Category: Reviews

REVIEW: Cleopatra in Space

Cleopatra in Space: Target Practice
By Mike Maihack
169 pages, Scholastic Graphix, $12.99

cleo01_frontcoverThe allure of Cleopatra VII has endured over the millennia and continues to be a source of fascination for people young and old. As a result, she is an easy subject to inject into novels, plays, and unfortunately, this graphic novel. What could have been a fun, interesting, character-driven fish out of water story became a by-the-numbers young adult graphic novel that bears no resemblance to the source.

Mike Maihack is a talent and clever storyteller and the art and color make the book a fun, if irritating, read. He has an open style that is expressive and a restrained color palette so you’re not overwhelmed. He’s been producing this as a webcomic since 2010 and the first cycle of stories is being collected by Scholastic’s Graphix imprint in April. A second volume is already promised for 2015 so they’re expecting great things.

Fifteen year old Cleopatra (or Cleo to her friends) is snatched from Egypt by a piece of technology that sends her far into the future where she has to attend an intergalactic school in order to fulfill her destiny of saving the universe. Her teacher Khensu, a talking cat, tries to mentor her, tempering her youthful exuberance and adolescent ways with exasperating results.

The future world is made up of species and races from around the galaxy, all of whom are looking to Cleo to save them from the Xerx War that threatens life as they know it. Additionally, they have no way of sending her home so she can fulfill her first destiny, to be the last great pharaoh of Egypt’s classic period.

History shows Cleopatra was fourteen when she was named co-regent with her father, Ptolemy XII, until his death when she was eighteen. So right here, the book makes little sense. Secondly, she arrives in the far future and at no point does she appear confused by the languages, the knowledge there is life beyond Earth, the technology, etc. Sher arrives, is assigned classes, and settles into dorm life where she is a slacker student but a deadly shot.

This is not the Cleopatra of history, the wily, tough leader who charmed two Roman leaders and oversaw her people after prolonged battle.  None of what we know of her personality is here, instead we’re given a modern day plucky teenager and we’ve seen that. We’ve seen the “savior” storyline, we’ve seen ti all before so plopping Cleopatra into this does nothing but trade on her name.

There is little explanation about why the organization that recruited her is acronymed .P.Y.R.A.M.I.D. or why there are Egyptian touches, such as her sphinx sky cycle, so far into the future on another world. Similarly, the Xerx is reminiscent of Xerxes, the Persian, conqueror of Greece as immortalized in 300 while their leader is Xarius Octavian (the surname being that of Caesar’s son who wound up with Egypt after Cleo killed herself).  The supporting cast is visually interesting but woefully under-utilized. What could have and should have been something different is a cookie-cutter approach to a young adult graphic novel, so it’s all the more disappointing that her 8-12 year old readers will know nothing of what the true Queen of the Nile was like.

Box Office Democracy Review: “Veronica Mars”

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that I backed the Veronica Mars movie on Kickstarter.  In addition to a myriad of cool perks this gave me, and thousands of other backers, access to regular updates on the process of making this movie, a level of access rather atypical today and totally unheard of a decade ago.  I watched this movie grow from a cool pipe dream to an actual thing that is actually playing in theaters.  This all adds up to a movie that I liked a great deal but am unable to assure myself that this affection is genuine, or is it more like the love a parent feels for their potentially mediocre child?

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Mindy Newell: Yiddishkeit

I miss bookstores.  Being able to walk up and down the aisles, pulling out a title that sounds intriguing, perusing the dust jacket flap, sometimes sitting down on the floor and reading the first couple of pages…just killing a couple of hours lost in a bibliophile’s heaven.

