X-Men: First Class stacked the deck in my favor: I am an enthusiast of all things sixties. I love superhero movies when they’re grounded and stay focused on the characters. I love historical fiction that cooks up an outlandish and crazy explanation for events that actually happened without re-writing history.

X-Men: First Class is the bomb. It’s not good enough to crack my personal all-time top five like Spider-Man 2 did, but it’s definitely the best superhero movie since The Dark Knight.

There were two major things wrong with it, but those two things don’t take away from the enjoyment of it. First, January Jones is way out of her depth here. She seems too much like she’s having fun and impressed with herself over hanging out with Kevin Bacon to actually get down to the business of acting. That said, I didn’t really think about this until after I got home, but that could just be a testament to how good a job the wardrobe department did on Ms. Jones’ Emma Frost costume.  Yowza!

The other problem ended up not being a problem at all. The X-Men who are assembled for the team’s first roster are a collection of characters so lame and with such shitty powers that I had to wonder if they’re really out of cool characters to include in these movies.  But thinking about it later I realized that using crappy B & C-tier characters was a brilliant way to keep the focus squarely on Professor X and Magneto.

The standout performances in this movie are Kevin Bacon as lead villain Sebastian Shaw and Michael Fassbender as Magneto. Bacon is so fun to watch, you get the feeling that he hasn’t enjoyed making a movie this much in a long time. Even saddled with a bunch of lames for a crew, he is a menacing villain and he’s an important part of all of the most satisfying moments of the movie. Fassbender gives the movie its dramatic oomph. His Magneto is the most realistic and committed performance of the film. Watching him on his revenge quest is the main thing that keeps this movie feeling like a real movie and not just some junk to give the fanboys something to natter about (like Marvel movies have a tendency to do lately in the run-up to the Avengers movie).

X-Men: First Class is one of those movies where the more I thought about it later, the more I liked it. It’s a good example of how these kinds of movies can take risks and be proper cinema but still be satisfying as summer entertainment. Watching it, I was afraid that it’s going to be too highbrow for the general audiences coming to it from Thor, but I hope it’s a big hit because I really want to see the next one.

Special thanks to the two people behind the scenes who were why I was able to catch the advance screening!

TRON: LEGACY is the kind of movie I would like to review after seeing it again, maybe even a couple more times. There are textures and nuances that are easy to overlook when you’re assessing it as popcorn escapism, and I have a couple of gripes with it that I would like to dig deeper into to find out if I missed something.

Tron: Legacy is a good movie. Despite a few bad reviews appearing online, it delivers on all of the levels that it needs to. It’s high-energy, loud, exciting, visually arresting, and gives you the comfortable and familiar in a new and original way.

But is it a great movie? Is it a classic?

First and foremost, Tron: Legacy is visual splendor (and gets a lot of mileage out of how fun & unique it is to look at). You could literally hear the gasps in the audience at certain moments. If you go back and take a look at the 1982 original, you have to agree that a revisit of this material was in order. Tron (1982) is charming as an artifact of it’s time, but it’s hideously dated and almost hurts to look at it. The world has finally caught up with it now and instead of sharp, jarring, and angular, the world inside the computer is graceful, elegant, and sexy.

And it’s not just the computer graphics that make this movie so engrossing. 3D is such a gimmick right now, but Tron: Legacy uses 3D to make the movie a richer experience in much the same way that The Wizard of Oz did with its use of color. It’s not just about making something flashy, but using flash itself as a device in service of the story and the experience.

To say that Tron: Legacy gets by on ripping off plot devices and motifs you’ve seen a bunch of times before kind of misses the point. We are talking about a product of the Hollywood event machine, after all. But we live in a remixed & mashed up world and part of the fun of Tron: Legacy is catching the samples, like when you’re listening to mid-90s hip hop. You’re going to recognize Star Wars, The Fifth Element, The Matrix, & The Dark Knight, but I was also picking up traces of Triumph of the Will, Ziggy Stardust, and the Busby Berkeley musicals of the 1930s.

