Posts Tagged movies
Moon: jmag review
Here’s my quick review of Duncan Jones’ sci-fi Moon from the latest issue of jmag.
MOON
Directed by: Duncan Jones
Starring: Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey
Almost every interview, article, or casual conversation about Moon must mention that its first-time director, Duncan Jones, is the son of David Bowie. (Hey, just like I’m doing now! Weird!) His film, though, is good enough to stand on its own.
Moon is a callback to the cerebral sci-fi of the 1970s. Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is serving out a three-year mining contract on a moonbase, alone except for a friendly robot named GERTIE (voiced by Kevin Spacey). Sam seems to be going understandably mad, leading to an accident and an impossible identity crisis.
Moon is almost a one-man-show, leaving Rockwell to carry the film on his twitchy shoulders. He pulls it off, too. Yes, there are some snags in storytelling logic, and an intrusive soundtrack by the usually capable Clint Mansell (Requiem For A Dream). When most sci-fi cinema has been co-opted by CGI spectacle, it’s always a pleasure to see one putting ideas ahead of explosions. Jones’ next film should be a doozy.
Other reviews by me this month: (500) Days of Summer, The Mighty Boosh box set, and Van Diemen’s Land. (You can read that last one over here).
Issue #33 is on sale now.
The Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co.
Inside the building at 372 5th Avenue Brooklyn, there’s a secret door. (I won’t say where because it’s a secret.) Behind it, there’s a large room where children sit and finish their homework, get help from tutors, or embark on ambitious extracurricular creative writing projects. When I visited, posters from their most recent batch of films were hanging around the walls. This is 826NYC.
Others have explained the make-you-all-warm-inside, bring-a-tear-to-your-eye, maybe-the-kids-will-be-alright-after-all charity work done at 826 National. There are seven locations around America, each fronted with its own theme. San Francisco has the Pirate Supply Store, Los Angeles has the Echo Park Time Travel Mart, and Chicago’s Boring Store does not sell spy equipment for secret agents. No sir.
But it’s the Brooklyn store that also houses the Superhero Supply Co., providing everything a young superhero needs to combat neighbourhood evil. As the sensibly-lettered sign outside says: “Costumes. Eyewear. Invisibility. Instruction Manuals. Dastardly plots will be foiled. Underground lairs will be found. ‘Ever vigilant, ever true.’”
There are X-ray goggles, wrist-communicators, industrial strength suction-caps, and secret identity kits – in case you need extra documentation to prove that you’re actually Ruben Fletcher, 46, an appliance salesman from Iowa City. There are other products that are a little more conceptual, too, just a jug of pure chaos from Bugayenko Laboratories.
There’s a selection of capes – and a cape-tester to see how it looks billowing dramatically behind you – and a Devillianizer machine in case you need to work on those occasional villainous tendencies.
I love the attention to detail, the utterly convincing graphic design, and the quips scattered around the store for those who are paying attention. (“Please ask a clerk for assistance with products on the higher shelves. Do not levitate, hover, or stretch.”) I love that you’re required to give your superhero name and recite the Vow of Heroism before leaving the store with your purchases. They frown on irony, too, so be prepared to say it with gusto.
Most of all, I love how democratic it all is. Too much fantasy seems to requires that its heroes are born special. Secret royalty; chosen one after chosen one; you know the drill. The division between who’s worthy and who’s not seems impossibly wide. Once you’re one, you can never be the other. Batman and Iron Man might be self-made heroes, but they’re the exceptions – and still chosen by tragedy. If you want superpowers just to help people, have fun, and save the world? You haven’t earned them. Look at anyone who takes Mutant Growth Hormone (in the Marvel Universe) or joins Lex Luthor’s Everyman Project (over at DC). It never seems to end well.
It’s also what made me wary of Brad Bird’s The Incredibles, even though I rank his earlier Iron Giant as one of my all-time favourite movies. It’s difficult to root for the stars when you know you’re just one of the mundane many who are holding them back from their heroic destinies.
I’m more of a sucker for the end of the good-hearted and much-maligned Mystery Men from 1999. The last thing these misfit heroes do in their film is assure everyone out there that they too have got what it takes:
“I think we would all like this victory to go out to all the other guys… and I’m talking about the people in this city who are super-good at their jobs, but never get any credit. Like the lady in the DMV. That’s a rough job.”
“For the people that remember jingles from tons of old commercials!”
“And for people who support local music and seek out independent film.”