Okay, bookstores aren’t entirely gone, but they are, as everyone knows, on the endangered list.  My own first hint of this came about 15 years ago when the Borders in the Short Hills Mall closed up.  It was astonishing—this was a bookstore that was always mobbed, no matter the time of day.  Many, many people objected to the closing, and many, many people let the mall’s management know it; the customer service desk clerk told me, as I filled out the complaint form, that there were over 3,000 signatures in the first week alone protesting the shutdown, and demanding, if not the return of Borders, the opening of another book proprietor.  I thought, and I’m sure many others thought, that the store closed because the management had raised its rent beyond what Borders was willing to pay.  But now I think that I witnessed the beginning of the end.  I knew for sure that bookstores were about to go the way of the dodo bird when I drove over to Hoboken one Sunday morning a few years ago to spend a few hours in the Barnes & Noble there to find that it was gone; I remember being shocked (“Holy shit!” I said out loud) because not only is that particular store is in a city with a university (Stevens Institute of Technology), but it is also home to the sort of population that publishers love and book stores crave—well-educated and upscale and readers.

I bring this up because I recently bought a book on Amazon that whetted my appetite, especially because it is the last work of the late, great Harvey Pekar, who was one of its editors.  That book is [[[Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular & The New Land]]].  According to the blurb on Amazon, which is lifted from the front flap of the book’s dust jacket:

Yiddish is everywhere.  We hear words like nosh, schlep, and schmutz all the time, but how did they come to pepper American English, and how do we intuitively know their meaning?

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Box Office Democracy: “Mr. Peabody & Sherman”

I was a big fan of [[[The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show]]] as a child and while I enjoyed almost all of the segments “Peabody’s Improbable History” was a particular favorite.  I don’t know what it is but time travel and know-it-alls have always appealed to me.  It was because of this fandom and the horrific earlier attempts to make films out of the Jay Ward cartoons that made me approach Mr. Peabody & Sherman with particular trepidation.  I’m happy to report that these fears were unfounded and that Mr. Peabody & Sherman is a generally delightful movie.

After perhaps a bit too much exposition (the original cartoon never seemed to need much more than talking dog, pet boy, time machine) Mr. Peabody & Sherman gets right into a trip to Revolutionary France that plays like a more action-packed version of an old-school Peabody short.  It even closes with a pun.  From there the movie packs on a rather stunning amount of plot when all I really wanted was more of the classic formula.

This is the peril of the modern reboot movie; they often lose the fun in favor of a more modern approach to storytelling.  I don’t care about Sherman being bullied for having a father that’s a dog, I don’t care about irrationally angry school counselors that want to involve Child Protective Services, I only care about Mr. Peabody hosting a dinner party because the characters attending are voiced by Stephen Colbert and Leslie Mann, and I don’t really need Mr. Peabody to learn a lesson about being a good father.  I just want time travel and jokes and for a good percentage of those jokes to be terrible puns.  I don’t think that’s too much to ask and the movie delivers on this frequently but I left the theater wanting more.

Mr. Peabody & Sherman is better than it is bad and I enthusiastically await a sequel (it seems on pace for those kind of numbers assuming the rights aren’t a mess) but there are so many tiny flaws holding this one back from the excellence that was in its grasp.  I’ve seen enough terrible kids movies the last two years that very good is more than enough for me but if I were Rob Minkoff and I had directed this and The Lion King I would feel like this one could have been a bigger deal.

Box Office Democracy: “300: Rise of an Empire”

300: Rise of an Empire is a movie that made me doubt my own sanity.  I watched that movie and wondered if I had completely imagined the ending of the original movie and, for that matter, the graphic novel it was based on.  I distinctly remembered that story closing with a mass of people being told the story of the brave 300 and how their sacrifice inspired the Greeks to band together and now they would fight the Persians and now their victory was assured.  I had to run to YouTube to find this clip to assure myself that that is how the movie ended.  It’s too bad no one involved with 300: Rise of an Empire bothered to do 40 seconds of searching because they could have avoided completely negating their entire first movie.

300: Rise of an Empire takes place before, during, and after the original film and tells a highly fictionalized version of the Battle of Salamis (for example, in the real battle the light from the sun was not exclusively orange and grey).  Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton) is leading a rag tag band of a Greek navy against the unbeatable Persian navy led by Greek-born warmonger Artemisia (Eva Green).  While leading the war Themistocles must also help Calisto (Jack O’Connell), the son of his friend Scyllas (Callan Mulvey) become a man and a soldier, a process achieved mostly through meaningful glances that seem to constantly threaten to turn this movie into another kind of Greek affair.

