In sticking with the comic book theme this week, I chose the animated HBO series Spawnfrom the now beleaguered Canadian creative genius Tood McFarlane. Adapted from McFarlane’s comic book of the same name, Spawn chronicles a little bit of the life and all of the death of government killer Al Simmons who is double crossed by his handler, burned alive, sent to hell, then sent back to Earth five years later to face horror and revulsion from his former wife, betrayal from those he thought were his friends, and various other nuisances, like mob hitmen, cyborg warriors and the minions of hell. It’s a good thing he’s got his homeless buddies to keep him company, and having the powers of a general in Hell’s army at his disposal doesn’t hurt either.
This was a great show. It was dark, moody, even a little scary at times, and man was it sad. Even better, it was voiced by one of the deepest set of pipes to grace the big and small screen: Keith David. It went a full three seasons and then got cancelled way before its time because of a lawsuit filed by a hockey player who didn’t like how McFarlane besmirched his nickname (Tony Twist). There’s been rumours that Todd’s going to try to resurrect the show somehow, but I think they’ve been in the “pre-production stages” for about 5 years now. I’ve also heard that they might try to make a Spawn movie again, now that superhero movies have swung around to a darker tone. Take my advice: avoid that movie unless you are a huge Spawn fan, and even then, don’t let it affect your impressions of the show or the comic.
Director Jim Sheridan (left) with Jake Gyllenhaal (as Tommy Cahill, center) and Tobey Maguire (as Sam Cahill, right) on the set of BROTHERS, an Alliance Films release.
There is not a single person in this movie that doesn’t do an incredible job. The cast is incredibly talented and distinguished and the mood created is totally tense, and it had me breathing deep throughout a lot of the film, but it never made any sense to me. The tension was held in place for reasons that seemed so ridiculous.
In the buttoned down culture of Denmark it might make sense to keep some secrets bottled up until they explode into some kind of crazy shitstorm. But in America, people spout off all the time about what they think and how they feel. All Tommy had to do was tell his brother he didn’t sleep with his brother’s wife, and all Sam had to do was talk to someone about what happened – like his Dad or something.
It also could be, and I say this without having watched the Danish original, that whatever trauma Sam endured while at war in the original film, might have better explained Sam’s fixation on his brother sleeping with his wife. His own guilt manifesting the way it did, never made sense to me.
So I think the cultural differences are what kept this movie from completely coming together. I’m sure that the Danish one is great – and while it might still come off weird how they keep stuff bottled up, at least it’ll be in context.
More will be revealed this Sunday, including my distaste for the music they used.
Brothers is coming to DVD from Alliance Films on March 23, 2010.
With no new releases to review, and with special guest Gareth Gaudin from Legends Comics in the studio, we devote our entire hour to talking about comic books and the movies that they’ve inspired. We set our sights primarily on the impending releases of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, The Losers and Kick-Ass and then cram in Steve’s picks for comic book writers who deserve an Oscar. We wrap everything up with some comic book related Vault picks: Todd MacFarlane’s Spawn and Kevin Smith’s Mallrats, both classics.
You can listen to the show here subscribe to our podcast here or check us out on iTunes here.
After watching a very cool video today I realized how Battlestar Galactica has kind of faded from my memory. Most times, if a show is great, it winds up on my shelf to be watched at a later date. Set aside the fact that I never have the time to watch any of the shows I buy anymore, because I’m sure when summertime comes around I might finally be able to sit and enjoy my complete series of Deadwood, but it’s the cost-prohibitve nature of BSG on DVD that means that this brilliant Canadian produced TV show will wind up being the kind of thing I have to wind up recording off TV… which doesn’t quite work the same way in this post VCR age.
Why Battlestar? Why? Why can’t you make yourself more accessible to the least of us?
While we await an answer, why don’t we watch this video:
There can be no doubt that Hollywood owes much of its returns of late to the rise of the comic book adaptation. What’s shocking to me is that it took everyone so long to come around to them being a viable source of material, about as long as it took for the world to come around to comics being a viable literary medium. A comic book’s nature as a kind of novel/storyboard hybrid brings it right to the doorstep of the adapted screenplay before it’s even adapted, so shouldn’t the geniuses behind these works be getting some recognition from the Academy?
