Third Party View

Well, ladies and gentleman it’s another week and another film has come out with Judd Apatow’s name all over it. I’m beginning to be hard pressed to remember a movie that wasn’t written, directed or produced by the man. He directed Michael Clayton, right? Some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten was from a British craps dealer on a boat to the Bahamas who kept yelling at me to “Parlay! Parlay!” Apatow seems to have met the same guy. With every success he’s taken his cache and put it back in, so that he can further his winnings. By now I imagine in what little free time he has he swims through his money like Scrooge McDuck. With that being said, it’s not as though it isn’t money well earned and Forgetting Sarah Marshall is another example of why he’s the funniest guy around.

After being dumped by his television star girlfriend, Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell), Peter Bretter (Jason Segel) falls into a deep rut. On the advice of his brother-in-law (Bill Hader) Peter tries to get back out in the world, but after having some disastrous hook-ups he gives up and decides the best thing for him to do would be to take a vacation and get away from his troubles. Against his better judgment, he makes up his mind to go to Hawaii, more specifically a resort that Sarah had always wanted them to visit. Unfortunately for Peter, it seems that Sarah had the same idea, but she’s doing it with her new boyfriend, the world famous rock star Aldous Snow (Russell Brand). Unwilling to shrink away and hide under a rock, Peter decides to stay at the resort. Luckily for him, he’s able to find some support in his misery with the other guests and staff, especially the easy going front desk clerk, Rachel (Mila Kunis).

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A couple of friends of mine live in a small town and it always blows my mind every time I visit, just how much people seem to know about each other. It seems as though everyone is connected to everyone else in some way or another. It may be that they’re cousins or they have gotten drunk and hooked up or both. (That’s a joke, sort of.) That knowledge is what makes the towns in independent movies seem to ring so true to me. Every time I think that these depressing little towns that people never seem to be able to escape from don’t exist, I just go visit my friends.

Arthur (Michael Angarano) is a lot like a lot of teenage boys who are trying to balance school with a home life that is less than ideal, while at the same time getting a grasp on understanding girls. Things seem to fall into place for him even as his father (Griffin Dunne) decides to move out when the new girl in town, Lila (Olivia Thirlby), takes an interest. Meanwhile Arthur’s former babysitter Annie (Kate Beckinsale) is going through a nasty separation from her husband Glenn (Sam Rockwell). Glenn has taken their separation hard and refuses to take responsibility for his own actions and accept the fact that his wife is moving on. When tragedy strikes the town events are put into motion that have dire consequences.

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I am about as far removed from the literary scene of New York as you can get, but even to me this seems to be a far truer representation of what that world is like than is depicted in most films. In most cases the characters seem to be completely off the rails or just generally wacky with unnecessary affectations. If Starting Out in the Evening isn’t the way things are, I’d prefer not know.

Aging writer Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella) has been working on his fifth novel for more than a decade. Forgotten by nearly everyone, he is sought out by a young grad student, Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose). She is basing her graduate thesis on his work and hopes in doing so she can spur the completion of his final novel. Reluctantly he gives in to her friendship, much to the disapproval of Leonard’s daughter, Ariel (Lili Taylor), who is afraid that her own life is passing her by.

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I’m going to warn all you kids out there don’t even remotely think that you could go see 10,000 B.C. and write a history report. As hilarious as I find the prospect of some D&D playing nerd or meat headed jock doing that, I like to think that our education system hasn’t sunk to quite those levels. If only we had the resources to surpass the Finnish in education.

Not that it really matters, but 10,000 B.C. is about a young hunter, D’leh (Steven Strait), and his tribe in (you guessed it) 10,000 B.C. Well, really it’s more of a re-imagining of what that time period was like rather that an actual account based on historical record. Anyhoo, D’leh’s village is attacked by a group of raiders, who not only sack the village, but make off with a good number of their people including the love of our hero’s life, Evolet (Camilla Belle). Along with several of his fellow hunters, D’leh, sets out to walk over treacherous mountains, pass over impassable deserts; fight carnivorous birds, saber tooth tigers and wooly mammoths all in order to get back his woman and possibly fulfill a prophecy to bring down a empire while uniting all the worlds cultures into a single unifying goal. You know just like you learned in Anthropology 101. It’s all right there in the fossil record. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re reading this then you’ve probably fantasized, at some point in your life, about putting on a costume and fighting crime.  That’s what this book is about, and it’s brilliant.

