People really are taking this comics stuff seriously. This Saturday, October 13, at 7 p.m. at the Montclair Art Museum as part of their "Reflecting Culture: The Evolution of American Comic Book Superheroes exhibition," there will be a lecture on "Superheroes and Society," moderated by Michael Uslan, executive producer of Batman and Batman Begins; with Danny Fingeroth, author of Superman On the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves; ComicMix columnist Dennis O’Neil, and Tom DeFalco, former editor in chief of Marvel Comics. $12 for memebers, $16 for non-members.
It feels like just yesterday that the summer blockbuster season was here, but I suppose we’ve already moved on from there and straight into that time of year when thriller/horror movies come out of the woodwork, and usually sink rather than swim. This year we’re subjected treated to another Japanese thriller remake with One Missed Call, another underground-graphic-novel-turned-award-winning-film with 30 Days of Night, and yes: yet another Saw movie – because they cost about $8.50 to make.
We proudly start off this traditional season with Rob Zombie’s faux remake/prequel of John Carpenter’s quintessential slasher flick Halloween. Now not to play into the web-gossip, but there was quite some controversy about this film’s script, involving a leak and a very critical critic from a website which I choose not to mention (I will give a hint though: it rhymes with Paint it Drool Booze). But all of that aside, it was rumored that Zombie went into rewrites only a few short weeks before shooting. Now I felt this was relatively unwise, but as usual, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start as we usually do, in the OCD fashion of a film breakdown.
Starting off with my favorite aspect of the film, the acting; I have almost nothing to complain about here. It’s evident in all of Zombie’s work (a whopping three films) that he is a huge fanboy, and while every fanboy has their niche (Smith has Star Wars, Tarantino has chatty women, and Favreau has Vince Vaughn) Zombie’s niche is easily noticed as B-Movies. This film is a practical who’s who of B-Movie actors, much like his previous two films were. To name a few, we movie geeks get Danny Trejo, Brad Dourif, Malcolm McDowell, Sid Haig, William Forsythe, Udo Kier, Clint Howard, and of course Tyler Mane as our masked pro/antagonist. With a cast like this, topped off with Zombie’s frightening-yet-gorgeous wife, Sheri Moon, this film was meant for every fanboy in the theater to swoon with joy every time we get another cameo, much like this reviewer did. Though it probably isn’t necessary for me to reveal, each actor pulled off their creepy-yet-impressive roles to a tee.
Moving onto the technical aspect of this film, I was torn. Another one of Zombie’s trademarks is complete filth, and not in the sense of obligatory nudity (of which there was plenty in this film), but in the sense that the film and setting as a whole made me long for a shower once the credits rolled. From the very start, we’re treated to visuals of a completely rundown, white-trash home in which almost everything looks dirty and unpleasant, all the way to the end of the film where just about everything/one is covered in blood. Much like House of 1000 CorpsesandDevil’s Rejects, this film definitely adapted the feeling of grittiness that the horror movies of yesteryear prided themselves on.
One trait that Zombie seemed to pick up in this movie that was thankfully left out of his two previous pieces was the use of unnecessary camera shakiness. I’m not sure if its his way of falling in line with popular films like the Bourne trilogy and the use of shaky camera work, or if it was a cheap way to add tension to a scene that already displayed it, but it was not only unnecessary, but distracting. When a filmmaker prides himself for turning heads with the amount of gore and violence he uses in films, there is no need to strap the camera to a rabid dog every time he feels the need to add more tension to the scene. The close angles and fast cuts during action sequenced made it feel like a bad episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and that’s not good, especially when the substance is far too good for any overuse of style.
