Posted 5/15/13 6:53 pm EST by MTV Geek in Comic Books, Reviews
By Patrick A. Reed
Welcome to MTV Geek's New Comic Book Day Pull List! Each week We'll pick some choice titles that hit shelves on that holiest of holy days at comic shops both physical and digital: WEDNESDAY!
This week we've got picks from Image, Marvel, and Dark Horse.
Posted 5/3/13 5:45 pm EST by MTV Geek in Comic Books, Free Comic Book Day, Reviews
By Patrick A. Reed
This year's Free Comic Book Day is the biggest and craziest yet, with more than 50 different comics from various publishers vying for shelf space and room in your shopping bag. Some titles are geared for kids, some feature mature content, some are fit for everybody – and thus, we present this handy field guide, so you can know what to look out for.
Posted 4/26/13 4:15 pm EST by Charles Webb in Movies, Reviews
[Note: the screener of the film Well Go passed along didn't appear to have final subs--so some of the names and content may shift slightly in the theatrical cut as they get polished.]
The second chapter in director Stephen Fung's "Tai Chi" series ramps up the schmaltz (romances will begin, reconciliations will be made) and it's actually the better for it. "Tai Chi Zero" was a fun if half-baked movie that relied on clever text effects and tons of cameos to obscure what was essentially an introduction for this film.
"Hero," by contrast crisscrosses the story of the battle to save the hidden Chen village from the evil East India Railroad Company with a budding romance between kung fu prodigy Lu Chan (Yuan Xiaochao) and his wife/sifu Yu Niang (Angelbaby), and the return of the Grandmaster's prodigal son with his own mysterious agenda. Meanwhile, the outcast Fang has teamed up with an "British' railroad company rep (Peter Stormare, anything but) to get his revenge on Lu Chan, Yu Niang, and the whole of Chen Village.
Posted 4/15/13 12:30 pm EST by Charles Webb in Books, Reviews
Reading "Dune" as a child, one of my favorite aspects of the distant future Frank Herbert created were the mentants--intense, human computational machines who functioned on pure logic. They were more human than human, a necessary function of the empire's prohibition against thinking machines, embodied and given such great flavor and detail through only a pair of characters--the conflicted Dr. Yueh and the half-mad Piter De Vries.
In just a handful of scenes, Herbert invested these characters with life and unique conflicts absent the entire cast of super geniuses and savants in Marcus Sakey's rote procedural "Brilliance," a potentially explosive mix of "Days of Future Past"-style mutant oppression mingled with the freedom vs. security paranoia of "24" which... sounds kind of good when you lay it out like that. Unfortunately, Sakey's fascinating alternate history where an increasing segment of the population has become mental savants capable of massive computations isn't worthy of the characters, putting a bunch of very smart people in a very played-out plot.
Posted 4/3/13 2:40 pm EST by Charles Webb in DVD and Blu-ray, Horror, Movies, Reviews
Noel Clarke meets the monster in "Storage 24."
It's the utter randomness of the British "trapped in a building with a monster" movie "Storage 24" that ultimately undoes "Darkhunters" director Johannes Roberts' latest. The characters--a mix of lovers and friends who don't seem like they would talk to each other unless they were, you know, trapped in a huge storage facility together, are a poor match for the film's alternately 9-16' tall monster. And without that connection, without any theme linking the would-be victims of and victors against this splay-mouthed beast, "Storage 24" ends up one of the alternately better produced bad "Alien" knockoffs out there.
Posted 3/27/13 11:45 am EST by Charles Webb in DVD and Blu-ray, Horror, Movies, Reviews
Scream Factory gives this squishy/sexy/grotesque Lovecraft adaptation a lot of love in a gorgeous restoration packed with candid looks back by the cast and crew of this Stuart Gordon-directed film.
Posted 3/26/13 2:10 pm EST by Charles Webb in Books, Reviews
Screenwriter and former film critic C. Robert Cargill's urban fantasy novel creates a rich universe full of dangerous and fascinating characters, even if the main conflict over the fate of a young amnesiac falls limp.
Posted 3/13/13 3:05 pm EST by Charles Webb in Animation, Anime, Movies, Reviews
"From Up On Poppy Hill" is screening as part of the New York International Children's Film Festival. For more details about screenings and tickets, head to the here.
"From Up On Poppy Hill" is such a small slice of hometown storytelling from Studio Ghibli that it's easy to dismiss it as fluffy melodrama from the "Spirited Away" and "Princess Mononoke" animation house. And yet this 1960's-set melodrama carries such deep currents of emotion and so much affection for its sweet-natured characters, that by the end I was pretty sure it would rank among my two or three favorites from the studio.
