As Tweeks! viewers know, Raina Telgemeier is one of our all-time favorite authors, so we were excited from the second we heard she would be writing another book about the autobiographical characters from Smile. And then when we found it was called Sisters?! How much more perfect does it get, right? So, the question is, does Sisters – In stores today! – hold up to the hype? Um, yes! Get yourself to a bookstore, tweens!
[[[Amulet Book Six: Escape from Lucien]]]
By Kazu Kibuishi
Scholastic Graphix, 214 pages. $12.99
We are six volumes into the fantasy series Amulet and it appears that as long as each book hits the best seller lists, Kazu Kibuishi will continue to pump these out on an annual basis. However, it is starting to fall into the trap of success: it’s spinning its wheels with no real end in sight. After keeping readers waiting, the sixth installment arrives and 200 pages later, leaves with little resolved and a cliffhanger.
Escape from Lucien opens up mid-story and one would think after six books, the publisher would include some front matter to set the stage, reminding its young readers what happened last year, who these people are, and what’s at stake. Instead, we rush headlong into action with factions at war, things flying fast, other things blowing up, and much discussion over prophecies and obligations.
Navin remains the focal point character although much time is given over to the supporting players, notably Max who takes Emily on a protracted flashback that reveals his secrets and sets the stage for more to come. The conflict ultimately remains stopping the Elf King but this book detours to Lucien where old threads are furthered and new ones introduced.
Kibuishi’s pleasing artwork and color remains strong and each book is a nice page-turner, packed with action, special effects, and large crowds running around. What remain slacking, though, are clearly defined rules for this reality. We have a wide assortment of humans, anthropomorphic creatures, robots, androids, elves, etc. but they appear more for visual variety than for understanding the races that make up this world. There are some racial tensions here and the rest is entirely ignored, robbing the works for richness and depth.
Amulet is all surface and very familiar territory. He gets credit for a book that didn’t once remind me of Star Wars so he’s getting more confident in his storytelling. Still there remain clichés and accustomed tropes without benefit of a creative spin on them.
The 10-12 year old readers this is aimed at won’t realize any of this, thinking it’s just exciting, but Kibuishi’s editors need to more strongly develop him as more than a flashy visual creator.
I was remarking to a friend a few weeks back that I was afraid that I had grown out of Sin City, that the franchise I had loved so much as a teenager/young adult was just beneath me now. I don’t think that’s it though, not entirely, popular culture itself seems to have absorbed the things it likes from Sin City and moved on. All that’s left is a movie that feels just as old and tired as the original film felt new and fresh nine years ago.
Before I go any further I have to shower praise on Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a man who seems to have been born to play noir leads. While this is no secret to anyone who saw his dynamite performance in Brick it’s a treat to watch him do this work and a crying shame that there aren’t more opportunities for him to do it. His scenes are easily the best in the movie as they crackle with an ephemeral energy that can’t quite hold on when he’s not on screen. He’s helped a bit by a story that clicks more thematically with classic film noir but there’s no denying that he’s pushing the entire movie higher with his performance.
See, I told you he was good.
Peter Capaldi is off and flying in the role he’s been practicing for since he was four years old. The Paternoster gang is here to cushion the blow of the wild turns in tone and character, there’s a well-hidden piece of chalk, and a dinosaur explodes.
Mind your handles, watch the spoilers and take a…
DEEP BREATH
By Steven Moffat
Directed by Ben Wheatley (more…)
Back in the 1970s during my first tenure as a DC Comics employee, I rhetorically asked the question “who was relaunched more often – Wonder Woman or Captain America?” For you young’uns, in today’s lingo “relaunched” means “rebooted.” Even as a rhetorical question, people’s heads exploded. This, of course, did not stop us fanboys from counting.
It turns out in order to get a fair count we needed to summon the spirit of Milton Sirotta. Oh, okay, check it out here. Yes, I’m asking you to Google Googol.
My advice, offered at the time and I continue to offer today, was to treat Wonder Woman as though she were a genuine superhero and have her do all the other stuff the other superheroes, almost exclusively male, could do. It’s amazing how often she was just… lame. I’m not saying the mythological approach, as best presented by George Pérez although the present team of Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang is absolutely first-rate, is in any way wrong. Not at all. They-all use mythology in a manner similar to Jack Kirby’s Thor, and that’s about the highest praise I’ve got.