Any criticism of the story, script, and acting are rendered moot for me by the fact that I was so hypnotized and enchanted by this movie that I was literally pumping my fist, stomping on the floor, and calling out in response to it. I remember a moment when I accidentally glanced at my watch. I had been so caught up that I could feel the illusion shatter, and I was sad that I was taken out of the movie for even that brief second. It’s terrifically hard for me to relax enough to lose myself fully in a movie so when it happens, it’s a rare treat (I think Spider-Man 2 was the last time I caught myself talking to the screen).

So often these event movies treat their ‘story bits’ like a conveyor belt to the next action sequence but when they’re done well, these kinds of epic tales are my favorite kind of entertainment . In Tron: Legacy it’s all as epic and Shakespearean as you would expect, but what’s masterful is the marrying of 21st century sensibilities with those classic archetypes and themes. Taking place within the world of tech, computers, and the Internet, this feels like they’ve made a blockbuster action movie for people living the app life (though I kind of wish that we would have got to see how Social Media is personified in Tronland).  But as an active member of that tribe, maybe I’m biased and that’s why I’m apt to forgive the movie’s flaws.

And Tron: Legacy certainly is flawed. Most notably, as good as the computer graphics in these movies are, they’re still not up to the task of making a completely believable person. We see Jeff Bridges both as he looks now, and as he looked in 1982 when the original Tron took place. It works when we’re in the computer world because everything’s supposed to be computery but a flashback scene that takes place in 1989 just doesn’t hold up. There are a couple of lingering questions along the lines of “wait a minute, where did they get those from?” and a whole thing I don’t get about how a driver can take her vehicle “off grid” if the world inside the computer is itself the grid. But right now those are kind of nit-picky things that do not take away from my enjoyment of the movie.

Tron: Legacy has it’s shortcomings but if a baseball player is the greatest home run champion of all time, you’re still going to want to see him in action even if he’s not so good at playing shortstop. Tron: Legacy is the best 3D movie experience yet. While flawed, it’s so fresh and groundbreaking technically that it stands out as Art in a way that other movies coming from the video games & comic books scene do not.

BONUS: Check out this vlog from an advance screening of Tron: Legacy in Toronto…

As I type this, it’s almost three in the morning and I have stayed up later than I should to watch the last disc of the Freaks & Geeks complete series DVD box set. I’m about to watch the last episode and I feel kind of silly, but I’m actually really sad that after this one, it’s going to be all over.

Watching the 18 episode complete series, I’ve grown to love these characters. I was shouting at Sam to go for it when he had the chance to kiss Cindy. I winced when Lindsay crashed her parents’ car. And even though I knew damn well they weren’t going to kill him off, I couldn’t help it: I nearly wept when Bill went to the hospital (and I wanted so badly to beat the shit out of Alan for putting that peanut in his sandwich). I am so engrossed in the world of the show that I almost can’t believe that this was a television series. It feels like a really long movie or a visual novel or something.  And while we’re here, let me just say that watching Busy Phillips as Kim Kelly feels like watching a real person.  I would almost venture to call it the best acting job I have ever seen.

It’s no surprise to me that Freaks and Geeks was cancelled before the first season finished airing. It’s too good for TV. And on top of that, I can’t believe that it ever made it past the television censors with its realistic portrayal of family life and teenage angst. Between the language, nearly explicit depiction of drug use, allusions to underage drinking, and frank portrayal of high school sex and relationships, this is not what anyone would expect to find when flipping through the channels of broadcast television.

It would have been nice for Freaks and Geeks to continue, just for the nod to the cast and creators for a job well done. But then it probably would have been less special. As it is, Freaks and Geeks is a work of Art. It’s flawless. And it’s no wonder that almost everyone involved in the making of it went on to become a huge star.

I have dreamed of working on a Judd Apatow production for years. I already thought he was one of the most brilliant and tuned-in creators working in any medium. But now I see that he’s a true Artist.

