created by Peter O’Donnell and drawn by a succession of artists following Jim Holdaway, who drew it first. I read those still not only for pleasure but because O’Donnell was a master of the medium. He knew how to pace and drive a story, wasting nothing, with every line forwarding the plot or the characters in a minimum of words. Elegant and compelling.

These days, there are very few adventure strips or strips with a continuing narrative and that’s a pity. Mostly, it’s gag and humor strips although some strips have picked up that narrative aspect. For example, Luann – created, written and drawn by Greg Evans – started out as a gag strip but has developed into a narrative, with the characters allowed to age and change.

Some strips these days are minimally drawn, such as Dilbert by Scott Adams. The drawing is competent although I get the feeling some panels are simply repeated over and over again but the writing is generally sharp and satiric. Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis also has minimal drawing although, again, the writing is generally sharp and funny. Mutts, written and drawn by Patrick Mc Donnell, is a modern classic; better drawn although sometimes the writing is not so sharp. Non Sequitur, by Wiley Miller, is unique – sometimes it is a single panel drawing and sometimes it’s a sequential strip. It has continuing characters but it also has many stand alone installments. This one is also superbly written and drawn and benefits, I think, from Miller’s work as an editorial cartoonist. He packs a lot into a little space.

Some strips, unfortunately, are wretched, badly drawn and almost incomprehensible. That was always true, however, and there’s good reading to be found even today. Almost all of them are also available somewhere on the Internet but I still enjoy reading them in the newspaper if I can. There’s a tactile pleasure in holding the newspaper and experiencing them that way. I recommend it.

As they (used to) say, see you in the funny papers.

 

Marc Alan Fishman: The Voice of an Entire Universe

Let’s just get this out of the way now: Amongst we ComicMixers, the esteemed (and far prettier) Emily S. Whitten is a bigger and better fan of voice actors than I shall ever be. With that being said… aren’t voice actors amazing?

You see, in between bouts of crippling sinusitis and binge-watching Breaking Bad like I was addicted to meth, I opted to catch John DiMaggio’s documentary I Know That Voice. A fantastic little flick dedicated in celebration of a continually (mostly) unsung hero of the animated world: the voice performer. With interviews from some – if not most – of the current tribe of working actors and actresses who lend their larynx to the cartoons of the day, I simply must recommend watching it yourself soon if you haven’t already.

Andrea RomanoBut that recommendation is not my singular premise of the week, kiddos. For you see, it was that fine feature that finds me floundering on someone who I particularly find perhaps even more incredible than the aforementioned performers – Andrea Romano, voice director.

A quick scan of her Wikipedia bio proved to me why she’s such a favorite of mine – Batman aside, which we’ll get to soon enough. After three years serving in LaLa land, Andrea landed the voice director role for a little show by the name of Duck Tales. For those not in the know, the best I could say is this: Duck Tales still holds up today, and puts plenty of what passes as entertainment now to shame. If you think Adventure Time doesn’t owe a debt of gratitude to Duck Tales, then you probably think dub step is real music. But I digress.

Duck Tales aside from wondrous writing – some episodes were adapted from classic Carl Barks stories – became a staple to my generation due, in part, to the strong direction in the vocal booth. For someone to be able to help her cadre of pros (and yes, we know Disney don’t fudge ’round when it comes to a good voice… save for Mickey, ha Ha!) produce pathos, angst, fear, pride, and greed in between daring adventures and slapstick? Well, it helped a show about anthropomorphic ducks and dogs going on worldly (and time-travely) jaunts feel like a show that could care less it was about ducks and dogs.

To wax poetic about every line-item in her IMDb profile would be a waste. Suffice to say, Ms. Romano’s resume is the tops. But the devil is in the details, there. Because no matter what else she was help produce in her tenure, Andrea Romano’s magnum opus lay across her impermeable casting and direction of the animated Bruce Timm DCU.

Close your eyes. Imagine Batman and the Joker trading a bit of banter before a major battle. If you’re not hearing Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill, I feel mildly sorry for you. Personal preferences aside, when Bruce Timm’s critically acclaimed Batman: The Animated Series debuted… it was not only the unmistakable visual identity of the show that captivated the world.

