Justin Lin’s Star Trek Beyond has been shooting for a while now, aiming for a July 2016 release as part of Paramount Pictures’ 50th Anniversary celebration. They have partnered with Omaze to offer a winning contestant a walk-on role in the feature film. Current Captain Kirk, Chris Pine, and film guest star Idris Elba made a video to discuss the contest.
Now this is the way you make a Fantastic Four movie.
Trivia: this 1983 fan film was produced by Bob Schreck, who later went on to a long career for DC, Marvel, Comico, and Dark Horse, and is now the editor-in-chief for Legendary Comics. You can see him in the background and the Wookie suit.
Yes, Wookie suit.
And the guy in the orange rocks? Why, that’s Gerry Giovinco, founder of Comico and the current CO2.
We would like to hold this up as a counterpoint whenever somebody says that all you need are people who know comics to make a good movie adaptation. Comics pros are just as capable of embarrassing themselves as anyone else.
We are also now taking bets as to whether this film will end up being more profitable than the FF film currently in theaters.
The old Broadway song goes, “Two lost souls on the highway of life“and that certainly describes Christian Longo (James Franco) and Michael Finkel (Jonah Hill) in the thriller True Story. We open with Longo hiding in Mexico, wanted by police for the death of his wife and children, but avoiding arrest because he’s masquerading as Finkel, a reporter for The New York Times. Finkel, though, has issues of his own, having been accused of fabricating a story by writing about one character who was actually a composite of several sources.
When told of Longo’s eventual arrest, Finkel is curious as to why he chose him, of all people, to impersonate and so begins the meat of the fascinating narrative. Available on a Blu-ray combo pack from 20th Century Home Entertainment, the film is an interesting two man character study, leaving you wondering as to each person’s sincerity and even sanity.
The two men begin to meet and talk in Mexico, leading to a symbiotic relationship as Franco agrees to tell his story in exchange for writing lessons from the journalist. Their exchanges are taut, with a wide range of emotions on display, from suspicion to trust to friendship to apprehension.
For Finkel, he’s hoping for redemption while Longo is in for the fight of his life as he is extradited to America and stands trial for the horrendous crimes, leaving the viewer uncertain if he committed the crimes or not. The journalist takes their voluminous correspondence and gets a book deal, his road back to relevance. But everything is not as it seems and rather than spoil things, let me just suggest you rent or buy the video for your own edification.
The lead performances are strong and the two men are comfortable with one another so their exchanges ring especially true. While some of the dialogue by screenwriters David Kajganich and Rupert Goold, who also directed, isn’t the strongest, they make the most of their moments. For his first feature, Goold does a nice job with keeping a talky story visually interesting. Since this is clearly about two men, it was seemingly decided they needed some female presence so enter Finkel’s girlfriend Jill Barker (Felicity Jones), for a few scenes including one dramatic confrontation with Longo. But it all feels unnecessary.
What makes this all the more interesting is that it is based on Finkel’s book of the real world events that inspired the film. That’s right, this all happened.
The AVC encoded 1080p transfer to 1.85:1 is visually just fine along with the lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix so watching this is a pleasure.
Since the movie did well at Sundance but not so well in general release, we get just some perfunctory special features. Goold offers up some enthusiastic Audio Commentary for the entire film as well as some interesting explanations accompanying the Deleted Scenes (16:44). Then there are an assortment of promo features: Mike Finkel (3:33), Who is Christian Longo? (3:56), The Truth Behind ‘True Story’ (4:03), and The Making of True Story (5:26).
Fantastic Four is a bad movie. Don’t go see it if you want an enjoyable 100 minutes in a theater and probably don’t see it for an ironic “so bad I want to make fun of it” kind of way either. It’s a lifeless bad, an entropic bad, a movie so bad it makes me question if there’s even a good movie based on this team to be made. Only the depths of history save Fantastic Four from being the worst superhero movie of all time (it might not even be the worst movie named Fantastic Four) but it’s certainly the worst superhero of this generation and is a top contender for worst film of the year.
Perhaps it isn’t possible to make a good Fantastic Four with the constraints that a non-Marvel studio would put on it. They need to make the principal characters young so they’re more relatable to young people, but then you have a team full of cut-rate Peter Parkers with none of the family-based charm that makes the FF work in the comics. You need to do an origin story but you also need to get Doctor Doom in there because he’s literally the only villain that anyone’s ever heard of so you end up shoehorning that character into a story that doesn’t involve him or he becomes some kind of vestigial Fantastic Fifth. There’s also an unwillingness to use the iconic costumes or codenames that aren’t The Thing, which takes a team with so much history and turns them in to a bunch of generic off-brand versions of themselves.
