I drew a couple of tiny backup strips for the letter-column pages of "Serenity: Float Out" -- Dark Horse's new "Firefly"-universe comic book, written by Patton Oswalt and illustrated by Patric Reynolds.
"Float Out" hits stores around June 2. I think fans are really gonna dig how Oswalt and Reynolds tell their story, which celebrates the life of wisecracking pilot Hoban "Wash" Washburne.
The little scamp hastily sketched above may have something to do with my backup comic -- only in the Dark Horse book, there's more color and less singing.
Thanks to Dark Horse editor Scott Allie for the opportunity. _______
During the Friday, May 28 "Cort and Fatboy" broadcast, we talked about the "Lost" finale -- which I foolishly watched without seeing most of the preceding TV series -- and "Prince of Persia."
Also: I've "got a comic in a comic so you can read while you read. The Final Five: Spidey version. How a potential Bilbo became a definite Wheelchair Charlie. SyFy lamentations.... and the glories of Frank Darabont's 'The Mist' are revisited."
"Prince of Persia" turns into noisy, "Mummy"-sequel nonsense fairly early in its run -- but it starts well.
After some voiceover narration blathering about people being "linked across time" and "destiny" and it being "a long time ago" and all that rot, we meet the Persian army ("fierce in battle, wise in victory") as they're about to invade a holy city. In the movie's amusingly ham-fisted attempt at social commentary, we learn the Persian king has faulty intelligence that the city is producing weapons of mass destruction -- i.e., really cool swords -- and so he's sent his three sons to put a stop to it and string a "Mission Accomplished" banner across the parapets, or something.
The invasion of the city is a swashbuckling good time. The king's adopted son, former street orphan Prince Dastan (Jake Gyllenhaal), leads a rough-hewn black-ops squad into the city over the back gate. I liked the idea of this two-fisted, bickering and quite possibly drunk crew of warriors, and for a while, the movie's a fun throwback to the sword-and-sandal B-pictures I loved as a kid -- with lots of leaping and smirking and quipping and bombastic music, marked by a sort of goofy self-aware old-Hollywood charm in which "exotic" is an English accent. (It's a sort of Cost Plus World Market fake exotica.) I half expected young Tony Curtis to pop up somewhere with an apocryphal pompadour.
Unfortunately, the movie's charm starts wearing off right around the time the holy city's Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton) enters the picture. Dastan is suddenly framed for murder -- and without a moment's discussion, he and the captive princess go on the lam while also trying to protect a mystical dagger that can turn back time.
After that, the movie turns into a series of frenetic but boringly staged chase scenes, with interludes of boy-girl bickering and double-crossing and CGI and increasingly hard-to-follow exposition about the magic dagger and how it works. The movie never really changes its rhythm -- so everything kind of looks and sounds and feels the same until it finally just grinds you down with its sheer dull busy-ness, much like a "Pirates of the Caribbean" sequel.
Walt Disney Pictures and producer Jerry Bruckheimer adapted "Prince of Persia" (subtitle: "The Sands of Time") from a video-game series that's been around since 1989. Given that Disney and the Bruck successfully adapted the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie from an old boat ride featuring animatronic puppets, I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, this time around, they didn't add enough of the crucial ingredient -- humor -- that made the first "Pirates" work so well.
The "banter" between the lovely (if decidedly non-Persian) Gyllenhaal and Arterton is boring; their chemistry feels forced. Director Mike Newell ("Four Weddings and a Funeral," "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire") stages action scenes that are competent and fast-moving, but also generic -- he just isn't particularly interesting as choreographer of large-scale mayhem. And the mythology of the supernatural dagger is both over-explained and mildly confusing, to the degree that the film's climactic battle just feels like a bunch of computer-generated white noise.
Some of this might be forgiven if "Prince of Persia" provided Jack Sparrow levels of quotable comic relief, but that character simply doesn't exist in this dojo. Alfred Molina gets a few laughs as an "entrepreneur" making his living running ostrich races, but he and his wacky knife-throwing crew aren't in the movie enough to turn the tide.
In a candid promotional interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Newell jokingly shared his own fears about the picture, saying: "Making it homogenous is a terrible danger. If I'm in the mood to be hyper self-critical, I would say perhaps I allowed [the movie] to become a little homogenous, but I'm not sure. Then again, I hope people are being entertained at such speed, with such vigor and inventiveness that I'm actually wrong about that fact. Or that they don't notice."
Unfortunately, I noticed. And I suspect I won't be alone in noticing. _____
(116 min., rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action)Grade: C
Remember that convenience-store Klingon I drew a few weeks back? It's one of several illustrations by different comics folk in Robots Tell Lies -- a forthcoming book of short stories by my pal Ian Smith.
Well, now you can download a preview chapter from Robots Tell Lies. The story happens to be the one I illustrated, "The Klingon." In keeping with much of Ian's writing, it's a funny/sad read. There are endnotes and remembrances of lost geek supremacy. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the book.
During the Friday, May 21 "Cort & Fatboy" podcast, we talk about the surprisingly raunchy-funny "MacGruber"; Fats and I disagree a bit about the merits of "Shrek Forever After"; and we observe "The Empire Strikes Back"'s 30th birthday.