I am going to miss the Weirs and all of their friends.

Check out this video from techvibes.com in which they interview me about vlogging, Toronto, networking, and keeping a daily schedule.

And below, watch my vlog from the day that this interview took place!  See in their interview when I’m all “I’m vlogging you right now”??  Now see that vlog!!

After watching the documentary film DEEP WATER, I was compelled to create my own artistic retelling of the 1968 race to be the first man to perform a solo, non-stop circumnavigation of the globe by sea.

Watch the video above for the story, and then enjoy a closer look at the drawings from the video below…

The Easter Bunny has come!  And instead of leaving me a chocolate replica of himself, he’s posted Plinkett’s in-depth review of Star Wars: Episode Two – Attack of the Clones on YouTube.

Plinkett is the name of the reviewer who made news last year by posting a 70-minute critique of The Phantom Menace.  Now he’s topped it by posted and even more elaborate, even longer 90-minute review of Attack of the Clones.  You’re probably hearing those running times and thinking that there’s no way they can be entertaining enough to warrant those lengths, but I dare you to start watching the first part of his Episode One review and not get sucked right into it.  Go ahead.  Here it is:

Watching Plinkett’s reviews has got me all fired up again, remembering some of my feelings about the prequel trilogy:

• I call bullshit on George Lucas from Jump Street.  Episode One proved that he’s full of shit about having the whole long story worked out ahead of time.  It’s like that myth that Sylvester Stallone was homeless before writing and starring in Rocky – a good story that feeds the mythology, but is utter bullshit.  He might have had a couple of ideas randomly floating around, but my impression from Episode One is that George Lucas bought into his own hype, took it for granted that a prequel trilogy was going to be earth-shakingly awesome, and then went “oh shit, I’d better think of something!” when he got to where he had to shoot something for the release to be on time.
• Episode Two should have been Episode One.  It plays like it’s the beginning.  There’s no reason whatsover to show us Anakin Skywalker as a child, except that George Lucas was rushing to get one movie done instead of thinking out the whole trilogy ahead of time.  But the inverse scenario can also be a problem, which is the reason why Iron Man, as great as it is, is not the classic that it almost was.  It’s also the reason why the Hulk movie was a dud.  In those two cases, the reason is that they’re so focused on building up towards a posse-cut team up Avengers movie that they’re scrimping on making the individual movie something that stands alone.  I guess you can’t win on this one.
• What’s up with the pervy romance angle?  Amidala is a grown woman in the first one.  Even if she’s only supposed to be sixteen or so, Anakin is about ten.  Then suddenly Anakin is all grown up, and nothing suggests that Amidala is any older than she was in the first movie.  But even if they had cast another actress in the role to play Amidala ten years later, there’s still nothing to suggest why a little boy grown up a bit is of any interest to a woman who has been Queen and a Senator.
• CGI Yoda is awful.  I understand that he can’t light saber fight if he’s a puppet, but why does he have to look so gross?

Whenever I draw at Free Comic Book Day, a lot of the kids want me to draw them characters from the prequel trilogy and it makes me want to scold their parents for not selling them on the original trilogy.  For shame, parents of today’s youth.

There is one inarguable ‘biggest influence on pop culture’, and that is The Beatles. There are two contenders to the title of biggest influence on pop culture since The Beatles, and those contenders are Jay-Z, and Wu-Tang Clan.

‘Meet The Beatles’ was Inevitable

Both The Wu and J-Hova are central to the mainstream embrace and popularization of hip hop in the 90s and 00s. But until very recently, only Jigga-Man has been blended with The Beatles. When Producer Danger Mouse’s visionary THE GREY ALBUM dropped in 2004, remixing Jay-Z’s entire Black Album with beats made only out of samples from The Beatles’ White Album, it was a sensation that started a variety of trends which would shape popular taste to the present day, and allow both acts to entrench their dominance and influence in ways neither could have predicted.