It’s become quite clear over the weekend that there were some serious behind the scenes squabbles over the making of this movie and it’s certainly apparent in the product given to us on the screen. After the four main characters get their super powers they are held as scientific experiments, a predicament from which Reed escapes and the remaining three are left behind. This creates a great deal of mistrust from Ben Grimm who feels abandoned but throws himself headfirst in to working as a secret weapon of the military. One such military operation is taking Reed back in to custody. When they bring Reed back Johnny is quick to embrace him, Sue feels guilty at being part of the operation that brought him back in and Ben still feels anger. Then Doctor Doom shows up and starts killing a lot of people and it feels like this is going to be the impetus for the four of them to put their differences aside and work together to stop this larger evil a few scenes later in the movie but instead this one confrontation is it. They fight Doom and at the end they seem to be the best of friends even though nothing really changed for all of them, they don’t talk, there aren’t even meaningful glances or anything. Reed goes from missing for an entire year to barking orders that everyone follows in what must have been hours. I bet there was a version of this movie that feels more complete but we’ll never see it and with the right NDAs we might never even know but this is the rare movie that’s boring at 100 minutes but might have been appreciably better at 120 minutes.
I don’t know where this property goes from here. There’s already word from Fox that their announced Fantastic Four sequel might get scrapped in favor of a Deadpool sequel. Oddly, not announcing sequels for movies that haven’t been released yet doesn’t seem to be an option at all. Perhaps this time Fox has finally stumbled so badly with the franchise that they’ll be willing to work out a deal that returns the characters to Marvel and we start seeing a slow rollout of Latverian mentions in Phase Three of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I’m not interested in seeing this version of these characters again and I’m sure as hell not excited to sit through another origin story in four years time. I want this to eventually be gotten right but maybe it doesn’t matter, there are enough super hero movies out there without another iteration of the FF taking up all of our time.
This weekend, on the way back from the wedding of one of my longtime best friends, I took a loooong train ride home. Naturally, I was riding in high style, in a Deadpool shirt and my handmade Deadpool symbol earrings. During the trip, I happened to be standing in the Amtrak café car line when a guy waiting with me complimented my geeky attire. This led to a several-minute conversation about Deadpool and the upcoming Deadpool movie; the X-Men movies; and (yarrrgh) the Wolverine: Origins movie. It was a great little comics nerd conversation, which I guarantee could have continued for hours were we hanging out at a convention rather than standing in a line for food on a train.
I realized afterwards that this conversation was particularly refreshing because after the initial “So you’re a Deadpool fan?” question, I didn’t encounter any of the attitude that I often get from men in comics fandom – the attitude that immediately questions or is at least taken aback by My Commitment to Sparkle Motion, i.e. my legitimate knowledge of and appreciation for comics fandom as an entity independent of any dude or some imagined desire to falsely pass myself off as a geek.
This still baffles me. If I was going to try to lie to random strangers about who I am, I think it would be way more fun to pretend to be fabulously wealthy and eccentric. I fail to see the advantage of pretending to be a geek.
It was nice to have a conversation that was not tempered by a feeling of defensiveness about the legitimacy of my geekdom in the eyes of my co-conversant, and it made me realize just how frequently I have encountered an attitude that, instead of accepting how I represent myself, continues to question the validity of my enjoyment of a certain brand of entertainment until I manage, basically, to out-nerd the other person (which, not even kidding, happens pretty much every time. If you challenge my geekdom I will pull out the big guns and quote esoteric nerd facts at you with the best of them). It’s so commonplace an experience that I barely notice it anymore; until I notice the lack of it, as in my pleasant conversation with a stranger on a train. As small an element as it may seem, for that component to be missing felt like someone had suddenly lifted the weight of Establishing My Geek Cred from the ingredients necessary to have a normal conversation about fun geek stuff.
I know that change can be slow, but I like to hope that encounters like my little train chat are a sign that geek fandom is gradually transitioning from some of the isolationist, unwelcoming attitudes I have railed against in previous columns (like the attitudes of geeklitism, or of Gamergaters) into a more understanding, celebratory camaraderie of mutual and group enjoyment of genre entertainment without snap judgments or prejudices.
I also suspect that social media, where one can generally interact on one’s own terms, is playing its part as a driving engine for change; and that some of the positive fan-interactive movements started by prominent celebrities in geek fandom, such as Supernatural star Misha Collins and his G.I.S.H.W.H.E.S. (Greatest International Scavenger Hunt The World Has Ever Seen), and Zachary Levi and his Nerd HQ strongly contribute to the changes I’m seeing in geek culture. I’ve already talked about how great Nerd HQ and the attitude it projects are, and more recently have celebrated the feeling of camaraderie in geekdom conveyed by the new Syfy Geeks Who Drink show and its Twitter interactions. Both of these have a strong positive and geek-celebratory social media component.
G.I.S.H.W.H.E.S., started by Misha Collins in 2011 is another such interactive social movement. The scavenger hunt, which wrapped on August 8 this year, consists of 15-person teams (which you can choose to be randomly assigned to, and which has led participants to meet new friends all over the world and have great experiences) working together over a week to complete a list of over 200 tasks, documented and submitted to the competition via photo or video. The submissions are judged and points awarded, and based on the overall points awarded to the teams, one team wins a Grand Prize all-expenses paid trip to an exotic locale with Misha Collins – which sounds abnosome.
