If you’ve ever seen the 2007 Robert Rodriguez movie Planet Terror you would have seen the trailer for the fake film Machete. It’s about a Mexican day laborer contracted to assassinate a senator. He is then double-crossed and left for dead. After all that happens he is out for revenge and vows to kill all who get in his way.
I was thinking about doing demo impressions as a feature here. I’m still not quite sure if that’s a good idea or not, but more content shouldn’t be a bad thing. Before I do test the waters with this feature I thought I should post this little personal experience.
Ahh, Ms. Blair Butler, proof that good things do come out of the Midwest(I’m joking Midwestern people). Blair has done and is involved with many things that nerds everywhere should be envious of. She was head writer for G4′s video game show X-Play, she has appeared on Comedy Central’s Premium Blend, and is currently the host of G4′s web show Fresh Ink Online. How can you not admire a woman who is really into comic books and video games and is funny?
There are only a few graphic novels that absolutely break-out into mainstream media heralded for all its’ good and “groundbreaking” feats it accomplishes. Joe Kelly and JM Ken Niimura’s highly imaginative book I Kill Giants is one of those very books and do they deserve it? Well, yes. Kelly and Niimura have teamed up to release a good solid book about coping with tragedy and the human mind’s impenetrable defense mechanism known only as – imagination. The critical acclaim for this book is overwhelming, but one can not help but wonder how this collected mini series delivered from issue to issue as the opening installments do take some getting used to. The narrative benefits from being collected; the reader can pursue the direction that Kelly and Niimura go by rapidly blowing through the pages to get to the next chapter versus waiting a month to get some closure on this unorthodox story. However, this must have been the reason Image readers loved this mini so much.
The story of I Kill Giants is about a young girl named Barbara Thompson, a fifth grader that is obsessed with D&D and claims to be a giant killer. Barbara alienates herself from every single person that surrounds her by genuinely being rude and downright nasty. At home she is terrified by something outside of her bedroom and can not help but cause grief for her family with her whimsical and unusual imagination. By night she is a trained giant killer, setting traps for possible giants and taking care of her giant-destroying hammer: Coveleski. When a new girl comes to town and tries to befriend Barbara, things begin to spiral downhill as Barbara picks a fight with a bully and is assigned to therapy sessions with the school shrink at the request of the principal (whom Barbara meets with everyday for her constant ejections from the classroom). As the therapy sessions continue, Barbara’s perception of reality and her imagination begin to blur and she is forced to recognize that she has been hiding from something truly more frightening than giants.
We decided to go with a movie trailer this week, well, because video game releases are light and albums and comics don’t really have videos. I was going to post a trailer of something that releases fairly soon, but I’d rather avoid putting up a video of a movie that comes out Friday. I don’t want to promote a video for a movie that’s going to end up sucking and have to change it mid-week. This is supposed to be video of the week after all. I had a hard time deciding whether to go with the comedy The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard or the sci-fi movie District 9.
Before you think the title means I hate Doug Benson’s new album Unbalanced Load, it doesn’t. I actually like it, I just think content wise it is a bit unbalanced. The first four tracks got more smiles than laughs out of me. Once it goes into the fifth track it gets much funnier.
I’m admittedly a previous fan of Doug Benson’s. Not a longtime fan; I think I first started following his work closely earlier this year when I first saw Super High Me. I was familiar with him from VH1′s now canceled show Best Week Ever and an appearance he made on Curb Your Enthusiasm. After becoming one of his Twitter followers and buying an autographed copy of his previous album Professional Humoredian I was afraid I’d either like this too much or that he would drop the ball. Here are my unbiased thoughts on it.
This is a little embarrassing to admit, but after I bought and read Northlanders Book One: Sven the Returned sometime back in May I liked it so much that I was eager to purchase and read Book Two. I was fairly certain my friend who recommended it to me (Andrew) told me that there was more than just that one book currently available at the time. I also somehow remembered looking it up on Amazon.com and seeing it for sale there as well. I was in the area of a local comics store last Thursday and decided to stop in and see if they finally had Northlanders Book Two in stock. They did, and I picked it up. It wasn’t until doing the smart thing of looking it up on vertigocomics.com that I realized it was just released the day before I bought it. I’m just glad I didn’t angrily ask why they didn’t have it at any of the places I looked.
