Category: Feature

Direct Beam Comms #49

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Mad Max

I’ve been thinking about the chronology of the Mad Max movies for a while now. At first I couldn’t make sense how they all fit together, it seems like while the fist three movies do fit together nicely the fourth Mad Max Fury Road does not. But I think it’s possible to figure a way for the all four Mad Max movies to fit together chronologically.

Mel Gibson as MAx
Mel Gibson as MAx

Let’s say that the first Mad Max movie takes place in year one of this timeline. In that movie let’s assume Max is aged 23 — or how old Mel Gibson was when he played that part. The next movie Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior was released two years after Mad Max and I think this still fits well with a logical chronology. Here, we’re less than five years after the world’s fallen apart leaving some of the last remnants of humanity to fight over an oil refinery. The only question is if people would really start dressing the way they do in just a few years — the good group in mostly white and the bad in black leather. But stranger things have happened.

One question comes with the third Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. While this movie was released four years after the second film I feel that it takes place much further in the future than that. Here, gasoline has all been used up and people are forced to get around via animal power — be it via camel trains or powered by methane harvested from pigs. In the movie Max finds a group of lost children living in a desert oasis who are so far removed from civilization that they’ve forgotten what civilization even really is. They get their history via a View-Master with the last adult of the group having left/died years prior.

The thing is — to get to this point I feel that decades would have had to have passed between the time civilization crumbled, sometime between the first and second movie, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. These kids would have had to have been alone for quite some time to have been young enough to have never been taught it. And since some of them now are supposed to be late teens early 20s it would mean decades at the oasis.

Which still fits with the overall timeline. This version of Max is a lot older and more grayer who could conceivably be a guy in his 40s even if Gibson in this movie still has a babyface and good looks.

Tom Hardy as Max
Tom Hardy as Max

So, if the first three films do fit together, where does Mad Max: Fury Road fit?

Actually, I think it actually fits quite well with the overall timeline. In this movie there are characters called the “War Boys” who have created their own language and worships autos as deities. And there are other characters who don’t know what TV was or what channels were. The main commonality in the movie is that both of these groups have people no older than 20-somethings in it. And if we assume that they were all born shortly after civilization fell, or sometime just before Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, we can assume that this movie takes place around 20 years after that or in the same general vicinity of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

If that’s true, Max in this movie would be a guy in his early to mid 40s which closely fits with Tom Hardy the actor playing him in Mad Max: Fury Road. Though Hardy wasn’t in his 40s then, he was in his late 30s, which still fits really closely to this fictional timeline.

So, I don’t think that this is a different version of the Max Max character than what’s come before or that this isn’t Max but the “Feral Kid” from Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior now standing in for his hero. To me, in all the movies Max is Max is Max and is all supposed to be the same guy and this all fits with the overall timeline of the Max Max universe.

The Reading & Watch List

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1953: Robert Beltran, Chakotay of Star Trek: Voyager and Night of the Comet is born
  • 1963: Terry Farrell, Jadzia Dax of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is born
  • 1977: Close Encounters of the Third Kind premiers in theaters
  • 1990: The mini-series IT premiers on TV
  • 1994: Star Trek: Generations opens in theaters

The Legend of Tarzan (2016) movie review

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Grade: B

It seems like every few years one of the movie studios or TV channels decide to give the Edgar Rice Burroughs character of Tarzan a go. Some of these adaptations like the Disney version of Tarzan were successful and some like the 1998 Tarzan and the Lost City were not. So I’m happy to report that the latest Tarzan movie The Legend of Tarzan is one of the more successful films based on the character in memory.

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Instead of telling the origin story of the Tarzan character again, the creators of The Legend of Tarzan give us a new Tarzan adventure while still showing his backstory of being raised by apes via flashbacks. This time, Alexander Skarsgård stars as the title character who prefers to go by his given name “John” thank you very much. Transplanted from Africa, John now lives on his family’s estate in England and is married to Jane (Margot Robbie). Lured back to the jungles of Africa to go on a sort of goodwill tour, instead Tarzan along with American George Washington Williams (Samuel L. Jackson) find that Belgium is in the process of enslaving the Congo and it’s only a matter of time before lead henchmen Leon (Christoph Waltz) is able to bring in enough troops to complete his plan. It’s up to Tarzan, George Washington and Jane along with a tribe who were once close to Tarzan and Jane as well as a bevy of animals to stop Leon and free the Congo.

