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.
So. Here's where I'm the jerk who didn't like the pilot of CBS's new Supergirl TV show that everyone is so excited about.
Look, sometimes I forget just how terrible 90% of network television truly is. It's no secret network TV has its formulas, its trope for every situation, and never met a bit of exposition it didn't like. I get that they had to get the character introduced and get a lot of things started quickly, and in the post-Lost wake, the networks think they've learned their lesson and are absolutely terrified of not giving the audience every detail about a show in the first episode.
And I say this as someone who likes Supergirl. A lot. I've got Action 252 hanging up in my office in a frame (please don't rob me). I've read Silver, Bronze, 90's, 00's and even gave the trainwrecky New 52 Supergirl a shot. I'm not a stranger to the character. And, while I actually like the general tone of "Kimmy Schmidt as Supergirl", because I was really convinced I'd never see that take again (thank you, Sterling Gates, wherever you are, for giving me that Supergirl, oh, so briefly)... The show is a mess.
Yes, it is a show for children and for those who don't know Supergirl, and no one is under any legal or moral obligation to maintain fidelity to the comics. I think Marvel has proved that's all pretty unnecessary so long as you get the basic details down.
In my book, there are a few places you can say that really changed comics. The publication of New Fun Comics, Action Comics #1, Detective #27, Sensation Comics #1, Amazing Fantasy #15, Fantastic Four #1, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Watchmen... stuff like that.
We can break down how each of those changed comics, and some were in large, cultural shift-y kinds of ways, while others took more time to reveal themselves.
Flash #123 is one of the places you can put your finger on that changed comic books in ways no one anticipated at the time. Pretty remarkable that between the first appearance of Barry Allen in Showcase #4, which I'm saying is the start of the Silver Age, circa October 1956, and the Flash of Two Worlds issue, circa 1961, we saw two huge changes in the state of comics thanks to one character (and, I'd argue, to a lesser extent in how Barry Allen dealt with his villains in those early issues). Today, it's almost impossible to imagine modern comics from any publisher without the concept of a multiverse (see Marvel's current Secret Wars event or the many worlds of Archie Comics).
The multiverse exploded the possibilities for comics, for alternate universes, and became a staple of sci-fi in everything from Star Trek's "Mirror, Mirror" episode to the existence of shows like Sliders and Fringe. And, of course, is part of mainstream physics at this moment in time.
Before we get too far into discussing how cool I find the multiverse, I want to also mention that I have a tremendous amount of affection, in general, for the characters of the Flash titles, and Jay Garrick of the Silver Age and Jay Garrick of the post COIE/ pre-New-52 definitely falls into that category.
So, of course, it was tremendously fun to see Jay put on the helmet on a legitimate TV show.
Last year I tuned into the CW hour-long superhero action/drama The Flash expecting the same crippling disappointment I've found with most things DC Comics in recent years, Dark Knight Trilogy aside. At my core, I always want these things to work, so you got to show up and see what they do. And, in this case, I think The Flash is doing it right.
Sure, the show dabbles in some of the angst and romantic melodrama you've come to expect from the network that turned Superman into a weepy teen for a solid decade with Smallville, but unlike doe-eyed Superman, this show understood that a program needs momentum, not endless circling of the drain when it comes to character and plot development.
Of course, the creatives behind The Flash was never embarrassed of the source material to begin with, but then they went ahead and just swung for the fences, because Barry Allen does not do "slow burn". In Season 1 we got a huge amount of the Flash's Rogues Gallery on screen, up to and including Gorilla Grodd (and I got Captain Cold, who is secretly one of my favorite villains anywhere in comics). And we saw a lot of other DC heroes running around, like Firestorm. All of that would have been a lot of fluff and of no consequence, if, at the center of it, we didn't also get a pretty solid story about a kid who saw his mother die in a blur of mysterious red and yellow, and saw a man in yellow kill his mother right in front of him.
I don't talk about the character as much as Superman or Wonder Woman, but I think it's been pretty clear to longtime readers that I'm a fan of DC's speedster dynasty and the whole Flash concept. From when Carmine Infantino drew his first strobe-image of Barry Allen in motion, this was a book that looked pretty straightforward, but which got really weird, really fast way back in the Silver Age, and it never turned back.*
And, lest we forget, the whole concept of a multi-verse in comics was spawned in the classic "Flash of Two Worlds" story in The Flash #123, back in 1961.