5. John Wagner (Judge Dredd & A History of Violence) If all you know of Judge Dredd is the movie starring Sly Stallone and Rob Schneider (who the heck allowed that to happen?) then it’s hard to imagine that the source for the film should appear on this list, but the comic book itself was so good. Good to the point of seeming like “can’t lose” kind of material for adaptation, with the kind of elements that made Star Wars an instant hit with audiences, the lone wanderer travelling a morally bereft wasteland, essentially a samurai or gunfighter, Lucas’ bread & butter. Sadly, it wasn’t meant to be. But where Judge Dredd failed, David Cronenberg was able to take Wagner’s graphic novel A History of Violence and do something sad, sick and surprising with it. The story of a murderous gangster who finds peace and starts a new family in a quiet town finds himself dragged back into it when he heroically kills two thugs trying to hold up his greasy spoon. The film explores the ugliness and irresistible nature of violence, and manages to add some rough sex and family tension for good measure. Hey, it’s a Cronenberg film.
4. Mike Mignola (Hellboy) I was fairly familiar with Mignola’s work, even before I rekindled my love affair with comic books in my late 20s, but it was never for any of the work he did on Hellboy. It’s kind of like being best friends with Lance Armstrong and not knowing that he likes to ride a bike. From the opening minutes of Hellboy, I knew that I had stumbled onto something special, something that had never been done before. I didn’t feel quite that way watching the second film, but that’s not Mike’s fault. I’ve only read through a couple of issues of the comic since seeing the film, but I can see that Guillermo Del Toro went to great lengths to stay loyal to the source material while generously adding his own little touches. For creating such a unique and likeable character (despite his lineage), and for giving him the same birthday as mine, Mike totally belongs on this list. I don’t know if the financial well is dry for more Hellboy flicks – I figured that when I saw Ron Perlman in makeup doing an add for Direct TV, that was probably the end of it, but the series certainly has plenty more material to draw upon.
3. Frank Miller (300, Batman Begins, Sin City & The Spirit) You’d think that a man that has had such a profound effect on comic books and their translation to the big screen would rank higher on this list, but you can only rate so high when you’re the director of The Spirit. All directing inadequacies aside, Frank Miller’s redefinition of the Batman took him to places that not even Tim Burton managed to go when he was directing the franchise. Christopher Nolan grabbed a hold of “Batman: Year One”, probably after reading “The Dark Knight Returns”, and ran with it to places nobody thought a superhero movie could go. Now everybody wants to go there, and I’m sure everybody’s wishing that Frank Miller thought to do his own spin on The Flash, Green Lantern or Spider-Man. His Sin City project was so iconic that he had to be brought on board the production to make sure that it was translated properly (which unfortunately lead him to directing the aforementioned The Spirit). His creative streak appears to be continuing unabated, but I think I’d prefer that he generates ideas rather than directing films.
2. Alan Moore (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, From Hell, V for Vendetta & Watchmen) We should probably mark him down for his constant attempts to get in the way of his work getting turned into movies, but there’s nobody out there with a mind so original, yet so plugged into society’s psychoses. This guy deserves the Nobel prize for poverty for all the money he’s turned down after refusing to be associated with any of the adaptations of his works. He’s an enigma to me, in that I have so much respect for his work, but constant resistance to sharing it with a larger audience makes me think he’s a bit of a jerk. I suppose given his seriously anti-establishment works, this kind of disinterest in playing the marketing game would be par for the course. Regardless, given the genius that are in the pages of his work, and on the screen, you gotta expect at least a little eccentricity. While The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen might have served more as a cautionary tale that not everything can be translated to celluloid, From Hell remains one of the greatest works of the Hughes Brothers, and Watchmen remains the greatest comic book/graphic novel ever written, and IMHO the greatest movie about comic book culture ever made (and yes I’m aware of a movie called Mallrats).