The Greek navy happens to be hopelessly outnumbered in this battle much like the Spartan army to the south but these soldiers, who are called out as being poets and sculptors before the fighting begin, handle themselves just as well as the Spartans do in the first movie dispatching dozens of Persian sailors for every casualty.  It kind of weakens the greatness of the fantastic Spartan army if it turns out that any Greek of the streets with a spear and a shield could have performed about as well.  There’s also the moment when Themistocles and his men find out that the 300 have fallen and rather than be inspired to unite as one Greece like they showed at the end of the first film it inspires everyone to want to give up and have many long conversations about how hopeless they are.  It’s a rare movie that can make me feel bad for trampling over the plot points of its predecessor when I didn’t even like that movie in the first place.

You might have noticed something about all those names in parentheses in the preceding paragraphs, they all play Greeks and they’re all remarkably pale English, Scottish, New Zealanders, Australian, or French people.  It’s whitewashing and it’s offensive, the only dark-skinned people in this movie are on the Persian side and they’re overwhelmingly incompetent or cowards.  Even Xerxes is retconned in to being the pawn of Artemisia and her anti-Greek ambition.  Artemisia is the palest person in this movie, which stretches credulity to the breaking point as they portray her as a Greek-born slave turned Persian admiral.  None of those activities seem like they would be conducive to avoiding the sun.

The worst thing about 300: Rise of an Empire is that it’s going to be used to defend Zack Snyder.   He must be something more than the only person fighting Michael Bay for a seat at the musical chairs of the world’s worst directors if he can leave a franchise and see the quality plummet like this.  Maybe there is some measure of artistry in all that slow motion if someone copying the technique can make it look so much worse.

The Tweeks Review the Pull of “Gravity”
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The Tweeks Review the Pull of “Gravity”

On the eve of the Academy Awards, the Tweeks look at multiple Oscar-nominated [[[Gravity]]], starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. (And some quick coverage of [[[Thor: The Dark World]]] DVD, because reasons.)

Review: “Adventure Time” Volume 4

Adventure Time has a history of uncommonly dark world building, and as anyone who’s seen the episode “I Remember You” will attest, it doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to gut-wrenching backstories. Fans expect the show to push boundaries. The comics are no exception: they seem sometimes to be a vehicle for character exploration too troubling for television.

Volume Four collects issues 15 through 19 of the celebrated tie-in series. Its primary storyline is an examination of the ambiguously sympathetic villain, the Ice King. Ice King’s magical abilities include ice spells (obviously) and being woefully pathetic, but in his deluded internal narrative he is a heroic figure. Adventurers Finn & Jake take pity on him and they team up for a quest through a dungeon that the Ice King no longer remembers creating, battling magical creatures that are representative of his numerous insecurities. Along the way, the reader gleans insight into Ice King’s tragic past, though Finn and Jake remain preoccupied with battling gibbering cartoon beasties.

As they progress through the dungeon and the reader is drawn inextricably into Ice King’s suffering and confusion, the adventurers grow sad without understanding why. The story plays into a conceit deployed in the show’s more dramatic episodes. Though the reader is presented with enough information to piece together the disturbing implications of the story, its two protagonists are action-focused and happily oblivious. The hints that the land of Ooo is a post-apocalyptic wasteland, the Lovecraftian horror of the undead Lich and the Ice King’s fight to retain his humanity and remember those he once loved are plot elements that only impact the reader. Finn and Jake remain perpetually sunny and relatively innocent. They are caught up in events larger than they are comfortable with: Finn and Jake because they are action heroes, and Ice King because his memory is failing. It is no coincidence that a significant plot point is a quote from one of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s darkest poems, “Behold, we know not anything”.

If that sounds lofty and unsettling enough for you, Adventure Time Vol. Four is worth a look. There are also some pretty radical monsters to fight, and one particularly gruesome reveal that made me shudder. Writer Ryan North’s offbeat, on-point humor is never absent for long, and each page has a tiny line of commentary at the bottom for those of us who miss the alt-text experience when reading print media. (If his name sounds familiar, it’s because of Dinosaur Comics!) He tells an ambitious tale, sure to please avid Adventure Time viewers and those who just love a good story.