Wonder Woman did not get her start in the All-American Comics’ anthology title, Sensation Comics. She got her start a month earlier, in the DC/All-American hybrid, All-Star Comics #8. But it was Sensation Comics that was her launchpad to superstardom.
Wonder Woman quickly earned her own title, as well as a regular slot in Comic Cavalcade and the job of – wait for it – secretary in the Justice Society. As time wounded all deals, only the eponymous title survived the “Golden Age,” one of only three superhero comics to do so. And that’s about all of WW’s really, really strange creation history that I’m going to share right now.
Last week, DC returned Sensation Comics to the world as part of its much celebrated (well, celebrated by me, often, in this chunk of the Ethersphere) Digital First line. That means it’ll be reprinted, I think today, in traditional comic book form and then ignored by too many retailers who think “digital” is a four-letter word. Woe onto them: Sensation Comics is a pure superhero title. It is Wonder Woman the Superhero. Which is what she was created to be.
You couldn’t put this first story in better hands. Gail Simone is no stranger to the character and no slouch as a writer – in fact, she’s one of the best practicing the craft today. Artist Ethan Van Sciver is a fan-fave as well, and for good reason: he is great at handling superhero stories. He should be cloned.
Together, Gail and Ethan give us … well, a Batman story, except Batman isn’t in it, Wonder Woman is. Instead of the ever-expanding Batman family, we’ve got WW’s sisters-in-arms. We’ve got The Joker, The Penguin, Two-Face, The Riddler et al, and Wonder Woman is taking them all on, as any great superhero would.
This is one of the best superhero comics I’ve read in quite a while. More important, it’s the superhero comic Wonder Woman deserves.
Horror movies need to have a metaphor. Slasher movies are historically about our attitudes about sex, Nightmare on Elm Street is about the fear we have of not being able to protect our children, even Shaun of the Dead was about the dangers of complacency. I bring this up because Life After Beth has a terrible time conveying its metaphor. Sometimes it seems to want to be about dealing with grief, other times it seems to be about moving on after a break up, it sometimes even feels like it’s trying to draw an equivocation between those two feelings. Unfortunately, it never picks exactly what its about and it makes the film feel directionless and kind of boring.
Aubrey Plaza is a delight to watch in this movie. Overlaying a kind of flighty 21 year-old girl with a person slowly turning into a zombie is a stellar idea and Plaza delivers a performance with stunning depth. The slow build with that character as she pushes her extremes incrementally until she becomes first an erratic lunatic and, finally, a flesh-eating beast. She shares the screen most often with Dane DeHaan who seems to be a little out of his depth and gets through the film just by doing different variations on sad and surprised. Not even a clean surprised though it’s a sad frowny surprised.
Much like having better action scenes could have saved The Expendables 3, being funnier could have saved Life After Beth. Life After Beth is one of those indie comedy movies that often feels like it’s too good to have jokes in it. There are a couple of laughs early and a few more later on but the middle section of this film is only funny when Matthew Gray Gubler is on screen and those moments are few and far between. Even the sublime John C. Reilly is left in the unfortunate position of alternating between delivering flat pieces of exposition and being very serious. It’s a waste of talent and it’s a shame to see. Even Molly Shannon, who I am not comfortable with seeing move to mom roles, gets more laugh lines. It’s a shame with all this talent they couldn’t make me laugh more.
The Yeti Files: Meet the Bigfeet
By Kevin Sherry
Scholastic Press, 122 pages, $8.99
Yetis are one of the most persistent legends around the globe and we covered more than our fair share of such stories at Weekly World News. They are also perfect material for a children’s book. Kevin Sherry, a veteran storyteller, explores the nature of Yeti life in The Yeti Files.
Apparently, Yeti are secretive on purpose so when a Yeti named Brian is glimpsed, he goes into hiding. This prompts his cousin Blizz Richards to go in search of him, propelling a story about family and acceptance among other species. We meet a variety of cyptids all drawn in a style making them non-threatening to the young readers this volume is aimed at.
