Here's what I think: If I hadn't been reading superhero comics for 30-odd years, this thing would seem fresh as a daisy Lots of superheroes having an adventure, living a little, learning a little, comparing and contrasting themselves, speaking entirely in exposition. It genuinely has the pacing and plotless weaving of a real DC Comics crossover event comic, complete with all the clunky dialog and trying to do too much with too many characters in too little time, and you kind of stick it out through the parts that don't work (which are many), because when it does work, it's a lot of fun. And, it may actually "count", depending on how well received the thing winds up.
So, I watched Monday evening's episode of Supergirl on CBS, and while heartened that the episode introduced the idea of Bizarro for a new generation, I'm also wondering what they're leaving for Superman himself at this point, or what they think Superman has been up to as they keep introducing all of his villains on the show like they've never been around before.
But, no harm no foul.
If I took exception to the episode, it was that we had a BINO. Bizarro In Name Only.
Good-bye! Me am not comics version of Bizarro-Girl!
If you've unfamiliar with Superman's sometimes enemy/ sometimes pal, Bizarro, well, firstly, I pity you. Secondly, in the original comics, Bizarro was an imperfect duplicate of Superboy and, soon, Superman. The angular-faced misfit was a perfect fit with the bi-polar nature of Superman's Silver Age adventures.
In the wake of the Senate hearings and the installation of the Comics Code Authority - we ended Superman threatening people and hurling them around violently and the comics explored what it meant for Superman to be the Last Son of Krypton as well as a Superman with time to kill since crime was abruptly held in check. The Man of Steel was now having a good laugh moving the Eiffel Tower around to mess with Lois one story, and in the second feature was openly weeping about the fate of his birth parents.
Equal parts clown, monster, hero, villain, misunderstood child and wreckless menace, Bizarro was the wild card in the Superman deck in an era of Superman comics littered with Robot Supermans, Supergirls, Super Cats and Dogs, King Kongs with Death Laser Eyes and routine occurrences of Superman being turned into a baby. I haven't even gotten to Jimmy Olsen's Silver Age lifestyle and all that insanity. And, yet, it all fit together pretty well.
Bizarro first appeared as a one-off in Superboy #68, but soon re-appeared in the mainline Superman titles where he gained his own supporting cast and planet. Hell, yes, he did.
Happy Birthday to actress Sherilyn Fenn. She's been great in some great movies and good in some bad movies and I was as stunned as the next person to see her combatting Bigfoot in the accurately titled 2012 SyFy/ Asylum movie, Bigfoot.
You may know her as Audrey Horne from cult TV series, Twin Peaks, making sweaters and saddle shoes a very good idea to high-school-me.
I am thrilled to say it seems she's returning to the role when the show returns late this year or early next year.
I'm not exactly what you'd call a "musical theater guy", but I don't turn my nose up at a good musical on screen nor stage. And, frankly, I kind of think it's weird that we're at a point in history where people singing through a story is suddenly seen as "unrealistic" when the combo of song and story has been a major force in storytelling in almost every culture. If you watch anything but documentaries, your argument that people don't just break out into song is an artificial construct and you don't like artificial constructs in your story, your argument is invalid.*
Ever since the debacle that was Carrie Underwood as Maria in NBC's live broadcast of The Sound of Music, I've been chasing that high where I could find it. My GOD, how I like a good disaster.
NBC has now also done Peter Pan, which I missed, and The Wiz, which was basically pretty much a solid performance and free of glitches or shameful moments, and had some really good performances, Queen Latifah.
But we're here to talk about Grease: Live!, which aired tonight on Fox.
Most famous for his roles in The Godfather and the TV series Barney Miller, where he played Fish, a cop who acted exactly how you'd expect a cop who looked like Abe Vigoda to behave - Vigoda somehow became pretty famous and well-loved. Almost all of his other roles since Barney Miller were more or less "holy @#$%, is that Abe Vigoda?" when he'd walk on screen. He also kept invading the sets of late night talk shows for a while in the 90's.
