The Simpsons Movie - I can't think of a movie that came in the middle of an ongoing series that was actually any good. Of course, I can only think of two movies in that category: this one and
The X-Files. In defense of
The Simpsons Movie, this is the best movie that I can think of in that category.
It's a shortish movie - 87 minutes - that feels more like a passable episode of the television show than it does like any sort of actual movie. Sadly, though, it doesn't even feel like one of the particularly good episodes of the series. Just felt like a mediocre and largely predictable episode of
The Simpsons. Yeah, there are a few chucklesome lines here and there, but there's no reason for this movie to have been made.
Quick question...why will
The Simpsons eventually go off the air? I can't think of any particular reason that the voice talent will leave their jobs at this point. They've swapped writers in and out for two decades now. The actors never really age. Is Dan Castelleneta going to have to die? They moved on from Phil Hartman, but he was largely a bit player. Maybe if Hank Azaria kicks it.
The Dinner Game - Subtitles...I warn you in advance that this film is in French which means you'll have to read the subtitles unless you're way more comfortable with French than either The Girl or I are.
This is the original French version of what was adapted and released this summer as
Dinner for Schmucks. It's a far more streamlined film - much closer to its roots as a stage play. It's very enjoyable but very different from its much flashier, much bigger budget American adaptation.
Take, for example, the main character. In the American version, Paul Rudd's character isn't cheating on his girlfriend. It's a misunderstanding from a one-night stand that he had a few years back. In the French version, he has a consistent mistress. In the American version, he's going to the titular dinner because he feels he has to in order to advance in the company. It's a once-a-month dinner, and this is his first time. In the French version, he's a regular who's been doing this for years and even has scouts out looking for the next fool for his weekly dinner. The Paul Rudd character is far more likable and easier to sympathize with.
The French version also lacks the neat and tidy wrap-up in which the fool and the main character become tight friends after some sort of redemptive scene between the two. We also never make it to the eponymous dinner in the French version, meaning that we never get to see more than a glimpse of the dinner when the main character calls to give his regrets for the current week.
It's a funny film but with a much darker tone than the far more widely-appealing American version.
Enjoyable.
Skaar: Son of Hulk - I've come to dig John Romita, Jr's art style, and he's all over this volume telling the tale of Hulk's orphaned son's development on his home planet, Sakaar. We get the initial story of his birth in the lava lakes and his subsequent adoption by some of the planet's residents as the second coming of their Green Scar savior.
In the beginning, Skaar is a voiceless, brutal killing machine. Over the course of the book, we get increasing glimpses of the thought behind the actions and Skaar becomes more and more verbal, more and more cerebral through the course of the story. We also see that Skaar is not necessarily the savior that the people of the planet believe as actions that appear to be altruistic sometimes turn out not to be.
I read the totality of
World War Hulk and enjoyed it. I went back and tried
Planet Hulk, the storyline immediately preceding
WWH and found myself bored, so I kind of assumed this would be every bit as boring. Not so much.
Actually enjoyed the progression of the titular character as well as the artwork from John Romita Jr. I like his art style more and more with each book of his that I read.
All in all, an entertaining read...but not as good as...
Hulk: Son of Banner - I have no frickin' clue how Skaar would've gotten from Sakaar (his home planet of death) to Earth. That isn't covered in this volume and doesn't really matter. We open with a de-hulked Bruce Banner meeting his son, Skaar and Skaar informing daddy that his goal is to kill the Hulk for abandoning him on Sakaar.
Banner knows that he's likely to become the Hulk again at some point, so he sets out to train Skaar in how to be deal with various opponents - Daken, the Juggernaut, Red Hulk, even Norman Osborne's underlings.
These encounters are entertaining and well written as we learn more and more about Skaar and his true motivations throughout the tales, but the real fun of this volume comes through the revelation of Bruce Banner as a credible threat in his own right.
Marvel has taken to naming various people as the "fifth smartest person on the planet" or the "third smartest person on the planet", and Banner is named as being in that club. He continually thinks one step ahead of everyone he meets and seems to have a genius contingency plan for every possibility. There's one particularly entertaining back and forth with
Victoria Hand, Norman Osborne's second in command. It's reminiscent of a childhood game of pretend in which each person takes turns making up some way to say that they had already expected the other's move and had already planned for that action.
It is this revelation of Bruce Banner as being a foe equally as dangerous as - but drastically different from - the Hulk that makes for the value of this volume and that makes this volume as entertaining as it is.
Scott Pilgrim vs the World: Soundtrack - The movie was a bit of a disappointment, and this soundtrack was, as well. The talent laid out is strong, but there are a lot of songs that just didn't connect with me - something not terrifically surprising considering where my tastes lie in comparison to those of the movie protagonists around whom the soundtrack is based.
This is music with a heavy fuzz peddle. There isn't a clear guitar riff to be heard throughout much of the album, but there's distortion and speed and anger - all of which perfectly match the feeling and musical styling of the movie adaptation.