The casting was an unheard of coup. Legends of the stage and screen joined well-vetted voice-acting professionals to layer a soundscape that perfected the art of matching an animated presence to realistic voice. I take nothing away from other casts, and cartoons mind you. But I beg for someone to compare the sheer volume of wins Ms. Romano chalks in her column, if by the DCU alone.

Even when facing a recasting, like Superman (heard of him?), Andrea cemented her mettle with me. Tim Daly’s Superman, as originally cast, brought so much to the role. As cast and written, Daly was innocent, untested, strong, but jovial. But by the time we reached George Newbern’s brogue come Justice League: Unlimited, the character had changed. Andrea’s selection delivered one of the most potent speeches ever uttered over celluloid. When through gritted teeth we heard “I live in a world made of cardboard…” in the finale of the series (and the animated DCU-ala-Timm) we heard a Superman that shunted away from his once prentice prose… that was still wholly made of his former self.

Beyond the most recognizable faces she brilliantly cast, Andrea Romano even nailed the minor roles. Take the casting of B-movie mainstay Jeffery Combs as the kooky Question. As a Vic Sage fan since forever, I can’t get Combs’ odd gravelly whisper out of my mind’s ear when I read him. Or take perhaps the hilarious casting of Fred Savage and Jason Hervey as Hawk and Dove, respectively. A wink and a nod to those of us who once grew up with the Arnold brothers of Wonder Years fame, but correctly recast; with the more nasal Hervey cast as the lesser Dove to the now meatier range of Savage. Even when taken out of our times, Romano matched the bravado necessary for Sargent Rock himself with the Hunter, Fred Dryer. I could go on (like the perfectly cocky Tom Everett Scott as Booster Gold, ahem), but my point has been made. And damn it all, I haven’t even gotten to the villains!

As my son begins to gain interest in the animated adventures of his favorite heroes, I’ll be perplexed to find him a definitive Captain America, or Iron Man. Luckily for me, he knows Superman and Batman. So, for the while, I’m well covered.

 

The Law Is A Ass

BOB INGERSOLL: THE LAW IS A ASS #339: INSPECTOR DANGER THE BREAKS THE CASE WIDE OPEN. OR DOES HE?

inspectordanger2I realize that most of you probably don’t have a deerstalker cap. So go get a couple of baseball caps. Wear one brim facing forward and the other brim facing backwards. You need the right visual. Because it’s time to look for the clues and solve a crime by matching wits with Inspector Danger.

Inspector Danger’s Crime Quiz is a comic strip produced by Werner Wejp-Olsen. In it the good inspector is presented with a weekly mystery to solve. Inspector Danger and his witless assistant Alfie – a foil who is so unobservant and dim that he makes the Nigel Bruce Watson look a positive luminary – investigate the crime. The strip provides you with all the clues you need to solve the crime before the Inspector. The Inspector solves the crime and his solution is printed upside down at the bottom of the strip. Meanwhile, Alfie stands around, and might as well have cartoon question marks floating around his head.

Now let me present you with the mystery from the December 8th installment of Inspector Danger’s Crime Quiz. We’ll see how well you do in solving the mystery.

Herbert Hudson, CEO of the recently bankrupt company Hudson Tech, drowned when his car drove off the pier and into the harbor. It looked like suicide. Hudson’s widow confirmed that Herbert had been depressed and threatened to take his own life. She wondered why he bothered to drive the ten to fifteen miles from his house all the way to the harbor to kill himself. She also came across as less-than-sympathetic when her chief concern was that all the money was gone and she, who was “used to a certain life style,” would soon be “walking the streets.”

The lab tech who examined Hudson’s car said the crime wasn’t suicide. The brake cables had been cut so it was murder. Apparently, the police department’s budget had been cut too. If the lab tech was talking about brake cables, his police lab’s stocked with really old reference books. Automobile brakes don’t use cables anymore. They’re all hydraulic. Have been since around the 1940s. Yes, the emergency brake still uses a cable, but if that cable had been cut, the car’s regular brakes would still have worked. Hudson’s car could have stopped on a dime and spotted you a nickle.