I'll miss Vigoda. It was always nice to know he was out there being Abe Vigoda, a role no one else will be able to fill.
Look, I'm not made of stone. I started tuning into The X-Files in 1993 when it was schedule adjacent to the short lived series The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. (a show canceled way, way too soon). And, yeah, I dug that shortish FBI agent and her skeptical ways and off-the-rack pantsuits.
I was also into aliens and real-life UFO conspiracy stuff at the time. Skeptical, but this was an era before YouTube or 10,000 cable channels - a state of things that meant, eventually, this dude got a platform on the @#$%ing History Channel
:
But, again, in 1993, access to those videos you'd see written about in books and articles were hard to come by, so why not at least entertain the notion?
And, again, Special Agent Dr. Dana Scully in sensible shoes.
In short, The X-Files was the first TV show I ever watched first run in prime time with any dedication, at least as an adult. Otherwise, I guess you could say I'd had strong feelings about The Dukes of Hazzard when I was 6.
I'm about two months behind everyone else finishing the Marvel Netflix series Jessica Jones, a spiritual sibling of the much celebrated Daredevil, and as far from the TV-logic and twee shenanigans of Agents of SHIELD as you're likely to get.
I'm going to throw this out there, and I'll ask you to stick with me: Jessica Jones may be, to live-action superhero media, what Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen were to comics in 1986.
Way back in the late-90's/ early-00's, I was reading a lot of this new kid, Brian Michael Bendis, who had some indie success with Goldfish, Torso and other gritty crime books (and Torso is still an amazing read, the based-on-real-events story of famed lawman Elliot Ness trying to find a serial killer in Cleveland after putting Capone behind bars). He followed this by teaming with Oeming on Powers, a "cops in a world with capes" comic with a decidedly Rated-R bent, and I followed that series for years. Around 2001/2002, Bendis and Gaydos brought Alias to Marvel and minted their new MAX imprint - a line of comics with a hard "R" rating, but absolutely within the Marvel Universe. Something even DC blanched at, separating Vertigo from DCU proper circa 1994.
This was about fifteen years after the atom-bomb of Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns exploded in the comics world and, in the aftermath, the idea that comics could reach an adult audience was left behind in the radiation and sand burnt to glass. Bendis was part of the generation who came into the field when a few things were happening. (A) Reaching an audience older than 17 was now possible - which meant the very real-world problems facing actual humans could be discussed in comics, even with a superheroic bent, which (B) meant that the comics companies were setting up imprints to deal with this idea, keeping their mainline branding safe for the parents associations who would show up and breathe fire and throw comics retailers in jail from time-to-time for not carefully shelving their wares. And, of course, (C) Marvel was dealing with bankruptcy. I have very little positive to say about 2001-era Marvel honcho Bill Jemas, but he was certainly willing to try new things, and all of that risk-taking has indirectly led to the Marvel we think of today.
Alias showed up in this market as a sort of indie-within-the-Big-2 title. It was something to see a character who smoked and drank and had sex with Luke Cage (which she does in the first few pages of the series - so I feel spoiler free), and met Carol Danvers for coffee. It was a detective series. There was something in her background we'd get to sooner or later, some dark reason she'd quit heroing, but at the outset, it seemed to just be a series about a failed superhero making ends meet and seeing real human foibles and crime in the underbelly of the Marvel U.
Longtime readers will know - Batman, the TV program, is probably ground zero for everything you see here at the ol' blog. Born in '75, obviously I was too not-yet-in-existence to catch the show when it premiered in 1966, and I think my dad was in Vietnam and my mom was in college and not watching TV when the show hit the airwaves.
Family history says my first words included "Batman". Or, more specifically, "Mat-man", as I couldn't quite work that "b" sound quite yet. The story is that my mom needed to fix dinner for my brother and myself, and at some point she figured out I'd hold perfectly still for half an hour each week night when she'd point me at the TV while Batman played in syndication, and the rest just sort of played out.