Speaking of, Tuesday sees the season premier of The Flash as it enters its sophomore year. And, look who shows up:
hell, yes
Jay Garrick has been vital to the Barry Allen Flash comics since that 1961 issue, and it's awesome to see he'll get screentime and, I hope, a recurring role.
Last season was the most fun I had watching any one TV show. Maybe it's not as intricate and adult as Mad Men or The Americans, but it does exactly what I want a Flash TV show to do - be super weird, have lots of fun twists and turns, use super speed in new ways all the time, and make Barry Allen an all right kind of guy.
They threw everything at the wall last season, and it mostly worked. Now we see what happens when they don't just worry about time-travel, they worry about the multiverse. Let's hope this isn't the season where they drop the ball.
True story. The first birthday wish I remember making, and I'm not sure that I thought the mechanics of how this would work out or the sheer body horror of it all, but I distinctly remember wishing I'd become Mickey Mouse. This went on for a few years until I read an article, probably in Dynamite! or something, about the fact there had been an honest-to-god guy named Walt Disney and it wasn't just a brand name like "Buster Brown" or "Cracker Jack".
Then, for a few years, I wished to become Walt Disney. Then I wanted mutant powers or some such and all that went away.
I had a pretty good idea of what Walt Disney had done for entertainment. Despite the fact the guy was dead (I was semi-obsessed with the fact that both Walt and Elvis were dead, but very present in our lives) I watched his cartoons, his TV network, his live-action adventure films, went to his amusement parks, watched his nature documentaries and I had a stuffed Mickey Mouse that was a pal. My interest in animation and the entertainment industry continued, and at some point in high school I bought a Walt Disney biography and read one or two animation histories. And not all of it was rosy.
In a lot of ways, reading up on Walt Disney was how I learned to reconcile the good with the bad when it comes to the folks we revere.
I am absolutely flabbergasted that the 2014 IFC mini-series The Spoils of Babylon is not more widely discussed. It had an all-star cast, a distinctive narrative and visual style and did something most comedy utterly fails to do - continue to tell a story that's still sort of interesting as the thing goes along.
The 2015 follow up is The Spoils Before Dying.
Now, follow me here.
Both series are framed by introductions of each episode by author, screenwriter, producer, director Eric Jonrosh. Jonrosh was the sort of high-literary figure of the 20th century that's since been kind of forgotten as Fifty Shades of Grey has come to define the modern American novel. Jonrosh also embodies the worst excesses of the brightest minds of the 20th Century and their more, uh, colorful golden years. And is played by Will Ferrell in a beard, old age make-up and about 150 extra pounds.
this is not actually me, your humble blogger, but I understand the confusion
The Spoils Before Dying is less the sprawling 1970's-era TV mini-series than its predecessor and, in a tale unrelated to the prior series, a noir-jazz-Mickey Spillane mash-up pastiche. Again, the story itself would probably be fine as a drama, played straight. I'm not kidding. It's a tight little murder mystery with Chandler-esque turns and a nice upping of the ante in the final act.
I don't often "binge watch" TV, but when you can get through a whole season of a TV show in four hours, sign me up.
The 2001-era movie, Wet Hot American Summer, has, apparently, become a staple of Netflix viewing. Or something. Because, for some reason, 14 years later, Netflix has doubled-down and produced 8 episodes of a TV show that should be insanely expensive to produce, just off actor's salaries. My guess is that everyone is working at scale or something, because, really, what was a herd of mostly up-and-coming actors in 2001 are now established either in Hollywood or smaller comedy circles. The Netflix series has also added a bucket-load of additional actors in other roles, including Jon Hamm (who has just shockingly good comedy chops, as he's demonstrated multiple times over the years), Michael Cera, and a few I don't want to spoil.
If you missed the original movie, the conceit was a play on "the summer camp picture", which was a staple of the 1980's, from comedies to horror films. The adult-aged actors played 16-year-old camp counselors, and, Friday the 13th aside, worked not just aspects of those movies, but of camp, in general.*
The original movie squishes a lot into a relatively short running time. It's a great ensemble piece playing out over the last day of camp as everyone concludes their unfinished business, from romance to preventing a rogue satellite from landing on the camp. You're either with the movie or you're against it.
Working a crowd isn't easy, especially doing so as the bad guy. But, man, somehow Rowdy Roddy Piper became not the villain people loved to hate - people just plain ol' loved him.