Northlanders Book 2: The Cross + The Hammer is a story of two men on opposite sides of warring nations that takes place in Ireland 1014 A.D. The Cross is a man named Magnus who is a native to Ireland and is traveling the land killing the foreign Norsemen that he believes are ruining his country and his people. Tagging along with Magnus is his daughter Brigid, a young girl whom Magnus believes he is somehow helping by eliminating the Norse. The Cross is Lord Ragnar Ragnarsson, a tracker who vows to his king to put a stop to the murders of his countrymen by finding and eliminating Magnus.
It is no news that Judd Apatow is one of the funniest bastards that the Hollywood comedy gods birthed. He is the king of bromance/gross out comedy and his films showcase how his cast can bond with movie-goers so easily even when they are talking about ball-sacks while smoking weed. Apatow has always granted audiences access to the soft yet neanderthal activities of male psyche without sacrificing the heart-warming charisma that guides his characters along their journey to fulfillment. Funny People takes everything that is lovable about this filmmaker’s past outings and turns it upside down. Instead of the characters being lovable messes they are annoying, wandering, and complaining shadows of the entities in Apatow’s previous films. Despite what the above poster may reflect, it seems no character in this film truly likes each other and it doesn’t help when there is virtually no on screen chemistry amongst any of the actors in this film.
The following is a somewhat loose outline of the plot of this film. Comedian and actor George Simmons (Adam Sandler) discovers that he has a serious blood disease that has an 8% chance of survival with experimental medicine. Trying to find some kind of happiness in his life, Simmons finds a friend/assistant in Ira (Seth Rogen) and thus commences a relationship between Sandler’s emo-ness and Rogen’s awkward nervousness. There is also some kind of subplot which evolves into the the real climax of this film which is a story of love lost between Simmons and his ex fiance Laura (Leslie Mann).
I think I should preface this review by first saying that I am not really the comic book guy here; Andrew is that guy. I do however like comics and own about 25-30, most of them are from when I was around 10 though. I’ve been getting more into comic books and graphic novels recently, so I hope to be writing about them again after this review.
Before seeing Green Lantern: First Flight, the recently released straight to DVD/Blu-Ray movie, I didn’t know much about Green Lantern at all. I actually thought he was a black man like in the Justice League cartoon. This movie was a perfect introduction for someone like me who had no idea who Hal Jordan was or how he became a Green Lantern. A Green Lantern named Abin Sur is dying and in a spacecraft entering Earth’s atmosphere. He lands and tells his ring to find his successor; it brings Hal Jordan back to him. Abin Sur gives Jordan the ring and then he dies. Before Jordan can officially become part of the Green Lantern Corp. he must appear before a council of the Guardians, which are an immortal race that founded the Green Lantern Corp, and be approved by them. The Guardians are very skeptical of a human becoming a Lantern until Sinestro, a character who appears to be the number one Green Lantern, offers to take Jordan under his wing and train him. From there it goes on to briefly show them in a veteran/rookie cop-like situation that to me was reminiscent of the movie Training Day.
The motion picture industry has not fared very well so far in this grand year of 2009. Most of the major distributors have not succeeded with their summer line up and have pretty barren slates leading into the winter. Surprisingly, the horror genre is no where to be seen during this prime-time for feature films. Granted Orphan was released to a somewhat successful first week with its gimmick twist ending which has made its rounds around the web as a great punch-line to most forum posters. In general it seems that Hollywood has completely lost its touch with what scares movie-goers. The modern day horror film is really stagnant because of creative laziness. Either the audience is terrified by a ghoulish design which is then sullied by a ridiculous and often times invisible plot or the picture just slopes into sharp cut-aways and dizzying shaky cam. The Collector is not a horror film which reinvents the genre nor is truly horrific. Instead it is a well done low budget slasher flick that succeeds in its job to make the audience as tense and squeamish as possible.
The plot of this film is intriguing yet simple. Arkin (Josh Stewart), a handyman by day and safe cracking thief by night, decides to rob his employer’s house in order to clear his wife/girlfriend’s debt with some nasty loan sharks. Once Arkin breaks into the house he finds that a devious and extraordinarily sadistic serial killer has rigged the house with deadly traps. In simpler terms, the killer (The Collector?) is a life time champion of Mouse Trap, only he brings it to a whole new level of sadism. Shocked by the brutality committed in this house of pain, Arkin becomes conflicted. Does the thief finish his job and save his family or does he try to be the hero and rescue his employer and his family as they are deformed by this masked killer?
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