Category: Feature

Direct Beam Comms #88

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVPosted on

TV

Mr. Mercedes

The AT&T Audience Network series Mr. Mercedes begins in 2009 in a surprisingly gory/disturbing scene with the mass murder of a group of people waiting in line at a job fair during the Great Recession by a killer running them down in a stolen Mercedes. Based on a novel by Stephen King with the series being created by David E. Kelley who also created shows like The Practice and Ally McBeal, Mr. Mercedes then jumps ahead two years with lead detective on the case Bill Hodges (Brendan Gleeson) having retired in the meantime unable to solve the Mercedes murder of 16 people. But Bill begins receiving mysterious messages from the killer (Harry Treadaway) who taunts Bill being unable to catch him and letting him know that the killer’s not finished.

One thing I don’t care for in cop shows like Mr. Mercedes is when it’s about “who’dun’it?” As in, each episode will deal with the hunt for an unknown murderer where a lot of people seem to be the guilty person, but aren’t. Until the final episode where the person “who’dun’it” is brought to justice. The problem with that format is that since you’re sure the murderer isn’t going to be found before the last few/final episodes you can pretty much skip everything until then since most everything in the series will be filler. I think where Mr. Mercedes gets things right is that the audience knows who the killer is, we know right from the first scene. It’s Hodges and everyone else who’s unsure. Which is very effective since we spend time with Hodges trying to get to the bottom of a case he shouldn’t even be investigating anymore along with scenes of the murderer going about his life, working at an electronics shop, dealing with a messed up home life and keeping tabs on Hodges as he slowly turns the screws trying to drive him crazy.

The Carmichael Show

It’s hard to believe, but at this point The Carmichael Show is the longest running sitcom on NBC. Or at least it was until NBC cancelled it a few weeks back. And, to be honest, I can see why they did. The Carmichael Show was never easy for NBC as it tackled weighty issues from the n-word, abuse, rape and much more through the guise of comedy and the sitcom. I can only imagine that advertisers hated the show because it wasn’t safe, read “lame,” like so many sitcoms are these days that are forgotten as soon as the episode ends. The Carmichael Show was about something — and it was funny too.

I really thought that NBC might have a hit on their hands when The Carmichael Show debuted in 2015 but I was wrong. Sure, NBC aired the series for three seasons in at least three different time slots during different times of the year. But, realistically, if The Carmichael Show was a series people were going to find, they would have found it. But like so many other series they never did.

My biggest fear is that The Carmichael Show will teach networks to not take chances with weighty comedies like this show, but let’s face it. It was a miracle a show as good as The Carmichael Show ever aired on NBC and a double miracle that it got picked up for two additional seasons after that.

The Deuce promo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7YMlL8x8GE

Movies

The Monster Squad

For a long time it was hard to see the movie The Monster Squad. To be sure in the late 1980s and early 1990s The Monster Squad was very easy to see with it being available to rent on VHS, popping up on pay cable and even appearing time to time on broadcast TV. But in the 1990s when all sorts of other movies were being released on DVD The Monster Squad was conspicuously absent. Now I’m not sure anyone but people who’d grown up with that movie noticed its absence, but it was noticed.

In fact, for a long time those of us who wanted to see The Monster Squad either had to settle for a bootleg DVD of the movie from VHS or LaserDisc. I settled on the Laserdisc to DVD version and had that copy for years until I gave it to a cousin who grew up loving The Monster Squad but hadn’t seen it since he was a kid.

Now it’s a lot easier to see The Monster Squad legally with it having an official DVD release in the mid–2000s, a Blu-ray release and it even pops up on the various streaming services from time to time.

To me, The Monster Squad is a movie that holds up 30 years after its release, if I’m not sure it holds up for audiences born after it debuted.

Here, a group of kids uncover a plot from Dracula to take over the world with the help of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, the Mummy and the Gillman. And since parents just don’t understand, it’s up to the kids along with a “scary German guy” to stop the monsters from bringing darkness to the Earth. Essentially, The Monster Squad is the movie The Goonies by way of the Universal Monsters. So, if you like either The Goonies or the Universal Monsters there’s a chance you’ll like The Monster Squad too.