I feel like I’m familiar with the Tarzan character while at the same time not being too familiar with the actual source of Tarzan. I’ve read loads of Tarzan comics, seen Tarzan TV cartoons, watched many of the Johnny Weissmuller films and more modern Tarzan movies too. But I’ve never read any of the original novels so I come at Tarzan only knowing of other’s adaptations of the character. Which with The Legend of Tarzan might be a good thing. I don’t have many preconceived notions on how Tarzan is supposed to behave/act and don’t notice inconsistencies between this movie version of the character and the original.

I thought this 2016 version of Tarzan was more better than bad, and I liked several ways how they handled the character than what I’ve seen before. Like, Tarzan can’t exactly talk to the animals, but has a kinship with them and is able to us them via their natural instincts towards his own ends. And I also liked how Tarzan is the ultimate outsider — he’s not really at home with the apes who raised him since he’s not an ape and he’s not at home with mankind since he was the one guy on the planet who was raised by wild animals.

The story of The Legend of Tarzan surprised me as well. I’m usually good at figuring out how movies like this are going to end and how the third act is going to play out. And very early on in The Legend of Tarzan there’s a big third act battle that’s set up so I knew how the movie was going to end. Or at least I thought I knew how it was going to end. When The Legend of Tarzan actually got to this big battle it didn’t happen the way I thought, and in fact the movie ends up going in a completely different direction which was much more satisfying on where I thought the movie was headed.

If there’s one thing that I didn’t like about the movie it was how much of it relied on computer special effects. I really can’t ding The Legend of Tarzan for using computer effects to create all of the animals from apes to lions to wildebeest to crocodiles since working with live animals is always fraught with the unknown, and working with live animals that can easily kill an actor doubly so. But so much of the The Legend of Tarzan backgrounds from jungles to port cities to savanna were so obviously shot in a soundstage with artificial backdrops placed in that this really stood out to me. When the movie was on location and there were actual actors walking across actual Africa The Legend of Tarzan was breathtaking. But most of the time with these artificial backgrounds it was not so much.

Direct Beam Comms #48

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, TVPosted on

TV

Stan Against Evil – Grade: D+

I generally like horror series and even the ones I don’t care for I can see things in them things that other fans may like. However, I didn’t see anything in the new IFC series Stan Against Evil that I liked nor do I see what other horror fans would care for in this show either.

Here, John C. McGinley plays the title character who’s an ex-sheriff forced to resign after he attacked a woman at the funeral for his wife. Enter new sheriff Evie (Janet Varney) who one week into the position learns that every other sheriff before her, minus Stan, was killed on the job. And the rumor is it’s all related to 176 witches burned at the stake centuries earlier by the first town sheriff. Stan only survived his tour because his late-wife was going out nights to do battle with these witch-spirits, and now that she’s gone and Evie’s the new sheriff it’s up to Stan to continue the good fight.

It seems like Stan Against Evil wants to be something like Ash vs. Evil Dead meets 30 Rock. So it’s got some of the gross-out humor of Ash vs. Evil Dead and some of the deadpan humor of 30 Rock which unfortunately aren’t a great fit with each other. It doesn’t help matters that McGinley, whom I genuinely like, is doing a rougher and gruffer, though definitely a version of his Dr. Cox character from Scrubs which is amusing but gets old fast here.

Stan Against Evil seems to be a show that won’t really appeal to either the horror crowd or the comedy crowd and perhaps that’s why IFC premiered it late Halloween night after the horror season’s mostly done? Maybe they see this show as a comedy first horror second show? All of which is disappointing — the creators of Ash vs. Evil Dead make this kind of horror/comedy look easy which from the looks of Stan Against Evil it isn’t.

The Crown – Grade: B+

the-crown-netflixI seem to be a sucker for dramas written by Peter Morgan. I loved his movie The Queen (2006) about the death of Princess Diana and the reaction of the British royal family to this event, and more specifically how Queen Elizabeth (Helen Mirren) almost lost the monarchy, I think the movie Frost/Nixon is an underrated little gem and now I like his new Netflix series The Crown too.

The Crown starts in the late 1940s with the marriage between Princess Elizabeth (Claire Foy) and Phillip (Matt Smith) and then we quickly jump to the early 1950s where Elizabeth’s a young military wife who’s father King George (Jared Harris) is succumbing to lung cancer which will very soon leave her as the 26 year old Queen of the UK. In many ways, The Crown is the middle story of a trilogy that would have started with The King’s Speech (not written by Morgan but David Seidler) where King George had to overcome his stuttering in order to deliver a speech about Great Britain enduring the second world war, here The Crown as a middle story where power transitions from George’s generation to the next and then The Queen where Elizabeth almost becomes the last monarch of the UK after a few missteps.

