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Absolute Crisis on Infinite Earths (Review/Retrospective)

This January, I’m going to take a look at some of DC’s biggest “events.” This week I’ll be taking at the event that started it all, Marv Wolfman and George Pérez’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, reprinted in DC’s oversized and slipcased Absolute line.

It’s interesting to reflect on Crisis on Infinite Earths, more than a quarter of a century after the twelve-issue maxi-series was published. In the time since, it seems like the editorial purpose driving the event – the desire to “simplify” DC’s tangled and messed continuity into one single and unified history by abolishing the myriad of alternate continuities – has been somewhat undone with the return of the multiverse in 52 and Final Crisis, but this arguably allows Wolfman and Pérez’s epic to be considered on its own merit. Although the series might not be as important as it once was in explaining the sometimes bizarre way that all of DC’s published line fit together, I think you can still see a huge influence of this crossover in the stories that the authors at DC are telling, and how they approach them.

Holding out for some heroes...

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Non-Review Review: Bruce Almighty

I like Bruce Almighty. I’ll concede that I might even like it more than any other of Jim Carrey’s madcap comedies. I think that it’s easily among the best of the comedies he produced after the millennium, doing well from a strong supporting cast and nice central moral. It isn’t deep or profound, and it’s unlikely to offer any more philosophical insight than anybody had going in, but it also manages to avoid being completely vacuous or empty. It’s remarkably satisfying for a light screwball comedy, even if it is a little on-the-nose.

All at sea...

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Perfectly Random: Channel Surfing In The Digital Age…

NetFlix have arrived in Ireland. Minor complaints about their selection of films aside, it’s time to rejoice as a film fan. Living here in Ireland, it can’t help but feel like we’re a bit behind the times when it comes to cinema. After all, our release schedule tends to lag behind that of our American cousins, with The Muppets only arriving on our shores next month. Still, as excited as I am at the prospect of having an entire universe of film and television at my very command, I can’t help but feel a slight sense of trepidation going forward. I know that this isn’t the end of the digital era of television, but it will undoubtedly affect the way I consume my films. And, while I’ll laud the amount of choice at my fingertips, I reckon I’ll miss the delightful randomness of channel-hopping in the digital age.

Getting on board with new media models...

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Non-Review Review: The Descendants

George Clooney’s work in The Descendants is being hailed as the actor’s greatest performance to date. Truth be told, I suspect that Clooney’s filmography has (generally speaking) been remarkably strong, so it’s difficult to really isolate the actor’s “best” performance. That said, I do think that The Descendants allows Clooney to play his most mature role to date, as Clooney finds the heart and the heartbreak in this darkly comic drama about a “part-time parent”who gets a major bump in responsibility following his wife’s near-fatal accident.

Hedging his bets...

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Announcing m0vie blog: the book!

And it’s official, I am a published author. My book, Pass the Popcorn: A Movie Memoir of 2011, went on-sale from Amazon.com last night, and can be purchased for the low-low price of $1.22 ($0.99 + tax) by clicking here. It’s basically a collection of essays and articles I wrote for the site, collected in one place, from 2011 and earlier. It’s really just an attempt to take some of my essays on film and bundle them up in a way to maybe raise the profile of the blog.

While I’ve drafted a new introduction and revised some of the pieces, all the articles can be found in some way, shape or form on the blog. Still, if you like it, tell a friend, pass it on. Get it as a gift for the film nerd in your life. If it’s successful, I’ll put together another collection next year. If it isn’t, well, at least it was worth a shot. Even after tax, you’re paying less than 1c for every 600 words, so what do you have to lose?

The blog has always been tremendously personal, a place for me to share my hastily-formed poorly-articulated thoughts on the movie issues of the day. Nothing was too big for me to share a random couple of thoughts about it, nor was anything too small. I’m happy with that, and that’s what the blog, hopefully, will continue to be. A place for me talk randomly about incredibly esoteric movie stuff.

Anyway, it’s been a tremendous year for the blog, in terms of readership and popularity. Since I won the Irish Blog Award back in March, things have taken off, and I’ve just been delighted with how everything’s gone. So I’d like to thank everyone for their support and encouragement, and even just for reading. It was a great 2011. I’d feel guilty asking for a better 2012, but hopefully it can be just as good. All I can hope is that I can continue to improve as a writer and eventually justify the run of good luck I’ve been having.

Cheers,
Darren.

Haywire Geography: Soderbergh’s Dublin…

It’s rare to see Ireland in a big American film. Of course, I mean the real Ireland, as opposed the “begosh and begorrah” nonsense that we’re treated to in crap like Leap Year, where we’re all a bunch of hicks with silly accents and farmer’s caps. While Ireland has made itself an attractive filming location for films like Braveheart or television shows like The Tudors, I am more referring to movies sit in and around our country in the present day. So not only was it a joy to see Steven Soderbergh set his espionage thriller Haywire in the city where I live and work, it was even better to see it so perfectly released and efficiently captured.

Going back the Hueston...

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Non-Review Review: Tremors

Man, I love Tremors. I’m a professed B-movie geek who grew up on the particularly cheesy Wes Craven and John Carpenter films of the seventies and eighties, who has always harboured a soft spot for playful monster movies, so I reckon I’m the film’s target audience. Tremors is one of those affectionate throwbacks, those movies that don’t just aim to evoke a particular genre and time period (as The Expendables was a generis eighties action movie produced twenty-five years too later) so much as offer an up-to-date and self-aware reinvention of them (as Spielberg produced a thirties adventure serial with modern sensibilities in Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Rodriguez offered a brutally hilarious modern-day Mex-ploitation film in Machete). Tremors is basically a fifties B-movie produced with late eighties A-list talent and self-awareness.

The town's gone to ground...

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Whatever Happened to Ron Underwood? One-Shots, Wash-Ups & Never-Has-Beens…

I think it’s happened to all of us. We’re flicking through the television channels, and we hit on an old movie we like. In my case, it was the superb 1990 B-movie Tremors. As we’re watching it, and remembering how much we loved it, our mind gets to wondering, “Whatever happened to that guy?” It could be an actor, an actress, a director or a writer. It’s somebody who showed a decent amount of talent (or, in the most frustrating circumstances, a phenomenal amount of talent), but who seemed to fade from view, and who we never heard from again. In this case, it was the director of the film, Ron Underwood. Whatever happened to that guy? Are they still alive? Are they still working? Why haven’t I heard from them since this one really good film I’m watching?

One shot at fame and fortune?

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Non-Review Review: Carnage

Carnage is pretty much an excuse to watch four very skilled actors ripping chunks out of one another. What’s not to like?

This means Warhol!

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Generation Next: The Changing of the Cinematic Guard…

There are times when I feel quite young. I was born on the same day that The Joshua Tree was released. My dad took me to the cinematic re-release of Star Wars. I was mainly introduced to the great directors through video and DVD. Hollywood as it exists today is not markedly different from the Hollywood that I grew up with. However, as I sat in the cinema last week, it occurred to me: perhaps I have sat through my first real changing of the cinematic guard, so to speak. It’s an occurance so subtle and gradual that I never really noticed it, and yet it must, by necessity, be part of Hollywood’s seasonal cycle.

Putting the older generation out to feed?

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