For me, only a couple of the songs resonate - "Black Sheep" by Metric, "It's Getting Boring By the Sea" by Blood Red Shoes. Throw in a couple of lines from the movie that I'm thrilled to now have, and this makes for a pretty successful soundtrack.
Just not one that interests me for more than a quick burn from the library copy.
Transmetropolitan vol 1 & 0 - I started in onto the run on
Transmetropolitan - the full run of which PLCH owns - with these first two volumes. Well, these were my first two volumes, but I found out pretty quickly that Vol 0 isn't something that should necessarily come first. Vol 0 is a collection of two special issues showcasing the main character being drawn by a number of celebrity guest artists. Entertaining and pretty, but I'm thinking there are a number of things that I missed having not read the rest of the series.
Vol 1 opens, however, with the first issues of the series, introducing us to Spider Jerusalem, journalist who has turned from the profession and is living as a hermit - looking like Alan Moore and living miles away from The City that he describes as being a modern - sometime in the 23rd century - version of Sodom, a place that he both loves and loathes with equal fervor.
Spider returns to the City at the urgings of his lawyers and again signs on to write columns for his old editor. From there he shaves his wild man beard and cuts his long hair revealing himself to be far closer to a mid-70s Hunter S Thompson clone, a journalist whose best work is completed between drug experiences and published without editing, speaking to the immediate impact that an effective wordsmith can have - particularly as Spider defuses a police riot by being the only observer reporting on the brutal actions of the police force.
Spider is nothing if not an excessive homage to Hunter Thompson, constantly yelling about the corrupt government, firing guns into the sky, taking anything and everything available to him, and befriending the least socially acceptable people in The City. The pacing of his words is familiar to me as I've read enough Hunter, and even
his wikipedia article points out the obvious parallels between the fictional and all-too-real gonzo journalists.
Supposedly, the rest of the series flows into a single story arc in which Jerusalem fights the good fight against a corrupt President. I hope that something comes because, while the patter and pacing of the comics so far have been enjoyable, the lack of furthering of the story has been a bit frustrating.
Incorruptible - The initial tagline of Mark Waid's series
Irredeemable was "What if the world's greatest superhero became the world's greatest villain?". I've read the first three volumes of that series and am seeing something worth following there. The shocking change of Plutonian (a Superman archetype) into a despotic murderer reveals a great deal about his background.
In this companion piece, the tagline is reversed - "What if the world's greatest villain because the world's greatest superhero?" and we have a flipped transformation of Max Damage from scum of the earth into someone willing to set up resistance to the Plutonian's reign of terror. The other significant difference in the storyline - other than the reversal of hero turning villain becoming villain turning hero - is that of the change's motivation.
Irredeemable gave us a complex backstory, revealed in dribs and drabs, allowing us to connect with the series.
Incorruptible instead offers us a switch motivated by the villain's fear of what the Plutonian could do now that he's gone mad. No more complex reason than a single-panel transformation.
This simplicity of motivation might be necessary for Waid to escape the challenge that he was simply remaking the same story in a mirror, but it doesn't make for compelling reading. Every character looks at the now-hero's background and sees nothing that would have suggested the change that we are expected to accept without any compelling reason.
I don't, and the story is boring because of it.
Plus, the fact that the collections of both
Incorruptible and
Irredeemable are only four issues long is starting to rack me off. Throwing in ten or fifteen pages of sketches and alternate covers doesn't make the collection a value. It just stretches the content with crap.
The Losers - I've not seen the movie based on this story, but I can tell from the previews alone that the adaptation must've been pretty true to this original. Every note from the trailer can be found as part of this first volume of the series that has since ended.
Simple enough story - military/CIA agents get set up by someone else in the agency and are now considered dead (or wanted for dead) by the agency that thinks they've betrayed them. It's pretty much the same story that the
A-Team had which made this past summer's pairing of the two movies coming out at the same time even more odd.
The comic's entertaining enough, introducing the characters as they're on their first revenge heist against the government that has cut them off. They steal a helicopter, meet a CIA informer (the front and center female from the cover to the left), and plan an even larger revenge heist that - of course - goes wrong when it turns out that the agency leaders don't have any idea why the titular Losers are trying to enact some payback. That is no one at the agency other than the mysterious and perhaps-fictional Max who was behind the entire disavowing of the Losers.
Pretty standard if wittily-written fare.
Supreme: Story of the Year - This one is a re-read for me, spurred primarily by the comparison that Chris Sims made between this and
All Star Superman in the linked article.
Upon further reading,
Supreme is not as good. Yeah, it's excellent, but reading it a second time, knowing where it was going and knowing the twist that was coming (I'll not ruin it as the twist was so stunning on my first reading) made the re-read less enjoyable.
The internal connections within Supreme are outstanding. Moore clearly had the entire series (at least that collected here) mapped out from the get-go, and the payoffs are well worth the read. It's just a little lesser than
All Star. Supreme didn't bring tears to my eyes on the second or third reading;
All Star did.
