Category Archives: comic books

‘Thor’ kicking ass, not taking names as far as we can tell

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This looks like it’s going to be fun.

We don’t know a lot so far about the sequel to “Thor.” It’s called “Thor: The Dark World” and draws from characters – and probably storylines – from the comics, pitting the Asgardian Avenger against Malekith, played by former “Doctor Who” Christopher Eccleston.

We also know that the “Thor” sequel will be part of phase 2 of the Marvel Comics movie universe, leading up to “The Avengers” sequel in 2015.

Today pictures from the set came out and show Thor, Sif (Jaimie Alexander) and company (or at least their stunt doubles) kicking ass.

“Thor: The Dark World” is scheduled to be released Nov. 8, 2013.

Duncan only one case of unconventional superhero movie casting

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In noting Michael Clarke Duncan’s recent passing in this blog, I mentioned the minor furor after the “Green Mile” actor was cast to play the Kingpin in the Ben Affleck “Daredevil” movie.

Duncan worked as Marvel’s kingpin of crime however, and became the latest in a string of offbeat and unorthodox casting for comic book movies.

Some of them worked and others did not. Here are a few examples.

Offbeat casting that worked:

Michael Keaton as Batman. When Tim Burton cast Michael Keaton to play the title role in his 1989 “Batman” adaptation, the furor among fans was crazed. If the Internet had been in every basement at the time, it would have melted down. Keaton was best known for comedic roles like in “Night Shift.” And what about that jaw line? But Keaton was perfect as the grim-faced Dark Knight and the distant Bruce Wayne.

Hmmm. We’re still making up our minds:

Jessica Alba as Sue Storm. Alba is as beautiful an actress as you can find in Hollywood. But she just looked fake as the blonde adventuress, the Invisible Woman.

Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man. I thought director Sam Raimi’s first two “Spider-Man” movies were pretty damn good. But Maguire seemed too old to be a believable Peter Parker. Or maybe I was just reacting to foreshadowing of his emo-laden dancing in the third movie.

Nope. That’s just wrong:

Kate Burton as Lois Lane. “Superman Returns” had a number of problems. Brandon Routh wasn’t one of them, but Burton was. She’s a lovely actress but far too lightweight to be the tough and spunky ace reporter from the Daily Planet. Here’s hoping Amy Adams works better in “Man of Steel.”

Michael Chiklis as Ben Grimm/The Thing. How much do we love Michael Chiklis? A lot. But while he was an okay Ben Grimm he just didn’t work in a Thing suit. And he just wasn’t tall enough. When “Fantastic Four” gets rebooted, I think they should go the Hulk route and combine live action and CGI.

Jack Nicholson as the Joker. Sorry, fans. I love Nicholson. But he wasn’t right for the Joker. He was too old, not physical enough and – while he had an admirably goofy vibe – just didn’t have the right psycho demeanor. When I’m watching “Batman” now I like Nicholson’s pre-Joker performance more than his post-Joker performance.

And one wild one: When the producers of the Christopher Reeve “Superman” movie were considering actors to play the Man of Steel, they considered everybody from Robert Redford to Paul Newman (two of the biggest stars of the time). One of the Salkinds suggested casting the most famous man in the world, Muhammad Ali.

Ali wasn’t right for the role, but what an idea!

Whedon, Marvel to do S.H.I.E.L.D TV series

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Breaking news and, well, duh.

Deadline.com is reporting that ABC has ordered a pilot for a live-action TV series that follows the agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. – the super spy agency headed up by Nick Fury – that brought together “The Avengers” in this year’s biggest movie.

Of course.

For months there’s been speculation on what Marvel might do in its foray into live-action TV. A Jessica Jones/Heroes for Hire series was apparently sidelined and a live-action Hulk remains ill-defined.

So when news broke a few weeks ago that Joss Whedon had, in addition to his “Avengers” sequel directing duties, agreed to develop the big live-action Marvel TV series set in the Avengers universe, all of us went a little meshugana.

And we started talking about possibilities, including a Black Panther series, a Daredevil series, one featuring the Marvel cleanup crew Damage Control and any number of other possibilities.

Of course, a SHIELD (forgive me, I’m dropping the abbreviation practice until further notice) series was proposed and seemed like a natural.

Marvel has spent several movies setting up the workings of SHIELD, introducing us to characters like Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) and Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders).

