Denys Cowan Mondo Black Panther poster
Category: Movies
Dr. No (1962) movie poster
Direct Beam Comms #117
TV
McMafia ***/****
The last few years AMC has been mostly known as the network that airs The Walking Dead, Fear the Walking Dead, marathons of The Walking Dead, marathons of Fear the Walking Dead, repeats of The Walking Dead, repeats of Fear the Walking Dead, Talking Dead, marathons of Breaking Bad and, on occasion, wonderful shows like Better Call Saul. But, for the most part, what once was a network that used to air edgy shows like Mad Men and the above mentioned Breaking Bad now mostly devotes itself to airing back-episodes of shows about flesh-eating zombies. So when a show like McMafia comes along and there’s no characters literally eating other characters I’m not sure what to make of it?
I jest, but whereas McMafia feels like a show that would have fit perfectly on AMC ten years ago, today it feels a bit of an anachronism on there today. But I mean that in a good way.
In McMafia, James Norton plays 1%er fund manager Alex Godman who’s family emigrated to the UK from Russia decades ago. Alex’s life is wonderful. He’s got a beautiful girlfriend, a healthy family and a booming business. But when an item in the news wrongly claims ties from his fund to illegal money coming out of Russia it puts his business into a tailspin. And when Alex’s uncle is murdered, assassinated really, in front of him, he realizes that even though he was never directly tied to his father or uncle’s shady business practices, it doesn’t matter to the people against him and Alex needs to take the family crime mantle as it were or end up in an early grave.
In many ways McMafia reminds me of the TV series Damages, a seemingly legitimate business is involved in illegal activities, mixed with a series like Traffik where crime and corruption are worldwide and the only reason people don’t see it is because they don’t want to. I enjoyed McMafia a lot if I have a few reservations. I keep getting the feeling that this is going to turn into some bigger, British version of the series Breaking Bad. Where a seemingly nice and normal dude in the first episode becomes a not-so-nice and murderous man by the last one. Which is fine, I just hope that the creators of McMafia blaze their own trail rather than following the well-worn path established by Breaking Bad.
Heathers */****
The newest Paramount Network TV series Heathers is set to debut this Wednesday. Or at least it was until the debut of the series was pushed back until sometime later this year after real-life events at Parkland High overtook the fictional story in Heathers. However, the network released the series based on the 1989 movie of the same name a little early to streaming services so lots of people had the chance to see it before it was pulled last week.
The first episode of Heathers follows most of the major beats of the movie where at Westerberg High there are three people named “Heather,” all girls in the original but two girls and a guy here, who are the cool kids at the school. Alongside these Heathers is Veronica (Grace Victoria Cox) who’s semi-cool by association and new kid/dreamboat J.D. (James Scully) who quickly draws Veronica’s eye. One night out the two decide to go over to lead Heather’s (Melanie Field) house and take some embarrassing photos and videos and post them to her social networks. But things don’t go as planned and the two end up accidentally killing Heather.
Which is the first problem I had with the series. In the movie J.D. and Veronica (Christian Slater and Winona Ryder) actually kill Heather and spend the rest of the movie trying to cover it up by murdering others in that black comedy. Yet in the TV series, Veronica and J.D. think they’ve killed Heather when in fact she’s not dead. But a suicide video that J.D. And Veronica put together for her goes viral, so when Heather awakens she finds out that she’s famous. Which is really lame. The whole idea of the movie is of this weird, murderous spree J.D. tricks and the cajoles Veronica to go on. I’m assuming the TV version avoids the high school murder-spree thing since, unfortunately, kids being murdered at high schools is a fact of life in 2018 America. But if the creators of the TV Heathers aren’t going to address this in some way and instead are going to change the essence of this story then I don’t know why they’d choose to make a TV version of Heathers in the first place other than on name recognition alone?
Honestly, this all might be a case of the TV version of Heathers not being meant for me. I didn’t like the TV series Riverdale either and that one’s a big hit for The CW and Heathers might be a similar case for The Paramount Network. Regardless, I left watching the first episode TV version of Heathers with a bad taste in my mouth that I think only rewatching the movie version is going to get rid of.
The Expanse TV spot
Fahrenheit 451 TV spot
Legion season 2 TV spot
Comics
In the last few years comic book companies have been releasing big, hardcover collected editions of multi-issue comic stories that are very expensive. I find it ironic that for a medium that started where a kid could spend part of their weekly allowance to pickup the latest issue of whatever, for those same comics to be collected in these edition that cost around $100 each is kind’a crazy. Still, comic companies keep doing this with two sets due out this week so they must be popular.
Kamandi by Jack Kirby Omnibus
I’m a big fan of the Kamandi character and over the years have bought many issues of the comic as well as collected editions of all the issues. Of which a brand new edition is due out this week.
One of Jack Kirby’s greatest epics of the 1970s is collected at last in a single hard-cover volume. These are the stories that introduced the postapocalyptic world of the Great Disaster and Kamandi, the last boy on Earth, along with his friends Prince Tuftan, Doctor Canus, Flower, Ben Boxer and more! Collects KAMANDI, THE LAST BOY ON EARTH #1–40!
Absolute WildC.A.T.S.
While I could see dropping $100+ on a good collected Kamandi edition, I really can’t see dropping that much on a collected WildC.A.T.S. edition. If you’re not familiar, WildC.A.T.S. was one of the original Image Comics titles, and while I loved these when they first came out I don’t think they’ve aged too well in the last 25 years. If anything, these comics are a sort of time-capsule to the 1990s style of comic books where action came first and story was a secondary afterthought at best.