Finally we move on to the pièce de résistance: in talking about the script/plot of the film. Going into a straight-up slasher film, my expectations never soar, in fact I usually leave my brain at the door. But when a movie is hyped as giving more substance to a horror movie that I practically grew up on, I wanted there to be substance and closure to a 30 year old story. Instead we get half-assed character development and dialogue that actually had me laughing out loud when it wasn’t exactly necessary. I’m proud of the fact that we took a snippet of Donald Pleasance’s dialogue from the 1978 film and turned it into an hour of film, but this should have been about what makes one of the greatest Monsters of American Cinema tick, rather than just explaining who he is and that he likes to stab things. I call him the pro/antagonist because if the character development was done properly, it would show that Michael Myers killed to protect his family, and hurt those who threatened that. Instead we barely touch on that subject, and spend more time watching Myers kill naked teens while they have drunken unprotected sex.
Overall, looking at this film as another slasher film with a great supporting cast, it exceeds almost all expectations. But this film had to potential of being the Batman Begins of a potentially dead horror franchise, and instead of turning this into a trend in the genre and possibly getting the chance to see Peter Berg’s Friday the 13th, we’ll more than likely be subjected to another ten years of Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash vs. Godzilla vs. Kramer.
I reluctantly give the film a 7/10, only because while it may be an American pastime and one of my favorite weekend activities, a movie needs to be more than an hour plus of killing naked drunken teens having unprotected sex.
On the west coast, San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum is debuting an exhibit on Osamu Tezuka tomorrow. Creating over 700 manga titles during his lifetime, he is best known in the West for his cartoons of Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion. His prolific manga work contains two main streams: manga ‘comic pictures’ for a youth audience, including Astro Boy, Kimba and Princess Knight; and gekiga ‘drama pictures’—more seriously-toned, adult oriented narratives such as Song of Apollo and Ludwig B, that stress realistic effect and emotional impact. Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga ends September 9th, with a parallel exhibit, "Manga in the making" ending September 2nd.
On the east coast, the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey is premiering two exhibits tomorrow as well: Reflecting Culture: The Evolution of American Comic Book Superheroes and Comic Book Legends: Joe, Adam, and Andy Kubert, featuring over 150 comincs and drawings from 1938 to the present. The Museum will also be running comics-related movies under the stars over the summer, from the original Adventures of Captain Marvel serial this Tuesday to Superman and Batman Begins in August.
Reports have been surfacing all weekend that both Two-Face and The Riddler will be joining The Joker in The Dark Knight, sequel to Batman Begins. If so, I hasten to point out that this is the sort of thing that killed the last round of Bat-films: too many villains.
One can hope that, at worst, we will see these guys in their pre-presumed identities. Then the movie will choke on an overdose of foreshadowing, but that beats the camera having to pick favorites for each shot. Nothing would beat two hours of Batman taking on The Joker, pure and simple.
Every weekend, when I walk by the newsstands, I see cover stories in gossip magazines about Brad and Angelina, Jennifer, Reese, Lindsay, Britney and others. Although I only read these magazines at the hairdressers, I am fascinated by the lifestyles of people I will likely never meet. On Sunday, I enjoy the Real Estate section of The New York Times, looking at pictures of homes that can cost tens of millions of dollars.
And then, there are my favorite comics.
Batman has always been one of my favorite characters, at least in part because of Bruce Wayne. I am moved by the image of that little boy, watching his mother’s pearls scatter on the street as his parents are murdered. As a child, I was afraid the same thing could happen to my parents. As a parent, I wanted to spare my child from that tragedy.
(To his credit, my son wanted to do the right thing. “Don’t worry,” he assured me when he was five years old. “If you’re ever gunned down by criminals, I promise to avenge your death.”)
Most of the people who have written Batman over the years have concentrated on the Caped Crusader and his underground Bat Cave, not the billionaire playboy who lives in the manor above. Most of the more recent writers believe that Bruce Wayne is the disguise, that the little, traumatized boy grew up to be Batman, not Wayne.
That premise allows for many interesting stories, and I understand that it’s more fun to play with the driven, rage-filled Batman, the character with the high-tech equipment and the regimen of martial arts training. A person who fights bad guys is more likely to work in stories that require a beginning, a middle and an end than a single man rattling around in a mansion.