While we don’t know what kind of series SHIELD  will be (well, presumably not a sitcom) and we don’t know if Jackson or any of the established actors will show up – please, please, please give us Tony Stark and Bruce Banner cameos – the flashy spy stuff that’s a natural part of the SHIELD universe makes this the most likely Marvel TV vehicle.

And since in the comics SHIELD is pervasive throughout the Marvel universe, we still could see meaty roles for fan favorites: Not just Fury and Coulson (yes, I know, I know) and Hill but others from the comics. Matt Murdock could represent Hill on a bogus murder charge. Fury could recruit the Punisher for a mission.

While the series will certainly be set in the present day, wouldn’t it be cool if it had some of the trippy feel of writer/artist Jim Steranko’s ground-breaking work on the comic a generation ago?

Yep, SHIELD is a no-brainer. And with Whedon behind the scenes and his frequent collaborators Jed Whedon and  Maurissa Tancharoen working on the series too, I think we’re going to get more of the Marvel goodness we enjoyed in “The Avengers.”

Comics classic: The Avengers Kree-Skrull War

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When fandom realized, a few years ago, that Marvel was planning an “Avengers” movie, half of those who thought about it said it would be a huge hit and half said it couldn’t be done.

And all of them said the plot should cover the Kree-Skrull War.

Well,  now that we’re on the other side of a billion dollars in box office receipts and great critical and fan reception, we know that it was doable, especially with Joss Whedon in the director’s chair.

But what about those Krees and Skrulls?

For those of us reading comics back in the day, the Kree-Skrull war was everything that was great about Marvel Comics, especially compared to DC.

Marvel had, by the time Avengers 89 came out in June 1971, spent nearly a decade building a universe that included not only costume-clad superheroes like the Avengers and the Fantastic Four but also more “cosmic” creatures like Captain Marvel, a Kree warrior come to Earth, and the Skrulls, alien invaders and shape-shifting imposters who fought the FF.

Writer Roy Thomas and artists Sal Buscema, Neal Adams and John Buscema gave us, over the course of eight monthly issues, a nice introduction to the larger universe outside Earth’s atmosphere and outside the influence of its “everyday” heroes.

Although Thor, Captain America, Iron Man and lesser-known Avengers like Scarlet Witch, Vision and Black Panther were the kings of New York superherodom, they were pitted here against alien menaces. While some of the storyline was large in scope – including space battles – other moments were (literally) small scale: One of the most famous sequences came in Avengers 93, when Ant-Man shrinks to microscopic size and goes inside the Vision to effect repairs on the android Avenger. The overall series plotline is almost ridiculously complicated and involves everything from the Fantastic Four to Skrulls masquerading as cows.

Because comics of the time were rarely planned out months in advance as “big events” are now, it was extraordinary that Thomas and company took the better part of a year to tell this story. DC comics was still, at this point, doing “one and done” stories. For all of us elementary school kids out there, the Kree-Skrull War series re-emphasized how different – and how much better – Marvel was.

So we didn’t get a Kree-Skrull war in the “Avengers” movie, although we did get a dose of Marvel’s cosmic characters. Particularly when Thanos shows up in the credits.

And of course, the Skrulls figured into the “Avengers” movie as the Chitauri, a disguised version of our favorite galactic marauders.

So maybe we’re inching toward a big-screen version of the classic comic storyline.

In the meantime, we can enjoy the original, which has been reprinted as a trade paperback a few years ago. The full-color paperback really emphasizes the artistry of Adams, one of my favorites.

 

Holy Avengers! Fan sculpture of Clark Gregg as the Vision

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Never let it be said fans don’t back up their fondest movie wishes with some incredible reality.

Above is a photo of what looks like a sculpture done by an artist identified as bhsxf on the website http://www.therpf.com.

Not surprisingly, it’s a more … human vision of the android Avenger than we might expect. Not the most human we’ve ever seen him, however:

But wow, is it cool.

Someone get hold of Joss Whedon STAT!

 

Joss Whedon, Galactus and ‘Avengers 2’

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As some online sites are breaking news that Disney has announced that Joss Whedon will be back to direct “The Avengers 2” – and that’s probably not a total surprise – others are pulling back from recent reports that Marvel/Disney is agreeing to a trade with 20th Century Fox that would allow some “cosmic” characters like Galactus and Silver Surfer – currently part of Fox’s “Fantastic Four” film franchise, and thus outside Marvel’s movie sandbox – to appear in Marvel films.

