This is not actually a sequel to the Bruce Willis films where he stars as John McClane. This is actually a secret sequel to Unbreakable, where Willis stars as invulnerable hero David Dunn. Somewhere between Die Hard 2 and 3, the characters switched places.
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Last night Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim premiered Star Wars: Robot Chicken. The half-hour edition of the popular stop motion cartoon show was entirely devoted to Star Wars gags. What separates this from countless issues of Mad Magazine was the involvement of George Lucas himself. Lucas provides a sense of legitimacy and an acknowledgement that he is finally ready to laugh at his own creation.
Unfortunately, much like the prequel trilogy, maybe more could have been done if Lucas was less involved. The sketch featuring Lucas being saved from a mob of fans by a guy dressed as a tauntaun was by far the weakest in the entire show. I don’t know if this was a problem with the writers or with Lucas, but the sketch felt particularly flat.
The rest of the show was more successful. The highlight was a sketch in which Darth Vader explains a number of the more contrived coincidences in the series to a Mark-Hamil-voiced-Luke Skywalker. Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy) was excellent as the voice of Emperor Palpatine in a number of bits, including one featuring a mama-joke contest between the Emperor and Luke.
Overall, the show worked the best when it was contained within the universe, albeit one with a lot more jokes, the Late Night with Zuckuss sketch (featuring the voice of Conan O’Brien) scored, as did the Ponda Baba segment.
The more it felt like they were winking at the audience the less it worked for me; another lowlight was the sketch featuring a Jedi President Bush fighting Sith Abraham Lincoln.
The best possible outcome of this would be increased exposure for Robot Chicken, Adult Swim’s gem, with its third season set to begin in under two months. With the Family Guy season premiere bringing another high profile Star Wars parody our way I’m interested to see if they can match this effort by Seth Green and the staff at Robot Chicken, the way Family Guy has been going it won’t be easy.
Star Wars: Robot Chicken can be watched for free (for at least the time being) at adultswim.com
A book like this comes around and I am forced to wonder whether Image is making books especially for me. Sam Noir Samurai Detective is exactly what it sounds like a story about a hardboiled detective who kills ninja assassins with a katana.
The construction of the world is the most amazing part of Sam Noir. Eric A Anderson and Manny Trembley have a textbook noir cityscape narrowly separated from the rolling plains of classic samurai dramas. The first story in the collection goes seamlessly from fighting ninja in the snow to a small army of samurai clad in business suits on top of a skyscraper. The second story adds pirates and voodoo to the universe. If this isn’t going to sell you on this, I don’t know what will.
Volume One trade collects the original mini-series along with the Ronin Holiday mini-series. I think the original series is a lot stronger, focusing on more established noir and samurai conventions as opposed to the more outside the box second series. Not that I can’t find any of it enjoyable, but the story in the second one felt a little slapped together and devoid of any sort of real climactic battle. To introduce a character that can make zombies and then only make one of them is weak sauce, I was really excited to see Sam and Eddie tear through a ton of zombies but it was not to be.
Image has announced a third Sam Noir mini-series is coming and I await its arrival anxiously. They have a real hit on their hands, a universe capable of effortlessly encompassing a great deal of genre fiction.
OK, so here we go: it’s the official midway point between the first and latter half of the Summer of Blockbusters. With last week’s box office flop consisting of Ocean’s 13 and Hostel Part 2, a sequel to a film nobody was all that psyched about to begin with has got failure written all over it, right? Wrong. Of the films I have caught this summer, FF2 has got to be my favorite, which is probably the highest honor I can give it. From titles to credits, I only complained once, and even that wasn’t totally worthy of complaint. But I’m getting ahead of myself, we’ve done this enough times for me not to deter from format, of course we have to break the film down and throw in a few obscure comic references, or else it just wouldn’t feel right.
Starting off with the acting, I was more than happy with everyone’s performances in the film, including Alba’s, who I bitched and moaned about in the previous film. This movie has got enough content jam-packed into 89 minutes that her flickering eyes and blank stare were almost as invisible as the character herself.
My favorite part of a superhero sequel is that we’re beyond the need for introductions and origins, and we can get to the grits of the character. There were a few things I wanted in the first film that were delivered with bells on in this film. Those being: more Johnny and Ben camaraderie, less “will they or won’t they” with Sue and Reed, and a whole lot less of Julian McMahon looking somber. While we got much more of the first, the second two still had their moments, but again with a film that primarily shifts the focus on a brand new character, the little problems like that get lost in the cracks. We also get a reprise of Stan Lee, unsurprisingly, but this time he doesn’t come back as Postman Willie Lumpkin, but another, very special character. I won’t give it away, but I’ll drop a hint: He’s old.
The next section of course being the special effects of the film. And I’m somewhat jaded in this category, because for years, the only Fantastic Four I knew of other than ink on paper was from the Roger Corman epic, and those of you who remember that also remember a lot of clay-mation stretchiness and I Dream of Jeannie camera tricks for the invisible effect. So comparing it to the two new films is like holding a candle up to the sun. The effects started off pretty poor, but then came to blow me away by the end of the flick. This is where we touch on the giant purple elephant in the room, Galactus.
I’m going to put an end to the rumor right now and admit that Yes: Galactus is a cloud, BUT! It’s completely pulled off in this picture. I was the first webgeek to bitch and moan that I wanted a giant purple dude like we’ve always known the Devourer of Worlds to be, but when you consider the impact of a twister three times the size of earth coming to literally eat the world, the image is haunting, and even us original geeks get a nod from the crew towards the end of the picture. Again, I don’t want to spoil too much, but during the final battle, look directly into the “belly of Galactus” to see an old face.
So here we are, one day before the highest anticipated film of 2007, Spider-Man 3
Lets begin with my least favorite part of the entire film: the acting. Now I may be a bit jaded, but I’ve never really got into having Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker. This is where doing a book or comic adaptation gets funky, because originally the character’s voice and overall demeanor is up to their interpretation. A perfect example of this is the [[[Harry Potter]]] film franchise. The casting of those films were almost spot-on with the fan’s interpretation of the characters, and they didn’t even have the visual aids that comic books have.
With that said, in my head Spidey was the nerdy, quiet kid before bitten by the radioactive/genetically enhanced spider, but then gains self-confidence while still keeping his puerile attitude towards life. This is how we get the wisecracking interpretation in modern books. But with Maguire’s performance, we are constantly treated to the somber, “woe is me” Spider-Man who, granted, still jumps, swings, and does whatever a spider can, but in between those periods is constantly in a state of teary-eyed misery. Even in the second film where he is convinced that being Spider-Man is a curse, and trashes the costume, he still looks like at any moment, he could burst into tears. Some could attribute this to Maguire’s incredible range, but if I wanted that, I’d go see Seabiscuit
Spider-Man is the comic relief of the New Avengers
Moving on to our leading lady, Kirsten Dunst, I have a whole different problem. In the first film, I was starting to get into the idea of having a non-supermodel quality Mary Jane Watson and by the end of the second film, I was completely sold, though she looked like she hadn’t eaten since Jumanji
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
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