Here’s the thing, though. The way the kids of The Monster Squad talk is 100% accurate to the way kids of the late 1980s talked, myself included. They say things that today is totally un-PC like calling each other “fggot” and “rtarded” as put-downs. Which makes watching the movie today is a bit jolting. But when the movie was released language like that wasn’t given a second thought.

That’s why I think new viewers today might have a tough time with The Monster Squad. I think it’s still a great film but I also think that since those terms were used in the movie it might at as minimum pull out new viewers out of the story or at worse make them actively dislike it. Which is a shame since I think The Monster Squad is a fun ride, warts and all.

The Reading & Watch List

Rumor Control

A few weeks back I started work on my yearly fall TV preview column. Some years in the past I’ve had not a lot to write about, or what I did write about were series that I was making fun of. This year has been quite a different experience. Between new and returning series I’m covering more than 20 shows. So far I’ve written what is the equivalent of four articles and will spend the next weeks going through this material a few more times tweaking things before it prints. This year’s preview will post on September 15 just in time for the new series to start premiering on network TV.

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1952: Jonathan Frakes, Commander Riker of Star Trek: The Next Generation is born
  • 1954: James Cameron, writer/director of Terminator, Aliens and Avatar is born
  • 1984: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension opens
  • 1984: Dreamscape premiers
  • 1986: The Fly opens in theaters
  • 1987: The Monster Squad opens in theaters
  • 1997: Event Horizon premiers

Direct Beam Comms #87

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVPosted on

TV

Manhunt: Unabomber

True-crime series are very “in” these days and now comes a Discovery Channel true-crime drama Manhunt: Unabomber which began last week. If you’re not aware, between 1978 and 1995 the “Unabomber,” a man named Ted Kaczynski, send bombs through the mail to people at universities, airlines and other organizations killing three and wounding 23. Since Kaczynski was very good at covering his tracks he was able to get away with bombings for nearly two decades before he was captured by the FBI.

The first episode of Manhunt: Unabomber deals with recently graduated FBI profiler Jim ‘Fitz’ Fitzgerald (Sam Worthington) who’s brought onto the Unabomber task force to create a profile of the killer in the late 1990s. But what the FBI really want is for Fitz to tow the company line and expand their already moldering profile to something longer and more media friendly. But Fitz full of “piss and vinegar” instead wants to start from scratch and redo a profile from the ground up. Which is met with a lot of hostility since at that point the FBI had been developing profiles on the bomber for nearly 20 years and were still no closer to catching him than they were in the late 1970s. But Fitz is firm on it either being his way or no way and when the Unabomber’s manifesto is released, giving the FBI much more material than they ever had before to create a profile, Fitz gets his way in creating a new profile to help the FBI catch the killer.

Which they do — it’s in the history books so I’m not spoiling anything but the FBI does end up catching the Unabomber and putting him in jail for life. That being said, I was interested in how the creators of Manhunt: Unabomber was handling the story of the Unabomber and they pace at which they were telling it.

For example, in the first episode we really don’t get to see the Unabomber at all. We do see him typing things and a few shadowy glimpses of a figure, but we never get to see his face which I thought was brave. With a show like Manhunt: Unabomber you just know one of the major acting roles in the series is going to be that of the bad-guy, so to not show him in the first episode, played by Paul Bettany in later episodes, took some guts. It has the effect of putting us, the audience, in the “heads” of the FBI who at that point didn’t know who the Unabomber was or even what he looked like other than from a witness sketch that was drawn years earlier.

I think Manhunt: Unabomber is closest in tone to the film Manhunter (1986). In each there are FBI agents trying to develop a profile of a serial killer, an FBI agent who walks the scene of a crime at night talking to himself to help develop a profile and the idea that the villain isn’t around for a good chunk of the start of the piece. But I mean this in a good way. If a TV series creator is going to find inspiration in something, they could do much worse than to find inspiration in something like Manhunter.