Also: Pac-Man, Looney Tunes, aging nerds, moviegoing memories, a particularly biting Kate Beaton comic and my colon.
"Shrek Forever After" falls into a category that's hard to write about passionately: "Competent Family Entertainment."
It's the fourth (and supposedly final) film in DreamWorks' animated series about Mike Myers' loveable ogre/licensing juggernaut. Like "Shrek the Third," it has the easy, forgettable comfort-food vibe of a TV-series episode. It juggles its now-enormous cast pretty well. There's a funny bit where a flat-voiced kid at a birthday party keeps asking Shrek to "do the roar." It coasts a bit, but it's slick, and enough jokes and characters connect that you can't quite dismiss it out of hand.
This time, the story riffs on "It's a Wonderful Life." Shrek, bored by family responsibility, has a mid-life-crisis and stupidly signs a contract with Rumpelstiltskin (well-voiced by animation artist Walt Dohrn). The terms: Shrek gets a magical "day off" to relive his days as a single ogre, and Rumpelstiltskin gets to delete a day from Shrek's past.
Of course, in fairy-tale fashion, the deal gets twisted -- and Shrek suddenly finds himself in an alternate universe where Rumpelstiltskin is king, everything's awful and he was never born. Can Shrek re-woo Fiona (Cameron Diaz) and find the exit clause in his magical contract before he ceases to exist at daybreak?
It's a decent idea, and the filmmaking team has a wicked good time screwing with the cast in the alternate universe -- which is frankly a lot more fun to watch than the universe where all the best drama wrapped up two movies ago and Fiona lectures Shrek about family responsibility. In the alternate universe, witches patrol the skies, Fiona leads an underground army of ogres, the Pied Piper is a Boba Fett-style bounty hunter, the king's palace is a giant disco, Donkey (Eddie Murphy) gets whipped for kicks, Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas) is morbidly obese and (best of all) the Gingerbread Man is forced to fight circus-animal cookies in a gladiator arena. (I could have watched a whole movie of Gingy Spartacus.)
"Shrek 4" is at its best when it's sadistically doing these character remixes; you can feel the filmmakers' glee at getting to shrug off story continuity and make a mess. Unfortunately, the movie sort of grinds to a halt whenever Shrek gets maudlin about what he's lost and rhapsodizes about family values and true love, with sad music welling on the soundtrack and (I kid you not) a tiny ogre tear running down his cheek. Personally, by film's end I kind of didn't want to go back -- hoping against hope that this was an Abrams "Star Trek"-style reboot.
But, again, it's really hard to get worked up about any of this. Here's what I mean when I call this hugely popular series "forgettable": Until I searched my hard drive, I'd completely spaced that I reviewed -- and sort of liked -- "Shrek the Third" back in 2007. Here's what I wrote then: "'Shrek' films are ultimately just the tip of a large merchandising iceberg.... They're crassly funny in the most inoffensive way possible, and they're the best-made embodiment of what's wrong with corporate Hollywood animation: voice-casting based on celebrity rather than talent, pop-culture references in lieu of actual jokes, bland affirmations in lieu of driving ideas, and forgettable pop songs."
That's probably a little mean, and it's worth noting that DreamWorks has upped its game considerably since 2007, with charming, narratively strong flicks like "Kung Fu Panda" and "How to Train Your Dragon." "Shrek Forever After" lacks the thrills and emotional heft of "Dragon" -- the best family film of 2010 thus far -- but it's a solid end to the series, and I suspect it will move a respectable number of tie-in Happy Meals. _____
"The Exploding Girl" is a small film about a fragile person. Ivy (Zoe Kazan) is an epileptic college student visiting her mother on a break. Ivy's safe-male friend Al (Mark Rendall) is crashing on Ivy's couch for the week. Al nurses a quiet crush on Ivy -- even as Ivy is quietly twisted in knots as her boyfriend slowly dumps her via cell phone.
And that's about it. "The Exploding Girl"'s conversations are self-consciously inarticulate, its moments mostly mundane. It's a movie made of un-Hollywood languid bits, many of them shot at a remove. But "Girl" works as a minimalist, occasionally quite lovely little vibe-piece -- with writer/director Bradley Rust Gray using all those tiny moments to build a slow, cumulative emotional suspense in which the payoff isn't much more than a couple of gestures.
Kazan makes this exercise worthwhile with her oddly compelling performance. On the surface, Ivy seems to be doing little more than mumbling, walking, making phone calls and staring into space. But Kazan has a gift for letting you see her think, even when she's perfectly still; the film's title refers to the ferocious trauma happening between Ivy's ears and her silent struggle to keep it in check. _____
(79 min., unrated, playing in Portland at the Hollywood Theatre)Grade: B
UPDATE: Now you can read the whole thing online as a nice linear webcomic. Or you can download a 16-page PDF of the "live comics adaptation" booklet I made for the "Barber of Seville" cast and crew.
____________
Tonight (Friday, May 7), barring disaster, I'm going to try and draw a "live comics adaptation" of Portland Opera's production of "The Barber of Seville" as part of their regular "Blogger Night at the Opera" promotion.
During today's "Cort and Fatboy" podcast, we talked about "Iron Man 2" and traded some odd insults. Also discussed: new "Inception" and "Super 8" trailers, questionable fan-film ideas, how to save your TV show from cancellation, and much more.