What I think works so well in The Crown, and of Morgan’s other dramas mentioned above as well, is that he does a great job of going behind the scenes of events that played out in the public eye and showing them in a new way. In Frost/Nixon it was the behind the scenes preparations of the two Frost and Nixon camps before the interview, in The Queen it showed what was going on behind the curtains of Buckingham Palace the news cameras couldn’t see and here in The Crown that was happening between George, Elizabeth and Phillip might not have been as cozy as the monarchy wanted everyone to believe with all sorts of real human emotions playing out in private.

People of Earth – Grade: B

poe-pilot-1600x900-800x450_072920160258The new TBS series People of Earth has a lot of potential, however, while the first episode was a disappointment the second was good.

I’m not sure what to make of it but episode of People of Earth are just 15 minutes long. Which almost makes me wonder if the series was originally developed as an Adult Swim series that ended up on TBS instead? The show follows journalist Ozzie Graham (Wyatt Cenac) as he interviews a group of people who’ve been abducted by aliens over the years. And in these interviews he finds that he too might have been abducted in the past so he decides to move closer to the abductees and the common place they were all taken of.

The first episode of People of Earth fell short was all of the jokes seemed telegraphed. I could tell when a lot the jokes were coming and was saying the punchlines before the characters were. And the show also falls into the trope where the lead character Ozzie is the one normal character on the show while the rest of the characters all seem like they’re standard, abet all a bit weird, sitcom characters and not real people.

That being said a lot of these issues were corrected in the second episode where the characters felt toned back a bit, and not as cartoony, and the humor was a bit more naturalistic as well.

One thing I did like and did find intriguing and funny in both episodes were the alien characters. These aren’t your standard scary The X-Files aliens, these are workaday Joes one of whom is the typical “bug eyed monster,” another a reptile and a third a nordic hunk. They complain about their jobs to each other and get on one and other’s nerves and two mercilessly tease the nordic alien.

I’m interested enough to see where this is all going and had enough of a good time with the second episode and watching the alien characters that I’ll probably stick with this one for at least the rest of the season.

Movies

Wonder Woman movie trailer

“The closer you get, the more you see the darkness within.”

Life movie trailer

Sort’a looks like Gravity meets The Martian by way of Alien.

Toys

20th Anniversary Starship Troopers Tanker Bug

14915604_1766471016946069_8598270323381981340_nChronicle Collectibles is releasing a 20th Anniversary (!!!) statue of the Tanker Bug from the movie Starship Troopers. The statue is a whopping 25” long, 20” wide and 10” tall and retails for $350. That’s a lot of money, however, when statues of 12” figures regularly retail for $150 and up, $350 doesn’t seem too pricey in comparison.

I have been a Starship Troopers super-fan the last 20 years and am excited that it seems like there might be some sort of recognition/merchandising push for a movie that was so badly slammed/misunderstood when it was first released. Even if there’s reportedly a reboot movie in the works from the writers of the upcoming Baywatch movie.

The Reading & Watch List

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1970: Ethan Hawke of Explorers and Gattaca is born
  • 1975: The TV series The New Adventures of Wonder Woman debuts
  • 1982: Creepshow opens in theaters
  • 1994: The TV series Earth 2 premiers

The forgotten 1970s Doctor Strange movie

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The release of the new Doctor Strange movie marks the eleventh movie from Marvel Studios that already includes films for characters like Thor and Captain America. While Marvel’s films have made literally billions upon billions of dollars, there’s a little secret that fans of comics know that most of the movie going public doesn’t — there was a series of films based on Marvel characters that were released in the 1970s that Marvel has wishes everyone would just forget about.

spiderman-vogueBack then, Marvel licensed several of their characters to studios in an attempt at creating TV properties. The first of these was The Amazing Spider Man in 1978.

Owing to the limitations of 1970s movie technology and smaller budgets for TV, Spider-Man, like all the other Marvel TV properties, began as a movie of the week. The original movie served as an origin story for the character of Peter Parker (Nicholas Hammond), here not a high school teen but instead his 20s, who’s bitten by a radioactive spider and is given superpowers he uses to solve crimes.