Posted 3/12/13 2:18 pm EST by Charles Webb in DVD and Blu-ray, Horror, Movies, Reviews
In a perfect world (without all of those pesky media rights), Scream Factory's double-feature disc with "TerrorVision" (1986) and "The Video Dead" (1987) would have included a better companion than the latter film--maybe Tobe Hooper's "Poltergeist" or "Anguish." The alien invasion via TV sci-fi comedy "TerrorVision" is effective in its own broad terms at poking fun at the kinky/strange side of life in the 'burbs in the 80's that it deflates the rather aimless (and toothless) "The Video Dead" by comparison.
"The Video Dead" has its fans--certainly someone at Scream Factory thought it was worth the time and effort to assemble the materials to make this movie look as good as it does over 25 years later. But it's really a movie of loose parts that betray the helter skelter way the film was put together on a shoestring budget by friends and locals out in the woods. This no-budget film (but it's got heart, I tell you) focuses on the Blair siblings, would-be aerobics instructor Zoe (Roxanna Augesen) and slacker Jeff (Rocky Duvall), encounter a bedeviled boob tube that spits out zombies when they move into their new home.
Posted 3/7/13 11:00 am EST by Charles Webb in Animation, DVD and Blu-ray, Movies, Reviews
For its first third, Walt Disney Animation Studios' "Wreck-It Ralph" is good--very good. Better than really any movie before it, this feature from writer-director Rich Moore is one of the finest, sweetest homages to classic gaming, with loving nods to arcade games of the past via its story of a video game bad guy who wants to go good (John C. Reilly, perfect).
It's when the CG-animated feature digs its heels into one of the games created for the film, "Sugar Rush," that "Wreck-It Ralph" starts to feel a little rote, going through the usual storytelling motions while (most distressingly) ignoring all of the rich video game history with a series of bloated subplots that lose a little bit of the initial charm.
Posted 2/27/13 11:45 am EST by Charles Webb in DVD and Blu-ray, Movies, Reviews
Nasser-Ali Khan is a pathetic human being. The talented violinist, crushed by the destruction of his beloved instrument, wracked with professional regret, disconnected from his wife and children, has decided to kill himself. And so we watch him lie in bed, haunted by his memories as a narrator takes us through his past and his children's future in this whimsical drama from "Persepolis" writer Marjane Satrapi and her collaborator on its film adaptation, Vincent Paronnaud.
The French-language "Chicken With Plums," set in Satrapi's native Iran, is a beautiful bummer, a deeply-felt and sumptuous movie that by the end I wanted to flee with as much speed as my feet could muster, Nasser-Ali's misery and the misery of his family suffocating inside of a gilded box constructed entirely out of whimsy.
Posted 2/13/13 3:24 pm EST by Charles Webb in DVD and Blu-ray, Horror, Movies, Reviews
In its favor, writer/director Bradley Rust Gray's teen girls in love horror movie is painfully, deeply earnest. About what, it tough to tell based on what ends up on screen, but it feels deeply sincere about the burgeoning love between butch and abrasive Jack (Riley Keough, "The Runaways") and and the addled--let's be nice and not say "ditzy"--Diane (Juno Temple, "The Dark Knight Rises"), even as their bodies are going through monstrous changes that threaten... something.
The problem is that the horror elements in "Jack and Diane" exist as a bait-and-switch to elevate a listless love story between two thoroughly vacant characters. It's a romance between mentally underdeveloped children, substituting brief flashes of expertly-crafted creature FX (and stop-motion sequences from the Quay Brothers) for any kind of deep understanding of its two leads.
Posted 1/31/13 3:02 pm EST by Charles Webb in DVD and Blu-ray, Reviews, TV
If you want to feel the passage of time, don't pay attention to your own (eventually) creaking joints or the gray in your hair: look at the faces of the band you've been listening to for years or of your favorite actors in a long-running TV show. In my case, it's seeing the years at play on the actors (and jokes) of the British sci-fi comedy series "Red Dwarf" which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year across ten seasons in the DVD release of "Red Dwarf X."
In the years since my teens, when the misadventures of the last human in the known galaxy and the hapless crew of the Red Dwarf were fresh, funny, and weird in that Douglas Adams-by-way-of-shopping-mall-punk way, I've seen many (many) better-plotted and thought out sitcoms. After three years off the air (and another ten before that), maybe it's a combination of nostalgia and love of these actors and their characters, but I can't quit you, "Red Dwarf."
Posted 1/30/13 9:45 am EST by Charles Webb in Animation, DC Comics, DVD and Blu-ray, Movies, Reviews
Now that we've seen it animated, can we stop begging and pleading to see Batman/Superman slobberknocker from Frank Miller on screen? With the second half of "The Dark Knight Returns," director Jay Oliva has finally visualized one of those things fans of the two characters have longed to see in well-staged, visceral beatdown, one of the success of this animated adaptation.
But does the total package nail the source material? And if it does, is that a good thing?
To the first question, yes, and to the second... well, let's read on.