Now comes Wu-Tang VS Beatles – Enter the Magical Mystery Chambers. This is a mash-up album by DJ Tom Caruana. Upon discovering it, I tweeted that it was my two favorite things in life coming together, and I was extremely happy to report that it is an amazing and richly entertaining album (I personally feel like it’s better than The Grey Album, but that is open to debate and will vary by individual)

An Unlikely Pairing, Unless you Know your Stuff

I thought I was the only one who loved The Beatles and Wu-Tang equally, but Caruana really knows his stuff. The use and juxtaposition of interview clips turns the listening of the record into an education in both groups’ histories, a comparison of their rise to fame, and a celebration of their legacy.

The album samples Beatles songs, solo Beatle songs, and covers of Beatles songs which means that Wu-Tang VS The Beatles presents a much more diverse listening experience than the gimmick might suggest. It’s full of witty and fun pairings, like the piano from You Never Give me Your Money under I’ve Got Your Money, or using You Know My Name (Look Up the Number) for M.E.T.H.O.D. Man. At twenty-seven tracks, it’s a bit big to take in on first listen but if you love these groups anywhere near as much as I do, you will really enjoy listening again and again, uncovering the layers, and seeing your favorites emerge.

Comparisons with The Grey Album – an “instant classic”, according to Professor Siva Vaidhyanathan of NYU – are inevitable, but Wu-Tang VS The Beatles takes the idea to different place than the limited scope of The Grey Album and becomes something very different. It might not end up being as big of an earth-shaker as The Grey Album, if only because The Grey Album was the pioneer in the mash-up album genre.  But Wu-Tang VS The Beatles equals or betters The Grey Album in three key areas:

BETTER THAN THE ORIGINAL VERSIONS:

Encore and 99 Problems on The Grey Album are way better than the original Black Album versions. Here you get similarly superior versions of Labels (remixed with McCartney’s Momma Miss America), Clientele Kidd (using a reggae cover of Live and Let Die), and Uzi (chopping up It’s Getting Better, Skiing from Harrison’s Wonderwall soundtrack, and more), among others.  I’m thinking that there are many fans who love both groups, and this record is an absolute treat for them. And get ready to die of awesomeness when you hear the Wu VS Beatles Outro closing the proceedings.

IT’S GOOD:

It’s one thing to lay some Wu-Tang acapellas over of Beatles songs. It’s another to take the time to make beats out of Beatles songs. It’s yet another to create this insanely detailed, beautifully produced, and eminently replayable sound collage of official release quality.

IT’S EXCITING AND NOVEL:

Technical brilliance and entertainment value are the yin and yang that make or break a project like this. Without one, the other is rendered moot. Wu-Tang VS The Beatles hits both notes with grace, ease, and excitement.

My only complaint about Wu-Tang VS The Beatles: Tom Caruana did it first! I’ve got an idea for a Beatles Meets Wu-Tang project and I never thought others were seeing the parallels that I see.

Download or listen to the album at producer Tom Caruana’s official site - http://www.teasearecords.net/wuvsbeatles

Further reading: check out cover designer Logan Walters’ series re-imagining classic Wu album covers as Blue Note-era sleeves – http://website13156.com/?p=193

What do you think about Wu-Tang VS The Beatles?  A natural fit or an unlikely pairing?

Warning – I’m going to discuss the ending of the movie in this review so if you haven’t seen it and don’t want it spoiled, read no further.

Last night I was in my San Fran pad, thinking about some correspondence I needed to write.  I grabbed a DVD off the rack and put it in the player, expecting that I was going to just have it on as background.  The movie was Closer – a 2004 film by Mike Nichols which is one of the most grown up things I’ve seen in years.  Instead of passively letting it play behind me, I was sucked into it from the first frame and held transfixed until the finale.

The movie succeeds as a summation of the current attitudes and morality regarding love and romance.  What we say we want and what we really want are often two different things, and it is this inability for people to be honest with themselves that causes the characters’ turmoil and distress.

