Archive for the 'Culture' Category

30
Jun

James Bond gets a Quantum of Solace

By Drew 0 Comments
Categories: Trailers, Film and Culture

I was talking to a friend of mine today about the new Bond trailer that was released today. My buddy is more than a decade younger than I am, and it was pretty clear for a generation that came of age in the 90s the crazy gadgets and glamorous gals didn’t have the same appeal when everyone has a cell phone in their pocket, and porn was marching into the mainstream.

Part of the problem is that Roger Moore was a fairly poor bond. By the mid eighties he had long outstayed his welcome, and was driving the franchise into the ground until it had become a sad parody of itself that was overripe for the kind of parody that launched the Austin Powers series.

Here’s a great video of Moore discussing how little he cares about the character, and it shows off just how far the whole thing had fallen:

Things picked up a bit by the time that GoldenEye came out, but reality was already outpacing the movie gadgets, and generally the Bond series was unable to generate any plots that didn’t have Bond, once again, running from location to location trying to intercept or stop packages as they were being shipped from one location to another.

Ever since the third film the character’s main job was to mess with FedEx, and failing to actually get the package, blow up the destination when he stumbled into it.

The actual spying and such were secondary to the “suave sophistication”, set pieces, and big bangs that the series leaned on when they didn’t have much of an actual plot. Ultimately Pierce Brosnan’s bond succumbed to this overwhelming sameness. The urge to improve the series remained however, and the last classic Bond film, “Die Another Day” became post-modern when the usual ridiculous montage of hot chicks became part of an interpretive dance representing the torture that James was undergoing while he was trapped in a North Korean jail:

But they couldn’t even hold it together for an entire move. After all the sturm und drang, the movie devolved into more of the same old thing once Bond managed to reach Hong Kong and the sexy arms of Halle Berry.

But with a new, leaner and definitely meaner Bond, played by Daniel Craig, Casino Royale, although not complete devoid of the cliches, definitely felt different. Perhaps revitalized by the more brutal nature of international politics in a post-9/11 world, and the success of the Bourne films, it had an actual edge, and gave us a Bond that is both effective and effected. The new film, Quantum of Solace, picks up minutes after the last one, and seems to be attempting to build on what the last one started. According to the interviews, they’ve even avoided the usual globe-trotting in favor of focusing on Bond and his problems. So, the big question they need to answer is, can they keep making Bond more interesting forty years after the film series launched?

The new trailer makes it seem as if the answer may be yes.

02
Jun

John Hodgman reviews Kirby’s Fourth World in the New York Times

By Drew 0 Comments
Categories: Comics and Culture

As a young kid I didn’t really get Jack Kirby.  His work seemed too “far out” and “wild” for a “liitle tyke” such as myself. I wanted entertainment, not big ideas, and Jack’s book were full of them. 

Most of what I read were the Marvel stuff he was going in the mid-seventies. Books like The Eternals, and his amazingly weird Captain America series.

As I grew up I started to realize how much my own mind had been “blown open” by those Kirby comics of my youth. Ultimately I got a chance to meet and interview the man himself back in 1992, getting to discover in person just how much enthusiasm he could still project, and how excited he was about new possibilities, even when he was in his seventies.

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But one thing I had never had a chance to experience were the comics that were supposed to be his magnum opus, a series of interconnected comics called the “Fourth World” that laid out a tale of the “New Gods”, and their battle against Darkseid, the lord of Apokalypse.  They’d come and gone by the time I’d gotten into comics, and I only managed to get my hands on some of them in the early nineties when the New Gods comics were reprinted.

The remaining books went uncollected for years, showing up in bits and pieces in occasional reprints, but it was only last year that DC undertook a definitive reprinting of the saga. It’s a gorgeous edition, with a new printing process that seems to capture the magic of the old newsprint without its frailty.

Yes, the plots can be corny, and the dialog often almost defines wooden. But at the same time Kirby manages to transcend all of the cliches that he revels in with the sheer amount of power in his art, and creativity in his ideas.  That is, after all, his super-power.

This new edition seems to have opened a place in the greater culture for the appreciation of Jack Kirby to start to flourish. Part of that is an entire generation of nerds, like myself, who have constantly reminded people how awesome he is. Another part is the heavy influence that the Kirby canon had on other superhero projects, and the penetration of comics in general into the mainstream culture..

But there’s a special feeling that comes with seeing the Fourth World Omnibus reviewed in the New York Times, by notable nerd John Hodgman. It’s as if the final walls have come crumbling down.