First, some explanation: Before Marvel was making its own films, the company farmed out the rights to its (at the time) biggest characters to other studios. Fantastic Four and X-Men went to Fox, with very mixed results. So did Daredevil, who turned up in a movie starring Ben Affleck that wasn’t bad. Meanwhile, Spider-Man and his supporting characters went to Columbia/Sony.

The separation of characters has been frustrating in small ways. The reporter character in the “Daredevil” movie worked – in the comics at least – for The Daily Bugle, Peter Parker’s employer. But they didn’t use that paper’s name in the movie because all that Spidey stuff was elsewhere.

There’s been some speculation that the movie rights to some of these characters would eventually revert to Marvel and we might see – as was rumored months ago – Spider-Man in an “Avengers” movie. But that’ll happen only if the competing studios stop making new films.

So Fox has ordered up a new “Fantastic Four” movie and hired “Chronicle” director Josh Trank to make it. Similarly, Sony/Columbia rebooted “The Amazing Spider-Man” this summer in part to keep that character from reverting to Marvel’s control.

But when Thanos, Marvel’s death-loving cosmic villain, showed up at the end of “The Avengers” this summer, it was obvious that Marvel had some cosmic-sized plans for its movies. The announcement that Marvel will make a “Guardians of the Galaxy” movie – whose characters are prime foes for Thanos – for 2014 only confirms the space-bound plans for Marvel’s movies.

While I doubt that more than a handful of people know the real truth, reports are now circulating that although Fox might have wanted more time to get its “Daredevil” reboot going, that doesn’t mean that Galactus, the Silver Surfer or other characters overseen by Fox will show up in a future “Avengers” or “Guardians” movie.

Much as we might hope that’s the case.

If anybody knows who’s coming over to whose playhouse, it’s likely to be Joss Whedon. After “The Avengers” made $1.5 billion worldwide, I’m guessing Marvel offered Whedon whatever he wanted for the sequel. And while there’s no doubt a big paycheck in the deal, Whedon – a lifelong geek who has written X-Men comics – would no doubt like to have some of those cosmic characters to play with.

Maybe he’s even expecting it. He ended “The Avengers” with one of those star-spanning baddies, after all.

Happy birthday ‘The Shadow’

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It’s the birthday of our favorite sinister, scary pulp magazine hero. This week in 1930, the character of “The Shadow” was created to serve as narrator of the “Detective Story Magazine” radio show.

On July 31, 1930, “The Shadow” made his debut on the air. The character caught on and publishing house Street and Smith hired Walter Gibson to write a series of pulp magazine stories that debuted in April 1931. He wrote under the name Maxwell Grant.

The character had a fabulously complicated story and history – even multiple secret identities – and enjoyed decades in the pulps and on the radio.

The character has been brought back periodically for comic books, which is appropriate since much about him – his fearsome reputation among crooks, his long cape-like cloak – influenced other famous characters like Batman, not unlike Doc Savage influenced Superman.

Besides a series of movies in the 40s, the character got a big-screen treatment in 1994 in a movie starring Alec Baldwin. It wasn’t bad but was far from a hit.

I’ve noted before my admiration for “The Shadow.” While the pulp stories are fairly typical of their time – and maybe not as good as the best of “Doc Savage” or “The Avenger” – the images of the character are undoubtedly iconic.

So happy birthday Shadow!

 

‘Dark Knight Rises’ review and spoilers

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I didn’t expect to like “The Dark Knight Rises” as much as I did.

The conclusion to director Christopher Nolan’s Batman saga – and make no mistake, this is a conclusion, as well as a new beginning – has sounded a little frustrating from the word go. Nolan’s well-known aversion to the more comic-bookish aspects of the Batman legend has irritated me a bit. Sometimes his decision to play it realistic worked quite well (Heath Ledger’s Joker). Sometimes it just seemed like a case of an embarrassed auteur ashamed to be playing around with comic books.

“Batman Begins” worked in Nolan’s realistic world, particularly as it established the mechanics of how a driven billionaire would become a street-fighting vigilante. “The Dark Knight” elaborated on that premise and at times seemed more like a gritty heist and robbery cop movie than a superhero movie. But it worked.

“The Dark Knight Rises,” as everyone knows by now, opens eight years after Batman has been framed for the murder of District Attorney Harvey Dent. As we saw at the end of “The Dark Knight,” Batman and Commissioner Jim Gordon agreed that to martyr Dent, who had slipped into madness and become Two Face, and make Batman a criminal was the best way to bring peace to Gotham City.