I don't follow wrestling now at all, and my window of interest when I was a kid was pretty narrow, so my viewership occurred primarily during that early 1980's window where the WWF was suddenly everywhere, and you had colorful characters like Jimmy "SuperFly" Snuka, George "The Animal" Steele, Mr. Fuji, the Iron Shiek, Andre the Giant and Hulk Hogan.
At age 8, I liked it a lot. The plots were straightforward. Mean Gene Okerlund had a cool, dry wit we all admired, and it was a lot like watching live-action comics, but only as complicated as the Hostess ads. There were good guys and bad guys, and sometimes they switched.
Among the wrestlers I liked, I counted Rowdy Roddy Piper. That guy had moxie. He was hilarious, he didn't take anyone seriously, and he was just fun to watch. I just assumed because I liked him he was a good guy who happened to talk trash or something. He had a kilt, bagpipes, and a mouth that didn't really stop. But, no, he was a bad guy.
In fact, his gig was more or less that he was the biggest SOB in wrestling, pretty keen with an insult or gag or low-blow. All with a cocksure attitude backed up with wins, and a fanbase that adored the act. The clips you watch now are, uh... un-PC, to put it mildly. But he didn't need to be un-PC, he just needed to be a needling jerk.
In fact, he's been voted the best "heel" in wrestling multiple times.
That, my friends, is the sort of life goal I aspire to.
Finally. At last. Eric Jonrosh's most controversial work makes it to television. Jonrosh is a bitter pill for much of America to swallow, but swallow it we should, for Jonrosh's work isn't just about America. It's about US.
A spiritual sequel to The Spoils of Babylon, I cannot wait to see Jonrosh's look at a very different America finally get it's release.
Here's the trailer for Babylon, if you've somehow missed it.
I don't know what the hell is going on with my cable at home, but it isn't good. Likely a mixture of the fact that we haven't updated our boxes or our modem in years and the technology has obviously continued to change. So, we're basically cable-less until we get a technician out sometime next week.
In this spirit, Jamie got into the DVDs, and popped out with Disc 1 of the first season of Justice League, the 2001ish launch of the DC Heroes team-up show featuring "The Magnificent Seven": Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Martian Manhunter, Green Lantern, Hawkgirl and The Flash (traditional magnificent seven swapping Aquaman for Hawgirl, but I get the motivations behind the swap and, frankly, it worked beautifully).
We watched the first three episodes, also known as the Justice League movie, "Secret Origins", wherein some pretty well designed aliens invade Earth and the seven disparate heroes team up as a unit for the first time, at least in the world of the Timm-verse that started with Batman: The Animated Series and continued with Superman: The Animated Series, both series legends in superhero animation in their own time and something I can't believe people don't talk about more instead of praising the just seriously gawdawful 90's X-Men and other cartoons.*
This evening we took in the second, not lesser, but - indeed - final installment of the TV movie exploration of Marvel's Sentinel of Liberty, Captain America in Captain America II: Death Too Soon (1979).
The movie is perhaps even more of a curiosity than the prior attempt, but it's worth noting that Wonder Woman - which we sort of think of as fully formed, first aired as a TV movie with tennis-pro Cathy Lee Crosby as a jump-suited, blonde Wonder Woman prior to the decision to try another TV movie pilot with Lynda Carter, which led into the series (which had to switch networks and decades before the 1977 season, just to make life more complicated).
Things were a little different back when you had to actually be home to watch TV when it aired, and once it was gone, it was gone.
Cap DOES NOT let thugs take money from sweet old ladies. No, really.
I genuinely feel this movie is better acted and directed than the origin story, and the plot plods along at a mosey instead of a painful death march. I'm not saying this even good TV, but I am saying it didn't physically hurt to watch (even if I did end the movie with a migraine halo).
This is the part of the year during which, if I want to see my wife, I watch the Fox dancing competition "reality" program, So You Think You Can Dance?
Of the possible reality game shows she could have selected to watch, it's one of the more innocuous things I could deal with. It's not dubious, karaoke-style singing a la American Idol. And it's not about a panel of judges that I know nothing about, a la The Voice. It doesn't make me hate humanity (see: any reality programming gameshow on MTV). And it's not as relentlessly depressing as most dating or "unscripted" things that, for real, I cannot get my head around at all.
But I also know next to nothing about the art of dance. If it didn't feature Madonna expressing herself circa 1989 or the ladies of En Vogue instructing me to "free my mind", I am not sure how much attention I paid to anyone dancing anywhere during my formative years.