As big as Star Wars may have been in my early childhood, so, too, was this version of Batman - or so I am told. But I have almost no memory of watching the show at this age, I just remembered the characters and sounds of the show. It fell off the syndication wagon in my local viewing area for a number of years, and didn't return until 1989, when the popularity of the Michael Keaton Batman meant someone decided to cash in.
If it's been a little quiet around here, I apologize.
Sunday I wrapped a week-and-a-half off from work (sometimes working at a University has its privileges. They just sent us home on the 22nd and said "don't come back til Monday the 4th"), and between writing those end of the year posts and no longer being under obligation to write about every movie I've watched, I've felt some sense of liberation and I'm enjoying it.
We also haven't watched all that many movies. I'll still, at minimum, post the poster for whatever movie I just watched, but full write-ups won't come as often this year. Yes, I probably should have written something about Hateful 8, but... nope.
A long while back I got Jamie the Season 1 Agent Carter BluRay set, but she's held off on watching it until now so we would get a refresher just before Season 2 arrives January 19th.
It's rare I feel so vindicated as I have about my instincts around Haley Atwell's kick-ass love interest for Cap in 2011's Captain America. I won't lie: Ms. Atwell is a striking lady, but I couldn't help but feel they'd found a lot of pieces in both script and actress I was interested in seeing expanded. But the Marvel Cinematic U is pretty firmly planted in the 21st Century, so I didn't expect anything except for a lot of me saying "I wish they would have done more with Agent Carter".
Well, sometimes the universe surprises us, and not only did they make a short-seasoned TV show I thought was better than it was ever going to be, but Jamie - who liked Peggy as well in the Cap movie - was a HUGE fan. I won major brownie points for getting her the Peggy carter Funko Pop, for example.
Welcome to the 2015 Signal Watch Awards, or, as we're calling them here - The Kryptos! We've named the awards after everyone's favorite flying super dog. We were going to call them The Jimmies, but that sounded like a crappy local pop-punk band, or some sort of speed the kids would be doing by crushing up their ADD meds, and we're not doing it.
So, welcome to the First Annual Kryptos - for 2015!
I was on blogging hiatus during the first season of Fargo. In the year since returning I haven't talked about the program a great deal, but if you're a regular reader (Hi, Dad!), you may have seen me make mention of the show and the Season 1 star, Allison Tolman. Hollywood, find this person work. She's great.
When the show came back on again this Fall, I didn't care to write about this season of Fargo on an episode-by-episode basis. When writing about television with its weekly installments, with its endless trails of breadcrumbs leading you in to the next episode and into the next season, you wind up tallying plot points, punching holes, checking boxes and idly speculating. I do it here all the time when I talk TV.
But with programs like FX's Fargo in this new era of American television, we're getting a new form of the medium, something akin to the novel for motion pictures. Obviously, TV has grown and changed. In many corners its unrecognizable from the industry and story-telling I grew up with, and while I find the idea of "binging" a show kind of weird and self-defeating, I can understand the desire to move from chapter to chapter and stay up late to finish a good book.
Fargo the TV series was never going to be the film of the same name, and seemed a hugely risky endeavor, a tight-rope act of television. It was to be produced by the Coens, but that's code for: they'd get a check, but have no real participation. Instead, it was the creative vision of Noah Hawley, a guy who worked on Bones and some other shows, but who didn't seem to have made a name for himself, exactly. Few modern filmmakers are as highly regarded as the Coen Bros., and few have been as routinely successful in plunging into new territory, film after film. And while you can enjoy a Coen Bros. film upon a first viewing, they bear repeat viewings and never disappoint. And the Coen Bros. are prolific.
The movie of Fargo arrived in 1996 to well-deserved critical acclaim and solid box office. A noir-ish tale of avarice, crime, and human monsters with the soft glint of decency still living on the edges, painting the warm bed and the mundanities of life as a refuge - a good thing - in a world that has darkness always lapping at the edges. The film struck a chord with a wider audience than the Coen Bros. had previously enjoyed, even when the studios tried to push them front and center with Hudsucker Proxy. Sure, a lot of folks went to see the cop movie with the funny accents, but they wound up seeing a pretty good picture, too.
