Over the last week, I had the pleasure to visit the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. I saw a lot of films as part of that, and the reviews have been popping up all week. Anyway, they give out an audience award, which gave me occasion to actually score films. Regular readers here know that I am loath to try to objectively rank cinema, as it’s a very subjective medium and I have difficulty reconciling relative grades, but I went along with it. Anyway, they use a four-point scale and, long story short, I found myself using a lot of “3” grades, which is the second-highest rank. This kinda got me thinking: Am I a little too generous to films I really shouldn’t be? How do I approach the cinema? Do I look for things to love? Do I have a pre-disposed bias? Do I want to love films, even if they aren’t especially great?
I think Pixar’s The Incredibles must stand as one of their best productions – alongside Finding Nemo, perhaps. It’s certainly one of their more conventional entries in the Pixar stable, in that it’s offered in the blockbuster format of the decade (superhero adventure), but – like the very best of their work – it’s so much more. A whole host of Pixar’s films – Toy Story and Finding Nemo chief among them – deal with the notion of paternal abandonment (though perhaps more fond of addressing the story of parents abandoned by kids, rather than kids abandoned by adults), but The Incredibles is perhaps the one which best deals with the challenges that managing a ‘functioning’ family.
I have the pleasure of checking out Philip Glass at the National Concert Hall tonight. Despite the fact that I know next-to-nothing about music, I’m quite fond of Glass’ rather wonderful compositions – mostly through pop culture osmosis. It seems that Glass is the go-to guy if you need something wonderfully emotional and catchy, yet grandiose and sweeping to accompany a given film. He’s done countless soundtracks, but these are the big “on-screen” moments which I think of when I think of Glass.
First up, Watchmen. There’s a wonderful sequence on Mars scored to Glass’ Prophecies and Pruitt Igoe, which is perhaps the best scene in the entire jumbled up and deeply flawed film, as the past and present collide to the ominous soundtrack and narration. However, I can’t find that, so watch the trailer instead.
It’s already happening. We’re already calling Kick-Ass a failure. Even though it managed to narrowly slide into first place at the US Box Office over the weekend, there are tonnesofpundits ready to dogpile on top of it and describe it as the most epic kind of failure. It seems to be a cyclical experience every time that a big geek film emerges, that has experienced a large amount of pre-release hype on the old interweb: Snakes on a Plane, Watchmen and Grindhouse among others. So how come Hollywood keeps pandering to a niche that never seems to show up?
Did Kick-Ass get its ass kicked? Should we call it Ass-Kick?
Alternative histories have long been a staple of science fiction. The basic idea is simple enough: take a key moment in history and play it out just a little bit differently (or a lot differently). The Man in the High Castle, the story of how America lost the Second World War, may be the most famous example, but there’s literally a whole subgenre of literary science-fiction based around the idea of playing things out in a way different from how they did. However, this fascination with alternative history never really spilled over into cinema. However, there are slowly emerging signs that audiences may be gradually adjusting to the genre and the potential it offers.
Twenty more years!
Note: This is not to be confused with the historical school of alternative histories, which are all based on perfectly reasonable assumptions, like if a courier who really existed was late or if a wound to a historical figure had been fatal. It seems in mainstream sci-fi these are more likely to involve pepperpot-shaped aliens or glowing blue supermen. So, some historians out there may object to the term – maybe I should use ‘speculative history’ instead. But it’s all semantics.
We’re a bit late to the party, but this week we’ll be celebrating the 75th anniversary of DC Comics, with a look at the medium, the company and the characters in a selection of bonus features running Monday through Friday. This is one of those articles. Be sure to join us for the rest.
It’s been 75 years since DC burst on the scene. I don’t imagine too many of the suits behind the scenes expected it to last quite this long. The wonderful folks over at io9 came up with a 75-book list of essentials and it’s a pretty good list, but it’s heavily toned towards “important” narratives rather than “good” narratives. It’s a fair distinction. Comic books are a young medium, and – being frank – most of the early writing sucks. The Golden Age Batman and Superman narratives were semi-decent stories (in many ways better than those that followed), but the truly awful dialogue makes them nigh impossible to read. I thought I’d just put together a list of some of the highly recommended DC stories I’ve picked up over the years.
Definitely important... not so sure it's essential...
We’re a bit late to the party, but this week we’ll be celebrating the 75th anniversary of DC Comics, with a look at the medium, the company and the characters in a selection of bonus features running Monday through Friday. This is one of those articles. Be sure to join us for the rest.
We’re a bit late to the party, but this week we’ll be celebrating the 75th anniversary of DC Comics, with a look at the medium, the company and the characters in a selection of bonus features running Monday through Friday. This is one of those articles. Be sure to join us for the rest.
Comic books are what Neil Gaiman once famously described as “the medium that’s always confused with a genre”. The fact that they are typically populated with spandex-wearing superheroes has led to a bit of a pop culture stigma around the medium, as stories about grown men in their underwear pounding each other are the only stories that could be told in that format. Anyone even loosely familiar with the history of the genre will know better, but I’ve always imagined comic books having a hard time fitting in to popular culture in the same way that books or film or television do. So can comic books ever really draw in that elusive adult audience?
It’s turgid. I just know that there are a lot of people who will say it is the worst film of 2010. [The location] was the main reason I took it – so that I could come home at the weekends. It wasn’t because of the script, trust me. I was told it was going to be like The Quiet Man with a Vaughan Williams soundtrack, but in the end it turned out to have pop music all over it. … Was it a bad job? Yes, it was. But, you know, I had a nice time and I got paid.
– Matthew Goode on Leap Year
It’s rare to hear an actor being so candid about a film that met with… less than stellar reception. On one hand I admire the guy’s honesty in speaking out, but on the other I kinda wonder if he really has the right to label the movie as ‘turgid’ after starring in it and whether ‘I got paid’ is really a justification for inflicting that racist romantic comedy upon mankind.
Okay, I think we were all a little disappointed with Watchmen. Although the use of that word seems unfair. The book defined the comic book superhero genre in a way that bled into film long before the movie was made. Zach Snyder’s work seemed… redundant. Watchmen had influenced the comic books that came after and they had influenced the movies. If anything, the movie adaptation seemed much less mature and developed than the previous year’s Batman blockbuster – The Dark Knight. Publicity and reviews for this year’s Kick-Ass are beginning to emerge and it seems like it’s all good, so far. The film, along with Shutter Island, was the runaway hit of Butt-Numb-A-Thon this year, a sort of geeky Sundance. It’s an interest look at what “real” superheroes would look like, and part of me wonders if this is movie will end up being what Watchmen should have been?
the m0vie blog 