The original TV movie was popular enough that it would spawn two seasons of an The Amazing Spider-Man TV series from 1978 to 1979. Either I was too young at the time or I simply didn’t watch, but I have no memory of seeing the Nicholas Hammond version of Spider-Man on TV until the 1990s when, I believe, USA Network would air the series each year around Thanksgiving.

This 1970s costumed Spider-Man isn’t on screen very often since the movie/series mostly focuses on Peter Parker rather than Spidey. At times The Amazing Spider-Man is remarkably dull for a series based on a comic book.

2d780eb0acccb50fda93cab83ada551eThe Incredible Hulk would follow Spider-Man in 1978. Starring Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno, The Incredible Hulk was the most successful of these 1970s Marvel TV series and ran some 80+ episodes as well as having several TV movies afterwards. Seemingly each episode of the series featured Bixby as David Banner always on the run from town to town trying to help some poor soul out of a bind before circumstances out of his control would cause him to Hulk-out (Ferrigno) and wreck some scenery before being forced to move on over dreary music and in the rain to the next town.

In 1979 two Captain America TV movies would debut with Captain America and Captain America II: Death Too Soon. This Steve Rogers (Reb Brown) is, no joke, a body-building artist who drives around in a van who’s given a serum which gives him super-abilities. Reb’s Captain America rides a motorcycle which rockets out of the back of his van and has a semi-transparent shield when he fights the bad guys.

I remember the Captain America TV movies being shown in syndication from time to time and these two movies are available on DVD.

If The Incredible Hulk were extremely popular and Captain America would get two movies, then the Doctor Strange TV movie must’ve drawn the short straw since it’s all but a lost film today.

drstrange19784Starring Peter Hooten in the title role, here Doctor Strange is a hospital psychiatrist who’s called to become the next “Sorcerer Supreme” in a never-ending fight against the evil forces of the universe — here personified by Morgan le Fay played by Jessica Walter later of Arrested Development fame.

It took me years to see Doctor Strange. As far as I can tell the movie only ever aired on TV a few times and while it was released on VHS Doctor Strange has so far never been available on DVD or a more modern format*. I finally saw it on a bootleg VHS tape taken from the official VHS release a few years ago.

And I can see why Doctor Strange wasn’t turned into a series — we spend a lot of time with the good doctor as a hospital physician before we get to Doctor Strange the mastery of the mystical arts. And even when we get to him a lot of the movie features Strange battling le Fay on a black velvet background void that features a soundtrack that’s part disco and part new wave.

I can only imaging the latest incarnation of Doctor Strange starring Benedict Cumberbatch will easily outdo the cheesy 1978 version of Doctor Strange and will one day be available on DVD too.

*Actually, Shout Factory has released a copy of Doctor Strange on DVD this week “remastered from original film elements.”

Direct Beam Comms #47

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Review, TVPosted on

TV

The Living and the Dead – Grade: B-

BBC America recently ran the six-episode BBC horror mini-series The Living and the Dead one evening back-to-back all-night binge-style. The series is available to stream on the BBC America website and I would assume will air again there at some point in the future.

tv-the-living-and-the-deadThe Living and the Dead is set in late 19th century England where Dr. Nathan Appleby (Colin Morgan) and wife Charlotte (Charlotte Spencer) have moved from the city to the countryside when they inherit Nathan’s family estate after his mother died. Nathan is a psychologist which is brand new for the time and Charlotte a photographer and hope that the move to the country will be a change to a simpler way of life. But what they’re not expecting is that something’s amiss at the estate when young Harriet (Tallulah Haddon) begins acting weirdly and speaking in voices with her being able to control people’s thoughts as well. When Harriet puts a farmhand under a spell that leads to the man’s death Nathan steps up and wants to try and help the girl before she’s thrown into the asylum forever.

I thought The Living and the Dead had an interesting concept, but I’m not quite sold on the show just yet. At times I thought the episode dragged just a bit with lots of shots of farmhands harvesting a field and Nathan and Charlotte gazing longingly into the distance. And the story of the episode, poor Harriet seemingly possessed, has been done many times before and is the current horror movie du jour too doesn’t help.

So when Nathan’s, let’s call it, Harriet “case” is solved by the first episode I was relived. I couldn’t see myself sticking around until the end of the season to watch Nathan battle Harriet doing creepy voices and killing people in mysterious ways. It seems like moving forward the main theme of The Living and the Dead will be of Nathan investigating the weirdness of the estate with each episode focusing on some weird specific thing.