Blizz’s narration gives us the inside scoop on crypitds, large and small, while being amusing. What’s odd is that cryptids apparently do everything humans do: eat too much, use the Internet, and have family reunions. There’s little unique here about their culture other than their desire to remain hidden from view. Hoping to change that is George Vanquist, self-proclaimed cyptozoologist, but as Buzz describes him, is actually clueless. He’s in search of Brian or his family and threatens to find the family reunion, requiring some ingenuity from the Yeti collective.
As threats go, Vanquist is more a bumbling one, there to provide comic relief but is actually so inept and dumb it detracts from a stronger story.
Sherry’s writing and artwork is appealing and this should be a gentle way to introduce young readers into the larger worlds of creatures sand fantasy.
I’ve decided the summer is over. Yeah, I know. School hasn’t started yet, the dandies can continue to wear white for a few more weeks, and the metaphor-challenged will remind us the Autumnal Equinox doesn’t happen until September 22nd – and quite late in the day at that.
Screw them. I say summer is over because the summer movie season has pretty much ended. Yeah, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For happens next week, but we’ve had Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Amazing Spider-Man 2, X-Men: Days Of Future Past, Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, and The Guardians Of The Galaxy and, clearly, my definition of “summer” is pretty quirky.
I haven’t mentioned the latest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie because I haven’t seen it. Or its forbearers. In my world, I guess talking raccoons are good but talking turtles stretch the imagination. Go figure.
The day after the Sin City sequel (say that five times fast) appears, the 2014 – 2015 television season begins. Oh, really?, you might ask. Yes: I define the beginning of this coming season as the debut of the newest round of Doctor Who. So there.
When it comes to superhero-based movies (and I’m putting Dawn of the Apes in with the others because I believe it belongs there) I don’t think the average comics fan has much to bitch about… unless he’s one of those screaming asshole naysayers than mindlessly shits on everything anybody else likes under the protection of the shield of anonymity that the Internet gleefully provides. Of the five released movies I noted above, only one – in my opinion – actually sucked.
That would be Amazing Spider-Man 2, a needless sequel to a useless remake, made by clueless people. It was a waste of a handful of fine actors. I enjoyed all of the others, and really, that’s more than I would have expected. As a group, they’ve raised the bar for heroic fantasy movies.
I’d even toss the quirky Lucy in with the rest. That one was clearly heroic fantasy, and it was damn good. So was the equally-quirky Snowpiercer, based upon the French graphic novel of the same name (but in French). Lucy didn’t have comics cred to fall back on, but Scarlet Johansson most certainly does. That one just might make it easier to get a good superheroine movie made. And wouldn’t that be nice?
So… is this all a fad? Yes, probably, but just in quantity. Quality rules and if “they” continue to make movies that are well-written, well-directed and well-performed, we’ll continue to see more – just as we have ever since the early days of film and vehicles such as Tarzan, Tailspin Tommy, Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon and Joe Palooka.
When it comes to the movies based upon the comics media, quality rules.
Isn’t that amazing?
Sisters
By Raina Telgemeier
Scholastic Graphix, 197 pages, $24.99 (hardcover)/$10.99 (softcover)
Mining one’s past for story ideas is a tried and true method but comes with the risks of exposing family and friends to the harsh spotlight so it can be challenging. Thankfully, cartoonist Raina Telgemeier has a wonderfully supportive family, who have allowed her to explore her early years in several works, starting with 2010’s Smile, and this month the wonderful Sisters.
Smile was all about coping with the arrival of braces while Sisters takes place sometime later as the family makes a pilgrimage from San Francisco to Colorado to see relatives. There’s 14 year old Raina, nine year old Amara, and six year old brother Will. As they drive there and back, the road trip is broken up with flashbacks tracings Raina’s first lesson in being careful what you wish for. After hoping for a sister, Amara arrives and she’s no fun at all. First there’s the crying then the usually sibling fighting and then the rivalry as both demonstrate artistic skills. Despite common ground, they just cannot stand one another, so Raina retreats behind her headphones while Amara takes in the world around her.