1. Stan Lee (Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, X-Men, Iron Man, Captain America, Daredevil & The Incredible Hulk) Stan Lee’s journey through life and his eventual installation of chairman emeritus of Marvel Comics has turned him into somewhat of a comic book character himself. While the man will never get an Oscar for his endless stream of cameos in Marvel films, the movie industry owes this man an unpayable debt for creations his has blessed us with. As the genesis for the new face of the sci-fi action hero, Stan Lee has changed the landscape of 21st century entertainment and given a whole legion of geeks something to do other than play D&D. So I suppose putting him in the number one spot might seem like a kickback, but if you consider how the landscape of comic books alone, not just comic book movies, is due to this funny old man with big glasses, he’s earned it. His creations have been making it to the big and small screen for a very long time now, but it took a bit of a wake up call to the Hollywood system to make them realize that just because they look like cartoons, doesn’t mean superheroes have to be goofy… unless they’re Howard the Duck (not a Stan Lee creation). Things were a little shaky at first, and there have been a couple of misfires, but given that Marvel Studios seems to have no problem with rebooting franchises that are barely even 5 years old, we can pretend the first 2 Fantastic Four films ever happened. I’m a little unclear on the need to reboot Spider-Man, given it’s critical and financial success of the first 2 films. Is one bad sequel really grounds for wiping the slate clean? I’m sure Stan is tickled pink that The Avengers movie is pretty much going to take shape in the same way the comic book did. They’ll be taking four incredibly successful Marvel Studios franchises and mashing them up into one super-mega blockbuster that’ll have Warner Bros. scratching their heads about why they couldn’t put their heads together to whip up a Justice League movie. Excelsior!
I’d like to make a special honourable mention for Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian. For obvious reasons Mr. Howard is at the heart of several different phenomena, including the Governator, and what will hopefully be a new instalment in the film franchise that might once again know what a Cimmerian is.
I was saying not so long ago that the media that Robin Hood was putting out was painting the wrong kind of picture for someone who was more of a guerrilla fighter living in the shadows. The change isn’t a radical departure from what I’ve already seen, but it seems to incorporate more of the ideas of who Robin Hood is in my eyes, and might serve to explain a little better how this film is going to escalate all the way up to full scale Ridley-sized battle. Check out the trailer:
I don’t normally do this, but I’m just so excited for our show this weekend that I thought I’d send out a little kit to get everyone up to speed on what we’re going to be talking about.
This Sunday we’re going to have Gareth Gaudin, one of the fine folks from Legends Comics on our show (their store has won a Joe Shuster award) to talk a little bit about comic of the comic book adaptations coming to theatres, adaptations of comic books you may not have heard of before.
Kick-Ass: I’ve been gushing about this movie so much over the past year or so, so I doubt there’s many readers who don’t know about this one. Based on a comic book series by Mark Millar, it chronicles the life of Dave Lizewski, a teenager who dons a mask and costume to fight crime, only to get the crap kicked out of him and stumble into a deeper world of good guys and bad guys. It brands itself as a work of ultra-violence, and based on the trailers, I think they’ll be delivering the same thing on screen. It’s been directed by Matthew Vaughn, the man who brought us films like Layer Cake and Stardust, and this will hopefully be his ticket off the budget B-list and onto making some seriously epic movies.
The Losers: Based on the comic book series written by Andy Diggle, The Losers is a kind of A-Team story of a group of special forces operatives who are betrayed by their masters and forced to work from behind the scenes to clear their names. (Small wonder that it’s coming out around the same time as The A-Team, right?) Buzzworthy director Sylvain White is directing the movie, which boasts a robust ensemble cast including Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Idris Elba and Zoe Saldana. Despite its seemingly derivative story, the trailer makes the whole thing look like a lot of fun.
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: I had no idea until a few days ago that the comic book that this is based on is actually a Canadian creation by Bryan Lee O’Malley. Having never held the comic in my hands, I can’t tell if the whole thing is allegorical, but it tells the story of a slacker bass player named Scott Pilgrim who meets the girl of his dreams (literally) but discovers he must fight each of her 7 deadly ex-boyfriends if he wants to go on dating her. It’s being directed by Edgar Wright, yes Hot Fuzz & Shaun of the Dead Edgar Wright, so no matter what the subtext, you know it’s gonna hilarious and dripping with satire. Oh, and that guy Michael Cera’s in it, so be prepared for scenarios involving social awkwardness and hipster music.
As sad as it is to hear of Corey Haim passing away this morning, I cannot say I am in total shock. But I don’t want to dwell on all his personal demons, I just want to recognize him for all his work and joy that he brought to millions of people during the 1980’s. I remember working in a video store and discovering the pairing of Haim and Corey Feldman. The Two Coreys then managed to dominate my VCR for the next week or so as I made my way through most of the films the made together. The one that stands out to me and probably most of you is “Dream a Little Dream” This is probably the best of the Two Coreys movies and will always be what I think of when I remember the life of Corey Haim. (yes I know that “The Lost Boys” is probably the better of all the movies and more widely known but it never really had the same effect on me as Dream, so there)
The rock music bio pic can be a hit and miss situation. Sometimes the stories are so well known that the movie just treads over things you already know. And in some cases the stories are so unknown that they seem made up. Luckily Anton Corbijn’s 2007 film about the short life and death of Joy Division’s lead singer Ian Curtis is neither of these. Most people are aware of a band called Joy Division and probably know a song or two (love will tear us apart, dead souls, disorder, etc) but what you don’t know is beautifully captured in stunning black and white.