Here’s a preview:

REVIEW: Shazam! The Complete Series

shazamordwaycvrGrowing up, Saturday morning television meant cartoons and nothing but cartoons. By the 1970s, though, live-action bits crept in, starting with Christopher Glenn’s In the News interstitials on CBS along with silly things like The Banana Splits and H.R. Puffenstuff. In 1974, though, Filmation cleverly blended the two as it took the Big Red Cheese from comics to television. Shazam! debuted in the fall of 1974 with Michael Gray as Billy Batson, charged by the animated gods with their powers to fight crime in the adult body of Captain Marvel.

Last year, Warner Archive released the complete series on DVD and it is as charming as ever in its simplicity. In a mere thirty minutes, Billy and Mentor (Les Tremayne) rode the highways of California in their RV and when danger struck, the magic lightning let Bill become the hero (Jackson Bostwick). The effects were little better than when George Reeves donned the red and blue costume as Superman twenty years earlier. Both fought evil with similar solemnity and everything was put back to order by the time the end credits rolled.

Throughout the 3-disc, 28-episode collection, nary another character from the comics are used, divorcing it from the source material, which is a shame since it could have used a Dr. Sivana or animated Mr. Talky-Tawny. Also, the wizard Shazam is absent and Billy gets advice directly from Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, and Mercury.

Bostwick was an earnest and likeable Captain Marvel and when he was replaced by John Davey, it’s fairly seamless. Gray’s Billy is easily five years too old to be a convincing youth but he’s very likeable while veteran character Tremayne does a fine job with little material.

Unfortunately the series aired from 1974-1976, a time when parent groups pressured the networks into cleaning up the level of violence the precious children were exposed to which undercut what could have been a fine kid’s action series. There’s fun stuff going on but a lot of missed opportunities as each case became a teachable moment instead of a thrilling thirty minutes of action. Still, the show was a cut above its competition which is why it is so well remembered. There’s a crossover with Isis (Joanna Cameron), who helmed a spinoff series of her own that was collected some time back and worth seeking out.

It would have been nice to have some extras but the Warner Archive program brings things to smaller audiences at the cost of no money invested in such bonuses,. We do, though, get a lovely cover from artist Jerry Ordway, who did a memorable run with the character in the 1990s.

REVIEW: The 300 Spartans

The 300 SpartansWe have Frank Miller to thank for reminding us of the valiant tale of the Battle at Thermopylae as 300 Spartans fought off an invading force from Persia. His 300 graphic novel is a wonderful retelling of the tale and a pretty damn fine film from Zack Snyder. With the film sequel forthcoming any second now, 20th Century Home Entertainment has wisely issued the Blu-ray debut of the film that inspired Miller when he first saw it as a kid. The 300 Spartans may lack the visual panache of Snyder’s version but it makes for compelling viewing.

Oh, the script is nowhere near interesting although it does a nice job of sticking to the historic facts as Leonidas (Richard Egan) is asked by Themistocles of Athens (Ralph Richardson) to lead the army against King Xerxes (David Farrar). Not a single soldier is as ripped as Snyder’s army nor is Gorgo (Anna Synodinou), Leonidas’ wife, given as much to do as Lena Hedley, but fills the screen nicely. There is some other soap opera elements, though, as Leonidas’ niece Ellas (Diane Baker) learns her fiancée Plylon (Barry Coe) has been dishonored and cannot marry her. And Xerxes has a gal pal of his own, Artemisia (Anne Wakefield).

An interesting historic note here is that a religious holiday kept many of the soldiers at home so Leonidas takes his person squad of 300 to defend all of Greece, a suicide mission under any circumstances.

The pacing is slower but it gives cinematographer turned director Rudolph Maté a chance to make the landscape beautiful to watch. He’s ill-served by the script and its leaden expository dialogue although we get the immortal “Then we’ll just have to fight in the shade!” Geoffrey Unsworth’s cinematography is gorgeous here, displaying all his skills making you long for more of the European locales to be better used.

This presentation of the cult film is sharp, which makes up for a lot. Like the 2004 DVD release, it has rich colors and excellent sound. Unfortunately, like the DVD, the bonuses are limited to a trailer and television spots.

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