The hunt, which is now a worldwide phenomenon with tens of thousands of participants in over 100 countries, had over 14,000 participants last year and is so successful that it has been categorized by Guinness World Records as the largest scavenger hunt of its kind. It has also broken several other world records through completion of some of the challenges issued to participants. The Gishwhes site describes the hunt as “part silliness, part art, part kindness and 100% fun” and notes that Gishwhes is the single largest contributor to the charity Random Acts.
About the tasks, the site notes, ”We try to create a list that is challenging, thrilling and absurd. We like to have participants break out of their comfort zones, re-awaken their inner artist, and do a bit of good in the world.” According to Collins, the primary reason for developing the competition was that he “loved the idea of thousands of people from all over the world connecting to create incredible things.”
Gishwhes is a great example of a celebrity both following his own personal inspiration for a project and using his status in fandom for good. I also believe its encouragement towards geek teamwork and outreach through fun and passion for the fandom, and the way it began and is maintained via social media and online interactions, is a contributor to a transition in genre entertainment fandom attitudes towards a kinder, more inclusive and positive fandom. Gishwhes encourages fans to branch out, join forces, and put their enthusiasm for their fandom towards creativity, social interaction, and helping others instead of focusing inwards or dwelling on themselves. I applaud celebrities like Misha Collins and Zachary Levi for leveraging their celeb status with fans for good in this way, and hope to see more from-the-heart fan interaction phenomenons like Gishwhes and Nerd HQ.
I also just plain love the cool stuff that’s come out of both; and particularly, some of the fun creations I’ve seen from this year’s Gishwhes. Favorites of mine include this gorgeous salt-and-pepper portrait of Robert Downey Jr. / Tony Stark; this portrait of Princess Leia (and her famous buns) in bread (there were prettier ones, but this won my heart for the punny speech balloons); and this lol-worthy video of “another boring trapeze teleconference. Business attire required.” You can see even more cool and crazy things accomplished during Gishwhes in this video from Misha Collins.
Other than all of the nifty things accomplished due to Gishwhes, I think the biggest thing I take away from it is the warm and positive attitude of the competition and everyone involved. It’s encouraging and inspiring to see all of the people who have chosen to celebrate and express their fandom in a fun and inclusive way; especially because, in the end, it is always our own personal choice as to how we want to move through the world; and how we choose to put ourselves out there can have bigger consequences for change than we can ever imagine. As Mahatma Gandhi said, “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him.”
From what I have seen, Gishwhes is contributing to changing the attitude of the world (and fandom) in a positive way. Here’s hoping that it continues to do so; and until next time, Servo Lectio!
This week you have a chance tho catch a unique cinematic experience when the long awaited documentary debuts in theaters for one day only. Writer/Director Shaun Monson talks about his long struggle to get his work on the screen and his list of nearly 100 celebrity narrators. To see this film in it’s one day event (Wednesday August 12th) go here for a location near you. Plus it’s the biggest twist on reality dating shows. VH1’s DATING NAKED and this season’s bachelor talks about how he is coping.
In a few days, TV’s funniest (and smartest) ladies, Lennon Parham and Jessica St. Clair from PLAYING HOUSE join us. Be sure and follow us on Twitter now here.
Things in the DC Universe are upside down with the world knowing who Clark Kent really is, Lois Lane behind that big reveal and even a new player in the Batman costume. “Truth” is a multi-title story overseen by Greg Pak who talks to VOICES OF KRYPTON on just how far these changes will go,
It’s definitely the “sweeter” side of super-heroism. In a world of Dark Knights and darker deeds, the new CBS series, SUPERGIRL, is a bright light of action and fun. VOICES FROM KRYPTON talks exclusively with the cast and creators on what we can expect when the show debuts on October 26th.
Fans and critics agree that the FX sitcom, MARRIED is one of the most relatable series on TV. Stars Judy Greer and Nat Faxon talk about where things are headed this second season and just what condition their character’s relationship is in. Plus Michael Carbonaro returns for a new season of THE CARBONARO EFFECT with a few new twists.
Get ready – the new TV season starts soon and we have the exclusive scoops.. Be sure and follow us on Twitter now here.
Los Angeles, CA (August 5, 2015) – As the galaxy prepares for the next generation of Star Wars, the six epic films will each release as commemorative Blu-ray steelbooks on November 10th. These highly collectible films will be available for a limited time only and can be pre-ordered beginning August 7th. In addition, Star Wars: The Complete Saga will be released in newly repackaged artwork on October 13th. The announcements were made today by The Walt Disney Studios, Lucasfilm Ltd., and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.
Each film from the Saga is presented with new character packaging allowing fans to choose their favorite or collect all six for a limited time. Characters include: The Phantom Menace – Darth Maul; Attack of the Clones – Yoda; Revenge of the Sith – General Grievous; A New Hope – Darth Vader; The Empire Strikes Back – Imperial Stormtrooper; and Return of the Jedi – Emperor Palpatine.
In addition to the collectible steelbook packaging, each single disc Blu-ray includes existing audio commentary with George Lucas and the film crew as well as audio commentary from archival interviews with the cast and crew.
The newly repackaged Saga includes all six feature films on Blu-ray, along with three additional discs containing more than 40 hours of previously released extensive special features.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
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