This is kind of a dark one, so stock up on the Prozac and remember to....
Keep Smiling
This week I picked up the collection of James Robinson's Complete Wildcats.
This is mostly of interest to me for the early Travis Charest artwork in the first few issues collected. It's interesting to see his humble beginnings as an Image artist in the Jim Lee/Whilce Portacio vein. That cover's by him. You can hardly tell, huh? The art here is very Image-y indeed but you can certainly see hints of the greatness to come. As a stand-alone collection the book is pretty hit or miss. There's hardly a complete story to be found. Lots of cliffhangers that are wrapped up in crossovers that aren't part of this collection. Kind of makes me want to track down Wildstorm Rising and Fire from Heaven for that matter since that ties in to the Alan Moore run that precipitated me picking up this collection in the first place. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure those are long out of print (and I'm not sure if Fire from Heaven was ever even collected). Anyway, I found it interesting and the stories included were perfectly fine, but I can't really recommend it since it doesn't really hang together as a whole. Some very nice art by Barry Windsor-Smith for one issue though. If you're really hankering for some Wildcats action, I do recommend the Alan Moore collection since it tells a complete story. Wildly uneven art though. The Charest stuff in the beginning kind of spoils you for the pretty pedestrian art that follows. I'm thinking I might have to pick up the Alan Moore Wild Worlds Collection that collects up a bunch of his Wildstorm odds and ends. Even though I hear it mostly kind of sucks.
Saw a couple of movies this week. Terminator Salvation was an utter piece of crap. Astonishingly bad really. I'd heard it got pretty poor reviews, but so did Terminator 3 and I still managed to get some solid enjoyment out of that one. But this one was really just joyless. Christian Bale shouts his way through a completely charisma-free performance. And the story makes no sense from top to bottom. The only bright spots are a 30 second cameo from CGI Arnold and a nice turn by Chekov as Kyle Reese. He almost seems to channel Michael Biehn in a couple scenes. I read an interesting article as to just why the movie turned out so bad. It boils down to McG being so desperate to land Christian Bale that he's willing to tie the script into ridiculous knots so Bale can play John Connor - a character that barely appears in the original screenplay. Then, rather than starting from scratch with a new script focusing on Connor, apparently they started shooting the original idea and just added more John Connor scenes on the fly while scaling back the screentime of Kyle Reese and the other Terminator guy who were supposed to be the main focus. It's an interesting article. You can read the whole thing here.
The other thing I saw was Zombieland. I would call it pretty good. It starts off spectacularly then kind of peters out after awhile. Woody Harrelson is great. That kid that acts an awful lot like Michael Cera is fine. The girls lean more toward annoying than cute. And there's a pretty cool cameo that you've probably already heard about. Worth a rental at any rate.
Okay, here's a sketch.
Seeya next week....
3 comments:
Sam, I've pretty much agreed with everything you've written until now. Terminator Salvation was the sauce of awesome. Ok, yes, Bale really sucked. But everything else was so freaking intense. It was a non stop thrill ride. The old clunky T800's were superb. The terminator motorcycles. The eel terminators. The explosions every five minutes. And that girl, Moon Bloodgood. I mean, how can you not love someone with a name like that? It's almost like she was created by Walt Simonson. T3 was nothing compared to this. Fie on thee Sam Little! Fie!
You're dead to me, Ostley.
I'll never forget what James Cameron said (in my fanboy T2 magazine in 8th grade) : "WIth T2 the story is full circle. There will never be any Terminator movies after this." ----
I guess we're both as good as dead for even talking about The Terminator after T2. Oh crap! Did you hear that?? Here comes JC and he looks like a blue cat person!
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