I believe we are now in season 478 of So You Think You Can Dance? and I feel no closer to understanding dance any better. I listen to the critiques, shrug, and have little to no opinion.
Oh, Deidre Hall. You and your magnificent coifs. And Judy Strangis of the gigantic eyes.
They may not have had Lynda Carter's budget (nor been Lynda Carter), but they had their own thing going on, including an amazing vehicle and the finest special effects you could produce using video overlays in 1976.
Electra Wow!
Seriously, only Lynda Carter may have rivaled Deidre Hall for amazing hair in 1976-1977, and both knew how to make a superhero outfit work.
I have only the haziest memories of Electra Woman and Dyna Girl from my own youth. The Sid and Marty Kroft shows were still on in rotation around 3:00 in the afternoon in the 1970's and early 80's, but it's hard to say what I remember as snippets and flashes of memory and what was what I caught later in college (and afterward) on basic cable.
The History Channel decided that they needed to make a 10 hour mini-series exploring the romantic revolutionary war period of The Lone Star State, an era in the 1830's when the winds of change blew over a few hundred miles of uninhabitable desert and scrub land and a bunch of people kicked out of every decent state in the nation hid out here until Mexico got sick of them.
As always, a little background:
I didn't move to Texas until 1979, but I did grow up here, between Dallas, Houston and Austin, and I've been lucky enough to spend time in San Antonio. I'm partial to the state, but I am also well aware of our checkered past and present. I do love my state, but it's often the way you love a fun but very disappointing relative. Say, a brother. Just for example. Purely hypothetically.
This guy was Governor for almost my entire adult life. and, he'd like to be your President.
Growing up in Texas, you're sort of constantly inundated in Texas history in public school (or, so it was when I was a kid), and names like Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston are up there with your American founding fathers. Names like William B. Travis and David Crockett have passed right into mythology as martyrs of freedom. Also, we have cows and horses and we're all pretty fond of Tex-Mex and barbecue, so we have a lot to offer kids. On top of this, I was 11 in 1986 when we had the State Sesquicentennial (that's the 150th birthday), so it was a whole thing when I was in 4th grade. Prince Charles came! It was a major deal, man.
In college I had an extra credit class free and wound up taking "Texas History from Prehistory - 1845".
So, and this is a wildly unpopular notion, but there is, in fact, a bit of a difference between the legendary version of history as is taught in public school K-12, and what actually happened and why. Or, at least, an interpretation of history that doesn't necessarily reflect the narrative of the progress of rich white dudes as a sort of destiny for all. I know many people find this idea upsetting, especially uncles at Thanksgivings. But, it is also true, full stop.
I wound up taking the follow up Texas History class, and, ha ha, also got myself a history degree (woooo! so full of good ideas), focusing as much as possible on Southwest US History in a program that was much more about a broad base of history. So, ask me to try to remember Roman History sometime. It is super awkward because it's mostly me blinking at you then saying "uh, aqueducts".
When I saw the History Channel had decided to make a dramatized version of Texas history, I was skeptical. They don't really have a track record that I'm aware of, and of late, most of their history has involved bearded people pretending to be rednecks on TV and lots of hunting of bigfoots and whatnot.
And right I was. This show is terrible. And weirdly so.
Most often we're able to write a post, say our piece, do some interpretation if needed, hit publish and then wonder, once again, what exactly it is we're doing with our life.
But every once in a while, something occurs that puts a new spin on something we wrote about, and it seems worth it to revisit the scene with the new evidence in hand. With my readership of upward of five humans, I feel it's only fair to try to keep up and adjust to new information. If I did not adjust as new info came to light, I'd still be wearing diapers and needing to be put in a very large stroller.
In the final scene of the show, the hard drinking, mid-20th Century picture of a man, Don Draper, has utterly broken down. In his wanderings between New York and LA, he has somewhat accidentally come to a hippie meditation retreat in California, and is subsequently abandoned there by his ride, but - vulnerable and shattered, he seems to open up in a way he has not previously in 7 seasons. In his final shot, he sits cross-legged with a group on a coastal bluff, comfortable in a meditative position. The scene cuts to the 1971 "Hilltop" ad from Coca-Cola, and the series ends.
The ad is very real, and ran in various iterations even during my very early youth which began in 1975 (I have memories of it appearing on TV when I was very little, at least the Christmas spot).