Besides, at the Superhero Supply Co., they don’t look down on you just because you can’t fly. You don’t have to cross your fingers and hope that you were born special. Why wait for an origin story? Go and get one!
You might have to cough up some spare change for the gadgets and tights out the front, but it’s all to raise money for 826NYC’s free programs out back – and that means just by wanting to become a superhero, you’ve already made the world a better place.
Enough Fidelity Already
My first piece as comic book columnist for the literary site Bookslut is now online. It’s about the successful adaptation of prose into sequential art, and you can read it over here. (It’s kind of long. I’ll wait. Pack sandwiches.)
I begin with a mention of Slate’s Sarah Boxer and her fury over an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 – one she found to be an “extended, ironic, illustrated joke.” While I happily admit that many adaptations are god-awful, I say that:
“…her hilarious complaint that ‘…the text is almost always shortened to make way for pictures’ suggests that she either doesn’t understand the difference between an illustrated book and sequential art, or doesn’t understand the concept of ‘redundancy’.”
It turns out, however, that there’s a title being released that will make her day: a new adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? by Boom! Studios. The art is solid, the story well-deserved of its status as a sci-fi classic, and its first collected edition has already been listed as essential reading. Inside, it proudly announces that it is the “complete text” of the novel, just “presented in graphic form”.
What does that mean? It means, bizarrely, you’ll see panels like this one from issue #3:
We see Rachael examine her wristwatch, next to narration explaining that she examined her wristwatch. We see that it’s Eldon Rosen who says “Half an hour”, but the speech balloon with its little attributive tail is supplanted by more narration explaining that, yes, he’s the one who said it, all right.
I have no idea what’s gained in this strange hybrid, except for the right to boast that nothing’s been cut from the book. Why not just publish a version of the novel with handsome illustrations on every second page? If you really want to be redundant, why not print all the dialogue twice: once in a text box, and once in a word balloon?
Fidelity can go too far.
Ask Zack Snyder. The fact that he was so visually faithful to the source material when adapting Frank Miller’s 300 won him many fans – but his determination to keep the comics’ narration left the film with an often pointless voiceover, explaining things we could already see. Much of the pre-film hype around his next movie, Watchmen, was pitched to placate fans of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s comic with the fact that it ‘looked’ just the same as it did on the page.
If you find yourself eavesdropping online on a superhero-casting discussion – you know, which actor should play who – you’ll find that most fans seem to be basing their choices on who looks right, and acting ability be damned. (This is why these casting discussions always seem to have a lot of professional wrestlers in the mix.) Do we really want nothing more than to see movies that are comic books forced into motion?
Say what you will about the Watchmen film, but it delivered that in spades. Its blu-ray release features Snyder giving a guided tour of every last detail he embedded in each frame. Maybe Vanity Fair was right, and Snyder “love[d] Watchmen too much” to make a truly successful movie.
Any adaptation requires massive change. One medium is astonishingly different from the next. Too much fidelity to the source material can result in weird redundancy at worst, but even the best case tends to be a dreary, paint-plot-points-by-numbers slog. (I’m looking at you, Chris Columbus’ Harry Potter films!)
If you really crave an adaptation that’s exactly the same as the source material, you know what’s perfectly faithful to the book?
The book.
Up: jmag review
Here’s my quick review of Pixar’s Up from the latest issue of jmag.
UP
Directed by Pete Docter & Bob Peterson
Starring Edward Asner, Jordan Nagai, Bob Peterson
When Pixar heard that a ten-year-old girl with cancer might not live long enough to see their latest film, Up, they flew a copy to her house. She died soon after.
To summarise: Pixar are awesome, and the world is terribly, terribly unfair.
Up is the story of what happens when Mister Fredricksen, mourning his wife, decides to attach thousands of balloons to his house and fly it away to childhood adventure. Thank god Pixar put story before toy sales, because a crotchety old man and a fat Boy Scout sidekick aren’t exactly Optimus Prime.
Despite its beautiful use of 3D, Up mightn’t be held up as one of Pixar’s classics. It’s not as conceptually clean as their others, with a plot that happily creates its own logic a la The Wizard Of Oz – one far too gonzo to sum up in a line or two. Watching it, though, I laughed and cried more than I have at a movie in a long, long time.
Other reviews by me this month: Wendy and Lucy, Fast & Furious, and Anvil! The Story of Anvil. (You can read that last one over here).
Issue #32 is on sale now.