In the new movie, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has become a recluse with bad knees, coming out of the rebuilt Wayne Manor only when Bane (Tom Hardy) attacks the Gotham Stock Exchange and Selina Kyle, a cat burglar with a great shtick, gets mixed up in the action.

At about two hours and 45 minutes, “The Dark Knight Rises” is long but doesn’t feel like it. The movie has some pretty nifty action scenes and some that are uncomfortably similar to the real-life tragedy that took place in Aurora, Colorado, a couple of nights ago. Scenes of Bane’s bad guys walking into crowded rooms and opening fire might make you squirm.

“The Dark Knight Rises” is intense and brutal and definitely not for kids.

So what worked and what didn’t work about the movie?

Spoilers ahead. Seriously.

What worked:

The character relationships. Alfred and Bruce. Batman and Jim Gordon. Even Batman/Bruce’s banter with Anne Hathaway’s Selina Kyle – and her roguish, you’re-never-quite-sure-of her-allegiance stance, which could have been corny but wasn’t – felt just right. So did her badass, “I can do this” attitude.

Batman’s words of wisdom: During the movie, Nolan foreshadows the change that’s coming by showcasing Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s earnest police officer John Blake. I mean, he’s an orphan, for goodness sake. And at one point he discards a gun after killing a man. (He does arm himself later, however.) But of all the telling instances pointing to John Blake’s ultimate destiny, the most interesting is a scene in which Batman tells Blake that he wears a mask not to protect himself but to protect those that he cares about.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Oh man, how Nolan kept all of us guessing for months about the role that Gordon-Levitt was playing. Would be be a bad guy? Would he be Robin? Nightwing? Azrael? By the end of the movie, it was obvious Nolan intended for Blake to carry on in Bruce Wayne’s boots. The clincher? Blake’s real name was Robin. And how about the ending in which Blake, working from directions given him by Batman, finds the Batcave and steps on a platform which rises under him? Future Dark Knight Rising, anyone?

Returning characters: Jonathan Crane, AKA Scarecrow, and most importantly Liam Neeson as Ra’s al Ghul, made this feel like a circle-completing movie. I totally understand why Nolan didn’t want to bring the late Heath Ledger back as the Joker even though I’m sure there were many ways he could have done so. Still, seeing Crane and Ra’s al Ghul made me want something … just a little something … to acknowledge the Joker.

The ending. It was obvious that Nolan intended to take his Christian Bale Bruce Wayne/Batman off the chess board before Warner Bros. could sully the character with any Justice League or Batman vs. Superman movies. I didn’t seriously think Nolan would kill Bruce Wayne off, but he did something just as dramatic: He retired him. And, for the most part, it felt right. And it made me glad that they did it in a way that ushered in a new Batman.

What didn’t work:

Batman’s eight-year absence. So after lifelong friend Rachel dies at the hands of the Joker in “The Dark Knight,” Bruce – motivated not only by grief but the idea that the law-abiding people of Gotham no longer need him – decides to become a recluse and STOP FIGHTING CRIME? No. No way in the world. The implausibility might have been lessened, to some extent, if we had seen a montage of scenes of Batman up on a fire escape, ready to swoop in if a mugger approached a family in one of Gotham’s most notorious alleys, only to realize he was no longer needed.

And doesn’t Batman’s hiatus contradict one of the premises of this movie? For eight years Gotham has been a peaceful place. So Bane traps most of Gotham PD underground (and don’t even get me started on how stupid it was to send all the cops – all of them – into the sewers) and the peaceful people of Gotham City decide to riot?

Bane. It’s a sign of how strong the rest of “The Dark Knight Rises” is that the movie works despite the fact that Bane is the weakest villain of the three movies. Even the Scarecrow was a better character. Sure, Bane is a tough guy and a good fighter. But Ledger’s Joker gleefully killed guys like that in “The Dark Knight.” And having Liam Neeson return as Ra’s al Ghul, even in a dream sequence and in the person of a good younger double, just emphasized how much more interesting his character was compared to Bane.

Tom Hardy. Sorry, Tom. How many ways did you detract from this movie? Maybe it was the truly bizarre mask. Or the fact that you’re just not big enough to be Bane. Or maybe, just maybe, it was the bizarre accent that too often sounded like, as some Internet wit pointed out, Darrell Hammond’s hilarious impersonation of Sean Connery on those old “Saturday Night Live” takeoffs on “Jeopardy.”