Long before an emerging Marvel Comics Group dared to hope its upstart super-hero funnybooks might attract the attention of corporate Hollywood, the comics fans had started speculating about how The Fantastic Four – the colorful exploits of a circle of powerful misfits, united by reciprocal affections and resentments – might weather a transplant to film.
Dream-casting fantasies abounded during the early 1960s: How about Neville Brand or Jack Elam – popular favorites at portraying plug-ugly tough guys – as the misshapen Thing, test pilot-turned-musclebound rockpile? Or Peter Lorre, as a recurring villain known as the Puppet Master? (Something of an easy call, there, inasmuch as lead artist Jack Kirby had modeled the bug-eyed Puppet Master after Lorre in the first place.)
It took a while for such wonders to develop – well past the mortal spans of Lorre and Brand and Elam and a good many other wish-list players. And in the long interim, the Marvel line of costumed world-beaters made lesser leaps from page to screen in a variety of teevee spin-offs, both animated and live-action, that never quite seized the cinema-like intensity of the comic books themselves. A live-action Fantastic Four feature of 1994 fared unexpectedly well on a pinch-penny budget, although this version has gone largely unseen outside the bootleg-video circuit.
The Marvel-gone-Hollywood phenomenon escalated around the turn of the century (beyond all early-day fannish expectations) with a big-studio X-Men feature, concerning another team of misfits in cosmic conflict. Success on this front brought an onrush of adaptations.
Prominent among these, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man series launched in 2002. X-Men has sequelized itself repeatedly. Ang Lee’s take on The Hulk proved as indebted to Nietzsche and Freud as to the Jekyll-and-Hyde bearings of the earlier comic books. A 2005 Fantastic Four feature won over the paying customers but irked a majority of the published critics: Bellwether reviewer Roger Ebert called that one no match for Spider-Man 2 or the DC Comics-licensed Batman Begins. No accounting for taste.
Now comes Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (due June 15), which raises the cosmic-menace stakes considerably while keeping the continuity anchored with director Tim Story and a familiar basic-ensemble cast. The story derives from the comics’ episodes about a planet-destroying being whose scout, the Silver Surfer, arrives to determine whether this particular planet is ripe for plunder.
If the notion of a surfboard-jockey space traveler sounds intolerably silly on first blush, consider that the character proved persuasively earnest from his first appearance – thanks to Jack Kirby’s vigorous drawings and Stan Lee’s gift for making arch dialogue seem right for the circumstances. As impersonated by Doug Jones (of Pan’s Labyrinth and the 1994 Hellboy) and voiced by Laurence Fishburne, the movie’s Silver Surver nails the spirit of the funnybooks. The Surfer’s attraction to the Fantastic Four’s Invisible Woman (Jessica Alba), who owes her greater loyalties to team boss Mr. Fantastic, lends a jolt of intimate conflict to the larger crisis.
The collaborative screenplay allows sharper exposure for Ben “Thing” Grimm (Michael Chiklis) and Ioan Gruffud’s Mr. Fantastic, along with a more richly conceived characterization for chronic villain Victor von Doom (Julian McMahon). Gruffud develops confidence and wisdom on a level with his character’s essential intelligence. Chris Evans remains fittingly temperamental as the Human Torch.
Improved visual effects stem from a refined job of make-up prosthetics for the Thing – Michael Chiklis’ tragicomic emoting comes across more effectively – and from the polished work of the Weta Digital CGI crew. The Silver Surfer tends to upstage the central characters in terms of spectacle, but the key performances are uniformly well matched.
First, it was stately Wayne Manor, as seen in Batman Begins. Now it’s the Gotham National Bank, to be seen in the forthcoming sequel, The Dark Knight.
