the m0vie blog

Batman: Gothic (Review)

Posted on October 3, 2009 by Darren

Legends of the Dark Knight was an interesting concept – tell self-contained stories using different creative teams set at various points during Batman’s crime-fighting career. As such, those stories would make the title easy to pick up, without tying it excessively to continuity. It’s a simple and an interesting premise, and it did produce all manner of intriguing Batman stories. Grant Morrison’s Gothicis perhaps one of the most intriguing of those stories, taking the character well outside what readers might have expected.

It’s all upside down…

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Filed under: Comics | Tagged: batman, batman: gothic, Bruce, comic, dark knight, dark knight returns, dc comics, frank miller, gotham city, gothic, gothic horror, grant morrison, Grantmorrison, horror, klaus janson, legends of the dark knight, morrison, mr. whisper, review, the legends of the dark knight | 3 Comments »

Absolute Batman: The Dark Knight (Returns) (Review/Retrospective)

Posted on October 3, 2009 by Darren

The Absolute Edition also collects The Dark Knight Strikes Again. Miller’s belated sequel is worthy of discussion on its own terms, and I plan to revisit it at some point. For the moment, however, here is the review of the original Dark Knight Returns.

It’s really quite difficult to discuss The Dark Knight Returns today. Part of the reason is because of the massive influence that Frank Miller’s Batman epilogue had on the medium, and part of it is because Miller himself has done a fairly efficient job at deconstructing his own definitive Batman work in stories like The Dark Knight Strikes Again and All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder. It’s impossible to approach Miller’s work here entirely divorced from either reality, and the result is a rather strange and dramatic legacy for one of the most iconic Batman stories ever told. It remains fairly essential reading for anybody even remotely interested in the Caped Crusader, the superhero genre or even the medium as a whole. It’s a classic, albeit one that is sometimes quite difficult to pin down.

Lightning strikes…

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Filed under: Comics | Tagged: absolute dark knight, absolute edition, alan moore, All-Star Batman & Robin The Boy Wonder, arts, batman, bruce wayne, Christopher Nolan, comic books, dark knight returns, dark knight strikes again, dc comics, dkr, dksa, frank miller, gotham, graphic novel, neil gaiman, review, the absolute dark knight, The Dark Knight, the dark knight returns, the dark knight strikes again, watchmen | 7 Comments »

Toy Story 3D x 2

Posted on October 2, 2009 by Darren

Hey, Disney, wassup? Seriously. I know I live in Ireland and that ripping off people is the norm, but c’mon? Everywhere else seems to be receiving Toy Story 3D as a double feature including Toy Story and Toy Story 2 in a four-hour epic? Instead, I have to fork out €10 twice to see two movies I’ve already seen and I can’t even make a decent weekend afternoon of it. We’re getting the first Toy Story rendered in 3D today, but we have to wait until Christmas for the second one.

Buzz isn't the only person the joke is on...

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: back-to-back, double feature, films, Movies, pixar, toy story, toy story 2, toy story 3, toy story 3d | Leave a comment »

The UK/US Broadcasting Models…

Posted on October 1, 2009 by Darren

It’s interesting to look at television, and look how the format of what is being broadcast has changed in the past few years and how it varies from place to place – I’m not talking about the revolution in content that has been slowly happening since the eighties, merely the way in which that format is presented. Television in the UK and Ireland isn’t normally broadcast in the same fashion as it is in the USA. Here shows generally run week-in, week-out for thirteen weeks rather than running twenty-four weeks spread from September to June. We don’t have shows that take breaks between episodes – the next episode is generally always next week. So when Sky recently announced that it had a spate of new shows returning this and next week, I was a little intrigued.

House will be making house calls even sooner...