The Dramaits Personae:

Larry (Clive Owen) is one of the two respectable characters in the movie.  He’s a an unapologetic hedonist, but he’s upfront and honest about his intentions.  He knows what he wants, and he doesn’t mind telling you.  His flaw is that once you cross him, he doesn’t let it go.  He has to punish you.

Anna (Julia Roberts) is a bitch whose self-esteem is so low that she can’t handle it when someone loves her.

Dan (Jude Law) thinks he’s slick but he is a fuckin’ douchebag who can’t take Yes for an answer.  When everything is going fine, he need to mess with it and seems actually surprised when how horrible he’s been hurts the people who love him.

Alice (Natalie Portman, looking like a grown-up Mathilda from The Professional for a big chunk of the movie) emerges as the hero, and the only person of the four with any integrity.  She’s the only one who’s got their inner life in order, despite the fact that her past would make most people think she’s got the most problems and needs the most help.

The movie takes place over four years during which we see the beginning and the end but not the middle of relationships between Dan and Alice, then Dan and Anna, then Anna and Larry, then Larry and Alice.  These four people make up a model of the quadrants of the dating public.  I identify most with Alice, and I have dated several of each of the other three types, even though I’m sure you could find people who who would tell you I’m one of them.  I guess it’s one of those things where we can see a little of ourselves in each one of them but at the end of it all, being Alice is all you can hope for – love huge, wear your heart on your sleeve, and let other people deal with their own karma.

One of the most profound moments in the movie, for me, comes late in the film.  Alice and Dan have reunited, and we have every indication that they will live happily ever after until Dan has to go picking at it again.  He’s asking Alice about her interaction with Larry while they were apart.  She’s trying to make him understand that whatever may or may not have happened while they were apart, and were probably never going to see each other again, has no bearing on their life together now.  Dan knows the answer, but he won’t let it go.  He has to hear it from her.  By the time he finally gets her to admit that she had sex with Larry he’s destroyed his and Alice’s future together.  Still not satisfied, he screams at her “Why him??”  Alice, exasperated and crying, screams at him “Because you weren’t there!”  What is with this compulsion we have to punish people for things that have nothing to do with us?  And why do we insist on torturing ourselves with truths that we really don’t want to know, and that ultimately don’t matter in the grand scheme of things?

Other reviews of this movie have concluded that Alice is just as bad as the other characters when we discover her big deception that’s revealed at the end of the movie.  Not me.  I applauded her.  I think this moment reveals her to be the wisest and most grown-up person in the story.  She’s lived some, and she knows what people are like.  She knows how she wants to live and she won’t let anyone make her cynical.  In this world, sharing it with these characters, that’s heroism.

As you saw in recent posts, I was visiting with my buddy Dwayne (drummer for Wildlife) this weekend. While I was there, he asked me if I had seen a film called Into the Wild. I hadn’t even heard of it. Dwayne was very insistent that I take his copy of the DVD home with me and now, moments after it’s ended, I have to wonder if he just thought it was a good movie that I might like or if he knew that he was handing me a mirror.

Into the Wild tells the true life story of Chris McCandless who, right after graduating from university in 1990, set out on a two-year spiritual journey that took him west to California, south to Mexico, and finally north to Alaska where he would pit himself against nature.  He didn’t tell anyone he was going.  He didn’t even take a map or compass.  He destroyed his ID, donated the remainder of his college fund to Oxfam, abandoned his car, and split.

I was left in a very emotional state when the movie was over because the exact same youthful exuberance and yearning for experience & adventure that led Chris to Alaska was the same as what made me quit my job to go be an artist and sell comic books on the street.  I spent the whole movie waiting for the triumphant ending that would reaffirm my belief in ‘buying the ticket and taking the ride’, to paraphrase Dr. Thompson.  I was wholly unprepared for it when it was revealed to have been a true-life cautionary tale, with a photograph of the real Chris McCandless (a self-portrait left undeveloped inside his camera amongst his belongings in his make-shift Alaskan home) the final image of the movie.

