| Pop Culture Gadabout | ||
|
Friday, November 30, 2007 ( 11/30/2007 04:51:00 PM ) Bill S. DAN CLOWES' UTILITY BELT: Watching series television over the past couple weeks, you can't escape the impression that Comic Con culture has come to television in a big way. Three different weekly shows, The Simpsons, Numb3rs and Criminal Minds, recently set their storylines in the comics world, with varying degrees of success. The Simpsons' trip into alt comics, none too surprisingly, proved the coolest - as big name creators Daniel Clowes, Alan Moore & Art Spiegelman made an appearance as yellow skinned versions of themselves at a trendy Springfield's comic store. Predictably, arty Lisa did all the swooning, telling Clowes how much she identified with the heroines in Ghost World, and Clowes got the funniest lines, confessing Dan Pussy-like, how much he wanted to draw Batman's utility belt. Pretty amusing to the cognoscenti, though my wife - who mainly knows Ghost World from a movie she didn't much enjoy - didn't find it all that chucklesome. You didn't need to be a comics fan to comprehend either Numbers or Minds, though. The Numbe3rs caper centered around a San Diego-type convention and an infirmed Golden Age comics creator named Ross Moore (played by Christopher Lloyd) whose tale of mistreatment at the hands of the comics industry contained elements of both Jack Kirby and Siegel & Shuster. A misguided attempt at raising money for the comics man, involving the theft of an "ashcan edition" of a Moore-created comic from the sixties, leads to a non-too-difficult whodunit (it's the Helpful Guy!) Wil Wheaton's turn as an artistically bankrupt comics artist turned entrepreneur (a little bit of Todd Macfarlane, mayhaps?) was fun to watch, while a closing sequence featuring Lloyd and his onetime Taxi-mate Judd Hirsh contained a decent teevee-centered in-joke about the comic artist's experiences in the sixties. Arguably the most successful of the three series forays into comicdom, though, was this week's episode of Criminal Minds, featuring another former child actor (this time, Frankie Muniz) playing a graphic novelist who undergoes a murderous psychotic break. Focusing on the PoV of Muniz's Johnny McHale, writer/director Edward Allen Bernero filmed the artist's hallucinations in a style that effectively aped the movie version of Sin City. Also, unlike most episodes of Minds, the show worked overtime to provide an empathetic view of Muniz's broken serial killer (more typically, the series treats 'em as faceless monsters to be psychologically picked apart by our gang of profilers). The approach by and large worked, in large part due to Muniz's high-stressed performance, though I can't help wondering why a plot-important voice mail message continues to function six months after its owner has been murdered. In one scene on Minds, the series' computer whiz Garcia (the wonderful Kirsten Vangsness) talks to non-comics fan Derek Morgan about (Shemar Moore) about Frank Miller. (It's worth noting that where Numb3rs made one of its regular agents a comics aficionado, Minds assigned that role to its two nerdiest characters.) When she tells him that Miller, whose name sounds vaguely familiar to the FBI profiler, was the creator behind Sin City and 300, Derek notes that they both made great movies. A joke, one suspects, even non-comics geeks'll get . . . # | Thursday, November 29, 2007 ( 11/29/2007 07:36:00 AM ) Bill S. "SO TELL ME ONCE, AND I WON'T ASK AGAIN." Let's go back to the early nineties with Bryan Ferry singing a Goffin-King classic to a still-fresh Anna Nicole Smith. Sexy and sad all at once . . . # | Wednesday, November 28, 2007 ( 11/28/2007 05:53:00 PM ) Bill S.  "I WILL HAVE MY FAMILY'S THRONE AGAIN!" Recently released on DVD as part of the "Sci Fi Essentials" series, Manticore (Image Entertainment) is a telemovie with a mildly successful current events hook: the Sci Fi Channel creature feature centers on a unit of American soldiers who come up against a mythological beastie that's been resurrected as the ultimate Iraqi Weapon of Mass Destruction.Though opening on a credits sequence showing two thieves as they rummage through the artifacts of an Iraq museum, the movie's first quarter looks more like a modern war story than a science fiction single feature. If you walked into the living room late, in fact, you might initially think you were watching an episode of the short-lived fx series Over There. We see battle-savvy Sgt. Baxter (dependable Robert Beltran) and his unit as they half-heartedly interrogate Iraqi locals about recent looting incidents, then are forced to fend off an attack by insurgents. Hovering on the edge of the efficiently filmed battle action is an arrogant imbedded "DNN" reporter (played by Deep Space Nine's Chase Masterson) and her scruffy loyal photog. These two representatives of the much-maligned mainstream media lead our soldier heroes into further danger by wandering off in pursuit of a rumored cache of WMDs. What they don't know, of course, is that a cave-dwelling Iraqi warlord (Faran Tahir) has revived the manticore, a legendary creature that the movie tells us is part lion/part dragon/part scorpion, to smite all military and civilian unbelievers. The flick plays fast and loose with this legendary creature - where most imaginings of the monster give it a human head, the CG Imagers make its facial features more leonine - but that's a small plaint. What matters to the movie are its disemboweling claws, its piercing scorpion