Unless …

So Hubert Hudson drove his 1934 Hudson Eight into the drink after the brake cables had been cut. (Notice how skillfully I made a play on words and saved the story?) Now the good Inspector Danger was investigating Hudson’s murder.

Hudson’s attorney said Hudson’s widow had money as Hudson left a $5,000,000 insurance policy with her as the beneficiary. The attorney also said the contract had an anti-suicide clause http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/suicide-clause.html, so the death benefit wouldn’t be paid if the death was a suicide. But that clause wouldn’t apply here, as the death resulted from a murder.

Inspector Danger paced around in circles for a panel. He didn’t think the wife was mechanically inclined enough to have cut the brake cables. He wondered whether she had someone helping her. Then he came up with his solution. Now while you read, my spoiler warning, think about the clues and see if you can identify the criminal.

SPOILER WARNING!

I am about to reveal Inspector Danger’s solution. So, if you don’t want to know it before you figure out the solution yourself, stop reading. End of WARNING, here comes the solution.

Inspector Danger deduced that Herbert Hudson did commit suicide. If someone else had cut the brake cables before Hudson started on his trip, he wouldn’t have been able to stop his car during the ten to fifteen mile drive and would have crashed into something long before he ever reached the harbor. Inspector Danger figured that Hudson drove to the harbor, then cut the brake cables himself just before he drove his car into the water. Hudson wanted to make his suicide look like a murder so his wife could collect the $5,000,000 death benefit. The solution also told us that Inspector Danger left the case “unsolved,” so that Hudson’s wife could collect the death benefit. “Chivalry over duty.”

So did you spot the criminal? If you said Herbert Hudson, you’re right. Kind of. If you said his crime was suicide, you’re wrong. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not against the law to commit suicide. In the United States, the laws making suicide a crime were abolished long ago http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_legislation. Moreover, even when those laws were in effect, it wasn’t really against the law to commit suicide. It was against the law to attempt suicide. But if you committed suicide, you’d be dead. The police wouldn’t be able to arrest or prosecute you even though they literally had the corpus delicti http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Corpus+delicti.

Let’s try another crime. Remember, Hudson committed suicide but made it look like a murder so that his wife would be able to collect a $5,000,000 death despite his policy’s anti-suicide clause. Voila, another crime; insurance fraud.

Now, I don’t know in what state the good Inspector operates, other than a general state of confusion, so, I’ll use the general definition of insurance fraud. Insurance fraud occurs when someone does a “duplicitous act” so that he or she can obtain an improper payment from an insurance company. Usually, the person collecting the proceeds of the insurance policy is the person committing the duplicitous act, but it can be someone else. If a doctor helps a patient fake an injury, so that the patient can swindle an insurance company, then the doctor is an aider and abettor and equally guilty of insurance fraud, even if only the patient collected the proceeds. In our story, Hudson committed insurance fraud by making a suicide look like a murder, so that his wife could collect an improper death benefit to which she was not entitled.

Of course, Hudson’s dead. He can’t be arrested or prosecuted. So, calling him the criminal is a little unsatisfying. Where’s the justice in the story, if the criminal can’t be prosecuted? Sure Logan and Brisco would be kept busy, but what would Jack McCoy get to do?

How about Mrs. Hudson? Was she guilty of insurance fraud for filing a claim for a death benefit to which she was not really entitled? No. There’s no indication that Mrs. Hudson knew her husband had faked a murder. She honestly thought he was murdered. So when she filed a claim for the death benefit – not if but when, because you know someone as mercenary as her wouldn’t leave seven figures uncollected – when she filed a claim, she wouldn’t know it was fraudulent. She wouldn’t be guilty of insurance fraud. If the insurance company learned the truth, it could deny her the benefit, but it couldn’t have her prosecuted for insurance fraud, because she did not knowingly commit a duplicitous act.

Which leads us to question that still hasn’t been answered: A crime was committed so who was the real criminal in the story? There’s got to be one someone somewhere who can take the fall.

If you said Inspector Danger, you win the prize.