According to The Chicago Tribune, the city’s former main post office – a 17-story building with an Interstate expressway running right through it – reported a roof fire late this morning. A crew was setting up for the next shoot; the Warner Bros. picture is once again using downtown Chicago locations to provide the look and feel of Gotham City.
The fire appeared to have started in a 16th-story marchine room and was extinguished within a half-hour. It is not clear if the fire was related to the filming, but local officeworkers who saw the smoke initially dismissed it as part of the shoot.
Just last week it was revealed that after filming was completed the building was going to be converted into quality shops, condos and offices. The bit about the expressway cutting through the building goes back 100 years, when architect Daniel Burnham designed the passage for horse-and-buggy transportation. It was finally built in the late 1950s.
I guess they could have had the Batmobile in mind at the time.
After the Joker and Two-Face warm their way into our hearts in the sequel to Batman Begins, who could possibly rule the roost in the third mega-budget blockbuster other than The Penguin? But, as always, casting is key to the success of any such decision and this time, Batman producers have outdone themselves.
The otherwise unemployed Dick Cheney will be performing the role of Oswald Cobblepot, the tuxedoed gentlemen lord of crime who attacks his enemies with a lethal bumbershoot. The motion picture, due for release in 2010, will mark a new beginning for the former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Halliburton Energy Services. Mr Cheney most recently was vice-president of the United States of America and, on June 22 2002, briefly served as acting president.
There is one possible fly in the ointment: Mr. Cheney will have to pass an insurance physical.
You can’t make a pop-culture classic without Ray Winstone. At least, that’s what the BBC is reporting. Veteran character actor Ray Winstone is rumored to be the newest addition to next year’s Indiana Jones film.
Winstone has appeared in Batman Begins and The Chronicles of Nania, in addition to The Departed, Sexy Beast, Cold Mountain, Quadrophenia and many more films. He was Will Scarlett in the British television production of Robin Hood. This fall, movie audiences will be able to see him in Robert Zemekis’ Beowulf, with a screenplay by Roger Avery and somebody named Neil Gaiman.
Me, I’m thrilled. I’ve loved her in everything I’ve seen her in, and I think that she’ll add an edge to the film that Holmes couldn’t. I’m looking forward to it.
People really are taking this comics stuff seriously. This Saturday, October 13, at 7 p.m. at the Montclair Art Museum as part of their "Reflecting Culture: The Evolution of American Comic Book Superheroes exhibition," there will be a lecture on "Superheroes and Society," moderated by Michael Uslan, executive producer of Batman and Batman Begins; with Danny Fingeroth, author of Superman On the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves; ComicMix columnist Dennis O’Neil, and Tom DeFalco, former editor in chief of Marvel Comics. $12 for memebers, $16 for non-members.
It feels like just yesterday that the summer blockbuster season was here, but I suppose we’ve already moved on from there and straight into that time of year when thriller/horror movies come out of the woodwork, and usually sink rather than swim. This year we’re subjected treated to another Japanese 
On the west coast, San Francisco’s 
Every weekend, when I walk by the newsstands, I see cover stories in gossip magazines about Brad and Angelina, Jennifer, Reese, Lindsay, Britney and others. Although I only read these magazines at the hairdressers, I am fascinated by the lifestyles of people I will likely never meet. On Sunday, I enjoy the Real Estate section of The New York Times, looking at pictures of homes that can cost tens of millions of dollars. 
(To his credit, my son wanted to do the right thing. “Don’t worry,” he assured me when he was five years old. “If you’re ever gunned down by criminals, I promise to avenge your death.”)
Long before an emerging Marvel Comics Group dared to hope its upstart super-hero funnybooks might attract the attention of corporate Hollywood, the comics fans had started speculating about how The Fantastic Four – the colorful exploits of a circle of powerful misfits, united by reciprocal affections and resentments – might weather a transplant to film.
First, it was stately Wayne Manor, as seen in Batman Begins. Now it’s the Gotham National Bank, to be seen in the forthcoming sequel, The Dark Knight.