The big difference between Manhunt: Unabomber and the other true-crime series like Serial, Making a Murderer and The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story is that part of the story of those true-crime documentaries and drama is that there’s a question on whether the person arrested for the crime is guilty or not. In fact, that’s pretty much the whole theme of Making a Murderer. But that’s not going to be present in Manhunt: Unabomber since when they caught Kaczynski there was never any doubt on who did that crime. So, I’m assuming that most of the eight episodes of Manhunt: Unabomber will be to find a reason why he built bombs and killed people, rather than there being any question as to “who done it.”

The Guest Book

2017 has been a very interesting year for sitcoms. There’s been a variety of series like People of Earth about a support group for people abducted by aliens, The Santa Clarita Diet about a zombified wife/realtor and even the now cancelled The Carmichael Show that’s a sometimes twisted look at life in the 21st century from the perspective of an African American family. And now comes the new series TBS The Guest Book by Greg Garcia who also created the series My Name is Earl and Raising Hope.

This comedy series about a rental cabin at the top of a mountain has the hook that each episode features different visitors to the cabin with a different story played by different actors each week while the locals, played by the likes of Garret Dillahunt, Kellie Martin and Charles Robinson remain the same. The first episode featured Tim and Sandy (Danny Pudi and Lauren Lapkus) a young couple with a troubled marriage who rent the cabin to spend a weekend away from their baby who’s marriage gets even more troubled after Tim’s visit to a strip club is recorded with the owner threatening to show the tape to Sandy if Tim doesn’t pay $700.

I enjoyed the first episode of The Guest Book a great deal and am very interested in seeing how this series unfolds with half of a different cast each week. I think it’s a great idea for a sitcom that hasn’t been tried in a while — even if HBO recently debuted a drama series about a motel room with a rotating cast called Room 104 the other week. Mostly, I’m just happy to see Garcia having another series on TV since I’m a big fan of his style of TV show.

Mindhunter promo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gZCfRD_zWE

Narcos season three promo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ory6b2EJ3Bk

Movies

Masters of the Universe

I kind’a feel like I shouldn’t be including Masters of the Universe in my reviews of movies that came out in 1987. Whereas with every other movie on this list I either liked at the time, like now or can see some glimmer of something interesting in the film looking back on it. With Masters of the Universe I thought it was a bad movie in 1987 and I think it’s a bad movie today.

I was exactly at the right age to love the Masters of the Universe toys when they debuted in 1982 and was a huge fan of the cartoon series when it debuted a year later. I used to run off the bus each day after school to watch our local kid’s show Happy’s Place that featured that animated series. And over the years I had many He-Man toys and remember friends of mine having many more. But while I might have been exactly the right age for the Masters of the Universe toys, I was exactly the wrong age for a He-Man movie. In 1987 I was at the age of transitioning out of playing with toys and wasn’t too interested in seeing a feature film about toys.

Still, it must’ve been in either late 1987 or 1988 that we rented Masters of the Universe on VHS and I finally saw the movie. Which to say was a letdown from even my low standards at the time wouldn’t be an understatement.

With the classic Masters of the Universe toys and cartoon, much of the action takes place on an alien planet known as Eternia with He-Man and allies like Man-at-Arms and Teela doing battle with evil Skeleton and his minions like Beast Man and Mer-Man. It was simple stuff, good vs evil but it worked for the pre-teen set. But because I’m assuming budget reasons, most of the Masters of the Universe movie takes place not on far-off Eternia but on a 1987 Earth. Here, He-Man (Dolph Lundgren) and his allies accidentally arrive on the Earth after Skeletor (Frank Langella) conquers Eternia. And on the Earth He-Man teems up with two teens, one of which is played by Courtney Cox, in order to keep Skeletor from conquering the Earth next.

Masters of the Universe was another Cannon Films movie that also produced Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and much like with that one Masters of the Universe looks very cheap. Though it is ironic that the movie Aliens made a year earlier had a reported similar budget to Masters of the Universe and looks many times better than Masters of the Universe does. So when people complain that Masters of the Universe didn’t have a good enough budget I wonder if it’s more it didn’t have a good enough production team for the movie?

Masters of the Universe would mark the end of movie studios trying to turn 1980s cartoon properties into feature films — for a time anyway. With animated Transformers: The Movie having flopped in 1986 and G.I. Joe: The Movie not even getting a theatrical release in 1987 and the live-action Masters of the Universe having also flopped in late 1987.