Inspector Danger knew Hudson committed suicide. He knew Mrs. Hudson had no legal claim to the death benefit on her husband’s policy. But he kept this information secret so that Mrs. Hudson could collect the $5,000,000, anyway. He aided and abetted Mr. Hudson in committing insurance fraud by letting Mrs. Hudson collect proceeds which he knew she was not entitled to collect.

So, let’s haul the not-so-good Inspector off to jail and put Alfie in charge of the investigations. I can see the strip now. A crime is committed. Alfie stumbles around for several panels without the slightest idea who the criminal is. Then he stands on his head to reads the week’s solution at the bottom of the page, but still has no idea who to arrest.

And we could say that Alfie never meta criminal that he could catch.

Martha Thomases: Resolution For The Hell Of It

ReadIf you are still hungover, you have my sympathies. If you have never been hungover, you get an evolving mixture of envy and pity. No matter. The new year is upon us.

This is the time of year when some of us, nagged by memories of elementary school homework assignments, make resolutions to improve ourselves in the year ahead. In general, my resolutions involve drinking more water and tossing more cat-toys (Selina likes to play “fetch”), but one change I made last year was awesome and I’d like to recommend it to you.

Every week, when I go for my weekly comics fix, I try to find at least one new book to try. I don’t manage to do it every week, but I bet I sampled 40 new titles last year. Some I didn’t like, but spending 15 or 20 minutes reading something different is not a horrible fate.

It’s easy for me to try something new because I’ve been reading the same (more or less) superhero comics for nearly six decades. Lots of titles that has been accepted by cooler people than me for decades is new to me. Still, there are books that were new in 2014 that I’ll be sticking with.

As you may recall, my budget can stand this experimentation because I’m no longer buying books that aren’t fun anymore. For me, fun books have different perspectives. Anything can happen.

It may be that this is the year that the industry is taking the same message to heart. I mean, there has been a part of the comic book business that published unconventional stories by unconventional creators since at least the counter-culture of the 1960s. And it’s not unusual for writers and artists associated with the underground to get a gig above, and vice versa.

What is unusual is for these writers and artists not to be straight white men. After years and years (and decades) of talk, there is finally a significant segment of the creative community that can get pregnant, or not, depending on circumstances and choice. Along with more women who write and draw, there seems to my (perhaps inaccurate) eye also be an increase in the number of female editors, assistant editors and associates.

It doesn’t seem to me that there has been a parallel increase in visible participation by people of color, but the subject isn’t going to meekly go away anytime soon. I think that now, more than ever, we need creators who can bring a non-white perspective to the “good guys/bad guys” dynamic of so much comic book plots.

Another excellent resolution for the new year is to commit yourself to the growth of our industry, both at a retail level (including libraries) and a personal, helping level . Our industry is not alone in the commercial arts in treating talent like so many disposable widgets, but that doesn’t mean that we have to stand for it.

Hoping your 2015 gives you better stories.

 

Box Office Democracy: “The Interview”

The Interview is a movie doomed to collapse under the weight of all the external nonsense forced upon it. It is not a movie worth being called an act of war. It is not a movie worthy of being the standard bearer for free speech against real or imagined tyranny. It’s not a movie worth the total public embarrassment of Sony Pictures. It’s just a stupid comedy. I don’t even mean “stupid” pejoratively here, it is in the same grand tradition of stupid comedies that has brought us movies like There’s Something About Mary and Caddyshack. Both movies I like a great deal, neither of them worth an international incident.

When it’s on, The Interview is quite funny. The bit with Eminem that I saw all over Facebook this weekend is my favorite so it’s a shame that that’s in the first ten minutes of the film. Otherwise the film hits on more joke attempts than it misses. Seth Rogen and James Franco have an undeniable comedic chemistry and it’s just fun to watch them bounce of each other. Randall Park is outstanding playing Kim Jong-Un, as is his Veep co-star Timothy Simons in a terribly small part. It’s also important to recognize Diana Bang who is fantastically funny as the leading lady in this film, a part that often doesn’t get a ton of space under the Apatow-Rogen film umbrella but Bang is electric and hopefully gets to do bigger and better things in comedy going forward.

