Spandex Goes Crossover Crazy

The fifth issue of Martin Eden's excellent "gay superheroes" comic SPANDEX dropped on my doormat last week and it's yet another multicoloured masterpiece. This time, Martin set his sights on the dirge of MEGA-CROSSOVERS that are miring the comics industry, almost as bad as they were back in the late 90s. He sets his sights, he takes aim, and he blows those crappy crossovers to kingdom come. Suffering "event fatigue"? This is the comic for you.

But, as always, Spandex is much more than just a masterly spoof of current comic book trends with twinkly gay bits on top. There's also real depth of characterisation as we learn the secret origins of Spandex leader, Liberty. Great jokes, inventive character ideas, guest stars aplenty (including the return of The O Men - slightly different than we remember them, but longtime fans will be glad to learn Miss Scarlet is still one helluva pistol packing mama!), action, shock plot twists... if every MEGA-CROSSOVER was as much fun as this, the mainstream comics industry would be in a much healthier state.

Buy the latest SPANDEX and you'll also get a free mini-manga featuring Japanese superheroes The J-Team (I can't believe I only just spotted the pun in their name) plus a cool Spandex trading card. And anyone who thinks that tight pair of swimming trunks shown on the penultimate page of Too Much Sex & Violence #1 was TOO MUCH... wait till you see the final page of this comic. It ain't for your granny. (Unless your granny's into... no, let's not go there.)

Go here: Buy Spandex now. That's all.

Evil Advertising McMonsters Hollywoodise My Hometown

I realise that by embedding the above video into my blog, I could be seen to be promoting the company in question... but they're such a ubiquitous Big Evil Corporation that I doubt one extra blogpost will affect their fortunes and if you're daft enough to read this post and go out and buy one of their "cooked meat" in "bread" products as a result... well, more fool you.

Anyway, the new McDimbulbs advert was filmed in Huddersfield. I'm not sure I'd have recognised this had someone not pointed it out to me. If you haven't seen it on your telly-box (I had to youtube it), it involves a young man (they all look young to me these days) singing the old Lerner & Loewe classic 'On The Street Where You Live' while he walks through town to get his McBreakfast. Except this guy has the worst sense of direction - he is in serious need of a SatNav. He begins his journey just outside Big Evil Corporation II, Tesco (ours is The Tesco Time Forgot - the only thing that's changed since it opened in the 80s is the prices). Conveniently though, The TTF has been edited out of the opening shot; we wouldn't want to promote a competitor, would we, McLads?

Anyway, our hero then walks under the grim Northern viaducts, heading in the correct direction (his goal is now about 30 seconds away) before he turns and starts walking back where he just came from. Next he finds himself a few blocks downtown by the Adult Cinema (also conveniently airbrushed out of existence) before walking past a launderette... in Fartown*. Which is a five minute bus ride away. Suddenly, he's on Cross Church Street, and heading in the right direction once again. Someone's even conveniently built an Abbey Road style zebra crossing to help him find his way. I'm surprised they didn't paint arrows on the shop windows too. Once again, he almost reaches his destination... when he detours along a side street packed with market stalls (which must have been blown a couple of blocks north by the strong Pennine winds). He takes time to flirt with a random woman (she's humouring him; she's already seen him walk past three times that morning)... and finally, he's there! Just in time to sink his choppers into one of those infamous "cooked meat" in "bread" combos before the men in the white van arrive to speed him back to the happy place.

It's all filmed in glorious HD technicolour supervision so golden and sunshiny it makes my home town look like Narnia. Now don't get me wrong, Huddersfield is a very nice place (I won't hear a word said against it... unless it's by me). But these aren't the streets where I live. It's Hollywood Huddersfield. I'm surprised he doesn't bump into Tom Hanks on his journey. (Maybe Tom finally heard about my sniper rifle.) Like the majority of advertising, it's one big, fat lie after another. Still... it's better than another repeat of Last of the Summer Wine. Just.

Has Television, Cinema or Evil Advertising ever distorted your hometown beyond all recognition?




(*I should point out to non-locals, this is pronounced "Far-town". Just as the nearby Penistone is pronounced "Penn-is-ton". Sorry.)

Book Review: The Lost Lions by Edward Gorey

Edward Gorey was an American writer / artist who published a number of bizarre, surreal and yet deeply affecting illustrated story books in the latter half of the 20th Century. Many of these have been out of print from a number of years, but new life has been breathed into them by independent publisher Pomegranate.

The Lost Lions (or, Having Opened The Wrong Envelope) tells the story of Hamish, a handsome young man who one day opens the wrong envelope and ends up in the movie business. Suddenly wealthy, he begins to raise lions. But fate has other plans for him...