Telgemeier is brave and confident enough to mine emotional territory while making her younger self overly emotional and far from the hero of the story. She’s withdrawn and moody, excessively fearful of reptiles, amplified when Amara desperately wants and eventually receives a snake. She’s so looking forward to hanging with her cousins, cherishing memories of their last visit many years earlier so of course the reality never measures up. This further isolates her from her surroundings which means she has been missing all the signs of her parents’ marriage collapsing. Amara, a far more observant girl, has noticed but said nothing.
Cleverly, the flashbacks bring us along from Amara’s arrival right up to the events just prior to the fateful car trip. Things then come together as the family, minus dad, is driving west and the van breaks down. Mom and Will are off to find a tow truck, leaving the sisters alone in the car where, finally, they begin to connect.
Telgemeier’s open, colorful artwork is pleasing to the eye and she takes her time setting things up and never crowding the story. She does a nice job aging her characters while keeping them recognizable, and keeps the settings clear. This is a wonderful sequel to Smile and a worthy follow-up to last year’s fictional Drama.
The universal themes portrayed here will allow families to recognize some aspect of themselves in the dynamic, much as I saw me and my brother in Raina and Amara although we were much older before peace settled between us. Scholastic recommends the book for ages 8-12 but really, it’s a fine all ages read.
It’s worth noting that I loved all three of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles released in the early 90s even though there is no way those movies hold up. I looked at clips on YouTube this week and could barely stomach a few minutes. This reboot of the franchise is objectively better than those movies. I don’t know that people will look back on it fondly in 24 years but there’s a level of commitment in production design and casting that goes above and beyond what we got with cash-in kids movies two decades ago. While this new revival of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is probably the perfect thing for the audience of pre-teen and pre-pre-teen boys it wasn’t particularly enjoyable for me.
The design of the Ninja Turtles is a revelation this time around. Rather than being the lazy palette swaps they were for decades all four turtles have unique looks this time around. They’re different in size, they wear different gear, and they even have different mask designs. This does so much to communicate character that was ignored for so long I didn’t even consider it as an option. I feel strange lavishing praise on this movie for something any competent costume designer could have done in 1990 with no problem at all (people have been wearing clothes in movies for decades) but they just didn’t try before.
The increased emphasis on production design is wasted a little on a movie that generally looks unpleasant. I’ve been telling people that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles looks like a movie I wouldn’t want to touch and that’s not just because there are reptile monsters as principle cast members. Everything, even human-only scenes, looks so slick and shiny that it comes across as slimy. It permeates the entire film and made me uncomfortable in the theater. I might be an edge case but everyone I’ve shared this idea with has instantly understood what I was talking about. I’m sure executive producer Michael Bay had very little direct hand in the visual look of this film but it sure felt like someone was trying, and failing, to imitate his signature style and it spilled in to something worse.
It feels terrible to say this but I’m not sure that I will ever really believe Megan Fox when she’s playing a smart character. I don’t believe she’s smart in her day-to-day life and she isn’t a good enough actress to convince me her characters are. Her April O’Neil is a more essential part of this story than past Turtles stories and this results in her having to carry an incredible narrative load and she doesn’t seem capable of enduring that kind of strain. She never seems clever enough to deduce the things she does and the emotion she plays most often is a combination scared and confused that doesn’t serve the story. Will Arnett is wasted as the vaguely pervy cameraman. He’s the second most important human character almost by default and while he does great work with what he’s given it isn’t nearly enough and I found myself focusing on him when he was on screen waiting for moments that never came. This is probably not a problem 12 year-olds will have.
Ultimately this movie is trying to appeal to two audiences: young people now who could become hooked on the franchise for life and people who were hooked on a previous incarnation of the franchise and are consuming the new product for nostalgia. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles does a great job of appealing to the former audience but offers little for the latter half to really enjoy once they’ve gotten over the idea that Megan Fox is nice to look at. The hype was good enough to bring enough of that older crowd in for a big opening weekend but they’re going to have to really hook that younger demographic to make this a winning franchise long term. While this movie is certainly competently produced enough to do it I wish it had been able to do a little more for the six year-old inside of me.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
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