While both Transformers and G.I. Joe saw live-action movies in the last few years with two Joe movies and five Transformers films, so far the 1987 Masters of the Universe movie is the only one from that line.

The Reading & Watch List

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1960: David Duchovny, Fox Mulder of The X-Files is born
  • 1968: Gillian Anderson, Dana Scully of The X-Files is born
  • 1981: Heavy Metal permiers
  • 1985: Real Genius premiers
  • 1985: My Science Project debuts
  • 1986: The Transformers: The Movie (1986) opens in theaters
  • 1987: Masters of the Universe opens
  • 1989: The Abyss opens in theaters
  • 1995: Escape from L.A. opens
  • 1999: The Iron Giant premiers

1990s sci-fi movie bonanza

CategoriesFeature, MoviesPosted on

There was an explosion of sci-fi movies all released in the late 1990s because Jurassic Park and Independence Day had come out earlier in the decade and were colossal hits. The movie studios, wanting a piece of the sci-fi money pie like how now they all want a slice of the superhero one, started putting money behind sci-fi films. And because of this money and since computer 3D special effects could now make sci-fi things like aliens and spaceships look real meant that not only could sci-fi movies have interesting stories, they could look really cool too.

Starship Troopers

Unfortunately, none of these late–1990 sci-fi movies were successful — until one huge film in 1999 that would change the sci-fi landscape even to this day.

Let’s start with my favorite sci-fi film of this period that turns 20 this fall, Starship Troopers. This movie about a team of teen military troopers doing battle with giant bugs on far off planets never got the attention it deserved. Or really, it got attention but the bad kind. I think the reason this movie was so derided was that audiences didn’t know what to make of it at back then. Here’s my secret for watching Starship Troopers — don’t think of it as a movie from 1997, think of it as a movie from 2197 that accidentally got transported to present day. To me, Starship Troopers is this propaganda film from the future trying to get the population behind this costly, unending war with the bugs and I think watching the movie in that light makes for a more enjoyable experience.

Event Horizon

Even Horizon, also from 1997, is another movie that was derided by the critics back then but is seen in a better light today. This R-Rated horror movie about the crew of a ship sent to Neptune to rescue the survivors of the “Event Horizon” that disappeared years ago and but finds the ship possessed by some evil force is a lot of fun to watch. Event Horizon isn’t the greatest movie, but it’s not a bad one either.

Another film from 1997 that didn’t do well at the time though now is seen in a better light is The Fifth Element. This one doesn’t fit with any other US based sci-fi movies and feels totally different, but in a good way. Much of that’s because it was co-written and directed by Frenchman Luc Besson. Here, forces are trying to unleash a great evil upon the universe and it’s up to Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis) and Leeloo (Milla Jovovich) to stop them. At times The Fifth Element is a bit goofy and weird but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Over the years The Fifth Element has aged very well and is a visually stunning and quite good movie.

The Fifth Element

Lost in Space from 1998 on the other hand, hasn’t aged very well and isn’t a good movie. This big-screen remake of the 1960s TV classic starts off interestingly enough with a family of explorers blasting off into an unknown part of space and after an accident and must find their way home. But the second half of the movie never quite fully gels and feels underdone. Worst of all some of the special effects of Lost in Space today look clunky and stand out in a bad way.

Like with Lost in Space the movie Soldier from 1998 hasn’t stood the test of time. Or, I thought it was a bad movie back in 1998 and I think it’s still a bad movie in 2017. Soldier is about an old solider from the future played by Kurt Russell who’s replaced by a newer model and is dumped on a world of trash where he finds a new calling of protecting families marooned there. Soldier is a movie that looks cheap and flimsy with a story to match. Let’s put it this way, the best part of the trailer for Solider features scenes of a giant battle and a skeleton floating in space — none of which appears in the finished film.

Lost in Space

Why anyone would leave the best looking part out of a movie like that is beyond me, but it goes a long way in explaining why Solider is the way it is.