If you were just to read the text, Hamish's story could take you little more than a minute to get through. Gorey's writing is sparse, a single sentence a page, yet there's much more to his stories than words. The gorgeous pen and ink illustrations that accomplish each sentence contain more depth and emotion than many full-length novels and Gorey draws the cutest lions you ever did see. The ending is enigmatic and thought-provoking and it's the kind of book you'll want to take your time over, savouring every wonderful crosshatched line.

Find out more about Edward Gorey and his newly republished books at the Pomegranate website.

SEEKING JUSTICE (2011)

MyRating: YYY1/2

Director: Roger Donaldson

Cast: Nicolas Cage, January Jones, Guy Pearce, Harold Perrineau, Jennifer Carpenter, IronE Singleton, Xander Berkeley, Marcus Lyle Brown, Cullen Moss

MPAA: Rated R for violence, language and brief sexuality

Will Gerald (Nicolas Cage), a high scool teacher, never knows that his perfect life with her beautiful wife Laura (January Jones) will suddenly go upside down, just after spending their happy time together celebrating their anniversary, when one day Laura is being sexually assaulted by an ex-con.

Feeling anguish, shaken and confused, while his wife is being hospitalized for her badly beaten up condition, Will is approached by a stranger named Simon (Guy Pearce), representing a vigilante group, who offers him a service to seek for justice by 'executing' the person who has attacked his wife. Will just has to say yes, and they will do it for him. Clean and safe. What he has to give in return is only to agree to help them back if any time in the future the group asking him for some 'small' favors. Hesitant but feeling pity for his wife, Will agrees to Simon's offer.

Life seems to slowly back to normal, when six months later Will is being contacted again by Simon, asking him to repay his debt by doing something for his vigilante group. The thing is, what Will has to do is to kill a guy whom the group accused as a pedophile and a danger to the society. On realising that no killing blood is running in his stream, Will knows that he can't do such a thing. But Simon is not easily to let it go and the group cannot accept 'no' for an answer. Soon, Will faces another kind of terror that may endanger his family, which will make him regret to ever accept their offer at the first place.

This is a surprisingly good action thriller from Nicolas Cage, who seemed to stumble in continuously making bad movies for some time. But I assure you, this movie is not one of them. The revenge theme is not something new, and at a glance, this movie may look like another typical crime thriller. But this is actually not just an ordinary revenge movie, as revenge is not something that our main protagonist badly pursuing for here. Rather he is halfly forced to take a revenge by using other people's hands, but still he has to pay for the result of his decision afterwards.

This is a well-made and entertaning movie with a slowly built suspense. Maybe a bit predictable, but I didn't find it reduce my interests towards the movie, as the story flowed smoothly and well-paced, with enough tensions and actions to be enjoyed. The desperate situation of Will colored the plot, made us wonder how he would escape his unfortunate situation. Good direction from Roger Donaldson (Species, Dante's Peak, Thirteen Days, The Recruit, The World's Fastest Indian and The Bank Job). And good acting from Nicolas Cage and Guy Pearce, who appeared pretty solid and gave this movie some weights. While January Jones was okay as the wife (this has been a pretty busy year for this Mad Men actress, after also appearing in Unknown and X-Men: First Class). I don't know when this movie will get a wide release in the U.S., but believe me, it is definitely worth to be checked out. It was a good movie. (MJ)

MYMOVIE CRITIC - REVIEWING MOVIES FROM THE AUDIENCE'S STANDPOINT

Farewell, Smallville

And so I say goodbye to a TV show I've been watching for one whole quarter of my life... though I really don't know why. Unlike the final episodes of Cheers, NYPD Blue and The X-Files which left me in buckets of tears at the loss of an old friend, the overriding sensation at the departure of Smallville was a huge sigh of relief. I can't tell you why I've stuck with this show as long as I have, particularly as what little prime it had was past about five seasons ago. You might think it's because I'm a comics nerd, but I haven't read the DC Universe in years and I've always found Superman the least interesting superhero anywhere. Far too powerful, far too pious, far too meh.

It certainly wasn't the writing that kept me watching either. With a few brilliant exceptions (mostly in the earlier seasons, mostly revolving around the long departed Lex Luthor) pedestrian plotting and preachy, clichéd scripting have been the name of the game for far too long. They could have made it much more interesting had they injected a little edge and - dare I say it - humour, but I guess they didn't think the target audience had much of a funnybone. Not that I'm entirely sure who the target audience was. Smallville began as a teen show but (like the cast) those original viewers would now be in their mid-20s... which I guess goes some way to explain how it evolved into a superhero Gossip Girl.

