Man, I have time in the summer. I really should be accomplishing more things instead of taking this bag of dreck into my headspace.
Let's get the worst out of the way first...
Super - This movie is awful, boring, and needlessly violent.
It takes a moderately interesting premise - man's wife leaves him, and he cracks, turning into a stupidly, insanely violent 'super hero' who wanders around hitting people with a really big wrench.
The climactic 'battle' scene is the most ridiculous, improbable, and violent mess of the whole movie, and that's saying something because the rest is pretty atrocious getting there.
The ending is awful and ridiculous and entirely out of character with the rest of the film.
This movie should have never been made.
The Brothers Grimm - This one is at least pretty.
The movie is boring and the cast mostly uninteresting.
The premise is moderately intriguing as the titular Brothers are cast as charlatans bilking villagers for capturing bogeymen that they've faked into existence based on local legends and stories. Heath Ledger's Brother (whichever he is) has more belief that there might be something magical, so when they find something actually magical, he more freely accepts the possibility. Matt Damon's Brother is far more cynical and skeptical, accepting the reality of the magic only when it is forced upon him.
The movie wastes Jonathan Pryce, Ledger and Damon, and Noomi Rapace.
The only thing to recommend this film is the presence of Monica Bellucci. She's pretty at least.
Superman/Batman: The Sorcerer Kings - Likely the final collection of this series which varied wildly in quality with each story arc as writers and artists wandered onto and off of the series.
This collection gathers together seven issues, one stand-alone, a two-issue arc, and a four-issue arc. All three are pedestrian, sending the two superheroes into various moderately interesting challenges but never taking advantage of the strength of the best issues of the series: the interaction between Batman and Superman. Instead, the single issue focuses on Powergirl and the huntress and the titular characters' surrogates. The two-issue storyline puts the two together but makes them secondary characters in the storyline, time hopping to have the villain take on versions of Superman and Batman from various eras, versions who are familiar from previous storylines but who lack the interesting dynamic of the main. The four-issue arc entirely separates the two leads, defeating the only thing that makes the series interesting.
This one's worth skimming, but you won't find anything memorable or revelatory.
Justice League: Generation Lost - I loved the late-80's Giffen/DeMatteis
Justice League.
Loved it, because it was hilarious and because it kept the great focus on the characters who jelled to form a family. When the series expanded from
JL to
JLA to
JLI to
JLI and
JLE, it lost its strong character focus, struggling to hold things together with an expanded roster, shifting team membership, and new creative teams and directions.
Here Giffen tries to get the band back together, but there have been numerous changes to the characters in the decades since - Rocket Red changed identities, Ice
died but came back, Blue Beetle
died and was replaced, Booster Gold was discredited again and sent through the timestream, Maxwell Lord
died and came back.
The magic is gone. Sure the plot works well enough to get the band back together, placing them as a quasi-team and the end of the twenty-four issues (delivered bi-weekly), but the original tone of the series was completely abandoned along with my enjoyment.
Animal Man - Here's another one that's looking to go back to an earlier era of DC comics, harkening back to both Alan Moore's
Swamp Thing and Grant Morrison's
Animal Man. The tone here is closer to DC's Vertigo line with Animal Man taking on agents of The Rot as he and his newly powered daughter fight to protect The Red. By the end of this collection, Buddy Baker (Animal Man) is on the run to get help from The Green in the personage of the Swamp Thing.
I respect the different tone that the series is taking as there are very few superhero comics taking a darker turn. I'm curious to see where things continue to go, but I'm not desperate to know. I'm intrigued, but I warn you that there's a lot of grotesquery here.
Strictly Ballroom - I saw this back in college and enjoyed the heck out of it.
Saw it again for free over on Hulu and wasn't disappointed.
Bax Luhrmann's sense of style carries through the story from the brilliant, engaging opening through the more traditional love story second half of the film.
We open with the male lead choosing to dance his own steps rather than take the more staid route to winning the Pan-Pacific Grand Prix dancing Championship. In the insular world of movie ballrom dancing, this is apparently the moral equivalent to killing a man, leading to the dancer being nearly disowned by the dancing community, needing to find a replacement partner, and having to find his own way - the traditional, orthodox route which 'guarantees' success or dancing the steps that he feels in his own heart.
If you can't tell which way the story's going to go, you need to read up on cinema storytelling 101. Luckily, though, the journey is lots of fun along the way to the predictable and heartening outcome.
Check it. It's funny and very much quotable.
Secret of Kells - The best media offering of the last bit was this animated feature, nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2010.
This movie tells the fictional tale of the creation of the
Book of Kells, one of the greatest illuminated manuscripts of Irish Catholicism. Here the book is brought from its home abbey on the Island of Iona to the fortified Abbey of Kells where Abbot Cellach is building the walls around his abbey higher and taller to fight off the eventual attack from the Vikings which destroyed the Abbey on Iona, nearly destroying the yet to be completed Book of Iona (later of Kells).
In Kells the illuminator from Iona finds a talented young man, Brendan, who wants to learn at the shoulder of the master illuminator and also wants to see the forbidden world outside the ever-growing walls surrounding the abbey and village of Kells. When Brendan does eventually find his way to the forest, he discovers a spirit of the forest in the cat/girl, Aisling, with whom he falls in chaste love and who eventually saves him from numerous dangers - in the forest and the abbey.
The story is moving, and the artwork is absolutely stunning, taking its theme from the illustrated manuscripts of the Book of Kells, itself. The use of bold lines and wonderfully detailed backgrounds, particularly in the greens of the forest and the menacing reds and blacks of the terrifying Vikings make for a visually stunning experience.
And two from the original Book of Kells...as it looks now then as it probably looked originally.
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