In fact, it wasn’t until the stealth sci-fi film The Matrix would come along in 1999 to both critical acclaim and find a box office bonanza that would change the sci-fi game for the next decade. Gone would be the spaceships and far-off planets of previous decades instead replaced with a more dark and run-down aesthetic with films like Pitch Black, Minority Report and many of the early superhero films of the early 2000s borrowing the style of The Matrix.

Direct Beam Comms #86

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, TVPosted on

TV

Midnight, Texas

The new NBC series Midnight, Texas is the latest attempt at a network to bring serious horror out of cable and to broadcast TV. While I thought that Midnight, Texas was lacking, none-the-less I also felt that it’s probably the best that a network show can be right now given all the limitations of broadcast TV.

Based on the series of books of the same name by author Charlaine Harris who also wrote the novels the series True Blood were based on, the town of Midnight, Texas is a sort of safe haven for those things that go bump in the night like witches, vampires and fallen angels. But these aren’t evil witches, vampires and fallen angels, they’re everyday witches, vampires and fallen angels just trying to get along in a world out to get them.

While I thought the characters of Midnight, Texas worked well and I was intrigued in the setting what I wasn’t sure of was the overall story. It seems like much of the series will deal with an outside force attacking the weird Midnight enclave and trying to drive out these misfits. In the first episode there’s a murder by some bikers ala the Sons of Anarchy that seemed like someone decided that since horror is hot right now and TV series like Sons of Anarchy too then why not try and blend the two and make something great? But this comes off a bit overdone for my tastes, if it’s probably right in-line with what the average viewer of broadcast TV expects in terms of story.

What I wasn’t expecting was just how scary some of the moments in Midnight, Texas were.

Manfred Bernardo (François Arnaud) is a psychic who really sees dead people. Really gross looking dead people who are trying to make contact with the living world. Be it a dead husband who looks like he just rolled off the morgue table, Bernardo’s grandma who pays him a visit and looks like she crawled out of a dusty grave or a drowning victim who’s bloated and rotting but when she tries to talk it comes out like waterlogged bile.

If this and the characters were all that Midnight, Texas were about I think I’d be really excited about the show, especially since the last NBC horror series Hannibal was one of my favs. That being said, I am interested in Midnight, Texas and will keep watching the show, if it wouldn’t surprise me that at some point in the season I stop watching and head off looking for a series with the characters of Midnight, Texas if not the story.

People of Earth

The first season of the TBS comedy People of Earth wrapped up last winter with the second having launched last week. I thought the first season of People of Earth was one of the better comedies on TV in 2016 if it took a while for the series to get going.

In the first season, writer Ozzie Graham (Wyatt Cenac) travels to a small down to do a piece on a support group for people who say they’ve been abducted by aliens. And what starts out as a joke evolves into something different when Ozzie realize that he too was abducted in the past and that the entire support group’s been together for decades now since the aliens have been abducting them since they were children.

The aliens doing the abducting are a mix of creatures. One’s a traditional “grey” alien named Jeff (Ken Hall), one’s a dreamboat alien with white hair Don (Bjorn Gustafson) and there’s a reptilian one named Jonathan (Michael Cassidy) too. These are more workaday aliens than monstrous ones who have deadlines, overbearing bosses and monthly quotas to meet.

Think The Office crossed with The X-Files and you’d be close to what People of Earth is.

The second season starts right where the first left off with Wyatt, now a believer trying to find the truth, Jeff dealing with new management in the whole abducting thing breathing down his neck and group member Richard (Brian Huskey) coming to terms that his girlfriend who exploded last season was really an alien robot plant.

After having read that paragraph again I know that must make People of Earth sound like a really weird series and to be honest it is a weird one. But it’s a good kind of weird, the kind of weird we need on TV in 2017.