So what could we expect out of a TV show with a seeming lack of participation from the Coens?
Murray is categorically a Boomer, but since we all saw Ghostbusters on VHS if not in the theater, he's been riding out in front of Gen X, the patron saint. Whether he was unflappably dealing with Gozer, an alien in his own skin in a Japanese hotel bar, or deciding to take his crew on an ill-fated voyage to the depths of the seas while they all wore matching outfits, he was the guy we aspired to be when we hit whatever age he happened to be in his latest project.
I dunno. Maybe that's just me. But I've ordered speedsuits for all of you. You'll have to attach your own name patches.
Few actors play exhaustion and pulling at the end of their wits and muttering about the insanity of it all to himself in quite the same manner as Murray. And that's kind of been the story of Generation X, something the Boomers weren't paying attention to as they Me-Generationed, and something the Millennials are oblivious to as they wonder aloud why more people aren't listening to their ideas.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was making nobody care how good a show actually is, just how it makes them feel.
Actually, the red button would have just opened the door, but that's okay.
I'm not sure how many episodes we are into Season 1 of Supergirl, but this week's episode "How Does She Do It?" was supposed to be last week's episode, but the episode contained some terrorist-like elements that would have seemed a bit unseemly to use in a show about the world's ginchiest superhero a few days after very real terror attacks that made the news in the same parts of the world where Supergirl is broadcast.
What I do know is that the entire program feels very, very much like it is written by people who absolutely cannot be bothered to think through their own show. And it is absolutely exhausting to watch a show where it seems like the writers cannot follow logic from Point A to Point B to Point C without then deciding Point 117 comes next.
Here is where I don my comic hipster cap and harken back to the days when I was picking up Brian Michael Bendis' Alias during its initial run. Yeah, yeah. I was reading Alias before reading Alias was cool.*
You have to keep in mind, and the kids will never believe this, but Bendis did not arrive on this Earth fully formed as a successful writer of Avengers and X-Men. He started in indie comics (if you're never read Torso and Goldfish, correct that situation), with a particularly noirish/ crime-ridden bent to his work, which was how I picked it up. It's good stuff.
Marvel was in a really weird spot when he showed up. The Spider-Clone debacle, merging with an action figure company and, basically, the 90's had nearly done the entire company in. At the time, they were a publicly traded company, and their stock totally, totally tanked. It was ridiculous. For all the warm fuzzies the kids have about that 1992-style X-Men of Many Pockets, that shit almost killed Marvel the first time around under the stewardship of Bob Harras, currently steward of DC Comics (hey, DC, how are sales over there, pals?).
So, by the turn of the Millennium, new leadership was installed and Marvel was trying all sorts of stuff, including not-quite-Vertigo type titles under the Knights (basically PG-13) and Max (basically R-rated) banners.
I keep meaning to write a post about Fargo,currently airing on FX. But, for right now, I just recommend you watch the hell out of that show. But I suspect writing about Fargo will take a super long time, I'm not going to do that tonight. And, I'm not going to talk about Supergirl, which was actually not half-bad on Monday.
Instead, because its a Tuesday and its fun as hell to discuss, let's talk about The Flash.
this is not the actual Flash, btw
There are a large number of reasons I tune in every week to see the Scarlet Speedster, and I don't think I talk about it enough, but Grant Gustin is actually really pretty great as Barry Allen. The guy has taken a character that comic nerds always insisted was "boring" (a diagnosis I never fully understood), and found the kind of guy it would take to be The Flash. I know, it's crazy to think that a level-headed person with a sense of responsibility would put on tights as readily as the now omni-present anti-hero, but Gustin and a crack writing team have managed to make Barry a buyable, believable character in the middle of a very, very strange world.