“The Dark Knight Rises” was a good finale to Nolan’s Batman tale. He did a good job and made the character memorable. Now I’m ready for some Marvel Comics-style universe building for the DC comics movie universe.

New ‘Man of Steel’ trailer: Huh?

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My first reaction when I saw this weekend’s “Man of Steel” trailer for Zack Snyder’s revisiting of the Superman franchise was that it didn’t look like a trailer for a “Superman” film.

What is this, Zack Snyder and Chris Nolan’s big-screen version of “The Deadliest Catch?”

If you haven’t seen the trailer, the preview is filled with shots of foggy landscapes, a kid running around in the yard outside his house and a bearded guy hitchhiking and working on a fishing boat. (The bearded guy, of course, is Henry Cavill, the star.)

Only at the end, after the “Man of Steel” title, do we get a “Chronicle”-like glimpse of Superman streaking through the sky, breaking the sound barrier.

The trailer raises a lot of questions, most of them about the choices Warner Bros., Nolan and Snyder have made about the movie and how they’re going to market it.

Why, why, why another retelling of the story from the beginning? Are filmmakers unable to resist the mythology of the death of Krypton and Clark’s Smallville years? Haven’t we seen this already, more than enough times?

Are they playing the “Amazing Spider-Man” game? The makers of that recent movie tried hard to convince us there was an untold story to Peter Parker’s parents and his origin. There really wasn’t one. Is the point of this movie (and trailer) to create the impression that the few early scenes in which Clark struggles with the decision about what to do with his powers are as important as what he does later? Isn’t that a dangerous game considering we all KNOW what he does later? Wouldn’t that be like devoting half of a movie to Sherlock Holmes’ dithering about whether to become a detective or a blacksmith?

Who is Clark imitating? When Clark is running around his yard using a red towel for a cape, who is he imitating? Really? In Nolan’s one-superhero world, why would young Clark possibly be wearing a cape before he becomes Superman? And are we supposed to believe that the down-home Kansas Kents would have red bath towels?

Wait, Superman can fly? Really, the build-up in the trailer is to a shot of Superman flying? Is that considered the most impact-full image of Superman they can present? Or a feeble attempt to reassure us that, yes, all that pretty but meandering footage we’ve already shown you is from a Superman movie.

I’ll go see this next May, despite this seriously bungled early marketing attempt and my misgivings, previously noted, about the “edgy” tack they’re apparently taking.

But so far I don’t have a good feeling about “Man of Steel.”

‘Dark Knight Rises’ spoilers? We’ll know soon

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I haven’t yet seen “The Dark Knight Rises” and I won’t even see it when it opens Friday because of a prior commitment. So almost everyone reading this will know before I do if there’s any truth to the spoilers circulating in the last couple of days.

In other words, keep in mind I have no idea if these spoilers are true. But based on what I’m reading, at least some of them are pretty accurate.

Oh yeah – SPOILERS!

The movie’s ending indicates more adventures of the Dark Knight are going to happen. We already know Warner Bros. wants to reboot the character after Christopher Nolan finishes his trilogy. The studio would love to build to a billion-dollar Justice League movie.

So after months of speculation that Joseph Gordon-Levitt would inherit the Batmantle in this movie … early indications sure make it sound like that happens, at least in some respects. Some reviews have outright said the ending sets up an “offshoot” movie, which certainly makes it sound like a continuation that isn’t another movie about Bruce Wayne.

A villain returns … but not the one you might think. Although the Joker survived “The Dark Knight,” Heath Ledger’s untimely death made it impossible for him to make even a small appearance in the movie. Rumors persisted that Nolan would include Ledger nonetheless, perhaps through unused footage or CGI.

Nolan is saying this week that Ledger is not in the new movie in any form. But early indications are that Cillian Murphy returns as the Scarecrow for at least one scene.

Batman bites the dust? Considering that in the comics Bane breaks Batman’s back and puts him out of commission for a while, everybody expected something dire to happen in this movie.

But I’m thinking David Letterman was kidding when, in a recent interview with Anne Hathaway (Selina Kyle in the movie), he says that Batman gets killed. Anyone who watches Letterman – who, during his days as a weatherman in Indianapolis forecast “hail the size of canned hams” – knows that’s typical of his humor.

I do believe that “The Dark Knight Rises” brings Bruce Wayne’s story to an end. I just don’t think the movie kills him off.

We’ll see this Friday. Well, at least some of us will.