Movies

IT trailer

Cool Sites

The Reading List

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1947: Arnold Schwarzenegger of Terminator, Predator and Total Recall is born
  • 1956: Michael Biehn of Terminator, Aliens and The Abyss is born
  • 1966: Batman the movie premiers
  • 1966: Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. premiers
  • 1971: The Omega Man is released
  • 1983: The TV mini-series V premiers
  • 1985: Weird Science opens
  • 1986: Flight of the Navigator opens in theaters
  • 1986: Howard the Duck debuts
  • 1987: The Lost Boys premiers in theaters
  • 1988: The Blob premiers in theaters
  • 1991: Terminator 2: Judgement Day premiers in theaters
  • 2002: Signs premiers in theaters
  • 2011: Rise of the Planet of the Apes opens in theaters

Direct Beam Comms #85

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVPosted on

TV

Game of Thrones

I think I’m done with Game of Thrones. I’ve spent the last six seasons watching the show but the last few years I’ve welcomed its return less and less. It’s not that I don’t like Game of Thrones anymore, it’s just that it watching it has become a chore.

The stories of the first few season of Game of Thrones were much more contained than the ones in the series are now. At first there were stories of Winterfell, Westeros and the Targaryen’s across the sea and that was about it. And even then those stories were interconnected with the likes of the people of Westeros and Winterfell meeting and coming together to the point where there were really only two story locations for a while. But with each season the stories have fragmented more and more and more, to the point where no single episode of Game of Thrones can contain everything going on at once with stories having to be spread out between multiple shows. And even then some stories only get five or ten minutes an episode and one character even went missing an entire season only to pick back up with his story a year later since there wasn’t enough room for him.

With all this story weight meant that each season Game of Thrones started moving slower and slower to the point where in its fifth season, to me at least, there wasn’t enough story progression in it to hold my interest.

While things did pick up in the sixth season of the show, I started finding myself less and less interested in certain stories. So much of what Game of Thrones was last season was of characters who used to be together being off on their own adventures and since I wasn’t into each and ever character’s adventures I found myself more and more skipping through parts of episodes to get to stories that I was interested in. I’d generally stop at Tyrion stories but skip through Arya ones. And honestly by the end of the season I was pretty much only interested in Tyrion.

When I start using my DVR to skip through episodes of any series I know that my days of watching it are numbered.

I do think that if this were the last season of Game of Thrones I wouldn’t be writing this I would instead be watching the show just to see how it all ends. But this season isn’t the last, there’s one more left, and even then HBO is examining the possibility of spinning off the show into a variety of different series. All of which is fine, but at what point is the story of Game of Thrones only about continuing the story of Game of Thrones rather than coming to some sort of ending?

Everyone likes to make fun of soap operas, but at what point do self-perpetuating TV series like Game of Thrones become more soap opera-like than what they initially set out to be like smart, fantasy dramas?

Inhumans promo

Defenders promo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_6J9BqgonU

Krypton promo

Westworld promo

https://youtu.be/phFM3V_dors

Stranger Things promo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgS2L7WPIO4

Star Trek Discovery promo

The Gifted promo

Movies

Superman IV: The Quest for Peace

One of the few movies I did see in the theater in 1987 rather than on VHS or cable was Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. That summer I was watching my younger brother at home while my parents both worked and one week they gave us a little cash to get out of the house and go to a movie. I looked through the paper to see what was playing at the theater in riding distance to our house and the choices were Superman IV and Madonna lead Who’s that Girl. Being the mega-comic book fan that I was with a closed full of Superman back issues I, of course, chose to see, you guessed it, Who’s that Girl. I have no idea why I’d want to see that movie at all — in fact I’m relatively sure I’ve never seen it. I can only guess that it was because it would be easier to explain to my friends that I went to see a movie that starred then it-girl Madonna than a Superman movie, since at the time once you were a certain age you weren’t supposed to like superheroes or comics anymore. My mom used her parent veto and nixed the idea of my eight year old brother seeing Madonna prancing around on-screen in a fancy leotard and told us we were seeing Superman IV with Christopher Reeve prancing around on screen in his fancy leotard.

So, one weekday my brother and myself rode our bikes to the theater and saw Superman IV. When you’re a pre-teen kid Superman IV isn’t a terrible movie. It’s got the humous Lenny (Jon Cryer), Lex Luthor’s nephew, and even has ol’ Lex himself (Gene Hackman) back in the role he originated after missing out on Superman III. And let’s not forget Mariel Hemingway co-stars who was one of the most beautiful women on the planet in 1987 which didn’t hurt the movie either.