Much like Smallville, I suspect that any critical viewing of Supergirl will be an exercise in shooting fish in a barrel. So, I've brought my 12-gauge and CBS has provided the barrel. Let's maim some metaphorical fish.
good thing this bronze statue is actually lead. Hope no one misses it so I don't have to find a pipe or literally anything but this valuable looking statue.
I came to many realizations watching this week's episode.
Reactron is not a terribly creative villain. He was kind of a one-trick-pony/ no personality guy in the comics, and here... more of same. Why did I used to like that guy? Costume design? No idea. I like the name, though. Could be that's it.
If Cat Grant were anymore one-note on this show, she'd be a tone in Koyaanisqatsi
The writers have just absolutely nowhere to go with Win. That dude is going to die horribly so anyone can give him a passing thought and he'll ever have mattered in the show. Also, I am not sure working a low-tier job at CatCo would set you up to hack satellites, get you $30K in equipment, and all the rest of the Smallville Watchtower responsibility he's taken on. He's so forgettable, I have to place him every time he appears in frame.
I have no idea what Kara's sister's name is after 3 hours of television. She's just "Kara's-Sister".
By episode 6, not one character in the DCU will have a secret identity unknown to Win. truly, that man is the nexus of the DCU
Three episodes in, I'm a little stunned at how badly the writers are handling Cat Grant. I have no huge expectations, but that the "interview" scene was incredibly poorly managed after the big build up last episode. It's like Cat's terrible dialog is infecting everyone else's forgettable or fortune-cookie dialog.
This weekend marks the 40th Anniversary of the debut of the TV show Wonder Woman, starring Lynda Carter.
If you've never seen the show, or not watched it since the 1970's, it's my official position that you should correct that situation. Over three seasons across two networks and a story taking place across 30-odd years, the show went from post-Batman '66 campiness to a straight family-friendly action-drama and covered Nazis, alien invasion, small time crooks, leprechauns and super-dolphins. And robots and smart-assed computers. And twirling. So much twirling.
It was with absolutely zero trepidation that I plunked down my subscription for the otherwise seemingly useless Starz channels that I could watch the new TV series, Ash vs. Evil Dead. I'm not a grade-A screwhead, but I am a fan of the Evil Dead movies, star Bruce Campbell and director Sam Raimi.
We also get Dana DeLorenzo and Ray Santiago as the new generation to ride shotgun with Ash.
It certainly didn't hurt my decision to get onboard that the show would co-star Lucy Lawless, who - spoilers - does not actually appear in the pilot aside from her credit. So, sorry about that.
What the pilot does have is a remarkable mix of comedy and horror in the Evil Dead 2 tradition, a supporting cast that seems to fit well into the Evil Dead spirit, and a parallel storyline with actress Jill Marie Jones, who looks vaguely familiar because she was briefly on Sleepy Hollow.
I don't really know what you people want to hear. It's a first episode, and much like Supergirl, it's working itself out as a show, but it's one that will rely perhaps on less of a single tone for the characters. Because if Bruce Campbell has figured anything out in this life, it's how to be Ash and what will make his fans cheer. The show is a hard-MA or R rating, and the gore factor is tuned up to Evil Dead 2 levels with improbable amounts of blood in the human body, and Raimi clearly happy to exploit CGI to get more creative exploding heads and whatnot. While the non-practical FX take a beat to adjust to, of course it makes sense that the show would exploit the potential there.
Ash seems to have accidentally unleashed hell on Earth once again, but rather than doing so in a secluded cabin, he's let it out in suburban Michigan in a way that, frankly, it seems surprising he hasn't done in the previous 30 years since the events of Evil Dead 2 and his return to the world, which we can pin to 1985, meaning his return from Army of Darkness occurred during the correct timeframe.
Anyway, I'm pretty much in the bag for this one, so don't expect a lot of critical viewing of this show. My biggest fear was it would be neither funny nor scary, and before we ever even get the title up, bother were more than taken care of.