In one moment, Highfather of New Genesis turns to one of the young boys in his care. “Esak,” he asks, “what is it that makes the very young — so very wise?”

“Tee hee!!” Esak replies. “It’s our defense, Highfather — against the very old!!”

This is probably the only passage in the English language containing the words “tee hee” that has actually moved me.

It’s good stuff, and well worth the read.

30
Apr

The Disappointment Season

By Drew 0 Comments
Categories: Film and Culture

I’ve got something to tell you, and you aren’t going to like it:
There’s a really good chance Iron Man isn’t going to be as good as you think it is.

No, I haven’t seen it yet. Call it a gut feeling.

But even if it’s just okay doesn’t mean it won’t be fun, or you won’t have a good time. It just may not be satisfying in the way that a truly great movie can be. And that’s the other thing I have to tell you:
It isn’t supposed to be.

image Movie blockbusters can be entertaining, and a great way to spend a few hours in the dark.  Astounding sums of money are spent to make sure that you are well entertained in an optimized manner. But the goal isn’t about being great, it’s about being just good enough. And maybe just a little bit better then that, if you’re lucky. But they still have to be the kind of thing you can wrap a nice, safe, advertising campaign around.

Sure, every few years there’s an X-Men 2, Batman Begins, or Fellowship of the Ring that manages to surprise you with a good solid story lurking amongst the twisted metal and flying dinosaurs and/or robots. But that’s the exception and not the rule.  And even then there’s invariably the let-down that comes when you watch it again on DVD and realize that perhaps it wasn’t as good as you remembered, and maybe you are still capable of being suckered in with whiz-bang effects and hot-chicks in leather-spandex short shorts.
Suckers.

And then there are the bombs.  Big budget disasters like the The Chronicles of Riddick, or Superman Returns. Films that you leave wondering just where everything went so very, very wrong. Maybe they tried to break out of the mold.  Or, what’s worse is that maybe they tried to be exactly what they were, and they failed anyway.

image Either way, when you spend one hundred fifty million dollars or more, your first order of business is to make that money back. You need to be something for everyone rather than the right thing for someone. And so we get these sleek entertainment machines, designed to give everyone who sees them a consistent entertainment experience; the feeling of something different while being pretty much the same thing every time. A video hypodermic of pre-measured fun delivered directly to your cerebral cortex.  A highly clinical procedure where the nurse is played by Jessica Alba.

But like I said, I haven’t seen the movie yet. Maybe this time I’m wrong. Maybe this time it’ll be perfect.

21
Apr

Watchmen Movie Action Figures

By Drew 0 Comments
Categories: Film and Culture

image

I get to be Rorschach!

via Toys R Evil

17
Apr

More Reasons the Hulk is Lame

By Drew 0 Comments
Categories: Film, Comics and Culture

I’ll stick by my own analysis, but over at io9 they’ve posted their own theory behind why the Hulk doesn’t work:

image The Hulk, by contrast, is like Godzilla: he’s all about the bomb. If you’ve only seen the TV show or the Ang Lee movie, you might not realize how much the Hulk’s origin ties in with nuclear bomb testing. In the comics, Dr. Bruce Banner is a repressed nerd who creates the most destructive bomb in history: the Gamma Bomb. He’s about to test it, when he sees a teenager has sneaked out onto the test grounds. Bruce manages to rescue the teenager from the blast (by getting him into a magically protective trench) but catches the full brunt of the explosion himself. Miraculously, Bruce doesn’t die, but instead starts turning into a big green (or occasionally grey) rampaging monster.

Despite the fact that we still have enough nuclear warheads to destroy the entire world a zillion times over, and loose nukes are still a huge problem, people don’t worry about nuclear destruction as much as they used to. It’s no longer hotwired into the zeitgeist the way it once was. And that may be why people always leave the bomb out of the Hulk’s origin when they retell it. (Actually, I think the TV show left out the bomb just because it would be too violent and disturbing to show Bill Bixby transfixed in the glow of a mushroom cloud.) Instead, you always have Bruce sitting in a chair and getting bathed with Gamma radiation, or injecting it into his arms, or in a big chamber of Gamma rays or whatever. It’s all about laboratories and irresponsible experiments, instead of nukes.

I’m not sure I agree.  After all, people still get angry and want to destroy things. I can’t imagine that ever going out of style.

Like I said before, go back to the TV show with drifter Banner.

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