A movie couldn’t be as intense as this based on the subject matter alone.  It’s the treatment of the subject matter that is everything.  And in Into the Wild, screenwriter/director Sean Penn has crafted one of the most beautiful, poetic, and graceful movies I have ever seen.  Whether it’s the sweeping grace of the start of Chris’ journey or the jarring unease as his fate slowly reveals itself to him, this movie completely nails the feel of every stage of the journey.  It’s so good because you can tell that Sean Penn was as affected and moved by McCandless’ story as I was, and inspired to do it justice.

One of the most skillful things to have pulled off was to make it so that this is not a sad movie.  This is an inspirational movie.  I want people who see this movie to think about what’s deep down in young men that drives them to want to abandon the world around them and uncover something that’s never been seen before.  Chris did it by going to Alaska.  Other people have done it by becoming writers, starting businesses, or finding a cause worth fighting for.  I hope that you’ll do it your way.

“There’s what you think and then there’s reality” -a wise woman once told me this.

Michael Mann made HEAT and that one ruled. It was a movie about bank robbers and the cops trying to catch them that got really heavy about the personal lives of everyone involved. I have watched Heat so many times I couldn’t even count. It’s the bomb.

PUBLIC ENEMIES is a movie about bank robbers and the cops trying to catch them, directed by the same guy only this one takes place in 1933 during the Great Depression. There’s no reason that PUBLIC ENEMIES shouldn’t have been as good as HEAT. In fact, it could have been better than HEAT because with the whole American ‘economic downtown’ and the comparisons thrown around about now and The Great Depression, it could have been a really cool look into how these kinds of circumstances mold these kinds of people.

But we don’t get any of that. PUBLIC ENEMIES is plot for plot’s sake and that’s it. There are a couple of intense action scenes (none of them the bank robberies) but they’re strung together with soap opera bits of nothing. It’s fun to watch everyone playing dress up and having fun doing the period piece thing, but at no point does anyone give us any reason to care about anything anyone is doing. The characters are never fleshed out into people. I don’t know anything more about John Dillinger now than I did before the movie started. He’s an archetypal old-fashioned bank robber. And Christian Bale is the archetypal cop who’s after him. I’m a fan of 30s pop culture and gangster lore so it’s kind of fun to watch the action scenes and hear the names Frank Niti, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Baby Face Nelson thrown about but I didn’t even know which guy was supposed to be Baby Face Nelson until the last scene he’s in.

Oh, and Giovanni Ribisi is in it. He doesn’t do much and he’s kind of a throwaway but for some reason I always get a kick out of it whenever I see him. I think that started with BOILER ROOM. But we’re not talking about BOILER ROOM. We’re talking about PUBLIC ENEMIES.

The archetypal girl in this movie has nothing to do but fawn over John Dillinger. I get that women are attracted to confidence and power but beyond that we have nothing as to why she would go along with him, and we are given absolutely nothing about why John Dillinger is so interested in and devoted to her. He just seems to pick her out of the crowd and instantly go cuckoo obsessed with her and we don’t know anything about either of them.

The movie looks like it was shot by the cinematographer from Trailer Park Boys. I’m used enough to that digital look in movies but for a movie that takes place in 1933, it absolutely kills the illusion. You can see the make-up and it looks way different when the camera pans than if they had shot it on film. Maybe it was just the digital projection, I don’t know. Regardless, at no point was I able to lose myself in it. I was always conscious of the actors. It never feels like we’re looking at that era the way THE UNTOUCHABLES did.

MIAMI VICE went kind of the same way, giving us no characterization and just plot, shot digitally. But that was sort of the point. It was supposed to play like any random episode of the TV show. It doesn’t work here though, and the whole movie feels like something everyone made to screen test the costumes and see how the period details photograph. It doesn’t feel like a whole movie.

It says a lot about the talent involved that despite these flaws, it’s never boring. It’s fun to look at, especially if you like those 30s cars, clothes, hairstyles, etc. Definitely worth a watch but you can safely wait for the DVD or download it.