Based on the biography from Curtis’s wife Deborah, this movie starts with Ian’s life just before joining Joy Division and follows it up until his untimely demise at 23. I won’t go into detail on how and when he died because I don’t want to ruin the movie. But let me tell you, holy fuck is it heartbreaking.
The music in this movie is amazing and made me rediscover the immense talent of this short lived band. What makes it even better is that Sam Riley, who plays Ian Curtis to a T, sings all the songs. And if you didn’t know any better you would think he was lip synching to old tracks. Now to a lot of people this doesn’t really matter, but what it does for me is add a layer of authenticity to the role that you can’t get by singing along to the already existing recordings.
I cannot recommend this movie enough. If not to awaken your senses to this great music and tragic story, then to just marvel in the beauty of the images captured on film. The whole movie is in black and white and every single frame could be used as an amazing poster ready still image. It is a treat to watch even if the story wasn’t heartbreaking and beautiful at the same time.
When routine bites hard,
And ambitions are low,
And resentment rides high,
But emotions won’t grow,
And we’re changing our ways,
Taking different roads.
Then love, love will tear us apart again.
Love, love will tear us apart again.
Dark Days explores the tunnels near Penn Station in New York City and gets to know the array of souls that call those tunnels their home. Director Marc Singer embedded himself among the people living in The Freedom Tunnel for a number of months before he decided to make a documentary about them in hopes of finding a way to raise some money to help them find a way out of their situation. For a crew, Singer had his subjects themselves help with the rigging and dolly work, and spent a number of years shooting on donated film stock – all of it in gloriously bleak black & white.
Singer’s rapport with his subjects is resonates throughout the film, and his painstaking process of crafting a honest portrait of their lives is a testament to his vision, this being the first film he ever made. This is an incredibly moving, insightful and original documentary, but somehow I only happened upon it through the soundtrack, composed by my favourite turntablist: DJ Shadow. Oddly enough, it turns out that Singer had paid out money to get Shadow to put together the soundtrack, only to find out he’d been scammed by some jackass promoter. When Shadow found out about it, and learned what the documentary was all about, he decided he’d hop aboard after all.
I’ve made my case for having my fill of doom & gloom documentaries, and while that might seem to be what this one is about, I’d say that this paints a portrait of life in the city. It doesn’t pander and it doesn’t preach, it shows their lives as they are and tells a compelling story in the process. That’s what I want from all my films, documentaries or not: to be entertained and enlightened, and Dark Days handles both criteria with respect and honesty.
In sticking with the comic book theme this week, I chose the animated HBO series Spawnfrom the now beleaguered Canadian creative genius Tood McFarlane. Adapted from McFarlane’s comic book of the same name, Spawn chronicles a little bit of the life and all of the death of government killer Al Simmons who is double crossed by his handler, burned alive, sent to hell, then sent back to Earth five years later to face horror and revulsion from his former wife, betrayal from those he thought were his friends, and various other nuisances, like mob hitmen, cyborg warriors and the minions of hell. It’s a good thing he’s got his homeless buddies to keep him company, and having the powers of a general in Hell’s army at his disposal doesn’t hurt either.
The rock music bio pic can be a hit and miss situation. Sometimes the stories are so well known that the movie just treads over things you already know. And in some cases the stories are so unknown that they seem made up. Luckily Anton Corbijn’s 2007 film about the short life and death of Joy Division’s lead singer Ian Curtis is neither of these. Most people are aware of a band called Joy Division and probably know a song or two (love will tear us apart, dead souls, disorder, etc) but what you don’t know is beautifully captured in stunning black and white.
Dark Days explores the tunnels near Penn Station in New York City and gets to know the array of souls that call those tunnels their home. Director Marc Singer embedded himself among the people living in The Freedom Tunnel for a number of months before he decided to make a documentary about them in hopes of finding a way to raise some money to help them find a way out of their situation. For a crew, Singer had his subjects themselves help with the rigging and dolly work, and spent a number of years shooting on donated film stock – all of it in gloriously bleak black & white.
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