The entire movie is dragged down to mediocre by a poor second act. After the first round of North Korean hijinks, the movie grinds to a halt as the characters slowly get in to their positions or the finale. This leads to a seemingly endless number of scenes of conversations that move the plot along at a glacial pace while not being particularly funny. It’s inexcusable. Add this to the frequent book-report-esque need to put in North Korea facts and statistics and there’s a lot of drag pulling down what might have been a better movie set in a fictional country.

I appreciate that Rogen, along with his directing partner Evan Goldberg, are continuing to be ambitious with their visuals. It would be very easy (and probably profoundly more profitable) for them to continue making Superbad knockoffs until they all died when their houses collapsed from carrying too much money, but much like This is the End there’s a lot going on here. Sure, they’re taking advantage of the fact that no one has any idea if North Korea looks like the outskirts of Vancouver but there are some real sets here and an honest-to-goodness war at the end. When you compare it to the costless dreck that you get from Adam Sandler or the Twilight movies and it’s just so nice to see people take a simple guaranteed paycheck and make a movie that’s actually interesting to look at on a screen. This sounds like an incredibly backhanded compliment but it’s becoming less and less common.

Tweeks Draw 2014

DrawOurYearThumbWe seemed to watch a lot of “Draw My Life” videos this past year, so we felt it was appropriate to recap our 2014 with a white board and some dry erase markers. In under 3 minutes, we quickly doodle this year’s top movies, tv shows, books & comics.  We also draw our favorite Con experiences, the pop culture headlines that stuck with us, and the best hair of the year (belonging to Blythe from IDW’s Littlest Pet Shop Comics)!   Lots of wishes for a fabulous 2015, everyone!

Dennis O’Neil: Good Guys and Bad Guys

breyfogle_4Just because it’s that time of year – and you know what I’m talking about and don’t pretend you don’t – don’t for one second think that I’ve become some sentimental goo brain and if you do think that come over here and I’ll make you a damp spot on the rug. Or at least give you a stern look. (Or at least consider giving you a stern look at some future date, maybe in an alternate universe.)

But despite my loud and proud misanthropy, there are a few things, as we creep past the solstice, that make me believe that there’s really no reason to be ashamed of my species. Leading the list this week, if there were a list, would be the comic book community’s response to Norm Breyfogle’s misfortune. Norm, who I’ve long considered a storytelling artist, suffered what seems to have been a bad stroke that left his drawing hand disabled. I wondered how his colleagues would respond. Splendidly, is how. Within 24 hours, the comics folk had raised over $20,000 and flooded the emails with offers of help and messages of support. Norm has a long way to go – months of therapy and sundry other problems to be solved – but at least his fellow storytellers have given him a start.

Then there was the movie brouhaha. As most of you surely know, cyberterrorists threatened nine-eleven type action against any exhibitor who showed The Interview, a comedy about an assassination plot directed at North Korea’s national big cheese, Kim Jung Un. At first, all parties caved, including the flick’s producer, Sony. Ah, but now the happy ending. At virtually the last minute, over 200 smallish, independent theaters got exhibition rights and showed the picture over the weekend. And it was made available for streaming on three Internet venues.

This has very little to do with The Interview. Might be a good flick, might not, might be somewhere in between. But what’s important here is that those who championed the movie refused to be bullied. Anyone who’s had extensive dealings with bullies – teachers, let’s have a show of hands – will probably testify that bullies can’t be appeased. You can’t get rid of them by simply meeting their demands. They don’t really what they’re asking for, they want the power that got it for them. Give it to them and they’ll just want more. Under the threats, they’re probably scared and that’s sad and pitiable, but irrelevant. You can feel sorry for a rabid dog, but you still have to stop his attack.

A final note and then I’m gone for the rest of the year: Norm Breyfogle still needs help. There’s a link on the ComicMix home page. Please give him some. Oh, and if any of you even dare to accuse me of being a nice guy…

 

Categories

Archives

Everything you need to make great comics!

comicmix-pro-300x69-2

Nucleus X

Bookshop Zaks