Strangely enough, I think it might actually be the cast who kept me. Although the show's best actor (Michael Rosenbaum, our AWOL Lex) departed three seasons ago (although he was dragged back kicking and screaming for the preposterous and nonsensical finale) and the show's best character (Allison Mack's divine Chloe Sullivan) has been woefully wasted in recent years... at least they had the good sense to jettison the horrible, ghastly, Queen of Whinge that was Kristin Kreuk (Lana Lang). Late replacements Justin Hartley (Green Arrow, a gormless Bruce Wayne substitute) and Cassidy Freeman (the ludicrously monickered Lu-'Tess'-a Luthor) breathed faint gasps of life into the show's sagging lungs while the final season wisely resurrected the better actors from the longterm supporting cast: Lionel Luthor (a demented John Glover) and Jonathan Kent (Bo Duke).

Most of all though, the two people who kept me watching longer than I ever stuck with Teri Hatcher and Dean Cain... were Lois and Clark. Erica Durance gave Margot Kidder a run for her money as the funniest, spunkiest, karate kicking-est Lois Lane ever... although I never saw Margot Kidder jump out of a cake wearing a bunny girl outfit*. And while Christopher Reeve (who had a recurring cameo on the show before his tragic death in 2004) will always be the one and only screen Superman for me, Tom Welling might well be my Clark Kent. Considering how much mawkish, pretentious, sentimental twaddle he was forced to spew week in and week out, it's a wonder I'm not up in a book depository loading a shotgun right now... and yet, incredibly, Welling pulled it off. He convinced me he was a nice guy. Which you might think is a basic necessity for playing Superman... but you'd be amazed how difficult it can be. I don't suffer me no fools, gladly or otherwise. Plus, the scenes with the ghost of his late father in the final season contained genuine emotion. I was filling up despite myself.

So farewell, Tom and Erica, Allison and Justin, John, Michael and Cassidy, Terence (Stamp!), Annette and Bo Duke. I still don't know why I watched your show as long as I did, but I reckon it must be down to you guys. I hope you all find gainful employment in the future and that your writers have been sent off to read Robert McKee and rue the day they ever set fingers to typewriter. Farewell, Smallville. That's 217 hours of my life (minus fast-forwarded commercial breaks) I'm not getting back...





*Plus, Michael Ironside played her dad. Extra points for that, obviously. Though points are deducted for Teri Hatcher as the late Mrs. Lane.

IN TIME (2011)

MyRating: YYY

Director: Andrew Niccol

Writer: Andrew Niccol

Cast: Justin Timberlake, Amanda Seyfried, Cillian Murphy, Vincent Kartheiser, Alex Pettyfer, Olivia Wilde, Johnny Galecki, Matt Bomer

MPAA: Rated PG-13 for violence, some sexualty and partial nudity, and strong language

Welcome to a world where money is not anymore the ultimate power and the world divides people based on their social class, each to live in a different area called the 'Time Zone'. Money has even ceased to exist, as time now has become the currency. This happens in the future when over-population has become the biggest concern, and to avoid that, humans are being genetically-engineered to stop aging when they reach 25, and then they will stay forever young. The bad news is, once you reach 25, you have only one more year to live, as the greenish phosphorescent digital clock, imprinted in your forearm since you were born, will start counting down and when it reaches zero, your heart will automatically stop pounding. And you die.

 

Your time can be added or bought though, the same way you have to trade some of your time away to pay for your necessities. Your wages are paid with time, the same as you pay for everything with time, whether it is a single public phone call that may cost you one minute, a cup of coffee that may cost you four minutes, or a trip by bus that may cost an hour or more. You also pay all services with time, including paying for a prostitute for 10 minutes of pleasure with 1 hour of your life. You can borrow time from other people, or take loans from banks and pawnshops, but with high 'time' interest rates . You can even gamble your time in order to win more time. And all these trades and exchanges can be done as simple as clasping your hands with others or by scanning a metal time reader to your clock. So simple, that your time can also be easily drained away by robbers. It's a world controlled by the rich, who set the system to benefit them by harvesting decades of time (even milleniums) from the poor, while the poor have to struggle day by day just to earn enough extra time to live for another day, or they may die in the streets at anytime with their time life running out.