Twenty-five years ago, Jim Lee premiered the legendary team known as WildC.A.T.s and help launch Image Comics. Now, Jim’s entire WildC.A.T.s run is collected for the first time in one oversized Absolute volume, including WILDC.A.T.S #1–13 and #50, CYBERFORCE #1–3, WILDCATS #1 and WILDC.A.T.S/X-MEN: THE SILVER AGE #1. This edition also features remastered color for WILDC.A.T.S #1–4, the unpublished script for WILDCATS #2 and a new cover by Jim Lee!
Movies
The Movie Chain: #9: Sunshine (2004)
Last week: 28 Days Later…
The Movie Chain is a weekly, micro-movie review where each week’s film is related to the previous week’s movie in some way.
The movie genera of a doomed space mission is a popular one. There’s movies like Alien: Covenant, Life and Cloverfield: Paradoxto name recent few. I think it’s because this kind of movie captures a few different genres at once from sci-fi to mystery and a lot of times romance too is why it keeps getting made over and over again. Whereas most other movies that feature astronauts blasting off into the void end up finding some slobbering monster in their story, the more esoteric Sunshine plays things a little different.
Directed by Danny Boyle who also directed last week’s 28 Days Later…, in Sunshine the crew of the “Icarus II” are flying to our Sun in attempt to kickstart it back to life after something went wrong causing it to dim sending the Earth into a new ice age. Along the way the crew featuring a pre-Captain America Chris Evans, Rose Byrne and Cillian Murphy of the last three movies, find the remains of the “Icarus” and learn that spending too much time that close to a star as the crew of the “Icarus” did can have some very bad side-effects.
Practically a forgotten movie now, Sunshine is the rare sci-fi movie that takes place in the very near future, feels real along with having believable characters and one heck of a great story too.
Next week: Trapped on a far-off planet, surrounded by nothing, low on gas.
Cool Movie Posters of the Week
Ten years of mighty Marvel
All I really wanted as a kid was to see a movie based on characters from Marvel Comics on the big screen. Growing up there were movies based on DC characters like the Superman and Batman but none from Marvel.
And it wasn’t like Marvel wasn’t trying. Their first movie in theaters Howard the Duck (1986) seems like an odd choice now but for a time the character was extremely popular and seemed like it could be a crossover hit but instead was a colossal flop. And there were a few more attempts shortly after with films like Captain America and The Punisher that went direct to video and Fantastic Four that went direct to nowhere and has never officially been released.
Still, reading the back pages of the magazine Comics Scene which each month teased that a James Cameron directed Spider-Man movie was in the works and Tom Cruise was set to star as Tony Stark in Iron Man –– movies based on Marvel characters seemed to be closer than ever and further away too.
In 1998 my prayers were answered with Blade and then in quick succession X-Men and Spider-Man. Over the following years some of these movies would be good, mostly sequels to X-Men and Spider-Man, and some not so good, Ghost Rider, Daredevil, Elektra, another Fantastic Four… Which is kind’a how I thought comics based on comics would be, a few gems mixed in with the dung.
But all that changed ten years ago with the release of Iron Man on May 2, 2008. This movie wasn’t just based on a character from Marvel, it was also produced by Marvel too which meant the people working on Iron Man actually understood how to translate the character to the big screen. Iron Man was great, quickly becoming a fan-favorite film and was one of the biggest movies of 2008. The Incredible Hulk would follow that same summer and while not attaining anything near the box office of Iron Man was still a good movie none-the-less.
In quick succession Iron Man 2, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger would follow over the next few years. And while I don’t think any of these three movies are great, I still think they’re good. And, more importantly, they all made loads of money at the box office.
In fact, Marvel went from a company in the 1990s that was on the verge of bankruptcy to one that was bought by Disney for a reported $9 billion dollars based on the strength of the characters and movies alone.
What would change everything was the release of The Avengers in 2012. That movie was well-written, acted, had amazing action sequences… that I think from The Avengers on audiences would no longer accept mediocre comic book movies, or just about every comic book movie released prior to this point, and would only accept great ones.
Great movies like Iron Man 3 and Thor: Ragnarok would follow and would be embraced by audiences. Not-so-great movies like The Amazing Spider-Man and yet another Fantastic Four would also follow and would be condemned by those same audiences.
Which is a double edged sword. When a movie can’t be just “good” anymore and has to be groundbreaking and “great” it sets an artificially high standard. I thought films like Suicide Squad and the condemned Fantastic Four were good, but since they’re not great it means that fans of the genera feel safe openly deriding them.
Still, this artificially high standard has produced a lot of classic movies over the last decade that I think people will still be talking about generations to come.
And now we enter another decade of movies based on Marvel Comics with more than ten films featuring their characters due out over the next few years. I don’t see any sign of movies based on Marvel comics slowing down anytime soon — they make way to much money at the box office to do that. Still, I can’t imagine if there was some way I could magically send a message to myself as a kid wishing for these movies that I’d actually believe my older self that there would one day be so many good Marvel movies out there.
After having spent so much time wishing for a good Marvel movie such an embarrassment of riches these days wouldn’t seem to have been possible.
Ken Taylor Mondo Batman (1989) poster