Dave Lizewski is a normal kid in a normal world.  In his words, he’s not the class jock but he’s not the class loser either.  He’s just a regular high school kid.  He’s me and you and he has conversations with his friends that you’ve had with your friends.  Dave doesn’t have super powers or some advanced technology.  He doesn’t have a tragic or miraculous back story.  He’s just a kid who loves comic books and wants to help people out for a living.  That’s what’s so great about this book- from the first-person narrative style penned by Mark Millar to the simple yet powerful pencils by Jon Romita, Jr., everything about this book is geared towards understated reality.

When I started reading comic books, really getting into them, I read mostly X-Men and Spider-Man with a few other titles smattered in here and there.  A few years later I read V for Vendetta, Miracle Man and Watchmen.  Alan Moore wrecked my view on the standard superhero fare, but he also opened me up to a whole new world of comic book appreciation.  Since reading those classics, the comics I’ve enjoyed reading more than others are the ones that take some convention or another of comics and put some spin on it, and of those, the ones I’ve enjoyed the most are the ones that are based as much as possible in the real world.  That’s what was great about the first two installments of The Ultimates and that’s what was great about Supreme Power.  (Speaking of, when did the last issue of Squadron Supreme come out?)

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This is, what, the third X-Force #1? It’s at least the second one. There was a period of time when I was too poor to buy comics and during that time X-Force became some sort of bizarre satire comic or something and I don’t know if that restarted at a #1 or just continued from where it was. I hear it was pretty good. I don’t know.

So, the X-Men have had a rough go of it lately, at least since M-Day, when the vast majority of the world’s mutants suddenly stopped being mutants. Some of them died as a result (imagine flying over the city when all of the sudden you can’t fly anymore: uh oh!) and some were killed afterwards due to violent anti-mutant sentiment, but by and large they just ceased to have mutant powers anymore. Surprisingly, this didn’t apply to a lot of key X-Men characters. Oh yeah, and Professor Xavier was shot and killed. Again.

In the most recent Marvel Mega Mutant X-Over, Messiah Complex, all the mutants have begun giving up hope that their species would continue when lo and behold, a mutant baby is born and a number of factions go after the baby for their own purposes. That’s mostly here nor there, but the important thing is that one of the factions is The Purifiers, a groups of religious zealots who believe mutants come from Satan. As it’s pointed out in this issue of X-Force, The Purifiers killed more X-Men (students) in one day than there had ever been X-Men killed before. (I was wondering if that included the ones that came back from the dead or not.) So these guys are dangerous nutjobs, these Purifiers.

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When The Boys was first released it was under DC’s Wildstorm imprint (which they got along with Image Comics when they took that over) it was everything you could ask for in a superhero series penned by Garth Ennis. Drugs, sex, violence, a topsy-turvy view of a world living with superheroes and that certain Garth Ennis je ne sais quoi that lets you laugh at some lowbrow and gross-out humor and still feel like you’re getting an intellectual read. It got a little too… edgy so it was shelved by DC until it was picked up by Dynamite.

And it was good. I’m a fan of comics that take an established comic theme and give it a real-world spin, which is why I haven’t been able to enjoy reading mainstream comics quite as much since I first checked out Watchmen and Miracle Man. In the world of The Boys, super heroes are rock stars gone wild. They indulge their every whim and vice knowing that nobody is going to do anything about it, and if something does go wrong their corporate sponsor’s PR person will handle it.

We were introduced to this world through Wee Hughie (obviously modeled after Simon Pegg), a Scott who lost the love of his life one day when a super-speedster ran into (or, more appropriately, through) her. Hughie was crushed and let his life go down the crapper until he was approached by Billy Butcher, leader of The Boys. The Boys is a covert group of people given a dose of Compound V, the source of super powers, whose mission is to keep the spoiled and corrupt super heroes in line. They do their job well. And violently. Read the rest of this entry »

Well after months and months of internet rumor and speculation Cloverfield is finally here.  Now, my childhood without cable really forced me to develop a taste for all the Godzilla films that my local television station on occasion would show in lieu of afternoon programming.  I admittedly am a fan of Alias and Lost, but since J.J. Abram’s also wrote and directed Mission Impossible III and had a hand in writing Armageddon, he still has to prove himself to me. 