Looking back on Superman IV 30 years later, it’s a mess of a movie. Produced by Cannon Films known for such gems as Invasion USA and Over the Top, Superman IV was made on the cheap and looks that way. The movie is barely an hour and a half long and that includes both beginning and end credits with the opening credits being the looooooooong credits the Superman movies were known for back then. Christopher Reeve is back as the Man of Steel and a lot of the other cast members like Margot Kidder have returned as well. But other than Reeve the rest of the recognizable faces other than Hackman are in cameo roles at best.

A lot of the movies I’ve gone back and rewatched from 1987 might not be as good as I remember but they all have some sort of weird nostalgic appeal, and Superman IV is no different. Though I would argue that it’s the one movie I’ve watched that’s actually a lot worse than I remember.

The story of Superman IV is of Superman trying to rid the world of nuclear weapons, but in a devious plans Luthor uses Superman’s tossing all of the nukes into the Sun as a way to make Nuclear Man, a character created for the movie and so-far is his only appearance, in order to destroy Superman. Essentially, Superman IV is a smaller version of everything that had come before in the previous films. It’s almost a small-budget remake of Superman II in many regards with Superman battling one superpower villain instead of three. And since IV was made on the cheap all of the seams show.

Low-budget or not, Christopher Reeve gave it his all in Superman IV in what would be his last role as the title character. After the disappointment of Superman IV it would be nearly 20 years with the release of Superman Returns in 2006 until the character returned to the big screen. However, it’s not like there weren’t attempts at a new Superman movie after IV as most of the 1990s were spent with Tim Burton trying to get his version of the character off the ground in a movie that would have been called Superman Lives and then in the early 2000s there was another attempt this time with J.J. Abrams in another dead movie that would have been called Superman: Flyby.

If you are interested in finding out what happened behind the scenes with Superman IV: The Quest for Peace it’s chronicled in the 2014 documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014) as well as in Jon Cryer’s memoir So that Happened. You can also find out what happened with Tim Burton’s aborted Superman movie in the 2015 doc The Death of “Superman Lives”: What Happened?

Blade Runner 2049 trailer

Starship Troopers: Traitor Of Mars trailer

Justice League trailer

Thor: Ragnarok trailer

Books

Lead Poisoning: The Pencil Art of Geof Darrow

I first became aware of the work of Geof Darrow in his incredibly detailed drawings in the comic mini-series Hard Boiled when I was a bit too young. That comic, an acid trip through a hellish, corporatized future where robots kill scores of people turned me on to Darrow’s work. Years later I found an amazing book on his artistic contribution to the movie The Matrix that is still one of my prized possessions and now comes another Darrow art book, Lead Poisoning: The Pencil Art of Geoff Darrow.

From Dark Horse:

Geof Darrow’s slick, precise inks and stunning detail have amazed comics fans for decades, from his early work with Moebius to Hard Boiled, his first collaboration with Frank Miller, to the overwhelming success of his current series, The Shaolin Cowboy.

Now Darrow provides incredible insight into his process by sharing the pencil drawings behind his meticulous inks in a huge hardcover collection. Featuring well-known covers and never-before-seen drawings alike, Lead Poisoning is a behind-the-scenes look that reveals perfectionism at its best, showing how clean and perfect the initial drawings can be as well as the bizarre alterations that appear to happen on the fly.

Featuring commentary by Darrow and his notable peers, Lead Poisoning: The Pencil Art of Geof Darrow is a hardcover that brings you right to Darrow’s drawing board.

The Reading & Watch List

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1928: Stanley Kubrick, writer/director of 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange is born
  • 1956: Kevin Spacey, Lex Luthor of Superman Returns and Moon is born
  • 1957: Nana Visitor, Kira Nerys of of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is born
  • 1972: Wil Wheaton, Wesley Crusher of Star Trek: The Next Generation
  • 1983: Krull opens in theaters
  • 1986: Maximum Overdrive debuts
  • 1987: Superman IV: The Quest for Peace opens in theaters
  • 1990: The TV series Swamp Thing premiers
  • 1995: Waterworld premiers
  • 1999: Deep Blue Sea premiers
  • 2001: Planet of the Apes opens in theaters
  • 2013: The Wolverine opens in theaters