In many ways The Living and the Dead is a cross between Sherlock (young/hip investigator here of the paranormal) with Downton Abby (gee, wasn’t the past before we had indoor plumbing and vaccinations wonderful?). Which is interesting in a purely British way.

That being said the episode did anything but “fly” by and the last half hour felt every bit like a half hour. There are some clues planted in the episode that there’s something even weirder happening at the estate than might be let on from the first episode. So I thing I’ll probably finish out The Living and the Dead, even if it sits on my DVR a few weeks/months before I do so.

Halloween

brandon-lee-the-crowIs The Crow (1994) the perfect underrated and forgotten Halloween movie? I think so.

I think there should be a law that requires all TV channels to air a certain amount of horror related programming each October for Halloween. I’d say that 30% of everything shown that month should be required to be horror related. Is anyone with me?

I always feel a strong sense of melancholy at the end of October. I think part of that is that by the end of October it’s hard for me to keep denying that fall’s here and summer’s over since it’s dark out where I live by seven which in a few weeks will be six, the leaves are starting to drop and the nights are getting colder. But I think a large part of that melancholy is because October marks the end of the Halloween season which means the end of lots of good movies on TV.

I don’t know what it is but the TV channels almost never air any classic horror movies throughout the year. Or, if they do it’s late at night and maybe once or twice a month. But during Halloween those same channels have no problems letting their horror flags fly and will air a bevy of new and old scary flicks throughout the month. There’s usually so much of an embarrassment of riches that at times I’ll feel like I’m not watching enough of them if I chose to watch something else.

But come November 1 all that ends. That’s when the horror movie marathons end and the channels start turning their gaze towards Christmas movies and programs.

I know, I know. With things like Netflix and Amazon Prime and all of the other streaming options out there it’s not like horror movie express ever has to end. With the click of a button I could be watching any number of scary films instantly. And while we can argue about the quality of the films available to stream, to me there’s still something special about a whole month full of horror films all airing at once and knowing that other people too are all caught up in the season of Halloween too.

The other thing is that really Halloween is the only thing I’m really interested in that has an entire month devoted to it. There’s no single month devoted to sci-fi, superheroes or action flicks, that’s solely reserved for October and horror films.

I think a big part of it is that in my neck of the woods is that after Halloween and then Thanksgiving, we move into the time of bad weather and days that are basically done by the time you get home from work. So maybe that’s it — maybe it isn’t that October and Halloween are done, it’s that once those things are over with it means that we’re moving into a new part of the year. And while moving onto just about any other part of the year is nice — Yay! Winter’s over and it’s spring… Horray! It’s summertime! … Fall is here and with it cooler temperatures! — Moving onto winter, to me at least, is dreadful.

So when Halloween’s over it means that by extension what I consider the good part of the year’s over and we’re onto the slow, cold dark time that is winter. And that’s what I’m dreading and not the end of October/Halloween?

Nah, I’m going to go with me missing watching things like Frankenstein, Dracula and The Wolfman on TV. 😉

One thing I have noticed of late is that with all the horror movie remakes created over the last few years means that there’s less opportunities for the original movies to be shown on TV. I see things like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Dawn of the Dead remakes on TV all the time, but I honestly can’t tell you the last time, or perhaps ever, that I saw the original movies air.

Books

The Signature Art of Brian Stelfreeze

may161221Out November 1 is The Signature Art of Brian Stelfreeze which collects illustrations from the illustrator’s long career. I’ve been an admirer of Stelfreeze’s work for many years now especially his painted covers for various comics and now Stelfreeze is gaining a wider reckognition as the artist on the new The Black Panther comic as well.

From Boom Studios:

Brian Stelfreeze Artist: Brian Stelfreeze Cover Artist: Brian Stelfreeze ’ The definitive art collection of the quintessential artist’s artist, perfect for fans of the craft. ’ Explore the career of comics legend Brian Stelfreeze in exquisite detail. ’ An unprecedented look at never-before-seen sketches, process sections, fan-favorite classic pieces, sequential pages, covers across Brian’s career, and commentary from his collaborators, including Scott Peterson, Doug Wagner, and Cully Hamner.

The Reading List

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1949: Armin Shimerman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Quark of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is born
  • 1954: Godzilla opens in Japan
  • 2009: The TV series V premiers