The night before Rob (Michael Stahl-David) is planning to leave for a new job in Japan, his friends decide to throw him a going away party.  Everyone is having a good time even though some unresolved feelings are brought up and there’s quite a bit of whispering about Rob’s relationship with his longtime friend Beth (Odette Yustman).  Unfortunately, before anything can be worked out there appears to be an earthquake bringing the party to a sudden halt.  In order to assess the damage everyone heads up to the roof just in time to see an explosion in the distance.  As the destruction moves closer Rob and his friends head to the streets in a desperate attempt to avoid whatever it is that is destroying New York City.

Admittedly, there isn’t a lot of strong acting in this film, however they do what they need to get the job done.  For the most part the party at the beginning looks like a hipster casting call.  If the people didn’t give it away, the fact that they play Kings of Leon, Spoon and a little Parliament for good measure should.  That being said Lizzy Caplan as Marlena and T.J. Miller as the unfortunately nicknamed Hud deserve a mention.  Paul Newman he ain’t, but being behind the camera we don’t see that much of Hud.  He does offer a few one-liners that are delivered perfectly to release a little tension in a movie that otherwise would have few breaks.  Besides, Hud is that friend who’s just a big dumb animal that everyone has or should have. Read the rest of this entry »

Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) is an oil man.  He’s an oil man in the truest sense of the word in that whatever runs through his veins must be as black as the stuff he pumps out of the ground.  After receiving a tip from Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) that the Sunday family ranch is on top of an ocean of oil, Plainview heads to South Boston, California.  Once there he sets out with his son H.W. (Dillon Freasier) to convince Sunday’s brother Eli (also played by Dano) and the rest of the town to allow him to begin drilling.  As an evangelical preacher, Eli is wary of this outsider until it is agreed that there will be a sizeable donation to the church.  The two men’s early disagreements set them on a path that will eventually be the end of both.

Daniel Plainview is one of, if not the best villain that has ever been captured on film.  He certainly has to be the most straight up evil one.  Hell, even when you take off Darth Vader’s mask there is what’s left of his shriveled humanity underneath it, but not with Planview.  If you were to look inside him, there would be nothing but an empty black hole.  Everything he says or does in There Will Be Blood serves only to further his own greed.  Anything that even remotely looks like an act of kindness is purely accidental. 

Take for example at his adopted son H.W.  When we first see Plainview with him as a baby there isn’t an ounce of affection, he just looks at him like he would any other tool to find oil.  We don’t know it at the time, but his only reason for keeping the boy is that he needs him to convince people that he is a family man in order to swindle homesteaders out of their land.   As a matter of fact it’s almost as though he brings H.W. out when he needs him and then slips some whiskey in his milk to put him to sleep when he’s no longer needed.  When H.W. becomes more of a burden than a tool Plainview gets rid of him as soon as his half-brother shows up, but when that goes sour and he needs to show that he’s a good father, he summons the boy back. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll admit that when I read that Marvel Comics was going to change The Incredible Hulk into The Incredible Herc starting with issue #112, I was pretty skeptical. I mean, on one hand you’ve got the Hulk, a comic book character popular enough to be a household name right up there with Batman or Spider-Man, and on the other you’ve got a b-list Avenger based on a Greek demigod. Who cares about Hercules? I’ve been reading comics for a decade and a half (that’s half my life as of March 4, so contact me for instructions on sending birthday contributions) and I’ve never once cared about Hercules. Don’t get me wrong- I’ve read and really enjoyed a lot of mythology, but Marvel’s Hercules has never been anything but muscles and ego.

So why did I pick this book up? Let’s go back a few months.

I’ve never been much of one to follow the Hulk, but when I heard there was a story arc where he was made to play the role of a gladiatorial slave I thought that might be pretty cool and worth checking out. The Hulk gets to cut loose and smash up a bunch of aliens? Sounds good to me. I was pretty happy with the Planet Hulk storyline so I kept reading after the world the Hulk just took over blew up and made him very, very angry. This lead to World War Hulk, where the Hulk declared war on the superheroes who sent him off into space. (The fight with Iron Man was particularly good.)

During World War Hulk, a few superheroes banded together to support their big green buddy. Two of the people in this group were Hercules and Amadeus Cho, the seventh smartest person in the world. (Thanks for reinforcing the stereotype that Asian kids are smart, Marvel.) The Hulk was taken away at the end of World War Hulk and the book was changed to The Incredible Hercules.

So what’s happening now? Read the rest of this entry »