Oh, the show must have drawn in a massive flood of Starz subscribers, because it was renewed before it ever even aired. So, look forward to two seasons of Evil Dead mayhem.
Okay. As I suspected it might be, Episode 2 was a far cry better than the pilot. So, everybody settle the heck down.
Yes, the episode was still rife with issues within the episode, and it's hard to see how some of the story elements are going to avoid narrative traps and holes, but I wasn't just grimacing my way through the episode and, despite the bleached out lighting and utter lack of eyebrows on Calista Flockhart (she had eyebrows in the 90's. I suspect Harrison Ford has taken them.), her dialog wasn't just setting me on the edge this go-round.
I don't get why DC Entertainment can't seem to decide what the hell the "S" stands for. You just spent millions on an ad campaign telling people the "S" stood for "Hope" and now you're saying it stands for "Stronger Together", which is kinda corporate-retreaty-trust-fallsy. Hope was fine. I was kind of telling my TV "please don't do this... please just say 'Hope' and move on." But, nope. This is why people wind up hating comics.
The first trailer has arrived for AMC's adaptation of the 90's Vertigo comics series, Preacher.
Here you go:
The series was written by Garth Ennis with art by Steve Dillon for, I believe, every regular issue and most of the Preacher one-shots, back when DC had a wing that was responsible for actually doing some fairly creative things under the watchful eye of Vertigo mastermind Karen Berger.
I don't write about his work a lot, and I probably should, but sometimes I think Garth Ennis is the last of that 90's-era bunch who has managed to stick it out, continue to get better specifically at comics writing, and is the last of the generation that believed comics were on an upward climb toward telling stories that people would care about rather than churning through nostalgia, giving comics form to internet memes, and maybe becoming a respectable form of literature rather than pop-culture artifact and detritus.
Sure, he dabbles in some of that, too, but even when Ennis has written superheroes, he's written some really damn good superheroes, from his stint on Hitman (his Superman/ Tommy Monaghan interactions were pure gold), and he did some excellent work with Punisher. I may not have found The Boys particularly my thing, but, man, any war comic he does is well worth the read. War Stories and Battlefields are both just absolutely stellar titles, as well as his work with Enemy Ace at DC and Phantom Eagle at Marvel.
He's able to swing effortlessly between some jet black gallows humor, shocking violence and genuinely heartfelt moments, often all in the same comic.
In short - he's one of the best writers working today, and maybe ever, in comics.
To say that Preacher spoke rather well to me when it hit the stands while I was in college is a bit of an understatement. Between Preacher and Morrison's Invisibles, I felt like I was getting made-to-order comics, or - more realistically - comics that gave me something new I didn't know I'd be interested in.
Where The Invisibles sometimes lost me in British or dated references I couldn't yet follow, Preacher - despite (or especially because it was) the fact that the creators weren't American or Texan - made a hell of a lot of sense to me. Scenes took place all over, but the heart of the comic was in Texas, with roots in Louisiana. Scenes took place on Congress Avenue in Austin and just outside The Alamo in San Antonio. I, too, had out of control friends and whatnot.
In retrospect, I hate to say how much influence Preacher and The Invisibles had on my 1997-penned screenplay for Screen Writing class, The Hypothetical Elevator. I was absolutely unaware of the influence at the time, but, boy howdy - yes.
I'm not sure what to think of a TV series. Of course I'll give it a shot, and I trust AMC to try to do something interesting with the ideas from the series. I can see bits and pieces of the characters in the trailer, even if it's clear, already, that they have no intention of sticking with the comics on a page-to-screen basis. That's fine, it's worked out okay for The Walking Dead. And you really don't want everyone spoiling the TV series by just picking up the comics - which ran about 75 issues if you include the specials, I guess, and had a concrete conclusion. No need to get folks deciding that they don't need to watch the show already.
Sure, I will absolutely be tuning in. Should be colorful stuff if they do anything like the comics, but it's going to be some seriously MA-Rated TV in the process.