That's the kind of life Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) lives, a 28-year old poor young man living in the ghetto with his 50-year old mom (played by Olivia Wilde). Will has managed to live another 3 years of his life as 25, the same as his mother who has lived an additional 25 years as 25, without growing old. When Will receives a huge amount of time gift from a stranger, he starts to get into troubles with a notorious mobster gang called the Minutemen, and when his mother fatally miscalculates the bus fare, Will decides to leave for New Greenwich, a place where the rich live in luxurious, in order to take revenge and uphold justice. There, he meets and falls for a beautiful woman named Sylvia Weis (Amanda Seyfried), a daughter of a rich bankers, Philippe Weis (Vincent Kartheiser). But as he is from the wrong side of the world and as the Timekeepers, lead by Raymond Leon (Cillian Murphy), hunts him on account of murder, Will is again forced to run and he takes Sylvia as hostage. And together, they have to trust and help each other in order to survive in a world where time is not on their side.

This is an interesting and unique science fiction movie from Andrew Niccol, the same director who gave us Gattaca (1997). I think the premise of using time as the ultimate currency, which can shorten or prolong people's lives, was such a fresh and original idea. The movie itself was entertaining. However, by seeing the big potentials that this movie has, I didn't think that the movie reached its full potentials. The story was a bit simplified by the actions that it offered, as I expected for much deeper story. This movie actually could offer more. The simple execution of transferring time through merely clasping hands and the minimum amount of special effects also made this sci-fi look rather simple, which was actually not a bad thing.

Amanda Seyfried was stunningly beautiful in her short brunette wig, which was perfectly suited for her and somehow made her look futuristic. And she has that tempting appearance that made her look so adorable and smokin' hot, running all the way throughout the movie in her sexy dresses and stilettos. Sometimes I couldn't explain the appeals and charms that this actress has, but she just 'has' it, even though I must say that her character was a bit underdeveloped in this movie.

I think Justin Timberlake played his role well as the street-wise young man whose struggles to earn extra time for his life he deserved and his anger towards the system's injustice made him tough enough to do all the risky and dangerous things. However, even though his motives were strong, I think that his character transition from the normal life to the 'live or die' life did not flow that smoothly, which made some of the actions that he took didn't look believable enough (for example, the high risk gambling scene that he was involved in, or the good fighting abilities that he has). Again, it was not about his motives or his drives, but in my opinion, the movie just didn't give enough backgrounds of what he is really capable of when those scenes happened.

Besides the good-looking leads, the supporting casts were also interesting to watch. I think only in this movie we can see Olivia Wilde played as Justin's mother. While Cillian Murphy gave a good performance as the Timekeeper, who judges things as only black or white. Interesting performances also came from Vincent Kartheiser (Pete Campbell from Mad Men) as the greedy time-loaning businessman and Alex Pettyfer (I am Number Four) as the mobster boss who is infamous for stealing other people's time by force.

As much as I enjoyed this movie as I enjoyed the beautiful casts and entertained by the creative premise, however in overall, I think the screenplay and execution from Andrew Niccol was felt a bit short from its very promising premise. I actually expected more and I think it could have been better. (MJ)

MYMOVIE CRITIC - REVIEWING MOVIES FROM THE AUDIENCE'S STANDPOINT

Too Much Sex & Violence... It's A Hit!

Welcome to the northern seaside town of Fathomsby; home to retired super-heroes, monster DJs, mutant prostitutes, pier-owning gangsters, disgruntled policemen and a woman who knows exactly what you're thinking about, whenever you're thinking about...S-E-X.

The reviews are in and the first issue of my new comic, TOO MUCH SEX & VIOLENCE, is a hit! Not an unqualified hit, but I expected a few rough waters because of the comic's ever-changing roster of artists, its at-times dubious subject matter, and the fact that first issues (story set-ups) are a notoriously difficult sell. Still, I think enough people are intrigued by #1 to come back for #2... and that's where we really blow the doors off.

Here's some of the comments I've had so far...

"This may be a freakshow, but it’s a freakshow you can’t take your eyes off... one of those first issues of a series that you finish and immediately want to reread, just to make sure you got everything." (Richard Bruton: writer, Forbidden Planet International.)

"A most enjoyable read... reminded me of Worthing, nicely weird and gripping."

(Glyn Dillon: artist, Deadline; Shade, The Changing Man)

"I quickly forgot I was reading a comic. I was simply reading something well written and expertly put together - there's a lot of talent contained within these 28 pages."

(Martin Pond: writer, Dark Steps)

"...a really engaging and unusual first issue..." (Nicolas Papaconstantinou: writer, Monkey On My Back)

"...extreme shocking for shocks sake is not the purpose of this book but there is at least one eyeball shooting out of its socket to keep it interesting." (Lee Sargent: artist, Quit Your Day Job)

TOO MUCH SEX & VIOLENCE #1 is available to buy for just £2.50 (printed) or £0.99 (pdf download) from this place here. Go buy it now. Or tell your friends to. Then write about it all over the interweb. Go on, I insist.