tail and its ability to Hulk leap into the backseat of a helicopter without anybody noticing it's entered the cockpit. The manticore's been let loose in an isolated Iraq village - where it's slaughtered most of the inhabitants by the time our intrepid soldiers arrive on the scene - and it isn't long before our cast of vaguely familiar looking teevee actors (among 'em, C.S.I.: New York's A.J. Buckley) come face-to-face with the monster. At first, of course, our unbelieving soldiers don't recognize what they're up against: seeing the grisly piecemeal remains of the slain villagers, Beltran's sergeant implausibly posits that it's the work of "a wild animal, something that might have escaped from the zoo." But once a few disposable members of the unit are decimated by the creature, the truth becomes harder to explain away. Lurking in the background is Tahir's villainous warlord Umari. Though the movie opened with our soldier heroes interrogating Iraqi villagers, they still instantly accept Umari as one of the good guys even though he looks about as benign as a 24 henchman. Possessing a fiery-eyed medallion which gives him control over the creature, Umari plans to use the manticore to retrieve the land he believes belongs to him, though the specifics of this back story are left pretty vague. Hey, he's a warlord; he's Middle Eastern - what more in the way of character explication do you need? Characterization aside, what we really care about are the bloody monster massacres. The title creature's moves are variably believable, but not bad for a low-budget teevee movie. Though the night attack scenes at times look too damn dark to be anything but annoying, the day-lit finale - where Baxter, spunky corporal Heather Donahue and the obligatory village urchin have a showdown with the beast - is good cheesy fun. The manticore's destruction is clever, if not quite clever enough to be convincing. Still, watching Blair Witch's weepy victim heroine get her shot at bashing the monster with a sledge hammer has its own kicky charge. As for Manticore's slight attempts at layering a War on Terror subtext onto its horror story, they don't really add much to the movie. Our MSM reps mainly serve to score some none-too-surprising satiric points: in one scene, we see Masterson's reporter carefully smudging dirt on her face for on-camera "versimilitude." (You're telling me that network news is more interested in image than in substance? Wow!) Baxter and his fellow wariors'll be heartily familiar to anyone who's ever watched a war flick made since All Quiet on the Western Front. Soon as one of the unit shows pictures of his stateside love to his peers, for instance, you know the guy is toast. Image Entertainment's "Sci Fi Essentials" DVD proves to be a fairly no-frills affair - doesn't even offer closed captioning for us geezers who occasionally have issues with muttery acting - though I'm not sure any bonus commentary could add to our understanding of this serviceable little timewaster, anyway. I do have to wonder what specifically makes this teevee movie an "Essential," though. Perhaps it's the presence of two alum from the Star Trek franchise? # | Monday, November 26, 2007 ( 11/26/2007 06:51:00 AM ) Bill S. UNAPOLOGETIC IDIOCY: Fat-bashing in the interests of fanboy criticism? Pretty friggin' sad. And for the record, if Gail Simone ever does decide to script a series of sensual foodee comics, I know I'd happily read 'em . . . (Hat tip to Dirk, who rightly roasts the abovementioned mean-spirited post.) # | Sunday, November 25, 2007 ( 11/25/2007 08:53:00 AM ) Bill S. " . . .AND JOOOOE!" Though it always kinda surprises me to see a superstation like WGN devote air time to memories of its days as a more local concern, both my wife and I got our kicks recently viewing a holiday tribute to three of the station's long-gone kids' shows. Bozo, Gar and Ray looked at three shows from its years as a Chicago station: Bozo's Circus, Garfield Goose And Friends and Ray Rayner. The series' heyday was, arguably in the fifties thru sixties (tho Bozo lasted through WGN's transformation into a nationwide superstation), and, since I didn't arrive in the Midwest until I was a 'tween, I missed growing up with 'em. For Becky, whose formative years were spent watching Chicago television, the retrospective had more of a nostalgic charge. There was a time, though, when Rayner's early morning program was practically the only available source for area cartoon lovers to watch the early Warner Bros. toons - which meant that more than one over-aged viewer sat through the show's juvenile-centered host sequences to get to the good stuff. Rayner, who looked like your goofy alcoholic uncle, also turned part of his morning show over to weather and sports headlines, putting him years ahead of the curve in the news infotainment biz. In addition to providing a good outlet for classic cartoons, the WGN kids shows also were a theatre for truly odd animation (the scary lipped Clutch Gargo, for instance). One of the seasonal cartoons that regularly appeared for edification of the kiddies was the Christmas-themed "Hardrock, Coco and Joe," which was unspooled for us geezers as part of BG&R's final segment. It's a decidedly peculiar little animation. One of those strange attempts at reaching down to a child audience that comes across as disturbing as it does cutesy, the stop motion 'toon haunts my dreams to this day. (That Santa looks especially creepy.) See if it doesn't haunts yours . . . # | |
|
|