Cinderella: from Fabletown with Love - meh...
The idea here - that Cinderella is really a super spy with more experience than any Mundy spy could possibly have but just poses as a socialite in order to appear harmless - is far more interesting than the series turns out to be.
We get Cinderella teaming up with Aladdin - another spy who appears not to be - to solve the mystery of where a number of super powerful magic items have been coming into the Mundy world. There are a few entertaining quips and well-drawn action sequences, but on the whole the mini-series was boring.
I'm looking forward to the next edition of the main
Fables series, but that doesn't come out until December.
It's too long to be stuck with this stuff as a substitute.
Youth in Revolt - In which Michael Cera plays Michael Cera.
But at least he does get a chance to also play a more confident version of Michael Cera as Francois, his inside-his-head alter ego necessary to be bad.
Funny film about a wildly inexperienced, twee boy who finds the love of his young life while on vacation but has to turn into a bad boy in order to get back to her. His bad boy actions are well over the top - including burning down a local business district and eventually attempting to fake his own death.
Cera is hilarious as the affected teen whose lifestyle choices almost guarantee that he'll never meet a girl his own age who will be interested in him. When he does finally find his Sheeni - who's into French cinema and deep poetry and is far too mature for her age - Cera's Nick Twisp is out of his depth but head over heels. His mother heads home, inadvertently separating the two young lovers, and Cera sets his loosely thought out plot into motion only to see said plot snowball out of control as his alter ego takes over.
The two leads are excellent as are the supporting actors - Steve Buscemi, Jean Smart, Zach Galifianakis, Fred Willard, Ray Liotta, Justin Long, and especially Adhir Kalyan. Everything moves along with a nice pace until the last scene or two when things slow to a resolution.
The Girl and I both very much enjoyed this one, even found ourselves laughing out loud a number of times. I'd even recommend checking the deleted scenes as there's a particular reworking of a diner scene that's hilarious.
Strong recommend...
Daredevil: The Devil's Hand - Second Daredevil read of the last few weeks. The other,
Return of the King, is barely even worth mentioning.
King is the same old, same old for Hornhead - life goes in the crapper as a number of people who know his unsecret identity choose to attack him from both sides of his life. Blah, blah, blah.
King did, however, serve as a plate cleaning, wiping away most of the ongoing storylines and setting up Double D to take over as leader of The Hand, a mystical, ninja-themed, mercenary group bent to world domination. Daredevil thinks he's use The Hand to do good - policing the streets of New York, killing those who are above the law, and eventually changing the direction of The Hand themselves.
The Hand, of course, think otherwise. In this volume, Daredevil begins to consolidate his power in the New York area, running afoul of the local police as well as Norman Osborne's HAMMER troops. Aided by Black Tarantula and White Tiger, Daredevil sets his initial plans in motion and has to prove himself a worthy leader by being willing to kill - or at least convince The Hand of his willingness.
In the second half of the story, Daredevil and White Tiger travel to Japan to meet with The Hand's five regional leaders and draw them to his side. Above these five and Daredevil, however, there turns out to be a no-so-secret cabal of Hand elders who have other plans and suggest among each other that they are really the ones pulling Daredevil's strings all along.
I love the dark, sketchy quality of the artwork throughout the first half of this volume, very strong and fitting of the New York setting. The artwork changes for the trip to Japan but retains the dark tone. Both are equally effective.
Finally, this is a Daredevil story that doesn't rely on the old tropes of Matt Murdock's life falling down around him. I'm actually eager to follow the next bunch of trades into Daredevil's
Shadowland.
First time in a while that I've been excited to follow DD. Good to see this happening again.
Chew - Last one for today...promise...
Best new read of the week (not as good as
Supreme, though)...Tony Chu is a detective and a
cibopath - a person who gets psychic impressions from whatever he eats. Kinda makes it a necessity for him to munch on dead bodies, fingers found at murder scenes, even a decomposing dog from the crime lab.
And it's funny.
I'm tellin' ya, it's really funny.
Well worth reading.
I'm two volumes in an wish the third collection were already out, but it's not just yet. Sadly.
Funny stuff.
Admirably, Corcoran has allowed a discussion of his positions on a Heavy Ink forum. Equally admirably, the tone of that discussion has been absolutely respectful and a spectacular example of how intelligent, rational discourse can be held over an issue that could very well devolve into the sort of violent name calling that has been so recently decried in the media.
Update: The direct links to files hosted on Check the Cool Wax have been removed as per a cease and desist order. Read the full details of the order here. 
Skimming through this month's Wired...
I am currently down with Time's Fifty Top 10 Lists of 2007.
Yet again, today's post comes from a recent NPR story, this one about an Andrew Keen's new book The Cult of the Amateur: how today's internet is killing our culture.
If ever there was a science guy who has used the medium of television (and more recently the magical interweb) to promote both himself and science, that science guy would have to be Steve Spangler.