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Filed under: Television | Leave a comment »

The Leading Man Swap-Out…

Posted on October 1, 2009 by Darren

I live in the same house as my gran (I reckon I’m young enough that it’s still cute rather than creepy), and last week a new boxset of her pet obsession – CSI – arrived in the door. Since she’s in bed shortly after I get home from work, the two of us have been watching episodes of the ninth season of the seminal forensic “drama” (it’s more science-fiction or fantasy, but let’s not quibble). It’s the season that sees former hot young actor of the eighties, William Peterson, replaced by former hot young actor of the nineties, Laurence Fishburne. I’ll admit I haven’t yet watched every episode, but it’s surprising how much I’m not missing the lead who coaxed the show through nearly a decade of airtime. Has CSI seemingly acheived the impossible? Has it successfully swapped out an established leading man?

A Fish(burne) out of water?

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: casting, csi, ensemble, gil grissom, laurence fishburne, lead actor, new actor, ray langston, Television, the x-files, william peterson | Leave a comment »

September In Review

Posted on September 30, 2009 by Darren

A look back at a wild September, with some of our more notable articles.

We celebrated the end of this year’s summer season, and it was meh. But seriously, are movies getting too long?

An article looking at whether bloggers are/aren’t/could ever be critics made the front page of WordPress, which brought lots of traffic and, more importantly, a lot of discussion.

Another piece that got people talking was a discussion over the ending of the Usual Suspects wondering if we’re sure we saw what we saw.

And we lamented the passing of another month without and Batman news by looking at whether Two-Face or the Riddler should appear in the next film…

Filed under: Months in Review | Tagged: Months in Review, september | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Tropic Thunder

Posted on September 30, 2009 by Darren

I make no apologies, I love this movie. Though it might not always hit the perfect notes, it maintains Ben Stiller’s pitch-perfect ability to just throw tonnes of stuff at the wall and if even 30% of the jokes hit, you’re at least grinning for the film’s runtime. He also has a fantastic cast full of the talented and the one-note, all of whom are perfectly chosen for the roles that they play within Stiller’s war comedy. Sure, the film may lose focus a bit, and it has a fairly short attention span, but this means that Stiller isn’t afraid to pull away from a gag that isn’t working.

Jungle Fever

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: apocalypse now, ben stiller, comedy, films, hollywood, jack black, les gorssman, Movies, non-review review, review, robert downey, robert downey jnr., satire, tom cruise, tropic thunder | 1 Comment »

Are Today’s Films Too Long?

Posted on September 30, 2009 by Darren

I happened upon an interesting article which suggested that today’s blockbusters are far too long. It’s a notion which got me thinking – it’s easy to jump to those sort of conclusions based on the kind of summer we’ve had, but are movies really getting longer and is that a bad thing?

Even bigger and meaner than you could imagine...

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: average runtime, cinema, film length, films, movie length, Movies, runtime, two hours | Leave a comment »

Can You Separate A Film Maker From Their Body of Work?

Posted on September 30, 2009 by Darren

I considered writing this little piece in a vacuum, leaving the issue the sparked it sitting like an elephant in the room – but there’s really no point avoiding it. I’ve been troubled watching Roman Polanski films ever since I read up and discovered why he had to direct The Ninth Gate from abroad. The knowledge that he had engaged in sexual acts with a thirteen year old girl has been very hard to disassociate from the man in viewing his filmography – oddly enough, it’s harder to disassociate than the grisly facts surrounding the brutal murder of Sharon Tate by the Manson family. I saw The Pianist and his rather lacklustre (Playboy financed) version of Macbeth before I found out about his flight to Europe and his seemingly eternal exile. I was unlucky enough to see Chinatown afterwards, and as great as the film was I couldn’t quite get over what Polanski had done. Am I being a little silly or is it really hard to view the work of film makers in a vacuum?

"Forget it, Jake, it's Polaski..."

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: behind the scenes, chinatown, external factors, films, in a vacuum, Movies, rape, roman polanski, statutory rape | Leave a comment »

Cruise Control – Thoughts on Tom Cruise

Posted on September 29, 2009 by Darren

I am going to just come out and say this. I like Tom Cruise as an actor. I think he’s hugely talented and vastly underrated. I think he suffers from a subset of the Sean Penn Syndrome that affects Christian Bale – his wacky personal life tends to overshadow his on-screen roles, which is a damn shame, given the talent that’s been hinted at repeatedly throughout his career.